The American Founder Who Electrified Paris
Image Source: The White House Historical Association – Public Domain
“I think the game is pretty near up.”
– George Washington, commander of Continental Army
These are times of madness, self-deceit, oligarchy and rapine. It’s been a long time since Crispus Attucks, freshly freed, took one for the team in Boston Town, crying at Fate, as he fell, “Oh, you motherfucker.” Long time since we threw the tea of some monopoly into the harbor. and switched beverages in defiance of ItIsWhatItIs-ism. Long time since the Sons of Liberty — names like Paul Revere, Sam Adams and John Hancock, all later co-opted by Big Sugar, microbrewing, and insurance underwriting — held sway in the hearts of the colonial usurpers in the Ind’gen Country of the New World Order.
For a long time now we’ve seen them paint the presidential elections between the Lessers of Two Evils as a case of the most important in one’s lifetime. For a long time, it hasn’t mattered. There doesn’t seem to be much representation for where our tax dollars go — the military complex gets most of it, Congress awards Israel vast sums as aid that comes back as kickback payments to members at re-election time, and African Americans, “newly freed,” have shouting that curse at Fate for nearly a quarter of a millennium.
Instead of the Sons of Liberty, we must now settle for MAGA sentimentalists, clown extras from Aladdin singing “Proud of Your Boy,” and Oath Keepers, itching for a coup for no particular reason, except history has sown it’s been the American Way for quite some time and it’s time to make the rooster crow, Cockadoodle-Do. Some of us wish, not-so-secretly anymore, that United Airlines Flight 93 had reached its target, purportedly the Capitol Building, and Woke the fat, sleepy legislators. And to top it all off, we seem intent on allowing the reascension of a populist groper twice impeached and who presided miserably over a pandemic we ignored. We look set to bring him back — or else.
Revolution is in the air. AIs are training on us through their internet of eyes, seeking the knowledge of what constitutes a 21st century human. Is it any wonder that they are hallucinating?
I am considering all of this noise in my head as I add another log to the ol’ barrel fire by the tracks. I have been watching a recent Apple original series, Franklin. It stars Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin, the legendary American inventor, writer, wit, statesman, and diplomat. I enjoyed Douglas in his last gig, The Kaminsky Method, in which he brilliantsly plays an aging acting coach. Alan Arkin co-stars. (For a moment I fondly recall his work as Yossarian and smile.) Douglas couldn’t have Kaminsky-coached himself better playing Franklin, and I am enjoying this old swain song of his; he’s a pro and he knows it — like Franklin himself. (I smile.)
To me, the series is timely and entertaining. Why have an America anyway? Who gives a shit? It’s December 1776, cold and snowy, and Ben has rowed ashore to France with his grandson, Temple Franklin (Noah Jupe), to see if he can convince the French Royals to aid in the American campaign for independence from England and to construct a brave new Republic. It’s taken months to sail from America to Europe, and the latest word from the colonies is that battle is not going well for the Americans, having lost New York to the Brits. The newly “independent” collection of colonies has formed a Continental Congress and a ragtag army. America needs friends with money, ships, soldiers, and armaments. Taxation without representation is no longer an option. Talking in a carriage on the way to Paris, Temple asks how long the vist to France will be. Ben replies, “Until we win France to our side and secure our independenc or we are hanged.” Temple gulps and asks, “Is there a third option?” And replies, “I suppose there is always treason.”
The series is based on a book by Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America(Holt, 2005). The chapters are titled with famous sayings of Ben Franklin: “The First Mistake in Public Business Is the Going into It,” “Success Has Ruined Many a Man,” etc. The book is a good place to find the vibe that opens the series and is carried throughout the series, Schiff writes,
“America was six months old, Franklin seventy years her senior. And the fate of that infant republic was, to a significant extent, in his hands. He sailed to France not for self-emancipation, as Americans have since, but for that of his country. Congress had declared independence without any viable means of achieving it; the American colonies were without munitions, money, credit, common cause.”
To get that aid would require finesse and skill with people. Ben had that. Schiff notes,
“He knew better than to confuse straightforwardness with candor; he was honest, but not too honest, which qualifies in France as a failure of imagination…A master of the oblique approach, a dabbler in shades of gray, Franklin was a natural diplomat, genial and ruthless.”
And Douglas does Franklin proud in this role.
What follows are episodes of bourgeois excess, court life, an implied frisson of erotic splendor ahead, sumptuous meals, dark lighting in large candlelit rooms on wintry days, wigs, and, probably the highlight, the music of spoken French, with English subtitles. Ben speaks some French, badly, of course, but with translatable wit. His grandson is told, after a lesson, not to bother, but to just stand there looking mysterious. When Ben meets Monsieur Chaumont and his wife Madame Thérése Chaumont, she wears a huge over-the-top bouffant with a toy ship riding in it to honor Ben’s journey from America. She is perplexed at his headwear and inquires, “What is that?” He replies, as she pats at it, that it’s some Canadian varmint. Her hand moves back, as from roadkill.
