Ben
Franklin and his wife, Deborah, were a very enterprising
pair. Their union was a common-law affair, never recorded
in any church records, but they owned and ran a newspaper,
a publishing business, a store, and a book shop. Ben
also wrote a lot.
He
put together many companies and organizations to meet
public needs, and many of them exist today (the American
Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, a
public library, and an insurance company, etc.).
He
was an inventor and did scientific research in electricity
and meteorology. (He invented the Franklin Stove, the
lightening rod, and the first postmasters' rate chart.
His kite experiment and other work in electricity made
him an international celebrity. He was the first American
to keep detailed, accurate daily weather records and
was among the first Americans to make daily weather
forecasts. His interest in anatomy may even have led
him to purchase cadavers to dissect while he lived in
England.)
He was a public servant, a politician, and one of the
founding fathers of our nation (Postmaster General of
Philadelphia, a member of the Second Continental Congress
who helped draft and signed the Declaration of Independence,
our ambassador to France, and a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention who signed the Constitution).
He pursued women with notable success before, during,
and after his marriage. He fathered a son out of wedlock
before he was married, and he and his wife raised the
child along with two children of their own.
In short, Ben Franklin lived life to the hilt in so
many directions that all we can do in making a fair
guess about the organizing adventure of his life is
to look at the choices he made when push came to shove
in his affairs.
Here
are some of the pertinent facts from the biographical
sources I cited above:
(1)
He ran away from home and from an apprenticeship under
his abusive brother to escape physical mistreatment.
(2)
He and Deborah spent 18 years of their 44-year marriage
apart. (Deborah refused to travel abroad.)
(3)
He invented a heat-efficient stove (the Franklin stove)
but refused to take out a patent on it because he intended
it purely as a public benefit.
(4)
He retired from printing in 1748, but engaged in other
businesses, in public affairs, and scientific pursuits.
(5)
He lost his Crown appointment as Postmaster General
of Philadelphia in 1774 because of his highly vocal
support of independence for the colonies.
(6)
When he lost his Crown appointment, Franklin left behind
him "a legacy of postal roads stretching from Maine
to Florida, regular mail service between the colonies
and England, and a system for regulating and auditing
post offices." (Benjamin
Franklin: Man of Letters)
(7)
He incurred the wrath of the British Government because
he exposed the duplicity of the English Governor of
Massachusetts in dealing with the people of that state.
From
these facts, we can reasonably infer that the love adventure
was not his Franklin's organizing adventure. Neither
was the pursuit of money or sex, although he had a healthy
interest in these activities. And too much of his life
was spent in public affairs after he achieved significant
economic success for us to say that the pursuit of knowledge
or of scientific knowledge was the organizing adventure
of his life.
What
we can say about him is that he saw social problems
and fixed them. But he functioned as so much more than
a politician that trying to think about his life as
organized around politics doesn't seem to work, either.
In fact, to see Franklin clearly, we may have to move
up a level: Ben Franklin lived in a time that invited
new ways of doing things in all areas of life, and he
pursued targets of opportunity in every area of life
that moved him to action.
I
put it this way to myself in thinking about Ben Franklin:
He was a pure beneficent change-maker. He saw so many
opportunities to improve his own life and the lives
of others that he moved from project to project in the
direction that he saw the greatest need for change to
be. He was one of the movers and shakers of his age
and a prime facilitator of change. He was fortunate
in having the mental equipment and other inner qualities
that made this kind of life possible for him.
In
the way of the usual organizing adventures of life,
these observations pretty much leave us with only one
choice:
We
have to say, or at least consider the possibility, that
the organizing adventure of Ben Franklin's life
was the marriage adventure.
The
marriage adventure is an adventure in which two people
commit themselves to become a single social, economic,
and psychological unit. They bind themselves together
to make the best life for themselves that they can.
They work together, and they share the burdens and the
benefits that come their way. It is the most intimate
of partnerships.
The
general expectation is that they will love each other
and limit their sex lives to each other and they will
probably have children and raise them.
When
this is the case, the marriage adventure is still a
different thing from these other adventures. The love
adventure, for example, may die a natural death within
the marriage adventure and still leave the marriage
adventure pretty much intact as a matter of convenience
or necessity. Two people whose marriage adventure is
the organizing adventure of their lives may agree by
mutual consent to live their sexual adventures outside
of marriage, and this may not necessarily destroy the
marriage. It could depend on the people involved. And
the adventure of having and raising children may not
even materialize within a marriage without having any
great effect on the quality of the marriage. Again,
it depends on the people involved.
The
Franklins certainly fit the profile here. Indeed, they
were so successful in their partnership early on in
life that their resources gave Ben in particular a base
to work from in pursuing his other interests.
Indeed,
we almost have to say that Ben Franklin's later life
grew up from the base of his successful marriage adventure.
Or we might put the matter this way: Ben Franklin's
marriage adventure with Deborah was so successful as
the early organizing adventure of his life that he was
able to go on in his later life to make a larger public
adventure the organizing adventure of his life. And
he was able to do so without abandoning his marriage
adventure or even undermining it in any substantial
way.
And
so we might say that:
(1)
The organizing adventure for Ben Franklin, at least
in his later life, was the pursuit of changes to improve
the general quality of life in his society, watershed
changes that the nature of the times made possible for
the first time in human history.
Or
we could say that:
(2)
The organizing adventure for Ben Franklin, at least
in his later life, was the satisfaction of his curiosity
on a grand scale with a careful balance between satisfying
his own needs and promoting the general good of his
society. He seems always to have been asking himself,
"How does this work and how can we make it work
better?" "Why can't we do things this other
way instead of what we do now?" And he had a happy
knack for asking questions about matters of consequence,
as well as generally coming up with answers.
I
rather like this way of thinking about Ben Franklin
in terms of successive organizing adventures.
But
it may well be fair to say that the organizing adventure
of his life was always something like one of these last
two ways of thinking about it and that his successful
marriage adventure was always a secondary adventure.
It was just the way he went about establishing a base
to work from.
In
any case, the range and substance of Ben Franklin's
contributions to our society suggest to me that he may
have been the greatest person of his age, and simply
saying that he created a successful organizing adventure
in his marriage doesn't quite seem to do him justice.