The selections are based on Claude-Anne Lopez's research in the treasure trove of nearly thirty thousand documents on Franklin assembled at Yale University. They include a detailed refutation of an anti-Semitic forgery attributed to Franklin and currently circulating on the Internet; three mini-detective stories showing Franklin on the fringes of the espionage world; discussions of Franklin's efforts to outfit Washington's army and to choose the first dinner set for the Foreign Service; and the tale of the misadventures of a French utopian scheme he sponsored. The only piece of fiction in the book is an imaginary party during which, on the first anniversary of his death, six illustrious Frenchmen discuss Franklin's influence on their country. Lopez has provided brief personal

Chapter One

Franklin, Hitler, Mussolini,

and the Internet

I ENDED my Introduction by thanking Franklin for having given me an interesting life. This seems like the right time to prove my gratitude by coming to the defense of his reputation, which has recently been sullied on the Internet, where he has been represented as a rabid anti-Semite.

    As I was wondering how to proceed, I received a request from Sandro Gerbi, a freelance journalist in Milan who is a lifelong friend of our family. He needed a quotation from a book that I would surely find at the Yale Library. The book in question, Morris Kominsky's The Hoaxers (Boston, 1970) was indeed easy to locate, and the passage that Sandro desired (pages 135-37), had to do with Franklin and an anti-Semitic speech that he had supposedly delivered. Sandro informed me further that he was writing a piece on the Fascist era and had collected a number of clippings from the German and Italian press dealing with Franklin and the Jews. Would he mind, I asked, if I looked into the question from the American side? Not at all, he replied.

    My search led me to a fascinating book by Nian-Sheng Huang, Benjamin Franklin in Thought and Culture, 1790--1990 (Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1994) and from there to old files of the New York Times and the exploration of territory that was new to me. The result of my research, published in the January 27, 1997, issue of the New Republic, has been of some use, I hope, in answering the many queries sent in by people who wonder whether they should believe this tale of narrow-mindedness and hatred. Here is a somewhat fuller version of that article.

    On February 3, 1934, there appeared in Liberation, a weekly journal published in Asheville, North Carolina, the text of a speech Franklin was alleged to have delivered at "the Constitutional Convention of 1789"--a date that should arouse one's suspicion, since it was in 1787, not 1789, that the Constitutional Convention was held. This speech was discovered, we are told, in a hitherto unknown diary kept by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, South Carolina's delegate to that convention, a diary titled "Chit-Chat around the Table during Intermissions." The authorship of the text has not been definitely ascertained, but it is surely modern and most likely the brainchild of William Dudley Pelley, the head of an American Nazi movement.

    Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1890, the son of a Protestant minister, Pelley worked for a stretch as a scriptwriter in Hollywood until sometime in the 1920s, when he "experienced death" for seven minutes. During this period, he claimed to have made contact with an oracle. Shortly after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Pelley's oracle instructed him to organize the Silver Shirts Legion, a secret group whose membership was recruited mostly in the South, the Pacific Northwest, and California. At its peak, it numbered somewhere between fifteen thousand and fifty thousand adherents. Known as "the Chief"--he obviously thought of himself as the American Hitler--Pelley was a prolific writer and an ardent propagandist whose mouthpiece Liberation sold at least a million copies in its heyday, 1934-39.

    The "Prophecy" has appeared in somewhat different versions over the years. One of them stresses that Jews are Asiatics. The version I offer here is the one originally published by Pelley and the most frequently reproduced.

There is a great danger for the United States of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in every land the Jews have settled, they have depressed the moral level and lowered the degree of commercial honesty. They have remained a-part and un-assimilated; oppressed, they attempt to strangle the nation financially, as in the case of Portugal and Spain.

For more than seventeen hundred years they have lamented their sorrowful fate--namely, that they have been driven out of their home land; but, gentlemen, if the civilized world today should give them back Palestine and their property, they would immediately find pressing reason for not returning there. Why? ... Because they are vampires and vampires cannot live on other vampires--they cannot live among themselves. They must live among Christians and others who do not belong to their race.

