The Superior American

THE PAPERS op BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, VOL. Ill (513 pp.)--Editor, Leonard W. Labaree--Yale University Press ($ 10).

According to Charles Baudelaire's defi-nition-by-negation of a superior man--"He is not a specialist"--Benjamin Franklin was one of the most superior men who ever lived. He was also, according to Phillips Russell's widely read biography, "the first civilized American." Superior or merely civilized, he certainly spread himself. Almost everyone now knows that he invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, that he-founded the Saturday Evening Post and the Philosophical Society of America, but even the brighter college students may be surprised to learn that he was a glass manufacturer who designed military forts, or that he was a colonel of colonial militia who habitually printed his own poetry.

The third volume of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (target for the total papers: 40 volumes) gives an astonishing impression of the multitudinous interests of a man who tried to take all knowledge for his province, and sometimes all provinces (especially Pennsylvania) for his knowledge. The volume covers the 5 1/2 years between 1745 and mid-17 50, and proceeds by remorseless chronology from the 13th edition of Poor Richard's Almanack (next to the Bible, the bestseller of the day) until a year or so before Franklin got to fly that famous kite in the thunderstorm. Those who like to smile with superior historical hindsight can do so on page 374 with the realization that Franklin was getting warm on lightning conductors. "A wet rat," wrote Ben firmly, "cannot be killed by an exploding electrical bottle."

Saint of Common Sense. Franklin's character--quirky, shrewd, humorous--shows in every line of verse, in his dry homilies, and even in his most perfunctory business correspondence. The "saint of common sense" never falls from this mundane kind of sanctity. In his early middle age he is sometimes the virtuous and successful artisan-turned-entrepreneur, who could offer the sound advice of one who had walked into Philadelphia with a few coppers, three loaves and a knowledge of how to set up type as his sole capital. "Time is money," he wrote in Poor Richard in 1745, and would add a sound little essay on capitalism in terms of groats earned by labor and pounds earning groats by credit. Or he would burst into verse in 1749 on this subject that he had mastered:

Nor trivial loss, nor trivial Gain despise; Molehills, if often heap'd, to mountains rise . . .

There is also the voice of the magistrate recording the prosecution of keepers of disorderly houses in Philadelphia's Hell-Town. This changes to his mockery of civic hypocrisy in The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, a superb little satire in which Miss Polly--threatened with public whipping for her bad morals--triumphantly defends her right to bear bastards for the public good.

Man of Enlightenment. Through it all shines his artisan's pride and shrewdness, with its traditional disrespect for aristocratic tradition ("All blood is alike ancient"), foreshadowing independence and his great role in it. Above all. Ben Franklin was a man of the 18th century Enlightenment, with its indiscriminate, omnivorous, ravenous appetite for all facts about all nature. Every blessed thing on earth (Ben had little theological curiosity) he wrote about, asked about, or collected facts about--vacuum jars, the "humors" produced by yellow fever, machines for producing static electricity (fatal to some rats), systems of government and ventilation, the geology of Pennsylvania, the weather, the making of glass, the weaving of cloth, and the proper way to build a fort. When he was not advertising muskets for sale he was procuring them for his Pennsylvania militia, drawing up the order of companies and ordering maneuvers on the next fair day after rain.

As a man of the 18th century, Ben gave one piece of advice that for 150 years shocked Franklin hagiographers. Old Mistresses Apologue, which he wrote for an anonymous young friend, listed eight sound reasons for preferring a seasoned older woman to a raw young one. It was the eighth reason that was too much for later generations--"they are so grateful!!" Even the equally sensible postscript ("But still I advise you to marry directly") failed to save Ben from the Victorian suspicion that he was not a totally respectable man.

Compulsory reading for the scholar, this third volume of The Papers is still delightful stuff for the general reader who prefers to have his Americana unbrainwashed by the biographer. He may even reflect that had Franklin got around to inventing the telephone, as well he might have, most of the fascinating odd bits would have disappeared without trace into the instrument.

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