Alison Award-winner is a leading expert on Benjamin Franklin

J.A. Leo Lemay, H.F. du Pont Winterthur Professor of English Literature

4:21 p.m., March 1, 2004--When Walter Isaacson was researching his recent bestselling “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,’’ he read a UD web site and a University of Delaware Press history.

The “Benjamin Franklin: A Documentary History’’ web site and “Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A Bicentennial Perspective,’’ are listed in Isaacson’s bibliography. Both are the works of J.A. Leo Lemay, H.F. du Pont Winterthur Professor of English Literature.

Lemay, whose research was a source for at least three prominent biographers in the last six years, was named the 2003 winner of the Francis Alison Award, the University’s highest faculty honor.

Lemay’s “Benjamin Franklin: Writings” has been called the most complete one-volume collection of Franklin ever published. Libraries consider his web site the most authoritative Internet source on Franklin. The William & Mary Quarterly dubbed him “the pioneering scholar of early American literature.’’ The New York Review of Books credited Lemay and his students with producing much of the scholarship about Franklin in the last half century. His list of publications is 13 pages long, single-spaced.

Lemay in a nutshell

J.A. Leo Lemay, H.F. du Pont Winterthur Professor of English Literature, has authored seven books and a documentary history web site.
This year, the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish the first two volumes of Lemay’s seven-volume biography of Benjamin Franklin. The Modern Language Association predicts Lemay’s will be the definitive Franklin biography.
The Modern Language Association’s Division of American Literature to 1800 named Lemay Honored Scholar of Early American Literature in 2000.
Lemay’s specialty is southern colonial literature, but he has been researching Benjamin Franklin since his graduate school days in the early 1960s.
His “Benjamin Franklin: Writings” has been called the best one-volume collection of Franklin’s writings.
Lemay is a graduate of the University of Maryland, where he also earned his master’s degree. He has a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Before coming to the University in 1977, Lemay served on the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Lemay has just shipped the first two volumes of his seven-volume biography to his publisher, but publications such as the New York Review of Books are already mentioning it.

Those who pass Lemay on The Green may not recognize him, but he has a high profile among scholars, and receives weekly mail from researchers and researcher wannabees around the world. The most asked question is, “What was Franklin’s middle name?’’ Lemay’s answer: He didn’t have one.

“At least once a week I get some person in junior high asking me to write their essay for them,’’ he said. “I don’t reply to those, but, if I can answer a question in a minute or two, I do it. And, of course, if it’s a scholar seeking help, then I’m willing to put in some time.’’

He keeps Isaacson’s book in his office, although not with Franklin’s original writings, which are shelved so close to his desk that he can fetch them by moving just one arm slightly.

Although Lemay’s specialty is southern Colonial literature and he’s written the most about that, he clearly relishes researching the only man who signed the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris.

Schoolchildren know Franklin experimented with electricity and weather. Parents may know that he invented swim fins,
Bifocals, a woodstove, the odometer and watertight bulkheads and that he started Philadelphia’s first hospital, first library and first volunteer fire department. Serious readers know Franklin wrote more often in female persona than male persona. They know Franklin’s “Join-or-die” cartoon showing the colonies as parts of a cut snake has been the most frequently printed cartoon for the past 250 years. They know Franklin’s autobiography has been the best-selling autobiography for 250 years and is still getting five-star reviews on Amazon.

Lemay’s knowledge is levels deeper. He knows Franklin served on more committees than any other person in the Pennsylvania Legislature from his election in 1751 until he left for England in 1757. He knows Franklin organized a militia in 1748 to protect settlers against privateers and Indians. He knows Franklin supervised the building of forts in the wilderness when the wilderness was anything west of Lancaster, Pa.

Lemay can show you currency Franklin designed for Pennsylvania and flags Franklin designed for fighting regiments. He also can explain that Europeans called Franklin “the water American’’ because he drank water when most people on both sides of the ocean thought beer and wine were healthier drinks.

He says the friends Franklin grew up with mostly became loyalists, and those who could afford it fled to England during the Revolution. Franklin was the oldest by a generation of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Lemay’s eyes light up when he talks about “The Grand Leap of the Whale,’’ a Franklin tall tale about a whale who jumps over Niagara Falls.

If you ask Lemay about a particular week in Benjamin’s Franklin’s life, it’s likely he can tell you at least one thing Franklin did.

So, what one thing about Franklin surprised the man who has been researching him since the early ‘60s? Franklin’s essay on the laboring poor.

“He said the poor are worse off if they are supported and given things, than if they have to work for themselves,’’ Lemay said. “In a way, it seems ungenerous to the poor, but, then, his belief was that people are naturally lazy.’’

And what single item touched Lemay as he spent decades thumbing through original documents on Franklin? It was two words he found in Deborah Franklin’s handwriting in an account book: “Carles Wife.’’ The misspelling of “careless” was a common error because most people in the 18th century did not learn to spell.

Lemay found Franklin, who always defended his wife’s honor in public and in his writing, had called Deborah “careless wife’’ after she forgot the quality of a large amount of the paper she had sold, when the difference between the cheap and the expensive paper was roughly equivalent to a half-day’s wages. She took it seriously enough to write it in her shop book.

Lemay has researched enough about Franklin to know he wouldn’t take umbrage that the Constitution he signed has been amended several times, but there is one amendment he thinks Franklin never would have predicted.

“They wouldn’t be surprised by the amendments. They thought they might have to change it right away,’’ Lemay said. “The only one that would surprise Franklin was prohibition.’’

Lemay’s prediction about his book to be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004 is: “Not many people are going to buy it, and not too many people will read it, but it will be the biography that will be consulted for the foreseeable future.’’

If Lemay and the Modern Language Association are correct, libraries throughout the country will want Lemay’s book as much as Borders customers want Isaacson’s.

Lemay unwittingly proved the value of having the correct reference book when he offhandedly mentioned that a famous John F. Kennedy quote included a reference to Benjamin Franklin.

A computer search and checks with reference librarians at two highly rated research libraries nixed Lemay’s version. But a check of the original speech in “The Papers of the Presidents’’ proved Lemay was correct.

Speaking to Nobel laureates at the White House on the evening of April 29, 1962, President Kennedy delivered the oft-quoted part of the address:

“This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined aloneŠ’

And the part Lemay rattled off:

“Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse and dance the minuet. Whatever he may have lacked, if he could have had his former colleague, Mr. Franklin, here, we all would have been impressed.’’

Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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