If they are not expelled from the United States by the Constitution within less than one hundred years, they will stream into this country in such numbers that they will rule and destroy us and change our form of Government for which we Americans shed our blood and sacrificed our life, property and personal freedom. If the Jews are not excluded within two hundred years, our children will be working in the fields to feed Jews while they remain in counting houses, gleefully rubbing their hands.

I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude the Jews forever, your children and your children's children will curse you in their graves. Their ideas are not those of Americans, even when they lived among us for ten generations. The leopard cannot change his spots. The Jews are a danger to this land and if they are allowed to enter, they will imperil our institutions. They should be excluded by the Constitution.

The original of this copy is in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia.

The Hoax Is Up and Running

    Had this fake prophecy been immediately denounced, it might have been stopped in its tracks. But mainstream historians did not read publications like Liberation, and the forgery's appearance provoked no American reaction, leaving it free to jump the Atlantic.

    By August 1934, it was reproduced in Der Weltdienst, a bulletin of international propaganda published in German, French, and English in Erfurt (Germany). Within a few days it was picked up by Der Volksbund, the organ of the Swiss Nazi movement, and by September it had acquired the resonance that only Julius Streicher, Hitler's anti-Semite par excellence, could give it in Der Stürmer . In a special edition devoted exclusively to Jews ( Das Jüdische Volk ), Streicher included the piece attributed to Franklin prominently in a list of anti-Semitic quotations from famous people ranging from Tacitus, Erasmus, Luther, and Goethe to Voltaire and Gibbon. The passage from Franklin's "Prophecy" had the dubious honor of being the only one underlined.

    Back in the United States, a certain Robert Edward Edmondson used his financial newsletter on September 25, 1934, to distribute the so-called prophecy to a large number of investment banks, businessmen, and other subscribers. This brought the hoax to the attention of Charles Beard, who decided to look into this surprising text with the care of a professional historian and political scientist of great repute. But his investigation was to take half a year, during which time the fabrication spread even further. The "Prophecy"'s consecration among anti-Semitic diatribes was its appearance in the thirty-eighth edition of Theodor Fritsch's bible of Nazism, Handbuch der Judenfrage (Leipzig, 1934). Simultaneously, the Right Cause Publishing Company, operating in Chicago, brought out a ten-cent pamphlet by one Victor de Kayville in which Franklin is mentioned in a long list of people who had warned the country against the Jews.

A Brief Overview of Anti-Semitism in the United States

    The 1930s proved a fertile time for anti-Semitism in the United States, but it had not always been so. In the early days of colonial America, anti-Semitism was less rabid than in Europe for several reasons: the perception of Catholicism as the main rival of the dominant Protestant faith; the influence of the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and individual rights; the need for settlers; agricultural abundance; and especially the role of Jews in Puritan thought. The Puritans viewed them as the descendants of the Hebrews of the Old Testament. It was believed that when the Jews finally saw the light and embraced Jesus, the millennium would begin. "By the end of the seventeenth century, the approximately two hundred and fifty Jews in America enjoyed de facto and, for the most part, de jure economic and religious liberty."

    During the eighteenth century Jews were accepted even more widely. Parallels were often drawn by the clergy between the revolutionary happenings in America and the events of the Old Testament. When the Continental Congress was considering designs for the new nation's seal in 1776, "Franklin proposed that the seal represent Moses dividing the Red Sea ... and Jefferson suggested that it portray the children of Israel in the wilderness."

    Hebrew was taught at Harvard and Yale. At the time that young Benjamin Franklin was secretly preparing to flee from Boston, much talk in Cambridge was centered on the conversion to Christianity of a learned Jew, Judah Monis. Such conversions were regarded as suspicious, probably motivated by material goals--in this case Monis's hope for a Harvard professorship, which he never received, although he became a tutor.

    The Pennsylvania Academy admitted Jewish students as of 1757. High society started opening its doors to wealthy Jews, as did the Revolutionary army (up to the rank of colonel) and several Masonic lodges. Some anti-Semitic episodes--vandalization of cemeteries, attacks in the press or from the pulpit--did occur in the young country, but on the whole a climate of tolerance prevailed for about a century after the Revolution.

