Benjamin Franklin lecture by George Hahn

Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome you all here to the library. I see we have some familiar faces, but also some different people that have come from, that worked at the library

previously, which is really wonderful. First, I really want to thank the redoubtable Dons and the humanities program for planning these events associated with the exhibit that we have here at the library.

And we do encourage you if you haven't had a chance to, to go to the exhibit, but it will be on display until December 5th. And it gives you a good idea of Benjamin Franklin's life and his many contributions.

And then I especially want to thank Doctor George Hahn, who's planned these programs, also helped support the grant and plan the programs with the Dons that have really added a lot to the series.

And I know he doesn't really need an introduction because we all came out to hear him this afternoon, but he is a professor of the English and a director of the MA in Humanities program, here at Towson, he's a specialist in British literature of the

18th century. And I've heard he really gets students excited about poetry as well. So it's good we have some of the students in the program here

this afternoon. His newest book just published is The Ocean Bards, British Poetry and the War at Sea, 1793 until 1815. The talk of... The title of his talk today is A Gentleman Rage,

Benjamin Franklin on the curve of 18th century satire. Thank you, Patty. Thank you very much. I call it Can a gentleman rage? Benjamin Franklin on the curve

of 18th century satire. I talk not, certainly, let's get this clear early, as an expert of any kind, of any stripe, on Benjamin Franklin.

But I am interested in satire, and I'd like to come at Ben Franklin by throwing a slant of light on what have been called his his satires. It was the golden age of satire, the 18th century in England,

Dryden, Swift, Pope Hogarth, Gay, Addison and Steele, Fielding and Jane Austen. Never has a country before or since produced so much corrosive free market laughter.

Of course, a veritably Free Press, the Licensing Act had expired in 1695, brought a sunny climate for English satire. Colonial America sprouted some humorous dissent, but the crop was sparse because the blazing sun of treason law dried up its

ground. After the war, American criticism was more humorless invective fired between Federalists and Republicans than the sophisticated irony and parody of the wits of the mother country.

One American exception, however, is thought to be Benjamin Franklin, hailed by many critics as America's founding satirist. But is he? First, some stipulated definitions.

Satire is a distortion, a fun house mirror that exaggerates things to mock them. It is a text that distorts its context. Like all art, it is an act of illusion, an artist's conception

of things. More a cartoon than a portrait and less a truth than a polemic, satire aims less to inquire than to persuade. Recalling Plato's rant against rhetoric, one may say that

satire starts with, rather than establishes a supposed truth, so it can never be philosophical in aim or fully ethical in act. It rests on analogy, but analogy has no purchase on truth, the less so if the analogy is false.

So satire is finally an argument by ridicule. It is the most aggressive, the most offensive of literary types. Think only of the few words that characterize it.

Satire is a scourge, a bludgeon, a whip, and a weapon. Satire shoots at, targets. It attacks, skewers, blasts, explodes, destroys, and demolishes.

Long satire, like Byron's mock epic Don Juan, is a mass frontal assault. Short satire, like Mencken's essays, are the light cavalry of literature, skirmishing an enemy flank. Playing on the passions

of its own times, satire is easy to understand in those times, but unless it harbours some universal antibodies, its immune system will break down and its meaning will be forgotten.

So most satire has a short shelf life, in its time, enraging or humoring its readers, in later times, puzzling them. And whatever its intention, satire rarely reforms. Swift's Gulliver didn't make readers less gullible and Pope's

satire on dunces didn't end stupidity. Voltaire's satire didn't bury optimism, and Jane Austen's mock of the Gothic novel didn't stop its rush from the presses. Satire can enlighten readers, expose shortcomings, and vent the

writer's rage, but alone, it never repairs. As war breaks up bones and buildings, satire aims to break up its readers false conceptions. More positively, satire may be a form of what Robert Frost calls

counter speech, the power of other minds to draw out the best in us. So satire is to literature what the scrimmage is to football.

