The Greatest Thing I ever Made

In my previous review of ‘The Seventh Son’ I neglected to mention a poignant section that describes a scene with Ben Franklin.  One of the characters is collecting in a book a list of the most important things certain people have ever done.

When he asks Ben Franklin to identify the most important thing he ever did, he replies that ‘making Americans’ was the most important thing that he ever did.

As the United States was being formed, many of the immigrants still identified themselves as French, Dutch, English, Iroquois, Spanish and Prussian.  People were still keeping their separate identities.  As they kept this wall of separateness they could not come together to work as a country.

Ben Franklin started writing about the concept of Americans and offered this group up almost in opposition to other ‘outside’ forces in a way that gave all of these strangers a new identity to join together and build a country.  It was the common bond.

It strikes me that today we are somewhat moving to a hybrid model.  We are still Americans but we are also starting to reconnect to our roots.  When this works well, we make renewed connections to our ancestors and other areas of the world.  When it works poorly, it serves to re-divide and segregate each other just as Ben Franklin feared.

A person’s perception of themselves and the groups they belong to are extremely important socially.  It is something that can bring people together and pull people apart. There are similar forces like this that work on many different levels.  Drugs for example can break a person away from their social bonds and connections.  This is partly why the mental and social aspects of drug rehab are so important.  It helps people renew the connections that are broken chemically. With a solid social connection to a group, a person or a people can be very strong, but without that connection they can be rapidly defeated.  Ben Franklin understood this, and this story definitely helped identify the importance of this concept.  It is one of the major themes in the book.