    The turning point came around 1880. The number of Jewish immigrants, mostly from Germany, had grown from 15,000 to 300,000 in only forty years. Hotels began turning away Jews, as did country clubs, the higher degrees of Masonic lodges, and some educational institutions. The situation grew worse during the early years of the twentieth century, when millions of impoverished Eastern Jews, clinging tenaciously to what were viewed as outlandish habits, arrived in America. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the seeds of racial hatred for its own sake had been sown, the Jews, especially New York Jews, were accused of helping the Bolsheviks. A systematic campaign against "the international Jewish conspiracy" was launched in May 1920 by Henry Ford in the Dearborn Independent ; several of his themes were subsequently used by Pelley. Those attacks lasted until the summer of 1927, when Ford suddenly desisted after a reluctant apology.

    More than 120 Fascist organizations sprang up during the 1930s and '40s. The Protestant fundamentalists who had spearheaded anti-Semitic literature were joined by the charismatic Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit, whose radio programs attracted millions of followers.

    The new wave of evangelical anti-Semitism provoked a response. In 1906, the American Jewish Committee was founded, and six years later, the Anti-Defamation League was established to combat the threat. Non-Jews, too, figure in the struggle, among them Clarence Darrow, Evangeline Booth, and the presidents of some prestigious universities, notably Brown and Stanford.

A First, Isolated American Reaction

    By March 1935, Charles Beard was ready to assert that Franklin's "Prophecy" was no more than a barefaced forgery. He had searched for Pinckney's diary in all the probable places--at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Franklin Institute, and in numerous other historical repositories--without finding any trace of it. He had written to Edmondson, asking him for the source of Franklin's "Prophecy." Edmondson answered that a copy of it had emanated from Mr. Madison Grant, of New York City. Beard wrote to Grant on October 20, 1934, asking him where the original document could be found.

    Madison Grant, according to his obituary in the New York Times (May 31, 1937), was an independently wealthy man who had devoted his life to zoology, environmental causes, and the building of the Bronx River Parkway. Equally enthusiastic about the cause of eugenics, the so-called improvement of the human race by careful breeding, he served on the Eugenics International Committee. This committee reflected the growth of agitation in favor of the conservation of the Nordic type. In 1915, on the eve of the United States' entry into World War I, Grant published a deeply bigoted book, The Passing of the Great Race, in which he denounced the Jews as Public Enemy No. 1. About the Polish Jews, he writes: "These immigrants borrow the language of the original Americans, adopt their dress, steal their names, and begin to take their women.... New York is in the process of becoming a cloaca gentium ." Logically enough, Madison Grant pushed for the passage of anti-immigration laws, notably the Johnson Restrictive Act of 1924. In other words, he was a man more interested in saving endangered animals than distraught humans.

    Grant's answer to Beard was circumspect. Some years ago, he said, he had received what purported to be a copy of Franklin's remarks before the convention in Philadelphia, but he had no information whatsoever as to the authenticity of the paper.

    Well aware of the difficulty of proving a negative, Charles Beard ascertained from the librarian of Congress that Pinckney had almost certainly not kept a diary of the convention proceedings and that no evidence exists that Franklin ever made such a speech. A stylistic analysis shows that the phraseology of the "Prophecy" is not that of the eighteenth century, and that it contains anachronisms such as the Jews' longing for their "homeland"--which was not a term employed at the time, and not a Jewish concern in Franklin's day, when Palestine was still under Turkish domination. "Homeland" came in use when the Balfour Declaration was issued in Great Britain in 1917. The forgery was not even a good one.

    Furthermore, the "Prophecy" is totally at odds with Franklin's well-known principles of tolerance, especially in religious concerns. The archives of the Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia contain a subscription paper dated April 30, 1788, according to which Franklin, along with forty-four other citizens of all faiths, contributed toward relieving the debt incurred by the congregation in building a synagogue. The appeal may well have been written by Franklin himself: he had been such a vigorous fund-raiser over the years that a distressed Hebrew Society would very likely have tried first to enlist his help. Even though the Hebrews, commonly called Israelites, worship Almighty God in a different manner, says the preamble, "the enlightened citizens of Philadelphia" will surely want to assist them. Indeed, many prominent Philadelphia names appear on that subscription list: Rittenhouse, Ingersoll, Rush, Muhlenberg, Biddle, Cowperthwait, Benezet, and so on. The three most generous donors--Franklin was one of them--gave five pounds each.

