Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts, 320 years ago.

     In recent days, I discovered Ken Burns’s two episodes on Benjamin Franklin that aired in April 2022 on PBS. The second part is more interesting, his efforts during the Revolution.

     Franklin was in London, when the Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. It was he, a well-known American, who received a public berating from England’s Solicitor General January of 1774, in the Privy Council.

     His feelings hurt, Franklin sailed back to Pennsylvania, convinced that independence was a better choice. He arrived home in May 1775, a month after the battles at Lexington and Concord, a month before the horrific battle at Bunker Hill. 

     Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the 2nd Continental Congress. He was the old man there, 69-years old. He stayed quiet, appeared to sleep often, but was keen for independence.

     In late April of 1776, Franklin, with two other delegates, traveled to Montreal, in Canada, to convince the Canadians to join the 13 colonies. The Canadians refused. Loyalists they were.

     Franklin returned with a hat composed of fur, skinned from a marten. 

      That summer, Franklin served on a committee to write a declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, then 33-years-old, wrote it, but Franklin edited it.

     Instead of, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” Franklin urged for a more philosophical meaning, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Jefferson agreed.

     On September 11, 1776, Franklin and John Adams met with British Admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island to discuss peace, but Howe refused to admit that the colonists had a new nation.

     In October 1776, Franklin sailed from Philadelphia, with two grandsons, 16-year-old Temple Franklin, and 7-year-old Benny Bache. The USS “Reprisal” arrived in France in December 1776. A month later Franklin turned 71.

     Franklin wore his marten fur hat to hide unsightly scabs atop his bald head due to weeks of a poor diet aboard the “Reprisal.” The French people considered Franklin’s hat rustic and quaint. 

     Franklin’s duty: to convince French officials to sign an alliance with the colonies and to support the Americans with arms.

     He was the one American whom the French people knew, because of his experiment with a kite in a lighting storm. Many wanted to see this famous American. He was harassed day and night at his room in the Hotel de Valentinois in Passy, a suburb within Paris.

     He played chess. He flirted with beautiful French ladies. He met King Louis XVI.

     After Franklin received the good news that American forces had defeated General Burgoyne at the battle at Saratoga, in New York, in 1777, he and French officials signed two alliances.

     The French government spent some 1.3 billion livres on the colonists’ war with England.

     With French naval support in the Chesapeake Bay, and with French soldiers and cannons, the combined American and French armies forced British general Lord Cornwallis to surrender his army at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781. The brutal and bloody war was over.

     If not for Franklin’s diplomatic skill in France, Washington may not have won the war.

     Two years later, on September 3, 1783, Benjamin Franklin signed the Paris Peace Treaty with English officials. By it, England’s government recognized America’s independence.

     Franklin sailed back to Philadelphia in the summer of 1785. Two years later, Pennsylvania appointed Franklin to the Constitutional Convention. When asked if America now had a republic or a monarchy, Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” 

     A Poor Richard quote: “either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing about.” Franklin did both. He passed away on April 17, 1790, at the age of eighty-four.

Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, at the age of 42, in his Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. His heart gave out after years of obesity and prescription drugs. 

     His long-time talent agent and promoter, cigar-chomping Colonel Tom Parker, lived for another twenty years, passing away on January 21, 1997, at the age of 87, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

     Together they accomplished a lot: 31 movies between 1956 and 1969, countless albums, numerous performances, an immense amount of income. Elvis said this of Parker, “I don’t think I would have ever been huge if it wasn’t for him. He’s a brilliant man.” That was most likely true.

     Parker said this of Elvis, “It’s unexplainable. They say anybody else could have done it. Perhaps. So, I was to be the one who was with him. He did his part. I did mine, and we were lucky with great talent, and we had a great show and a lot of fun.”

     Colonel Tom Parker made Elvis Presley King of Rock and Roll.