It dares the reader to resist, or it bends the reader to its will. From another slant of light, the satirist is a healer, a pathologist, detecting cancers in the body's politic and social,

ultimately, for law or popular will to be the surgeons that excise them, and that too is positive. Since classical Rome, two general tones mark the ends of the curve of satire.

Horatian satire is gentle, generalized, urbane, and mild. It satirizes the inconsistencies of human nature. Juvenalian satire is biting, bitter, and angry. It attacks individual human beings and institutions with

contempt and abuse. Both tones are aggressive, but Horace's satire is a boardwalk shooting gallery of 10 ducks, fun without injury. Juvenal's is a combat zone. And the neoclassical 18th century

imported both types, paired at opposite ends of the curve. Swift and Pope are the reigning Juvenalians, Addison and Steele the Horatians. So where is Franklin on this curve?

In answering, I exclude his squibs, hoaxes and puns, and the wonderful all American horse sense that gives its humor its foundation. Rather, I will glance at four mature and exigent criticisms of

policy that are called satire: On Transported Felons, On Empire, On Hessian Hegemony, and On Slavery. What characterizes their tones and their diction? Could a self-styled, urbane gentleman like Franklin really

vent anger in public? And are these essays really satires? What does not characterize Franklin's tone is clear both in intention and effect.

As early as 1733, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin wrote an essay on Ill Natured Speaking. In it he said that ill natured speakers delight in touching gall'd horses, that they may see them wince, and he compares them

to the meanest insect, the trifling mosquito, the filthy bug, who has as well as you the power of giving pain to men. In 1781 he repeated the same insect imagery in a letter about malevolent critics and bug writers.

They will abuse you and wound your character in nameless pamphlets, thereby resembling those dirty little stinking insects that attack us only in the dark, molesting and wounding us.

And in 1788 he complained to the spirit of rancor, malice and hatred that breathes in the newspapers. These prohibitions govern the tone of what are called Franklin's satires, and what are his satires,

therefore, lose satire's great predatory bite. They are models of a diction that the 18th century called the plain style. It was the style in England of Swift and Addison and Steele.

This Anglo American plain style we hear in Madison's Federalist Papers and Washington's Farewell Address. It is parallel, balanced, antithetical, phrased mainly in periodic sentences.

Jefferson wrote plain style with a lean to Latinate diction, and Paine wrote it with a bend to the Old English. But all the Founders prose was clear as a window pane. Their tones, however, were as different as the organ and the

fife. Had Paine, for example, written the Declaration in his visceral style and Jefferson Common Sense in his cerebral style, we might all have stood at Camden Yards last July 4th singing God Save

the Queen before a cricket match. Neither is a satire, of course. Jefferson explained independence to the world in universal terms, but Payne got the muskets into the field.

The difference? Payne's anger. Franklin, Franklin likewise pens the plain style in his essays.

In the Autobiography, he invoked Addison's spectator papers as his tonal model. Even, mild, moderate, always more humorous than stinging. He never limes the lampoons of Pope or imitates the

grotesque visions of Swift. He is ironic, but not militantly ironic. Yet Franklin is derivative of Swift in the structures of his satires, so much so that Franklin often seems like the

copyist with a pale palette painted Gainsborough by the numbers. Contrast two of Swift's matchless essay-length satires with Franklin's. In the 1708 argument against abolishing Christianity, Swift,

a Church of England Parson, purposely argues the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. We should not, his part persona rages in the earnestness of a Cotton Mather sermon,

abolish Christian services to allow trade on the Lord's Day, because we would lose valuable nap time on Sunday mornings. Without preachers, whom will we mock? And without Christianity, how could our freethinkers deny the

Trinity? And in A Modest Proposal of 1729, Swift attacks repressive English taxes imposed on the Irish. So his ironic persona proposes ways for Ireland to meet its tax

obligations. How? Irish parents should butcher and market their babies to earn money, to end abortion, to reduce the number of family mouths to feed, to save their children from begging for food, to raise

the Irish GNP, to increase the English Irish balance of trade, to reduce the number of papists. And finally, to put some good food on English tables and gloves on English ladies.

