The John Franklin letters.

Description

No set of such letters which I have examined seems to tell the story of the time more completely in brief space than those which I have edited into the present volume. Let me give the background of this correspondence and then step aside. The John Franklin papers were willed to the University of Illinois by their recipient, Mr. Jacob Semmes Franklin, who died in 1980 at the age of ninety-three. Jacob Semmes Franklin was a life-long farmer in Central Illinois, working and living on acres which his own grandfather had originally plowed. Throughout the period of the liquidation of the United States government he stood firm as a patriot and his farm was often the center of secret Ranger activities. However, old Mr. Franklin's activities are only casually reflected in this correspondence, which came to him from a nephew, John Semmes Franklin, who lived in the East and who was in the Ranger movement, and attempted to keep his uncle informed of happenings in Washington, at United Nations headquarters, and elsewhere, during the years preceding the rise of the Buros and the destruction of the sovereignty of the United States. Now, with the virtue of "hindsight"—or historical perspective, as we scholars call it—we see how accurately John Franklin assayed the events of his time and how clearly he saw where we were going. In reading these letters to his uncle, we can marvel equally at his clear sight—shared by a few—and the blindness of others, shared so tragically by so many. I should add that John Semmes Franklin was born in 1920 in Chicago, Illinois. The father died when the boy was only three years old, and he spent the next thirteen years of his life on Jacob Franklin's farm, which accounts for the close bond between nephew and uncle. John Franklin served in the Infantry in World War II, participating in the campaigns of the First Division. In the Korean "police action," John Franklin was concerned with long-range penetration operations, and later worked on certain confidential projects in the Far East, as is mentioned in one of the early letters. When the uncle died, John Franklin returned to the farm, where he himself died in 1984, at the age of sixty-four.