     After Elvis passed on, Parker worked the estate, collecting his cut on all memorabilia and record sales, while his father, Vernon Presley, was the estate’s actual executor. 

     Vernon died in 1979, but he named Priscilla, Elvis’s ex-wife, and Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, then 9 years old, as co-executors. At once, Priscilla learned the estate was nearing bankruptcy due in part to Elvis’s lavish spending, and the fees paid to Tom Parker. 

     In 1981, it fell to Judge Joseph Evans of Shelby County Probate Court, in Memphis, to sort out the claims against Elvis’s estate. He appointed an attorney named Blanchard E. Tual to serve as Lisa Marie’s guardian ad litem and to investigate Tom Parker’s role in the estate.

     After four months, Tual presented a 300-page report to the court. He found that Parker had charged Elvis and then his estate 50% of all income, since January 2, 1967.

     Tual said that this arrangement was “excessive, imprudent, unfair to the estate, and beyond all reasonable bounds of industry standards,” that Parker was “self-dealing and overreaching.” 

     Also, Tual found that Parker had set up side deals that cheated Elvis out of millions.

     He found that on March 1, 1973, Parker had contracted with RCA to buy Elvis’s music catalog, in essence forfeiting all his rights to further royalties on the pre-1973 music sales.

     RCA agreed to pay the following amounts. “To Elvis: $2,800,000; to Parker: $2,600,000,” for a total of $5,400,000. In hindsight, that music catalog was worth far more than that.

     Tual found that Elvis missed out on millions he could have earned if Tom Parker would have allowed him to perform in foreign countries. Tom Parker was born in the Netherlands, came to the U.S. in 1929, illegally, and had never obtained a U.S. passport. He dared not cross the border.

     Tual found Elvis was often “without the benefit of independent counsel or business advice.”

     Tual recommended, and Judge Joseph Evans agreed, that Priscilla should fire Tom Parker and bring suit against him for “fraud and mismanagement.” The case was settled out of court in 1983. 

     RCA agreed to pay Parker $2 million for his “collection of master recordings, memorabilia, video-taped concerts, and film rights.” RCA also agreed to pay Elvis’s estate $110,000 per year for a decade to settle RCA’s claims on Presley’s earnings. 

     On June 7, 1982, Priscilla opened up Graceland for tours, a wise move, instead of selling the mansion. Elvis Presley Enterprises is now solvent and earns in excess of $10 million each year.

     If he had lived, Elvis would celebrate his 91st birthday in a few days, on January 8.

Two movies were released this past November, “Frankenstein” on the 7th, and “Hamnet” on the 26th. Both were based, in part, on well-known fictional works from previous centuries, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,” and William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

     Mary Shelley, girlfriend, lover, and future wife of the poet Percy Shelley, began writing her Gothic horror novel, “Frankenstein,” in the summer of 1816, when just 18.

      The English poet Lord Byron had suggested that she, and Percy Shelley, and a group of like-minded literary artists should each try to write a ghost story that summer while the writers enjoyed the rainy, cool summer days near Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

     In mid-June, Mary’s imagination kept her awake. She wondered, “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated. Galvanism had given token of such things.” 

     She later wrote, “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”

     Mary Shelley finished her fictional tale of Victor Frankenstein—a surgeon, and his recreated  being built from a body—in 1817, when she turned 20. The novel was published in 1818, in three volumes, but without Mary’s name listed as author. It was “an overwhelming success.”

     Guillermo del Toro, a filmmaker, author, and artist from Mexico, has filmed the latest of untold numbers of film adaptations. Del Toro is drawn to monsters, Gothic stories, and horror.

     Del Toro says, “There is a difference between eye candy and eye protein. Eye candy is just pretty, but eye protein is telling a story, and it is pretty.”

     Maggie O’Farrell is a writer from Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. The copper-colored hair, blue eyes, and fair skin indicate Irish ancestry.

