Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (10 page)

In a classic canny maneuver, Franklin corrected an early typo—he had reported that someone “died” at a restaurant when he meant to say “dined” at it—by composing a letter from a fictitious “J.T.” who discoursed on other amusing misprints. For example, one edition of the Bible quoted David as saying he was “wonderfully mad” rather than “made,” which caused an “ignorant preacher to harangue his audience for half an hour on the subject of spiritual madness.” Franklin then went on (under the guise of J.T.) to praise Franklin’s own paper, point out a similar typo made by his rival Bradford, criticize Bradford for being generally sloppier, and (with delicious irony) praise Franklin for not criticizing Bradford: “Your paper is most commonly very correct, and yet you were never known to triumph upon it by publicly ridiculing and exposing the continual blunders of your contemporary.” Franklin even turned his false modesty into a maxim to forgive his typo: “Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”
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The Franklin–Bradford newspaper war also included disputes over scoops and stolen stories. “When Mr. Bradford publishes after us,” Franklin wrote in one editor’s note, “and has occasion to take an Article or two out of the Gazette, which he is always welcome to do, he is desired not to date his paper a day before ours lest readers should imagine we take from him, which we always carefully avoid.”

Their competition had been going on for a year when Franklin set out to win from Bradford the job of being the official printer for the Pennsylvania Assembly. He had already begun cultivating some of the members, especially those in the faction that resisted the power of the Penn family and its upper-crust supporters. After Bradford printed the governor’s address to the Assembly in a “coarse and blundering manner,” Franklin saw his opening. He printed the same message “elegantly and correctly,” as he put it, and sent it to each of the members. “It strengthened the hands of our friends in the House,” Franklin later recalled, “and they voted us their printers.”
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Even as he became more political, Franklin resisted making his newspaper fiercely partisan. He expressed his credo as a publisher in a famous
Gazette
editorial “Apology for Printers,” which remains one of the best and most forceful defenses of a free press.

The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are “almost as various as their faces.” The job of printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions. “There would be very little printed,” he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody. At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”

“It is unreasonable to imagine that printers approve of everything they print,” he went on to argue. “It is likewise unreasonable what some assert, That printers ought not to print anything but what they approve; since…an end would thereby be put to free writing, and the world would afterwards have nothing to read but what happened to be the opinions of printers.”

With a wry touch, he reminded his readers that publishers are in business both to make money and inform the public. “Hence they cheerfully service all contending writers that pay them well,” even if they don’t agree with the writers’ opinions. “If all people of different opinions in this province would engage to give me as much for not printing things they don’t like as I could get by printing them, I should probably live a very easy life; and if all printers everywhere were so dealt by, there would be very little printed.”

It was not in Franklin’s nature, however, to be dogmatic or extreme about any principle; he generally gravitated toward a sensible balance. The rights of printers, he realized, were balanced by their duty to be responsible. Thus, even though printers should be free to publish offensive opinions, they should generally exercise discretion. “I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance vice or promote immorality, though…I might have got much money. I have also always refused to print such things as might do real injury to any person.”

One such example involved a customer who asked the young printer to publish a piece in the
Gazette
that Franklin found “scurrilous and defamatory.” In his effort to decide whether he should take the customer’s money even though it violated his principles, Franklin subjected himself to the following test:

Franklin ended his “Apology for Printers” with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to avoid all criticism. Despite his “despair of pleasing everybody,” Franklin concluded, “I shall not burn my press or melt my letters.”
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Along with such high-minded principles, Franklin employed some more common strategies to push papers. One ever reliable method, which had particular appeal to the rather raunchy unmarried young publisher, was the time-honored truth that sex sells. Franklin’s
Gazette
was spiced with little leering and titillating items. In the issue a week after his “Apology for Printers,” for example, Franklin wrote about a husband who caught his wife in bed with a man named Stonecutter, tried to cut off the interloper’s head with a knife, but only wounded him. Franklin ends with a smirking pun about castration: “Some people admire that when the person offended had so fair and suitable opportunity, it did not enter his head to turn St-n-c-tt-r himself.”

The next issue had a similar short item about an amorous constable who had “made an agreement with a neighboring female to
watch
with her that night.” The constable makes the mistake of climbing into the window of a different woman, whose husband was in another room. Reported Franklin: “The good woman perceiving presently by the extraordinary fondness of her bedfellow that it could not possibly be her husband, made so much disturbance as to wake the good man, who finding somebody had got into his place without his leave began to lay about him unmercifully.”

And then there was the story of the sex-starved woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he could not satisfy her. She “at times industriously solicited most of the magistrates” to gain sympathy for her plight. After her husband was medically examined, however, she moved back in with him. “The report of the physicians (who in form examined his
abilities
and allowed him in every respect to be
sufficient
) gave her but small satisfaction,” Franklin wrote. “Whether any experiments
more satisfactory
have been tried, we cannot say; but it seems she now declares it as her opinion that ‘George is as good as de best.’ ” In another passing reference to sexual virility, which was also his first published notice of lightning, Franklin reported about a bolt that melted the pewter button on the pants of a young lad, adding: “ ’Tis well nothing else thereabouts was made of pewter.”