The final solution is the logical solution, even if one thinks the church is a good place to nap to the drone of sermons, or the taxes are a form of state sanctioned cannibalism. Each essay is a satire on timely public issues that have

evaporated over time. But the preservative of the satire is the angry affirmation that is what is purely rational is not even remotely ethical.

Swift's personae measure water in watts, time in teaspoons when they use a rational calculus to solve a moral matter. So Swift's satire always breathes righteous indignation.

An angry man intolerant of mechanical abstract reasoning. Or think of Defoe's '72 satire, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, satirizing Swift's own Tory and High Church fear and treatment of non-Anglicans.

Defoe's persona, masked as a Tory and High churchman is another ironic rationalist. Again, the final solution is the logical way to rid the nation of nonbelievers.

So the essay demands that dissenters not merely be exiled, but killed. Defoe's analogy? And I say to you, when a snake enters your garden, do you treat

him with- Do you treat with him and wait for him to strike? No, you kill him. The animal imagery is telling, a hierarchical metaphor that implies authority and superiority, but the analogy is

purposely false. Dissenters are not snakes, and the garden image implies that to a Dissenter, England is no Eden.

Defoe the Dissenter knows that, but he parodies his persona's angry language to exaggerate and stigmatize the persona's own ruling church and politics. Swift's and Defoe's satires are edgy and violent

because they are fighting rearguard actions in defending what is sacred to them. They glimpse an apocalypse if their side is lost. Their calls are phrased because their calls are felt as life and

death matters, nuanced with cold human racial implications. Their dire warnings well with a dark laugh. Addison's and Franklin's essays are coffeehouse cleverness, less than analytical, a wink, a nod, and a smile among gentlemen,

aligning the more with comedy than with satire. Yet Franklin's four essays do follow Swift's and Defoe's main structural lines, parody, irony, and speeding along accumulated effects like box cars on the rails of his sentences. Each

voiced by a persona, all the essays offer a project to criticize, but Franklin tempers his plain English in what he praises as modest diffidence

in the Autobiography. Franklin is prescient in feeling that low pulse in his own plain style, but it is that modest diffidence that makes his satire the lesser,

an American reprint of the mild Horatian Whig satire of Addison and Steel, far from the slash and salt of Pope's and Swift's Juvenalian Tory brand. Whig satire models its persona on Shaftesbury's

ideal of the good-natured man, a gentle man who finds truth in humor and expression in refined words, and in the autobiography, Franklin cites Shaftesbury as a model of gentlemanly conversation.

Another of Franklin's models, Steele, in Tatler 21, claims that in a gentleman the height of good breeding is shown in never giving offence. Can there be satire without offence?

In #242 Steele asserts good nature to be as an essential quality in a satirist. Tell that to Swift, who saw savage indignation at the heart of his satire.

And in Spectator #10, Addison promises that his satires will "make instruction agreeable and diversion useful, for which reason I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and wit with morality."

In the Autobiography, Franklin holds Addison up as "a model that I wish to imitate." And like Addison again, he claims to imitate Socrates, who "avoided abrupt contradiction and put on the humbler enquirer and

doubter to express himself in terms of modest diffidence." And in his list of thirteen gentlemanly virtues, Franklin numbers moderation, tranquillity, and humility. But the satirist must establish an air of superiority.

He is, after all, chastising. And can a true gentleman hold himself out as superior without offence, let alone abuse, what is called Horatian satire?

Is it best only a first cousin to satire? It is comedy's fraternal twin. Empty of anger. Franklin's essays are masterpieces of incongruous comedy, but not of satire.

Together, comedy and satire graph a Venn diagram in which the family resemblance is merely risibility. In one a gentle smile of recognition of inconsistency, in the other an angry laugh of disdain and rebuke.

Thus in his essay Exporting of Felons to the Colonies only a smile results from the simple inversion of returning a favour to England. As the mother country transports felons to the colonies, so the

colonies should export rattlesnakes to the mother country. Or, In an edict by the King of Prussia, Franklin's German persona argues that since England was colonized by Germans

and Anglo Saxons colonize America, and Prussia defended England and America in the Seven Years war, Prussia has a right to tax both England and America. In the third, Rules by which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One,

Franklin, styling himself as a how-to book author, a modern simpleton, he says, lays out 20 canons that will assure the diminishing of the British Empire.