     In 2020, Maggie published “Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague,” during the covid pandemic, to universal acclaim. The “New York Times Book Review” named it one of the five best works of fiction that year, and O’Farrell won the U.K.’s “Women’s Prize for Fiction” that year.

     Historians acknowledge that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November 1582, when he was 18, and she 26. Six months later, in May 1583, Anne gave birth to Susanna.

     Then, in February of 1585, Anne gave birth to twins: a second daughter named Judith, and a son Hamnet. William relocated to London, where he luxuriated in a phenomenal success as a poet, playwright, and actor at the Globe Theater.

     Anne remained at home in Stratford-on-the Avon, carrying on with the duties of raising three children alone. In August of 1596, William and Anne suffered a “devastating loss” when Hamnet died at age 11, perhaps due to the bubonic plague, although the exact cause is not known.

     Maggie O’Farrell reimagines life in Anne’s home without husband or father. Maggie never mentions William’s first or last name. She gives Anne the name of “Agnes,” pronounced “ann-yes,” a close variation, and she points out that Hamnet was sometimes spelled as Hamlet.

     Maggie builds her story around the grief that the couple endured, due to Hamnet’s passing.

     She shows how William channelled his grief in his best tragic play, “Hamlet,” about a Danish prince who buries his father, the king, because the prince’s uncle murdered Hamlet’s father.

     Chloé Zhao directed the movie, “Hamnet.” Critics give it either four or five stars, calling it “stunning,” “a masterpiece.” Some critics suggest the film may win Best Picture award.

     Take your pick, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” or Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” a dose of eye protein either way.

 Last time, I discussed the first phase of Mexico’s Revolution, when Francisco Madero challenged the three decades-long dictator, Porfirio Díaz, in the 1910 election.

      Díaz won the election, but Madero called for a revolt against Díaz on November 20, 1910. Madero’s forces defeated the army’s forces, causing Porfirio Díaz to resign and flee to Paris. 

     Because Madero failed to hold together a strong government, a power vacuum spread across Mexico that lasted for the next ten years. Mexico’s Revolution turned violent and bloody.

     Strong personalities, powerful warlords, vied and jockeyed for top position. Among others, there was Victoriano Huerta, Pascual Orozco, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, and finally Álvaro Obregón.

     It helps to contrast Mexico’s Revolution to the United States Civil War. 

     Whereas the U.S. Civil War was fought between North and South, Mexico’s Revolution had a number of competing generals, each with an army, and each attacking another army. 

     Whereas the U.S. Civil War had two functioning governments, with Lincoln presiding in the North and Jefferson Davis in the South, Mexico’s Revolution lacked a functioning government. 

     Whereas the U.S. Civil War battles were fought between soldiers, Mexico’s Revolution massacred civilians en masse, without hesitation, no mercy.

      Whereas the U.S. Civil War caused the deaths of some 600,000 soldiers, from both North and South, historians hesitate to fix a number for the Mexican Revolution, due to a lack of statistics. 

     Best estimates place the number between one million on the low side, and two and a half million people on the high side. 

     Whereas the percentage of casualties in the U.S. Civil War was about 2%, from a population of 30 million, the percentage of casualties in the Mexican Revolution was almost 7% on the low side to almost 17% on the high side, from a population of 15 million, per the 1910 census.

     Whereas the U.S. Civil War lasted for four years, April 1961 to April 1965, Mexico’s Revolution lasted for ten years, from November 20, 1910, until near the day, November 30, 1920, when Álvaro Obregón was inaugurated President, and the fighting began to subside.

     The Mexican people endured an immense amount of pain, death, and bloodshed.

     Historians believe that between 1 and 2 million of Mexico’s citizens immigrated north into the U.S. during Mexico’s Revolution, near 10% +/- of its population. Again, statistics are difficult to determine. Some migrated north in a given year but then returned months later.  

     Migration north did not cease once the fighting subsided. In one year alone, 1923, some 1000 people crossed the border everyday throughout the year.