Two Problems with Charles Beard's Refutation

    Beard's counterargument is not without holes, however. The first problem concerns Beard's assertion that never in his life had Franklin expressed anti-Semitic views. In truth, we know of two instances of anti-Semitic language by Franklin. Both were related to his frustration with a man who, Jewish or not, had behaved in an irritating manner.

    The offending gentleman was an Amsterdam merchant and banker, Jean de Neufville, who back in 1779 had promised to raise a loan in the Netherlands for the American cause after a similar attempt by another banker had failed. If Franklin kept negotiating with this Neufville, a "self-interested vain promoter" whose original demands had been extravagant, it was out of his embarrassment to be forever milking the French Treasury. The promised loan never materialized. Two years later, when another unpleasant matter was embroiling John Adams, then in Holland, with Neufville, Franklin saw fit to warn his colleague: "I believe him to be as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem." One month later, commenting on the document that he had sent Adams to back up his charges, Franklin elaborated sarcastically: "By this time I fancy your Excellency is satisfied that I was wrong in supposing J. de Neufville as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem, since Jacob was not content with any percents, but took the whole of his Brother Esau's Birthright; and his posterity did the same by the Canaanites, and cut their throats in the bargain, which in my conscience I do not think Mr. J. de Neufville has the least inclination to do by us, while he can get anything by our being alive." Only recently have we learned--or are we still learning?--to exclude racial slurs from our vocabulary; in the 1700s no consciousness had been raised in that respect.

    The second problem with Beard's refutation was that he published it in the Jewish Frontier, which made it unlikely that it would reach the general reading public.

Enter Fiorello La Guardia

    And there the matter rested for two years until, on March 3, 1937, New York's colorful mayor La Guardia gave a speech at a luncheon of the women's division of the American Jewish Congress. He suggested displaying that "brown-shirted fanatic who is menacing the peace of the world" in a chamber of horrors at the upcoming New York World's Fair.

    The German embassy, of course, reacted with indignation, and the following day Secretary of State Cordell Hull expressed regret over "the use of language by any American citizen calculated to offend a friendly power." Questioned by the press, the feisty and impenitent La Guardia stood by his original statement and added some. At this point, everybody jumped into the fray: the mayor's allies and his political enemies, German-American organizations, and a number of concerned citizens whose views were reported in the columns of the New York Times . But nothing could equal the pitch of fury reached by the German press: threats of boycotting the World's Fair unless La Guardia were removed, slurs on the mayor's partial Jewish ancestry, a photograph showing his resemblance to a gorilla, the accusation of his being an Obergangster, and so on.

    And Franklin in all this? His vitriolic "Prophecy" was trotted out once more, warmly praised, and declared in Germany to represent the views of a venerable elder statesman on the brink of death. Under the headline "Franklin was right," Der Angriff, pretending that it had just received the document from a reader, published a translation of it on March 9, 1937. Die Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung did the same thing on the same day, stating, "The Jews will devour America."

    During the following weeks of that agitated month of March, two very different developments occurred: Mussolini's press took up the cudgel, and the American intelligentsia woke up to the seriousness of the situation.

Il Duce Follows der Führer

    Mussolini had concluded his alliance with Hitler in 1936. By early 1937, he felt that it was time to drag his basically tolerant countrymen into a closer alignment with their formidable partner to the north. The La Guardia fracas provided the perfect pretext for opening an anti-Semitic campaign.

    On March 20, the chairman of the Banca d'Italia sent Mussolini a letter quoting the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung to the effect that the Jews would devour America. This was enough to set the ball rolling. In 1938, the minister of popular culture, Dino Alfieri, cabled the Italian embassy in Washington to obtain more background on the now intriguing Franklin allegation. The embassy's answer has not been found, but Milano's Corriere della Sera eventually ran an article entitled "Benjamin Franklin's Terrible Anathema against the Jews." Rome's Popolo d'Italia went even further, with comments that the United States was indeed in a dreadful mess precisely because the Jews had been allowed to take over. The moral: Italians, beware!

