BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, LL.D., PH.G., F.R.S., ETC.
It is considered advisable by the historian at this time to say a word
regarding Dr. Franklin, our fellow-townsman, and a journalist who was
the Charles A. Dana of his time.
Franklin's memory will remain green when the names of the millionaires
of to-day are forgotten. Coextensive with the name of E. Rosewater of
the _Omaha Bee_ we will find that of Benjamin Franklin, whose bust sits
above the fireplace of the writer at this moment, while a large Etruscan
hornet is making a phrenological examination of same.
But let us proceed to more fully mark out the life and labors of this
remarkable man.
Benjamin Franklin, formerly of Boston, came very near being an only
child. If seventeen children had not come to bless the home of
Benjamin's parents they would have been childless. Think of getting up
in the morning and picking out your shoes and stockings from among
seventeen pairs of them!
Imagine yourself a child, gentle reader, in a family where you would be
called upon every morning to select your own cud of spruce gum from a
collection of seventeen similar cuds stuck on a window-sill! And yet
Benjamin Franklin never murmured or repined. He desired to go to sea,
and to avoid this he was apprenticed to his brother James, who was a
printer.
It is said that Franklin at once took hold of the great Archimedean
lever, and jerked it early and late in the interests of freedom.
[Illustration: THE PRINTER'S TOWEL.]
It is claimed that Franklin, at this time, invented the deadly weapon
known as the printer's towel. He found that a common crash towel could
be saturated with glue, molasses, antimony, concentrated lye, and
roller-composition, and that after a few years of time and perspiration
it would harden so that "A Constant Reader" or "Veritas" could be
stabbed with it and die soon.
Many believe that Franklin's other scientific experiments were
productive of more lasting benefit to mankind than this, but I do not
agree with them.
His paper was called the _New England Courant_. It was edited jointly by
James and Benjamin Franklin, and was started to supply a long-felt want.
Benjamin edited it a part of the time, and James a part of the time. The
idea of having two editors was not for the purpose of giving volume to
the editorial page, but it was necessary for one to run the paper while
the other was in jail.
In those days you could not sass the king, and then, when the king came
in the office the next day and stopped his paper and took out his ad.,
put it off on "our informant" and go right along with the paper. You had
to go to jail, while your subscribers wondered why their paper did not
come, and the paste soured in the tin dippers in the sanctum, and the
circus passed by on the other side.
How many of us to-day, fellow-journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who of all
our company would go to a prison-cell for the cause of freedom while a
double-column ad. of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven congresses
of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lair, went by
us?
At the age of seventeen Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to
Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to "sub" for a few
weeks and then got a regular "sit."
Franklin was a good printer, and finally got to be a foreman. He made an
excellent foreman, sitting by the hour in the composing-room and
spitting on the stove, while he cussed the make-up and press-work of the
other papers. Then he would go into the editorial rooms and scare the
editors to death with a wild shriek for more copy.
He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman so that strangers would
think he owned the paper.
[Illustration: FRANKLIN AS FOREMAN.]
In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Franklin married, and established
the _Pennsylvania Gazette_. He was then regarded as a great man, and
almost every one took his paper.
Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with
great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper
work, and everybody respected him.
Along about 1746 he began to study the habits and construction of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper in which he said that he
would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or odd
specimens of lightning, if they would send them in to the _Gazette_
office for examination.
Every time there was a thunderstorm Franklin would tell the foreman to
edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an old door-key, he would
go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a mess.
[Illustration: FRANKLIN EXPERIMENTING WITH LIGHTNING.]
[Illustration: FRANKLIN VISITING GEORGE III.]
In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster of the Colonies. He made a good
Postmaster-General, and people say there were fewer mistakes in
distributing their mail then than there have ever been since. If a man
mailed a letter in those days, old Ben Franklin saw that it went to
where it was addressed.
Franklin frequently went over to England in those days, partly on
business and partly to shock the king. He liked to go to the castle with
his breeches tucked in his boots, figuratively speaking, and attract a
great deal of attention.
It looked odd to the English, of course, to see him come into the royal
presence, and, leaning his wet umbrella up against the throne, ask the
king, "How's trade?"
Franklin never put on any frills, but he was not afraid of a crowned
head. He used to say, frequently, that a king to him was no more than a
seven-spot.
He did his best to prevent the Revolutionary War, but he couldn't do it.
Patrick Henry had said that the war was inevitable, and had given it
permission to come, and it came.
He also went to Paris, and got acquainted with a few crowned heads
there. They thought a good deal of him in Paris, and offered him a
corner lot if he would build there and start a paper. They also promised
him the county printing; but he said, No, he would have to go back to
America or his wife might get uneasy about him. Franklin wrote "Poor
Richard's Almanac" in 1732 to 1757, and it was republished in England.
Franklin little thought, when he went to the throne-room in his leather
riding-clothes and hung his hat on the throne, that he was inaugurating
a custom of wearing groom clothes which would in these days be so
popular among the English.
Dr. Franklin entered Philadelphia eating a loaf of bread and carrying a
loaf under each arm, passing beneath the window of the girl to whom he
afterwards gave his hand in marriage.
[Illustration: FRANKLIN ENTERING PHILADELPHIA.]
Nearly everybody in America, except Dr. Mary Walker, was once a poor
boy.