ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a passage from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography that encapsulates much of what people have found both maddening and admirable in the personality projected in that book. There is a degree of pomposity in the redundant phrases. On the other hand, the redundant phrases are more than space fillers; they echo the parallelism of biblical rhetoric, as though to suggest that to provide a hospital is also to do the Lord’s work. And even if Franklin exaggerates his role in the project, he shows remarkable political acumen: a well-developed sense of how to appeal to various interests, considerable expertise in the psychology of fund-raising and public relations in general, and a practised skill in working the Assembly. In making himself a model of his time and place, Franklin was conforming to an old pattern of American autobiography, going back at least to the writings of Cotton Mather, in which private lives were made to dramatize public issues.
