Authors: Jack Hitt
So he hired this young housewife, Claude-Anne Lopez, to perform the grunt work of typing some of these later papers so that the real historians could, one day, get to them.
“I was hired as a transcriber,” Lopez told me. “It could not have been lowlier.” And the atmosphere in that Sterling sanctuary could not have been more solemn. The work was done in near silence and moved at a glacial pace. The Franklin Papers opened for business in 1954 and produced “Volume 1” in 1959. The effort continues to this very day. They are on Volume 40 and intend to finish the entire project sometime in the next fifteen years. The work began with the beginning of Franklin’s life and moved slowly forward—almost in real time. When I visited the project, I once asked one of the scholars when she was hired. “Oh,” she said in a soft voice, “it was around the time Franklin left for Paris.” The chronology of Franklin’s life so structured the place, it had become a kind of calendar.
“I was paid sixty-five cents an hour and in order to get a pension you had to work nineteen hours, and Larabee had me working eighteen hours a week,” Lopez said. “They had weekly meetings and I was never invited because my work was completely separate. There were
three men and three women. Larabee was the head and Whitfield Bell was number two, and he was my friend.”
The other reason Lopez had no one to talk to was “because the French letters came later in Franklin’s life, and others were doing Boston”—in other words, Franklin’s earliest years. So she worked alone, apart from the scholars.
Being European, Lopez confessed, “I knew nothing about American history; all I knew was what I had read in
Gone With the Wind
.” One day, when she encountered an unfamiliar name, “I raised my voice and said, ‘Was there somebody named John Jay?’ And who came tiptoeing to my booth but Whitfield Bell, and he whispered to me, ‘I must show you the American Dictionary of Famous People. I will bring that to you!’ ”
Larabee was very restrictive when it came to Lopez’s work. She was not encouraged to think or have an opinion, simply to transcribe and be done with it. She told me that she just couldn’t help taking notice of little details that she knew something about. So, after a while, she would simply insert a little note in a document’s file folder for a future reader. Historians who have worked there over the years still delight in coming upon a Lopez note from three or four decades ago.
“In my own way, I was trying to edit, but Larabee wouldn’t hear of it,” Lopez said. One day, when she realized that an “unidentified” letter of Franklin’s was, due to a misspelling, actually a letter from the famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier—the man who discovered oxygen and hydrogen, co-invented the metric system, and helped standardize much of modern chemistry (and was also, incidentally, guillotined during the French Revolution for selling inferior tobacco)—she wondered what she was to do with this discovery.
Her husband’s reply was what he knew: “Publish or perish.”
So, she wrote a little article, and it was accepted for publication by a German magazine. And later, people talked about the article (although not Len Larabee, who never mentioned it to Lopez). She was asked to give a talk at Smith College about her paper. In the cozy
outpost of Ben Franklin scholarship, there was a tiny bit of news. A new voice was in town. Claude-Anne Lopez.
As years passed, Lopez spent a lot of time with Franklin in that era when he was notoriously bedding all those women—a simple fact of history that was presumably indisputable. Lopez wrote a book called
Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris
. The book was widely reviewed and well received. “Larabee was still running the papers and he never said a word about it.” Lopez actually went on to write three notable books about Franklin and is now regarded as one of the great Franklin scholars of our time.
When a new editor, William Willcox, arrived to take over from Larabee in the 1970s, he was stunned to learn that Lopez was still considered a “transcriber” and was not even listed as a staff member of the Franklin Papers.
“What?” Willcox said incredulously to Lopez. “You are the only person here I’ve heard of.” And so Claude-Anne Lopez, the amateur academic, was officially recognized to exist eighteen years after she was hired. Her name appears for the first time in 1972 with the publication of
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 15
. Or, to put it in Papers’ time—just before Franklin printed his maps charting the Gulf Stream and the birth of his grandson, Benny.
Coming to Franklin as a self-made scholar, Lopez brought the kind of eye that a Leonard Larabee would never appreciate. She saw a completely different man from the one seen repeatedly by the professionals who had pored over his words. Probably the most controversial and unacceptable discovery Lopez made was realizing that Franklin was not really some colonial lothario. It took a complete newcomer to his letters to see what’s actually right there.