     This migration into the U.S. was due to the Revolution’s bloody violence, devastation, severe unemployment, plus economic and political collapse.  

     Peace began to appear a possibility in 1920, when a Constitutional faction led by Venustiano Carranza called for a new constitution. Delegates from across the country arrived in Querétaro in November 2016, and on February 5, 1917, delegates voted for a new Constitution for Mexico. 

     Article 27 insisted upon land reform, Article 123 spelled out labor rights for factory workers, and Article 3 called for a secular state that restricted the Catholic church and provided for free, mandatory, and secular education.

     Although an assassin’s bullet ended Carranza’s life and his presidency, on May 21, 1920, his death is considered close to the end of the Revolution’s violent phase.

     My vote for best quote on the Mexican Revolution, “the proud country’s citizens endured a horrible present to escape an intolerable past to forge a better future.”  

Porfirio Díaz assumed the office of President of Mexico, on November 28, 1876, and for the next thirty-four years, he acted as the nation’s Strong Man, a tyrant, a despot, an autocrat. He won elections in 1877, 1884, 1888, 1892, 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1910. 

     Díaz’s rule was by force. His slogan was “Pan o palo,” meaning “Bread or Bludgeon.”

     The Latin-American historian from California, Lesley Bird Simpson, wrote this about Porfirio Díaz, in his book Many Mexicos, “The benefactors of Díaz’s tyranny and strong-armed rule were to enjoy the most efficient despotism ever seen in the western world.” How did he do that? 

     Simpson says, “He gave his generals little jobs and restored them to their rightful place at the public trough; he kept them apart and played them off against each other.”

     Díaz set up the Rurales, a national police force composed of gunmen from the cities and towns loyal to him only. “They were given showy uniforms, good salaries, and the power to shoot on sight, and no questions asked.” 

     By them, he eradicated the bandits. “Mexico was now the best policed country in the world.”

     Díaz next encouraged foreigners from the United States, England, and France to bring money to Mexico, to build railroads, mines, smelters, and to set up massive plantations where the well-healed hacendados grew coffee, sugar, and bananas. “The foreigner was king.”

     Soon, “There was no law but the will of Porfirio Díaz. Elections were such a farce that hardly anyone took the trouble to vote.”

     Then, “Between 1883 and 1884, Díaz gave away to foreigners and friends 134,500,000 acres of the public domain, about one-fifth of the entire area of the Republic. Only a smattering of the Indian communities had any land whatsoever.” Foreigners clamored to grab even that land.

     This was a massive plunder, “a denial of elementary justice to a large part of the population.”

     In essence, Porfirio Díaz was skillful at political manipulation. He kept the church under his control. He pampered foreign investors. He crushed and silenced all opposition. He controlled the generals. He protected the wealthy, the families that owned the huge haciendas.

     Simpson writes, “As the years rolled by, Mexico lay quiet in her straight jacket.”

     In 1908, a young businessman from a wealthy family in Coahuila, just south of Texas, named Francisco Madero, wrote a book, The Presidential Succession in 1910. In it, he asked an innocent question, “who would succeed Díaz?” What? Will Díaz not live forever?

     Although Madero stood only five feet, two inches tall, spoke in a squeaky voice, and lacked biceps, he dared to mobilize a political campaign for himself as Mexico’s next President. His slogan, Effective suffrage, No re-election! Enthusiastic crowds followed him across Mexico.

     On September 30, 1910, Porfirio Díaz won the election. His Rurales jailed Madero for four months, but while incarcerated the young man wrote his “Plan of San Luis Potosi,” calling for a revolt against Díaz. Madero escaped prison on October 6, 1910, and fled to San Antonio, Texas. 

     There, he learned that others—in pockets around Mexico—also wanted a revolution: two men from the state of Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, Pascual Orozco and a vicious bandit nick-named Pancho Villa; and also Emiliano Zapata, from the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City.

