THE LIFE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: SOLDIER, SCIENTIST, AND POLITICIAN 1748-1757
By J.A. Leo Lemay University of Pennsylvania Press, $45
746 pages Reviewed by James Srodes
When J.A. Leo Lemay died in the autumn of 2008 at the age of 73, there was a deserved outpouring of sadness from the American history community over the loss of a genuinely generous friend and an important figure among those who labor on the canon of our national heritage.
Lemay was and arguably remains the leading expert on the long and complex life of Benjamin Franklin, or, as he called Franklin, "our oldest revolutionary." Not only was Lemay the most thorough explorer into the myriad facets of Franklin's character and occupations, but he was by far the most eloquent teller of the story of 18th-century America as it evolved from a wilderness society into a beacon of light for other nations.
This is not so surprising because Lemay, like that other great Franklin biographer of 60 years ago, Carl Van Doren, taught English rather than history. He knew how to make the flat facts of the past resonate in the here and now. That is why the publication late last year of the third volume of Lemay's projected seven-volume "Life of Benjamin Franklin" is cause for both celebration and concern.
Like the two preceding books that begin the Franklin story with his birth in 1706 to the sprawling family of a Boston soap maker, this third installment tracks his personal story against a fascinating backdrop of the emergence of a distinct American identity, the development of a single people out of a polyglot mass of new arrivals from other cultures. This volume covers an exciting period that sees Franklin grow from promising Colonial printer and striver into a rising leader in the second-biggest city, next to London, in the British Empire and an international figure in the new science of electrical physics.
The thing is, when times are as fraught and uncertain as they are right now, history has even more important lessons for us than ever. And the way Lemay tells it, the period from 1748 through 1757 has a special echo for today's reader.
This part of Franklin's life shows how critical solid leadership is when a community faces both external threats to its existence and internal conflicts brought on by cultural change. Change one can believe in was something Franklin knew about.
The period from the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1689 through the battle of Waterloo in 1815 has rightly been called the Second Hundred Years War. Despite being on the farthest frontier of the known civilized world, the settlers struggling in North America felt constantly threatened by the never-ending conflicts that embroiled England with shifting alliances among the great European powers as they scrapped over old Continental boundaries and new colonies around the world.
