The Many Faces of Benjamin Franklin

US News ^ | 06/23/03 (I don't understand it either) | Jay Tolson

[what's up]

makes a powerful case that Franklin was probably the most indispensable of the Founding Fathers.

My vote is for John Adams.

Walter Isaacson? Forgive me but I think I will skip the new book.

[BlueLancer]

A man of many talents indeed!

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[stainlessbanner]

bttt

[boris]

When they introduced the new $20 bill, I wrote letters to the editors of the local papers asking why they replaced Andrew Jackson with Christopher Lee.

I think they thought I was serious and didn't print my letter. But take out a yuppie food stamp and look hard at the portrait, then watch a few Hammer Dracula films...

--Boris

[Constitution Day]

"Beer: Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." - Benj. Franklin

[Doctor Stochastic]

But not all American writers and thinkers have looked upon Franklin with such favor. Even when they were fascinated by the man, writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald saw him as the patron saint of the money-grubbing, soulless American bourgeois, the very cliche-spouting glad-hander that Sinclair Lewis would satirize in his novel Babbitt.

Makes Franklin seem even better.

[dighton]

A true inspiration to the Zot Brigade.

[buffyt]

There was a mini-series about him recently. It was very good. I had no idea that he lived in Europe for so long and was never paid for it. If they re-run the series, I will post a notice here. He was fascinating and brilliant! Way ahead of his time.

[RonF]

During the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin was presented with a chamber pot with George III's likeness painted on the inside while walking on the streets of Paris. Benjamin immediately set the pot down in the middle of the street and utilized it to the roaring approval of a crowd.

Franklin once received a letter from a group of citizens who had formed a new town in Massachusetts. Splitting off from Wrentham, they had initially named the town Exeter. But they were all rural farmers and had no money to pay for a bell for their church. They needed one, as the bell not only called people to worship, but also warned of Indian attack, fire, and called people to civic and social gatherings. So they renamed the town "Franklin", sent him a letter apprising him of this fact, and solicited a bell from him.

Franklin had other ideas. "Sense being preferable to Sound", he had his son purchase and ship them a case of books and instructed them to form a library. They did. The library exists to this day, and is the oldest public circulating library in the United States of America. And the original books, in a glass case, sit in the front hall of the library.

[Im4Starr]

Ben Franklin's Epitaph:

The Body of B. Franklin, Printer, like the cover of an old book, Its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here food for worms. But the work shall not be lost, for it will, as he believed appear once more in a new and more elegant edition revised and corrected by the author.

[martin_fierro]

Ben lives.

<|:)~

[DeuceTraveler]

I vote George Washington. But they were all incredible men.

[Bob Buchholz]

I've got that quote on a t-shirt. People always stop me and comment on it.

[Constitution Day]

Funny you should mention that.
I know that I've seen that on someone's shirt here in my hometown... that wasn't you, was it? :)

[what's up]

Yes, don't get me wrong. I love Franklin...it's just that Adams is my favorite.

At least this year.

[Adder]

Great read! Thanks!

[Wonder Warthog]

Franklin first, Washington second, Adams third, Jefferson fourth. Of course, "I" like Adams because he was a crotchety old fussbudget--the most "warthog-like" of the Founding Fathers.

[Bob Buchholz]

I live Washington, NC but do get to the big city on occasion so it is not out of the realm of possibility.