Writing as “The Casuist,” Franklin even helped to pioneer the genre of sexual and moral advice columns. (Although the literal definition of the word “casuistry” refers to the application of moral principles to everyday conduct, Franklin used it, with a touch of irony, in its more colloquial sense, which implies a slightly off-kilter or misleading application of those principles.) One letter from a reader, or from Franklin pretending to be a reader, posed the following dilemma: Suppose a person discovers that his wife has been seduced by his neighbor, and suppose he has reason to believe that if he reveals this to his neighbor’s wife, then she might agree to have sex with him, “is he justifiable in doing it?” Franklin, writing as the Casuist, gave an earnest answer. If the questioner were a Christian, he would know that he should “return not evil for evil, but repay evil with good.” And if he is not a Christian but instead “one who would make reason the rule of his actions,” he would come to the same conclusion: “such practices can produce no good to society.”
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Franklin also knew another maxim of journalism: crime stories sell, particularly when they are outlandish. In a report on the death of a young girl, for example, he provided the mix of reporting and outrage later perfected by racier tabloids. The case involved a couple who were charged with murdering the man’s daughter from a previous marriage by neglecting her, forcing her “to lie and rot in her nastiness,” giving her “her own excrements to eat,” and “turning her out of doors.” The child died, but a physician testified she would have died anyway from other ailments she had, so the judge sentenced the couple merely to be burned on the hand. Franklin raged at the “pathetic” ruling and delivered his own harsh verdict that the couple “had not only acted contrary to the particular law of all nations, but had even broken the universal law of nature.”
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A third reliable method of selling papers was through a light and rather innocent willingness to gossip and scandalmonger. In his first Busy-Body essay for Bradford, Franklin had defended the value of nosiness and tattling. Now that he had his own paper, he made it clear that the
Gazette
was pleased, indeed proud, to continue this service. Using the same tone as the Busy-Body, Franklin wrote an anonymous letter to his paper defending gossip, backbiting, and censure “by showing its usefulness and the great good it does to society.

“It is frequently the means of preventing powerful, politic, ill-designing men from growing too popular,” he wrote. “All-examining Censure, with her hundred eyes and her thousand tongues, soon discovers and as speedily divulges in all quarters every least crime or foible that is part of their true character. This clips the wings of their ambition.” Gossip can also, he noted, promote virtue, as some people are motivated more by fear of public humiliation than they are by inner moral principles.
“‘What will the world say of me if I act thus?’
is often a reflection strong enough to enable us to resist the most powerful temptation to vice or folly. This preserves the integrity of the wavering, the honesty of the covetous, the sanctity of some of the religious, and the chastity of all virgins.”

It is amusing that Franklin, though he was willing to impugn the innate resolve of “all” virgins, protected himself by impugning only “some” religious people. In addition, he showed a somewhat cynical side by implying that most people act virtuously not because of an inner goodness, but because they are afraid of public censure.
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The following week Franklin defended the value of gossip in another letter, even more flavorful, purportedly penned by the aptly named Alice Addertongue. Franklin, who was then 26, had his fictional Alice identify herself, with an edge of irony, as a “young girl of about thirty-five.” She lived at home with her mother and, she said, “find it my duty as well as inclination to exercise my talent at censure for the good of my country folks.”

After taking a swipe at a “silly” piece in Bradford’s
Mercury
that criticized women for being gossipy, Alice recounts how she once found herself at odds with her mother on this issue. “She argued that scandal spoiled all good conversation, and I insisted without it there could be no such thing.” As a result, she was banished to the kitchen when visitors came for tea. While her mother engaged guests in high-minded discourse in the parlor, Alice regaled a few young friends with tales of a neighbor’s intrigue with his maid. Hearing the laughter, her mother’s friends began drifting from the parlor into the kitchen to partake in the gossip. Her mother finally joined them. “I have long thought that if you would make your paper a vehicle of scandal, you would
double the number of your subscribers.”

Franklin’s playful defenses of busybodies, among the most amusing pieces he ever wrote, set a lighthearted tone for his paper. Because of his gregarious personality and fascination with human nature, he appreciated tales about people’s foibles and behavior, and he understood why others did as well. But he was, of course, only half-serious in his defense of gossip. The other part of his personality was more earnest: he continually resolved to speak ill of nobody. As a result, he toyed in the
Gazette
with the argument for gossip, but he did not really indulge in it much. For example, in one issue he noted that he had gotten a letter describing the disagreements and conduct of a certain couple, “but for charitable reasons the said letter is at present thought not fit to be published.”
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