    The German propaganda machine, in a bold piece of escalation, now elevated Franklin to the rank of president of the United States. It was with that title that he was referred to by Rudolf Hess, deputy leader of the Reich, in two addresses to the workmen of the freshly conquered Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia (November 30 and December 2, 1938).

    Neither dictator cared whether their propaganda was true. Mussolini proclaimed that "the regime needs myths, not history," and Hitler asserted in Mein Kampf that "a lie is believed because of the unconditional and insolent inflexibility with which it is propagated." The more brazen the lie, the better it will work. But in the United States, the search for truth in the matter of Franklin's "Prophecy" was finally resumed in earnest.

American Scholars Speak Up

    On March 10, 1937, three years and five weeks after the birth of the canard, the New York Times gave full play to the imposture and published Beard's refutation of 1935. By November 1938, the International Benjamin Franklin Society had published a fifteen-page pamphlet entitled Benjamin Franklin Vindicated: An Exposure of the Franklin "Prophecy" by American Scholars . The authors reaffirmed the mythical nature of Pinckney's diary, exposed the grossness of the forgery, and deplored the way a lie can gain credence as it spreads. Only one of them, however, J. Henry Smythe Jr., saw fit to remark that "this libel of the Jewish race is unjust both to Jews and to the nature and fame of Franklin." The others concentrated only on defending Franklin.

    That very year, 1938, an opening salvo was launched in what would be a bitter, protracted struggle between William Dudley Pelley and the North Carolina authorities. The Silver Shirts' financial enterprises were in violation of the state's security laws, and Pelley, who had received a suspended sentence in 1935, was charged with parole violation. More dangerously, his pro-Nazi propaganda caused him to be embroiled with the Martin Dies Committee on Un-American Activities.

    The printing equipment of Liberation was sold in 1940, and Pelley moved to Indiana, where he published inflammatory anti-war articles in the Galilean . They caused him to be arrested in 1942 under the Espionage Act of 1917, the first instance of the legislation's use in a major prosecution after Pearl Harbor. Found guilty on eleven counts by a jury composed of farmers and small tradesmen of southern Indiana, Pelley was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He was released from the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute after eight years, in 1950, and died in 1965.

    One would imagine that the discredited old chestnut died along with its author, but no, it is giving signs these days of sprouting anew. At the annual convention of the Muslim Arab Youth Association held in Kansas City in December 1990, one of the speakers, Rajib Najib, paraphrased Franklin's "Prophecy" once again, the only novelty being that the Jews' "counting houses" became "palaces." A controversy sparked by Salah Jafar (who quotes the entire spurious text) has been taking place on the Internet's bulletin boards, where several people are refuting his statements. The question has also been discussed in home pages on the World Wide Web.

    Poor Franklin. Nobody loved a good hoax more than he did. He published his first at sixteen, his last less than one month before he died, and many in between. But with the exception of his anti-British propaganda during the Revolution, those hoaxes had benevolent purposes. The persona he adopted in adolescence, that of the outspoken middle-aged widow Silence Dogood, pleaded in favor of education for girls, tolerance, freedom of speech, and other worthy causes in a series of fourteen essays that Benjamin slipped before dawn under the door of his brother's printing shop.

    And who can forget Franklin's most charming literary creation, Polly Baker, the spunky lass who not only bore many children out of wedlock but spoke up in a Connecticut court in defense of all seduced girls? So vivid was she that many years later people still thought of her as a real person.

    At the end of his life, Franklin called on his sense of humor one last time to produce the speech supposedly delivered by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim to the divan of Algiers in defense of the traditional custom of enslaving the Christians captured by Barbary pirates.

    Now, through an ironic twist of fate, Franklin's own posthumous reputation is being muddied by a hoax. Poor Richard used to say that truth stands on two legs, whereas a lie stands only on one. These days the only legs a lie needs are virtual ones.