Variations on America at 250, or Benjamin Franklin Schlepped Here

This is the season when many of us may imagine how nice it would be to own a “Franklin stove,” which, unlike an open fireplace, spreads its warmth evenly throughout a room. What’s not widely known is that the idea for the stove was born in an act of subterfuge, when Benjamin Franklin stopped one cold winter night at a roadside tavern. Finding all the seats close to the fire occupied, he instructed the landlord:

“Bring me a pint of ale, and please take some oysters out to my horse.”

The room, of course, emptied immediately, for no one had ever seen a horse eat oysters.

Now with his pick of the chairs, Ben settled in one next to the fire. A minute later the crowd rushed back in, led by the landlord.

“Dr. Franklin,” he cried, “the horse won’t eat the oysters.” “Well then,” said Franklin, after a moment’s thought, “give the horse a bucket of oats, and bring the oysters to me.”

Pershing Square Revisited

Franklin went to Versailles to secure backing for the American Revolution. This support proved decisive in October 1781, when a fleet of French warships blocked Cornwallis’s escape at Yorktown, leading to the British surrender. Essential were the efforts of the Marquis de Lafayette, a young French nobleman who, smitten by the Americans’ cause, had crossed the Atlantic to join General Washington’s army.

So beloved was this intrepid youth, that when in 1917 our troops went to the aid of France in the First World War, US Army General John J. Pershing assured a crowd in Paris, “Lafayette, we are here.”

As a result, part of 42nd Street in New York was named, and is still known as, Pershing Square. But as so often happens, questions arose as to the declaration’s wording. Sometimes it was rendered as “Lafayette, I am here,” which comes off as slightly arrogant.

Krushchnev at the United Nations

Of course, notwithstanding America’s help, France remained vulnerable. In 1940, the Germans re-invaded, and not until 1944, with the help of the Allies, was Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, able to assume the nation’s presidency. Unfortunately, before de Gaulle could craft an uplifting slogan to unify his war-ravaged nation, he was overheard complaining, “How does anyone expect me to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”

With the Nazis vanquished, it was Communism that haunted France, especially after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev warned the West, “We will bury you!” This threat, at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent, was walked back delicately by Russian diplomats, who insisted a kinder translation of Khrushchev’s remark was “We shall certainly be present at your funeral,” a reassurance one might give a cherished friend or relative.

In 1960, however, Khrushchev was back at it, taking one of his shoes off while speaking at the UN and angrily pounding it on the lectern. His aides hurriedly explained to Western media that using a shoe in this manner was a harmless Ukrainian folk custom, although many American schoolchildren, taught from infancy to always keep their shoes on, were traumatized irretrievably, and remain so to this day.

Lester Leaps In

The Soviets had meanwhile so demoralized France, a lamentation arose for those bold characters from the nation’s past—Joan of Arc, Robespierre, Napoleon, Gustave Flaubert—any of whom would by now have taken Khrushchev by the scruff of the neck and shaken him like a kitten. De Gaulle, however, rejected such criticism, reminding his followers, “The cemeteries of Europe are filled with indispensable men.”

This remark stirred a cultural tempest. For if de Gaulle was right, and heroes were replaceable, why erect so many costly statues in their honor? Left Bank intellectual Simone de Beauvoir chimed in, not only agreeing with the president but offering her own list of European “greats” she thought overrated, including Coco Chanel and Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Black American novelist Chester Himes, then living in Paris, echoed de Beauvoir’s opinion of the famous German composer, confiding, “I’d give all of Bach for eight bars of Lester,” a reference to the legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young, known as “Prez.”

If you visit Lester Young’s grave in New York’s Evergreens Cemetery, you’ll find it’s not far from Cypress Hills National Cemetery, the final resting place of Sergeant John Martin, a.k.a. Giovanni Martini, the Italian-born army bugler who was the lone survivor of Custer’s Last Stand. On the morning of June 25, 1876, the day on which Custer would perish on a hilltop in Montana along with 173 of his men, it was Sgt. Martin who Custer sent to fetch help. The note Custer hastily wrote for him to carry to Captain Frederick Benteen read: “Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring Packs. [ammunition].”

As “Custer’s Last Stand” came to be depicted in countless paintings and dime novels, bugler John Martin strove to distance himself from the notoriety of being its sole survivor. He sought and found oblivion, as many have, in Brooklyn, where he married an Irish woman named Higgins, fathered eight children, and lived in contented anonymity for another half-century, until being run over by a truck in 1922.

Once Upon a Time on Mulberry Street

It’s unknown whether John Martin ever met his fellow New Yorker Ely Parker, a retired Union army officer, but they shared the distinction of having each once inhabited a supremely iconic moment in American history. Parker, a Seneca Indian who served during the Civil War as secretary to General Grant, at war’s end in 1865 drafted the terms of surrender Grant gave Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

Legend has it that as Grant introduced his staff to General Lee, the defeated Confederate, scrutinizing Parker’s dark features, remarked, “Well, it’s good to see at least one real American here today.” To which Parker replied, “General, today we are all Americans.”

After leaving the army, Parker took a patronage job overseeing the supply room at New York police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Many an arriving patrolman in need of a new hat or baton was met by a tall, full-blooded Seneca in police uniform, wearing a neatly trimmed beard and completing the paperwork with the aid of a pair of gold-rimmed bifocals.

Franklin’s Tower of Babel

Ely Parker would have laughed at the notion that Benjamin Franklin was, as some liked to say, the “The First American,” although he possibly did not know that the bifocals on which he relied were a Franklin invention, the one of which the Founding Father was himself most proud. It came about because Franklin’s diplomacy required him to be able to understand what was being said by those sitting across the dinner table, and as his French was mediocre, he needed to be able to watch their lips, while also of course seeing what he was eating. To do this he had no choice but to spend every meal swapping one pair of glasses for the other.

Frustrated, he returned home one evening and stayed up all night cutting and reassembling several pair of his glasses. He then wired together one frame that held two lenses, an upper and a lower. Now he could carry on a conversation with whomever sat opposite, while also appreciating the viands passed his way. He was particularly fond of the country’s large variety of cheeses.

Indeed, it was in seeking a means of pinning a slab of cheese firmly to the plate with one hand while slicing it with the other, that Franklin made yet another interesting invention, a small wooden disk with a short pin attached. He dubbed his creation “le bouton au fromage,” or “cheese button.”

Recent scholarship from Yale University, however, argues that “cheese button” may have simply been a term of endearment he used with female friends. His great discretion ensures we will never know the true answer, but it’s interesting to note that no less an eminence than Samuel Johnson, one of Franklin’s London contemporaries, told his companion and biographer Boswell that, in offering canapés to guests, he himself had used the cheese button. Pressed by Boswell to explain the provenance of the device, he replied he was satisfied to leave the question unresolved.

“This is the way history works and what makes its study so delightful,” Dr. Johnson no doubt assured his famous muse. “One thing ricochets off another, as in the urchins’ game of marbles, until we are left utterly clueless, yet decently entertained.”