We enjoy the tension between personages immensely. Especially the romantic dalliances of Ben and his grandson among the ladies of the court, who flirt endlessly, perfumed and costumed like Birds of Paradise in drag. There also the sober seriousness of Ben’s dealings with other visiting American leaders, such as John Jay and John Adams, the future construers of the Constitution. Adams is prickly and does not like Ben. As Schiff puts it, “[Franklin] set his colleagues’ teeth on edge, none more so than John Adams’s. Franklin’s greatest enemies in France were his compatriots.” And there were attitudes in conflict when visiting British diplomats had tete-a-tetes with French statesman regarding the fate of America.
It’s a historical crossroads, you muse as the drama unfolds before you. The British Empire is in trouble in the Americas. The colonists have shown resistance to taxation ever since the Stamp Act of 1765, which forced Americans to pay fee for all legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, cards, almanacs, resulting in major uprisings culminating in the Boston Massacre. Independence would mean transport would stop to America and all all the King’s riff-raff would be far-flung to the fatal shores of Australia. Also, the King was mad; it was like he had introjected the Fool meant to amuse him, resulting in instability. At that time, the King could have a man hanged, drawn and quartered, an act of absolute power-over that its hideous message was reserved, eventually, for treasonists.
And France, apparently, did not know it, but they were just a dozen years or so away from the storming of the Bastille and the commencement of the French Revolution brought on by Robespierre, who fought for establishing equality under the law and eradicating privileges. Bouffants would have to fall in baskets woven by the children of poverty. Then Napoleon came along. codified some human rights. Beethoven wrote Eroica in his honor, then was disgusted when he heard the Little Big Guy had declared himself Emperor.
Back home George Washington was at war with the Red Coats. Ben was getting mixed news, months later. He wasn’t keen on the war and would have preferred a negotiated settlement. But the English were arrogant and imperial. In a recent tweet, Ed Snowden quotes Ben on war, and it is instructive in how sensible it was in its approach. Adult. Snowden posts:
“𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐖𝐚𝐫, 𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐛𝐚𝐝 𝐏𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐞. What vast Additions to the Conveniences and Comforts of Living might Mankind have acquired, 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐲’𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐔𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲. What an Extention of Agriculture even to the Tops of our Mountains; What Rivers render’d navigable, or join’d by Canals; what Bridges, Acqueducts, new Roads & other public Works, Edifices & Improvements, rendering a compleat Paradise, might not have been obtain’d 𝐛𝐲 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐖𝐚𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐟! in bringing Misery into thousands of Families, and destroying the Lives of so many Thousands of working People who might have perform’d the useful Labour.”
And then one thinks of the Brown University report, Cost of War, which draws the conclusion that the wars since 9/11 have cost Americans an estimated $8 trillion, with nothing like what Ben cites to show for it. War, what is it good for? Absolutely Nothin’. Say it again.
Well, we know how it turned out. The Convention that formed the Constitution almost was the work of assholes entirely — property owners and in a scheme that saw some people as property. We, the People have George Mason to thank for producing a document that the hoi polloi could give a shit about. He refused to ratifiy the worked-out document until the “Founding Fathers” attended to his demands and included several amendments that became the Bill of Rights. The far right has been trying to divest the Constitution of that set of rights and protections ever since. Fuck the far right.
I love the way the old geyser Ed Asner put it in his last book before he died, The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs. Ed writes, “George Mason of Virginia proposed that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution. The delegates, almost to a man, soundly defeated the measure. They were tired. They wanted to go home. And the Constitution was already written.” Nuh-uh, Mason goes, pony up some principles or I ain’t signin’. They ponied up, winking and nodding, knowing there were other ways to trample the grapes of wrath.
Ed Asner probably had it right in his grouchy pronouncements on American contradictoriness, underwritten by an enormous glacial mindset composed of dizzying ignorance. But Ed, the real person, an Ed as a TV character, was an activist anyway, fighting, probably futilely, for enlightenment among the masses, not through some tyrannical moral God who favors the rich, but the Common Man who can eke out some integrity through critical, independent thinking. The Asner Method may be all we have left between us the darkness ahead.
Franklin is not a perfect series, but it is enetrtaining and of some historical value. The very life of this new America was at stake. It could go either way. Many of Franklin’s critics were angry that he was overseas cavorting with the bourgeoisie when he should have been firing a musket at home. He hadn’t been appointed to plea to the French. He just came. They loved his air of “sleek charlantism.” And that love made all the difference in procuring the necessary resources to beat The Man with the Red Coat down. Douglas is outstanding, but you have to be a Douglas fan.
Schiff is an excellent companion text for the series. Schiff emphasizes,
“Without French funds the Revolution would have collapsed; by a conservative estimate, America’s independence cost France more than 1.3 billion livres, the equivalent of $13 billion today. France was crucial to American independence, and Franklin was crucial to France. “
Mad King George did the Curly Shuffle. Britain was angry at France and no doubt plotted revenge. Maybe Steel Dossier was the nickname for the guillotine. The rest is history.
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