“I paid a lot of attention to his letters to women—to Catherine Ray and the other girls,” she told me over a glass of wine, “and these letters are so delicate and so grandfatherly.” There are three great letter exchanges with three women in Franklin’s oeuvre, and Lopez believes they are widely and commonly misunderstood.
“I was always particularly interested in the wooing side of Franklin. It doesn’t necessarily mean sex. Americans are so peculiar about sex. When I arrived here, people still wrote ‘
s-x
.’ Many American men are virgins when they marry. It’s astonishing.” The question remained: was Ben Franklin our founding Casanova?
“I am sure he tried; he was a man after all,” Lopez said with a laugh. “With Polly [Stevenson, his London landlady’s daughter], he never tried. He thought of her as his daughter and he encouraged her to marry.”
Lopez acknowledges what is indisputable: Franklin had a wild time as a young single man. He wrote, almost humiliatingly, about it. “After his youth, he settled down,” Lopez told me. “People say it was a terrible marriage with Deborah, but it wasn’t a terrible marriage. They had fantastic cooperation. It was her doing. Deborah ran the shop and kept the accounts. When he was away, she was the postmistress.”
And it’s true that Deborah Franklin wasn’t as social as Ben and feared crossing the Atlantic. So he traveled alone and she became his trusted surrogate in Philadelphia for the rest of their lives. Ben loved the society of women, but Lopez observed a far less dashing reality.
“As soon as I read Catherine Ray,” Lopez said, “I realized that
she
was the one going overboard and he was the one calming her down.” Lopez referred to an incident often cited about Ray, when Franklin watched her sail off for a long, long time. This anecdote is always presented as being evidence of him as a smitten man.
“He was visiting his brother in Boston at Christmas,” Lopez said. “She was going back to Block Island and then he wrote he stood on the shore and watched her disappear through his glass. The French talk about
amité amour
, a loving friendship. It’s platonic, and for a woman it can be quite nice.” She looked away for a moment. “You don’t get pregnant.”
As to the years in Paris and the famous story of Franklin playing chess with Madame Brillon in the tub, Lopez reminded me that
women bathed beneath a board that covered everything except their heads. Socializing with a bathing person wasn’t so unusual then. And there was one other thing, Lopez said. “Franklin had gout. He had kidney problems. He had stones. Marie Antoinette loaned him her litter. He was in real pain! Adams wrote that Franklin lost his head with the women of the court.” But the truth is that “he didn’t frequent the court much; he wasn’t invited that often, only special occasions. It’s a completely false idea that Adams had.” She paused and looked at me as if we were gossiping about somebody we both knew personally. “John Adams—I hate his self-satisfaction, his arrogance—so many alcoholics in that family.”
So, the reality of Ben Franklin in all probability is that he was not a sex maniac but a busy man with a functional marriage who flirted with younger women in a grandfatherly way. It’s a truth as difficult to hear as the claim that T. rex was a giant buzzard.
“Anytime I take a cab in Philadelphia,” Lopez added, “that comes up—‘Oh, yes, Franklin was quite a woman chaser, wasn’t he?’—I don’t even try to dissuade them anymore.”
Looking back on her career, Lopez’s only regret is that she wishes she had marketed her books better. Still: She spent her later career awash in academic approval, giving prominent lectures, publishing all over, and being regularly honored as the great Franklin expert—all achieved by a series of self-motivated actions that Franklin would have recognized as arguably his greatest invention—the pursuit of happiness.
That troublesome phrase appears in Thomas Jefferson’s final draft of the Declaration of Independence, a document edited by two men—John Adams and Ben Franklin. Surely Adams had vetted it for the constitutional and legal arguments that were his expertise. He was the Harvard-trained lawyer after all. But it was probably Ben who brought his own lightness of style to the sentences.
The main idea of personal happiness at that time was not some hedonistic notion of pleasure but the other, more philosophical, kind.
The Greek philosophers believed that discovering one’s own talents and then taking the pleasure of exploiting them (finding out that you had a singing voice, could write well, start a company, or invent new things),
that
was the deeper pleasure the founders had in mind and the freedom they sought.
