A few days ago I finished reading the book “The First American,” by H. W. Brands. It is a biography of Benjamin Franklin. Brands is a history professor at a Texas university. He does seem to be a traditional liberal, but his writings on American history seem to be pretty reliable. He has plenty of footnotes to show where the things he writes come from.
Franklin was a remarkable person. Born in Boston in 1706, one of the younger children in a large family, he grew up in a growing town. Apprenticed to an older brother who was a printer, he learned the trade, and also showed that he could write. But after conflicts with his brother, he broke his apprenticeship agreement and left Boston. He landed with empty pockets in Philadelphia, still a teenager (by modern standards—in that day, young people started working early).
Over his years in Philadelphia, he established himself as a printer, author. and prominent citizen. He also became known as a scientist and inventor—the lightning rod, the Franklin stove, the swim fin, and bifocal lenses for glasses were among his major successes. In later years, he found a younger man to operate his printing business, and became both the British postmaster for the American colonies, the effective head of logistics for British armies at the start of the French and Indian War, and for a brief while colonel of the Pennsylvania militia in that war. His scientific work attracted attention in Europe as well as America.
In 1757, the Pennsylvania colonial legislature sent him to England to negotiate a conflict between the legislature and the proprietors—the descendants of William Penn who still had official control over the colony. He was to spend most of his time in England for the next18 years.
He went to England as a proud Briton, glad of his heritage. During his time there he served as a representative for not only Pennsylvania, but also Massachusetts and, for a while, Georgia.
The dispute with the Penn family did not go well. But the actions of the British government after the end of the war in 1763 began to rile the Americans in all the colonies. At first he discounted the reaction of his people. But as time went on, as the British officials became more and more obsessed with exercising their power over the colonies, his views changed. It was not easy for him. He had built up many friendships in England by that time, and had thought of living in London permanently. But the treatment of the colonies by Parliament and the government ministers, and even finally their treatment of Franklin himself, convinced him that things could not go on as they had been.
He left London on the first day of spring in 1775. By the time he reached Philadelphia in early May, the fighting we now know as the American Revolution had begun. At first many were not sure where he stood on the conflict; he had been known for years to be friendly to the royal government. But he showed himself to be firmly in the Patriot camp. He first served in the Continental Congress, worked with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence (and signed it), and was sent to Paris to represent the American cause to France. He remained in France through the war, and was involved in working out the peace treaty after Yorktown. One of his last activities was being part of the Convention that wrote the U. S. Constitution, and saw Washington become president. He died on April 17, 1790.
Franklin started out as a very loyal British citizen. But his attitudes and views were changed—by the attitudes, behavior, and outright arrogance of the ruling class of Great Britain. He became one of their greatest foes, even though his work was not on the battlefield. But the French alliance he helped create eventually made it possible to gain independence for the United States. The defeat at Yorktown brought down the British government. According to Winston Churchill’s account of the end of the war, King George III even considered abdicating the throne and returning to his family’s lands in Hanover.
So why have I written all of this? I believe a lot of people in the modern US are in the position of Ben Franklin in the 1770s. For most of our lives, we have been proud citizens of the US, as he was of Britain. But as his views changed as he saw more and more of the obstinate and arrogant behavior of the people running the British government, so also a lot of Americans are getting fed up with what they see being done by the people running our government today. I have written before, here and in other places, that a civil war is not viable, because of the nature of our divisions. But the gap between the mass of the people and what Angelo Codevilla called “the Ruling Class” back in 2010 https://spectator.org/americas-ruling-class/—the politicians, the bureaucrats, the top-level academics and Fortune 500 execs—has been getting more and more pronounced. And they keep pushing things to make it even wider. Like the British leaders of the 1770s, they think they can do whatever they wish, and push whatever weird idea they want to.
I do not claim to know how this will be worked out. I do believe that over time, the Ruling Class is going to lose, big-time. But there will be costs, for all of us. I pray we can get though the next ten years or so while this works out.