For example, levy odious taxes, delay and pervert justice, suspect your colonists always of revolt, deny them representation, grant your generals unconstitutional powers, dissolve your colonial parliaments, et cetera.

And in On the Slave Trade, Franklin masks as an editor who prints a letter by an Algerian Muslim governor, an advocate of human bondage at a time in the 1780s when North African states were capturing, selling and enslaving European whites.

If we cease our cruises against Christians, how shall be, how shall we be furnished with the commodities their countries produce? If slavery is stopped, who will indemnify the owners for their

losses? Where would the slaves go if freed? They are too ignorant to establish good government, and

the wild Arabs would soon molest and destroy or again enslave them. Does the Koran censure slavery? Of course not, Franklin writes in 1790 after similar questions

and answers were voiced by Southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention. In Franklin's parody, slave masters are businessmen, slaves, stupid Christians, Indians, wild Arabs, and the Bible is the

Koran. Again the persona, again simple inversion, again accumulated effects. Every time, fun without fire. We smile, but righteous anger never flames up.

Franklin's essays never darken with the fear and repulsiveness of butchering or of mass execution that shock the reader into horrified recognition and anger that therefore prompt him to action.

We never feel the pain of slaves, the injustice to taxpayers, the crimes of transported felons. Swift and Defoe founded their satires on inviolable principles.

Franklin's comedy rests on circumstances. Horace taught that literature should instruct and entertain. Cicero added that it should also persuade, and Juvenal showed that satire should punish.

Franklin teaches and Franklin delights, but his steely rationality fences out the sympathy to move the reader or to punish the satiric butt. He is a lawyer whose reasoning wins the admiration of

the judge but whose emotional distance loses the case to the jury. Convincing but not persuasive, he is the director, telling the comic actor to put two feet into one pant leg to get the laugh

when he falls down. Funny, but not satire. Incongruous reversal is Franklin's most common denominator, and it's as simple, untextured, and unnuanced as a

nursery rhyme. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. So felons become snakes, Prussians pass as Englishmen, North Africans mimic South Carolinians, and Yankee Doodle cross-dresses as John Bull.

It's all good fun. Pastel violet comedy on the spectrum. Horatian light. If only the reversals were acted on and not merely understood by

the reader, Franklin implies, the country would be a better place. But teaching ethics is not moving one to ethical action. A reader's understanding of a gentleman's words, Franklin's or Jefferson's, did not bring action or liberty.

The emotive, warlike words of Paine, no gentleman he, did. Gentlemen both were Swift and Pope, but Swift took off his clerical bands and Pope hung up his wig when they sat down to

aim their satire and impersonate rude and angry young hellfires. Franklin never could. The reasonableness, diffidence, and moderation that are found in Grandfather extols as virtuous in the autobiography hedge

against abusing the guilty and sentimentalizing the victim. Respectability ruled his life, and respectability stifled his satire. So what's the main attraction of satire?

Baltimore's own HL Mencken, bo gentleman himself in throwing his brick bats, had an answer. I believe that people like to read abuse. What that says about the satirist is one thing.

What it says about ourselves as readers of satire, we can ponder. George, I'm convinced and not persuaded. Why couldn't there be something that's of a lighter-toned satire

than the invective that you describe and ascribe to? Well, I think it's, I think it certainly aspires to be to be a lighter tone. But even when you compare - Franklin's most comparable, I

think, to Addison and Steele, who were on the mild end of the, end of the satiric, the satiric curve for two other, for two reasons. One, as I say, he bases what he what he says on circumstances.

Swift and Pope base what they're saying on life and death matters. It's a life and liberty matter and slavery ended. Death doesn't.

And I, and I think, and I think second, if the satirist doesn't impart the anger that, after all, I think is the generator of satire, well, why sit down to write this? To make a joke?