We don’t know for certain who put that phrase in the Declaration, but it was probably Ben. He wrote a good deal about happiness. The common phrase that would have rung familiar two hundred years ago, particularly as it pertained to government, came from John Locke—that governments were instituted to protect “life, liberty, and property.” Locke’s term ends with such a solid and limiting
ker-thunk
. It’s hard not to suspect that the rascally Franklin, who broke with tradition himself, envisioned the future of American citizens as something far more open-ended than the mere accumulation of property and careted in that phrase.
The pursuit of happiness
. Even in the founding document, the sense of playfulness is there.
The other image that Franklin loved to invoke in this vein was the kite. He wrote about how, as a child in Boston, he would lie on his back on the surface of the harbor and get pulled along by his kite. It’s almost certainly a fiction. But that image is so compelling, such a wonderful sense of a child at play, drifting about, pulled here and there by a kite. His other usage of that image is a good bit more famous, the most famous image from the founding era: Ben flying his kite to prove that electricity existed in clouds and was the source of lightning.
Several Franklin mavens believe that that story—the kite and key on a string—is
also
a probable fabrication. (I am one.) The fact is that Franklin had given away his theory of electricity by publishing his ideas and letting others—Europeans!—prove his theory by setting up electrical rods. The experiment was to put one’s knuckle near the rod during an overcast, pre-thunderstorm afternoon, and if the clouds were as charged with electrical “plasma,” as Franklin believed, then you would feel a nice kick of intense static electricity. And that
was
proven in Europe. (Proven too well in St. Petersburg, where a Swedish scientist named Georg Wilhelm Richmann put his knuckle near the rod when a bolt of lightning struck and he was killed.)
The famous kite story was one Franklin told
many
years later—not at the time he allegedly performed it. His only witness was his son William. Franklin’s account is unusually vague. My own suspicion is that Franklin feared that the discovery of electricity was his greatest achievement. So he tried to retrofit the story of his experiment so that the history books would give him proper credit. He laid claim to the achievement not by setting out the details of his experiment—like I said, the account is vague—no, rather he put in the minds of all of us an image more indelible than the scribblings of a thousand historians. He improvised his own rewriting of history, in other words, by conjuring the world’s first beta-test version of what we might now call a photo-op.
He did it by invoking an image that is at once playful and profound, practically the logo of the amateur’s childish spirit, of liberty, of leisure—the emblem of the lightness of being, where creativity thrives. It can be American, not out of nationalist pride, but because this sense emerged at our founding and is the inheritance of anyone born or driven to come here. While we might list the great liberties—speech, assembly, due process, trial by jury—the one that goes unstated, almost presumed, is the revolutionary decision to abandon one’s past and one’s self, as well as one’s culture, tradition, and history. To walk away from everything that one is—whether it’s fleeing a repressive nation for this new place or simply out the back door for the garage—
that
is real freedom. It’s a story that everyone who lives here or comes here recognizes in their gut is true, that the amateur’s dream is the American Dream.
Every idea starts somewhere, and this one began over lunch with Eric Nelson, a book editor who first asked me if I had ever noticed how many of my stories seemed to involve some self-invented crank wandering off to the outskirts of an obsession. The way he spoke made it sound like he was talking about me, but soon enough the idea was getting kicked around to collect a number of pieces from magazines and radio and shape them into an anthology. But that didn’t happen in part because, at the time, I was beginning the research for an article for my editors at the
New York Times Magazine
, Paul Tough and Gerry Marzorati. The original draft was about NASA’s awards program—a half dozen or so massive monetary prizes dangled in front of America’s backyard tinkerers to seduce them into inventing a new generation of cheaper and better space gear. They pushed me to do more reporting and expand the focus (maybe this is how one can tell a magazine idea is a possible book: the rare phenom of an editor telling you: write
more
). I wound up with a reported story called “The Amateur Future of Space Travel.” And that reporting, which didn’t make it into this book, managed
to get me poking around the edges of this idea as something larger and more fundamental to what often goes on in our nation’s metaphorical garages. By this time, I found myself eating several lunches with David McCormick, who’s a good bit more than a literary agent when he gets around half an idea and some ragged paragraphs on paper. A few hundred e-mail exchanges later and I had a book proposal in my hand. So I want to thank them all for getting me started.