Benjamin Franklin (post 5): “The Man of Many Masks” by Gordon S. Wood, Prize-Winning Historian

“…Franklin is never very revealing of himself. He always seems to be holding something back—he is reticent, detached, not wholly committed…we sense that he was always in control and was showing us only what he wanted us to see…

“…Literary scholars have continually interpreted and reinterpreted the Autobiography but still cannot agree on what Franklin was trying to do in writing it. Among the Founders, Jefferson and Adams also wrote autobiographies, but theirs are nothing like Franklin’s. His resembles a work of fiction in that we cannot be sure that the narrative voice is the same as the author’s…It is hard to interpret the Autobiography, since, as scholars have pointed out, Franklin moves between several personas…

“In all of Franklin’s writings…his assuming different personas and roles make it difficult to know how to read him. He was a man of many voices and masks who continually mocks himself. Sometimes in his newspaper essays he was a woman, like ‘Silence Dogood’ or ‘Alice Addertongue’…At other times he was…‘Obadiah Plainman’ or ‘Richard Saunders,’ also known as ‘Poor Richard,’ the almanac maker…During his London years he wrote some ninety pseudonymous items for the press using forty-two different signatures. For each of the many pieces he wrote in Philadelphia and in London he had a remarkable ability to create the appropriate persona…No wonder we have difficulty figuring out who this remarkable man was…

“Although he wrote against disguise and dissimulation…we nevertheless know that he was the master of camouflage and concealment…he seems to have delighted in hiding his innermost thoughts and motives. “Let all Men know thee,’ Poor Richard said, ‘but no man know thee thoroughly…’ ”(1, pp. 13-15).

Comment: The above looks like the description of a man with undiagnosed multiple personality trait, except that there is no report of memory gaps, probably because such information is rarely volunteered, and nobody had asked him about it. And without a history of memory gaps and the interviewing of alternate personalities, the diagnosis cannot be confirmed.

Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787  won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal (2).

1. Gordon S. Wood. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. New York, The Penguin Press, 2004.

2. Wikipedia. “Gordon S. Wood.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_S._Wood