Word: dogood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
...mortified," said President Edward Hoiyoke on his deathbed in 1769. "let him become president of Harvard College." The mortification has come in part from the nation, which has always insisted on treating Harvard as a patch of alien soil. As far back as 1722, under the name of Silence Dogood. Ben Franklin was blasting it as a place where students learned little more than how to "enter a Room genteely . . . and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and Charges, as great Blockheads as ever." Two centuries later the theme was still the same. "I want...