He made much better jokes in much shorter form. The... There's a pulling back. He's standing on the brake rather than the accelerator.

The pace of those satires, of those four satires, just doesn't rush. It doesn't overwhelm as theirs does. From the start, the Romans, the Romans said satire is all ours.

We invented it. And the the man that gave definition and attracted most of the imitation was Juvenal. The polite satire of Addison and Steele was never... Just barely made the cut so far as satire is concerned.

And as I say, because I think he's standing, because Franklin's satire moved to a little, or less strong than theirs. I think he's a wonderful writer of comedy, but I

can't call it satire. Patty? Would you call it irony then? Oh, irony is the oil on the rail for it. But that's, I think that's true of most satire that most satire is at least a put-on, the author pretending

that he or she is something that he's really not. Franklin pretending that he's a Hessian or Swift pretending that he's an extreme rationalist and so on. And the disjunct, the disjunction between what the

author says and what the author's persona, the narrator, says, is the irony that keeps it going. It seems like you imply that because it's not real satire, it doesn't have much impact.

Or maybe I'm not... Whereas I would say a lot of great... Well, you're putting words into my mouth, but I think I'll accept them.

Well, I would say that a lot of great literature, you know, has irony and that still makes it powerful without being hit me over the head with a sledgehammer like A Modest Proposal. Well, I hate to apply a calculus then of popularity, but on

the, on the scale of things, I think you'll find you'll find Swift's Modest Proposal far, far more anthologized than any satire by by Franklin. So if we take the old test of time test, I think he is...

I don't think there's a contest. I maybe I should apologize. I feel like I'm I'm dissing someone in the graveyard. Me too.

Remember this. Just debating. Not to detract from the 18th century... (inaudible) Oh, no, I wouldn't. No, I put him, I put him more to the middle of the curve, near, maybe even nearer Swift.

He, one, he's relentless. He hits, he hits many of it. I mean, he is a, he is a comic as well, but you know, limited purely to his satire, as say with visual art, with Doonesbury.

I put him far nearer Swift. Yeah. Carrie. So I wanted to ask, do you think that's (inaudible) or

circumstantial, that Franklin was not in a position to write like Swift because of the mission that he had? Oh, I'm sure that enters in into it. As I said,

I'm no Franklin scholar, so I can't look at intentions, only the effect, and the effects that I looked at are those essays that have been ascribed, as satire, to him.

I mean, he was, I'm certain, I'm certain he was a far busier man than Swift. He was a far more important man than Swift. He was at the edge of national policy, which Swift... Swift was a

member, was tight with the Tory minister, ministry, from, you know, 72 to 1714, not very long. I mean, Franklin arches over the whole, virtually the whole 18th, 18th century.

There's no question that that Franklin is a far more, more important man than Swift is. But, you know, that's not... I was taking up the question purely as literary, not as political.

Well, maybe his sense of humour was more American than British and the main culture, in a way that, for instance, I'm just thinking about how popular he was in France with the nobility there, and there were not, there

where they like rather crude jokes And Benjamin Franklin fit right there. He could make even puns in French, you know, pretty risky puns, you know.

So you're comparing him with Swift, you know. But British humour has always been in a class by itself. I think you're right. It's dry humor, the dry mock.

But that's Franklin in conversation. And some of the things I read about him in conversation, I won't repeat here. He was no gentleman in conversation.

But in print, I mean, you know, if we grant him at least the honesty of trying to describe what he did in the autobiography, he tells us he's trying to be a gentleman.

He's trying to be modern. He's trying to be temperate. And I see what he says there as a mirror of what he does in the satires.

And you know, he is Anglo American until, Jack mentioned, I don't remember when did... Was it 1773 I think you said? That he... I'm sorry. (Five.) That he finally saw that he had to break with England. But American

culture was derivative of England, at least, I think, at least until that point, they read English books, they watched English plays, of course they spoke the English language.

They were ethnically English. It's, that's why, early on, I discounted, you know, what he said, the hoaxes and the squibs and the puns, which are, which are wonderful, but you know, they're not

satires. Is there really, then, a difference between the four examples that you gave and the hoaxes? Aren't they just hoaxes as well?