     Zapata urged the Indians to take back their land. His motto: Land and Liberty, and Death to the Hacendados! He wore a leather belt, slung over a shoulder, lined with bullet cartridges.

     Madero urged the armies to revolt against Díaz’s regime on November 20, 1910.

     Orozco and Villa’s armies pushed aside Díaz’s army at Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, and marched to Mexico City. Porfirio dated his resignation letter May 23, 2011, and fled to Paris.

     Mexico’s citizens celebrate November 20, the anniversary of when Mexico’s Revolution began. Next time, I will look at how Mexico’s Revolution progressed over the following decade.

Ulysses S. Grant was first elected President in 1868, as a Republican, from the state of Illinois. According to an old college history textbook, “Grant’s military triumphs during the Civil War did nothing to prepare him for the Presidency. 

     “He was probably the least experienced and most naive citizen ever to hold that position. He chose his advisers based upon their loyalty to him, rather than for their administrative ability. His choices for his Cabinet officers were disastrous.

     “His White House staff was dominated by old army friends who had no political experience.”

     In addition, Grant “did not grasp the the potential of the great office which the voters had bestowed upon him.” Instead, “he believed that Congress should make all the decisions, because they represented the people’s will. A president should only execute the will of Congress.”

     Right away, those close to Grant understood that he would look the other way when well-healed businessmen came calling to bribe politicians throughout his Federal Government, heaping bags of money and favors upon them. 

     “By Grant’s negligence in office, he allowed a general moral laxity to flourish.”

     As Grant’s first term drew to a close, a group of Republicans, who were disappointed with the corruption that swirled around this President, formed a new political party, calling themselves the Liberal Republicans. They only agreed on one issue, their disgust for Ulysses S. Grant. 

     The Liberal Republicans chose for their Presidential candidate Horace Greeley, a long-time New York City newspaper editor, but an eccentric who applauded any and all types of reform.

      “He committed himself, all at once, to utopian and artisan socialism, to land and dietary reform, and to anti-slavery.” Of Greeley, Grant said, “He is a genius without common sense.”

     The Democrats decided to join the Liberal Republicans and endorse Greeley as their candidate also, even though he was a Republican, because they were most anxious to see Grant unseated and driven out of the White House.

     Despite the corruption inside his administration, Grant remained popular among voters.

     Then, tragedy struck the Horace Greeley family. His wife Mary returned from Europe in late June of 1872, feeling poorly. Greeley gave up speaking and appealing to voters, to instead care for Mary, but then she passed away on October 30, five days before the election. 

     Greeley’s campaign for President for a new political party sputtered to a stop.

     On November 5, 1872, Grant won the popular vote, 3,595,235 to Greeley’s 2,834,761, which meant that Grant would receive 286 electoral votes to Greeley’s 66.

     However, before the Electoral College could meet and count those ballots, Horace Greeley also passed away, on November 29. 

     Forty-two of his 66 electoral votes went to Thomas Hendricks, a Democrat from Indiana, 18 went to Benjamin Brown, and Horace Greeley retained 3, although he was deceased. The Liberal Republican Party succumbed to defeat and ceased to exist. 

     Grant served another four years as President, but instances of corruption continued. 

     The worst was the Credit Mobilier scandal. It was a construction company that assisted in building the transcontinental railroad. Company officials gave away its stock to Congressmen and officials as a bribe to stop them from investigating their company’s business transactions.

     A footnote to this history. On November 5, 1872, a women’s rights advocate named Susan B. Anthony walked into a voting precinct and cast her vote for Ulysses S. Grant. Two weeks later, officials arrested Anthony, and fined her $100 for voting illegally, because of her gender. 

     She explained her position, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” She never did. By the 19th Amendment, adopted in 1920, women received the right to vote, and more than 8 million women voted in the 1920 election, 48 years after Susan B. Anthony voted for Greeley.