Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on war
PHILADELPHIA: When fears of a devastating attack by French and Spanish privateers swept Philadelphia in 1747, Benjamin Franklin circumvented the city’s pacifist Quaker leadership and organized a private army of 10,000 defenders.
But if Franklin were alive today, would he be among the national chorus of pundits baying for a US war with Iraq?
Probably not, says Yale University historian Edmund Morgan, a leading authority on the 18th century printer, inventor and statesmen who helped secure America’s independence through diplomacy and the weight of his international reputation as a genius of the Enlightenment.
Morgan believes Franklin’s highly reasoned views about world affairs could be useful to 21st century US policy makers at a time when the prospects for war with Baghdad are straining relations with allies including France and Germany.
A philosopher who believed people capable of moral perfection, Franklin saw war as a hazard to be guarded against like fire or lightning.
“He’s a citizen of the world, maybe the first in modern times,” said Morgan, 87, who is Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale and administrative board chairman of the university’s archive of Franklin’s papers.
‘BETTER WAYS’: “He had no scruples against war. But he thought it was too expensive a way to accomplish what wars are generally intended to accomplish, whether in terms of territory or ideology,” added the professor, who is author of a best-selling biography “Benjamin Franklin” published late last year.
“There were lots of better ways of doing things.”
For example, when war broke out between Britain and her American colonies in the 1770s, Franklin proposed ending the hostilities by having the United States purchase England’s North American possessions including Canada, Bermuda and the Bahamas.
“If we are to obtain them by conquest, after perhaps a long war, they will probably cost us more,” he wrote in 1776.
The proposal went nowhere, and Franklin joined the Revolutionary War effort.
What little direct military experience he had was limited to defensive militias organised in times of dire emergency.
Today, Franklin’s popular image is one of a kindly old gentleman who published his own guide to the good life in Poor Richard’s Almanac and proved lightning to be a form of electricity by flying his proverbial kite in a thunderstorm.
But Franklin was also a subtle diplomat who, as the first US ambassador to France, believed good government thrives mainly through the good opinion it enjoys among its citizens and allies. In fact, Morgan argues that America might not have won France’s support for the revolution, if the French had not held Franklin himself in high esteem. And there could be no independence without France.
“Now we’re on a course that could lose us the good opinion of our allies and the consequence of that is something we can’t even imagine,” said Morgan, who opposes US President George W. Bush’s policies on Iraq. “Franklin thought there was no such thing as a good war or a bad peace. If you’re thinking about how that reflects on the present day, it’s pretty obvious.”—Reuters