You mean the four examples? Are they hoaxes? I think you could say that. So would you be satisfied to call him a ridiculist as opposed

to a satirist? No, because those four pieces are called satires. And I'm just challenging the... What I've done is just to

challenge the critical book. You mean satire light? Satire light. No, I said Horace light.

I just... Comedy cool. I'm sorry. Faux satire. Maybe lying satire. I didn't even go as far as saying that. I think that's a real insult, Jack.

Did Benjamin consider himself a satirist, or was it others who characterized his writings as satire? It's a good question. I can't answer it. I don't know. Did he... I guess no one, I mean, even in England,

would style himself a satirist if they did what they did. So... But I still I can't answer that about Franklin. And from the beginning. that's the persona. Anthony Afterwit Polly Baker, Pacificus Secundus and so on.

He'd wear that mask, which they all did. And it's... That helps generate the irony, that the author, Franklin, Swift, doesn't agree at all with what the mask, the persona, is saying.

And so you get, at best, two targets of satire. One, the persona, knock that dummy down, and two, knock down what the dummy, the persona, is saying. Do you think that Franklin's, whatever you want to

call them, actually produce more results than Swift's? I was thinking how as when he was at the, I'm trying to think... It was one of the Lords' houses when they read the satire of the Prussians, and everyone, of course, was

outraged at first, and then they said, wait, this is some of your American humor. But the question you asked... I'm wondering if Franklin actually may have had more effect with the approach that he

took. What do you want to say the, the difference between what Stephen Colbert and, we'd say, what Jay Leno almost, you know. I think Jay Leno actually, particularly the things like that jaywalking

makes his point about American illiteracy probably better than some of the things that Colbert's does. Well, I mean, I could only go so far as to say I don't know.

I don't know the answer, but I'll use Franklin's comment when he talks about ill natured men. He compares them to mosquitoes.

Socrates compared himself to a gadfly. What does that do? It certainly didn't win Socrates... Socrates still had to drink the hemlock.

And I'm sure much of what Franklin wrote after 1775 that are thought of as satires did provoke the British, but I don't know that they inspired the Americans, if that's where you're going.

And again, I should stop my comment at that point and ask, you know, say, Jack, who's the Franklin specialist. Well, there, there certainly was no effect to stop sending felons to America until the break with England.

And that had nothing to do with Franklin and slavery, of course, despite that Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, the last satire that you you summarize, that fell on deaf ears, but actually only a month before his death in April 1790.

So he's still very much with it. And yet he was what regarded as the most dangerous man, most dangerous man in America, most dangerous man alive.

Did they regard Swift as the most dangerous man ever? I think the Whigs after 1714, regarded him as a pest. He wasn't even a player on the stage anymore.

He was sent back, of all places, to Ireland, which is where he did not want to be. So he - I'm sorry? He was a mosquito then, right? Yes, that's right.

You know, off he went. He, you know, he was just not, not regarded after that, after that point. Franklin was what the reputed for, at least in the British ministry, as cunning and crafty and one that

almost had the... They call him the wizard, that he had almost magical powers to incite people. George, If I understand your thesis, if we talk directly, you're saying

that Franklin is too mild and temperate to be even classified as a Horatian. I guess my question is, the question that's being begged here is to what extent is the distinction between the two,

Horatian and Juvenalian? To what extent is that a valid way of defining what satire is? Because the distinction itself comes from the 18th century, or the very latter part of the 17th century that John Dryden, if

I'm not mistaken. So, and I believe, although I'm not sure on this, I believe I've read somewhere that the distinction became less valid as the century wore on and the authors could not assume that

the readers would be aware of the Roman models. So, I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is to what extent could, you know, satire be something else more broad than, you know, what Dryden defined it to be, or is that

kind of a conventional, you know, distinction even now? Yeah, it's conventional. And Dryden, remember, as one of the 18th century thinkers who saw a balance in everything, and everything he

looked at was Newton's third law. There had to be a balance. So if we've got Juvenal over here, well, here's Horace.

