Great Franklin’s Ghost

I’ve been reading about Ben Franklin again—what else is new? But this time it’s actually related to a project, something I’m tinkering at with Bill Turkel and the clever, clever elves at the Center for History and New Media. About that project, more later. In the meantime, when you dine with Franklin, a side order of old weird America is always on the menu. Things come up that don’t fit even Bill or the CHNM’s generous definitions of serious history. Lucky for you, I have a blog…

Great Franklin’s Ghost!

Benjamin Franklin was not, as he is often remembered, a statesman who happened to dabble in science—that sounds more like Thomas Jefferson—but a scientist who happened to dabble in statecraft. (This according to Joyce Chaplin’s terrific The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. And if you enjoy that, definitely see James Delbourgo’s A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America.) But as Franklin’s star rose in the century after his death, it was Poor Richard’s Yankee practicality that people remembered. Doctor Franklin the Enlightenment magus faded from popular memory. (On this, see also Pamela Laird’s Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin. Yeah, there are a lot of books about Franklin.) Washington was the soldier’s hero, and Jefferson remained beloved by democrats and other bearded yokels, but for industrializing America, Franklin the penny-counting businessman was the great archetype and inspiration: Early to bed and a penny earned, the Horatio Alger hero before there was Horatio Alger. Franklin’s science mostly dropped out of the picture: He invented bifocals, didn’t he? And something about a kite?

But there was one segment of American society which kept the memory of Franklin as scientist alive. In the middle to late nineteenth century, millions of Americans dabbled in spiritualism, visiting seances, decoding table rappings, pushing Ouija-style planchettes, and watching mediums emit ectoplasmic goo. And no spirit from the Other Side—no Puritan preacher, no messiah, no rich dead uncle—communicated with American spiritualists more frequently than the ghost of Benjamin Franklin. (And on this, see Werner Sollors’ 1983 article, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph, Or Indian Blessings to Gas-Lit American Drawing Rooms.” OK, I’ll stop doing that now.)

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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.