Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ketelhohn referred the incident to House Master Myra A. Mayman, who according to House Committee Chairman Benjamin R. Reder '86, chose not to bring the case before the Administrative Board...
...Historian Catherine Drinker Bowen, has done a brilliant reconstruction from archival material widely scattered in England, France and the U.S. Although his research was thorough enough to produce a 700-odd item bibliography, Randall's greatest skill is portraiture. In A Little Revenge, both Franklins are vital, believable figures: Benjamin, "puffy and smooth from gout, his body overweight and rounded into the peculiar barrel shape of the once-powerful swimmer too long out of the . water"; William, "a smoother, thinner, sharper replica of his father, with the same impressive forehead, the same strong, straight nose apostrophizing the same...
Those slight fissures, however, are becoming perceptible. Son of one of the most prominent men in Pennsylvania, young William is engaged to the daughter of a wealthy physician--and one of Benjamin's political enemies. Before the wedding can take place, the father imperiously takes his son off to London in 1757. Reading law at the Inns of Court serves to strengthen the young student's monarchist tendencies. Moreover, the circumstances of his birth only serve to deepen William's belief in British law. Observes Randall: In 1758, "William Franklin, bastard son of a provincial printer, was called...
...continually pestering his son about past moneys owed (including repeated references to the cost of a small quantity of Lapsang Souchong tea). A born conciliator, William attempts to mediate between the Crown and the colonies, but even when arrested by revolutionary troops, he refuses to abandon his monarchist beliefs. Benjamin, according to Randall, makes a formal request to the Continental Congress that his son be incarcerated. Then he ignores William's sufferings, including eight months in solitary confinement and the death of his wife Elizabeth, which occurs during William's three-year prison term...
...close of the war, William returned to England, where he lived on a pension from the Crown. Randall ends his sad, striking account by noting that father and son had only one more tepid meeting, in 1785, although Benjamin lived five years more. The collision, Randall theorizes, was not merely temperamental but genetic. Philosophically, Benjamin the pragmatist and William the stiff-necked legalist could never meet on common ground. More important, both men shared "the single-minded Franklin drive to prevail no matter what the cost." The cost was prohibitive. Perhaps it is just as well that Benjamin...