So we'll put them at far ends. But if you look at Restoration comedy, some of which Dryden himself wrote, I mean, there are what you might call satiric shots in them, but they're

more comedies. I mean, the very word Restoration comedy, it was a way... Dryden's designation was a way, a kind of intellectual visual aid for people to see that.

But even he, even Dryden points out that, you know, the anger isn't there, and implies, I think, that you need that anger for satire. Swift's great, Swift designed his own tombstone, wrote his own

epitaph, as many people in the 18th century did. And he said, and he wrote it in Latin, he said, but, on his gravestone, that he is now in a place where savage indignation can no longer tear at his heart.

He went into the earth with that in mind, that belief that my personality, saying, I think, is such that I get upset at things. He's sensitive.

Another word for sensitive is being thin skinned. And I think a satirist has to be thin skinned. And Franklin, I don't see as being thin skinned at all. He comes, he's more rational, he's more

balanced. He's more even, far more than Swift. And it seems to me the motive then isn't there for satire.

And at best these, as I said, a kind of kind of joke, a wink and a nod among very urbane gentlemen, which to me is comedy. I think I really agree with your overall thesis

because Franklin had other objectives in mind which would not been served by the most savage of satire. So, you know, I think in what you're saying essentially

correct that as a satirist, he's probably, he's certainly not in the league of these other men you're talking about. No, and he probably didn't try to be. Again, I don't

want to venture into intention, but... I think that your distinction is certainly valid. I wonder if Franklin's background as a printer and a printer's apprentice and a publisher might have let

him be more influenced by Addison and Steele as well. Well, my guess is yes, he tells us, was he 10 or 12 years old when he discovered a copy of the Spectator?

And then in the print shop, he was a member of what they called the Courontiers. Were they other printers on the paper? And they would argue with one another, a lot of banter back and

forth. And in situations like that, whether I guess in a coffee house or a printing shop or a salon, the buoyancy of the wit, you didn't have a chance to make a long

speech. You had to make short, sharp, short, sharp comments. And I think we see those in certainly much of what he writes

early on, and even some of these essays that are called satire. I'm planning to read some of the books over my Christmas vacation.

So I'm not an expert, but, and maybe this is what you're already saying, that Franklin just didn't seem cynical enough. You know, he's not so angry. He believed in self improvement and, or at least from what we've

been hearing, and working for the common good. So he just, you know, that may be a more positive outlook. What we need is John Adams' opinionon Franklin. Can you infer one?

I can. Oh yes. Oh, he's spoken. Yes.

What's that? He was clear. He thought very little of Franklin's morality in any respect. And DH Lawrence wrote a book in the 20s, Studies in Classic American Literature, in

which he, what was the phrase he used for Franklin, to describe Franklin? It was something to the effect that, you know, what was it, Good Doctor Franklin,

I like him, I admire him, but I hate him. Few people know that Adams and Franklin slept together. Jack, where's this going?

Jack. We're waiting for the other shoe to drop. You... Are you going to... Are you going to finish your comment? There was no room in the inn.

That was the problem. Oh, my comment? Yes. It was not unusual for men to sleep together in a tavern or an inn because there was no room or...

And Adams tells the story in his diary and memoirs that Franklin was trying to convince him 'cause he didn't think he was going to... They were actually on a mission to meet Lord Howe, who had

offered a peace feeler, and they were traveling to get there and had to sleep overnight, and there was no room at the inn, as Gary said. Adams was convinced he was not going

to be able to sleep with this man until Franklin threw open the window, and it's the dead of winter. And Adams said, why are you doing that? We'll freeze to death.

We'll get sick. And then Franklin went into this long exposition about how fresh air staves off colds and flu and everything else, and he kept talking long enough that Adams fell asleep. That reminds me

in Moby Dick, didn't it start... Ishmael had to sleep with Queequeg or whatever his name was. But Franklin was too much the gentleman to to throw Adams out the window.

But he could have. Oh, he could have, but he didn't. Well, thank you all very much. Appreciate it.

For listening.