Books: The Superior American

THE PAPERS op BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, VOL. Ill (513 pp.)—Editor, Leonard W. Labaree—Yale University Press ($ 10).

According to Charles Baudelaire's defi-nition-by-negation of a superior man—"He is not a specialist"—Benjamin Franklin was one of the most superior men who ever lived. He was also, according to Phillips Russell's widely read biography, "the first civilized American." Superior or merely civilized, he certainly spread himself. Almost everyone now knows that he invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, that he-founded the Saturday Evening Post and the Philosophical Society of America, but even the brighter college...