He was notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies,[5] science fiction,[2][3] prison literature[6] and marine ecology.
His main areas of academic focus were science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history.
[5] A critic of the Vietnam War, he was one of the founding members of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, heading its Palo Alto chapter.
Franklin was arrested in December 1972 for harboring Ronald Beaty, a federal fugitive after being freed in October during a prison transfer in which one guard was killed and another wounded.
There he and his wife Jane studied Marxist theory, helped organize the Free University of Paris, and participated in setting up the European network of GI deserters, who were primarily young men opposed to the Vietnam War.
[19] In a matter of months Franklin, along with roughly half of RU's members, left to join a Chicano-based leftist group in Palo Alto called Venceremos.
[20] According to the testimony of one witness, Franklin urged students assembled at the rally to disrupt university functions by shutting down its computer facility.
Franklin concluded his speech at that rally by saying: See, now what we're asking is for people to make that little tiny gesture to show that we're willing to inconvenience ourselves a little bit and to begin to shut down the most obvious machinery of war, such as, and I think it is a good target, that Computation Center.
[21]A report in the Stanford Daily student publication suggested that Franklin urged protestors to "resist police efforts" with the effect of "inciting a riot".
[20] Stanford president Richard Lyman gave Franklin a letter, claiming that he violated an agreement entitled "Statement of Policy on Appointments and Tenure", with the specific complaint that Franklin "deliberately contributed to a disturbance which forced the cancellation of a speech by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge at Dinkelspiel Auditorium".
A decade later, in 1985, with the help of a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, Franklin appealed the termination, and sought back pay, damages, and reinstatement, but the effort was not successful.
[26] ACLU lawyer Margaret Casey said the ruling would have a "chilling effect" on the power of academics to express their thinking freely.
In 2014, he was influential in organizing Rutgers faculty to block the choice of former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker:[27] This is a culture which gets much of its vision of reality from images projected on movie screens, television screens and computer screens.In 2014, Temple University scholar Carolyn Karcher summed up Franklin's achievements by saying that he has an "extraordinary gift for teaching us to read our history in our literature and to glean from both insights that can help us alter our future."
[30] His book War Stars was cited by leftist philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, who bemoaned the prevalence of a recurring theme in popular literature that "we're about to face destruction from some terrible, awesome enemy.
"[32] His book Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century (1966) identified American authors including Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville as pioneers of this genre who wrote science fiction, contrary to popular understanding.
War Stars is informed by Franklin's own earlier experience as a navigator and intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.
[33] In 1991, he was Guest Curator for the Star Trek and the Sixties exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution; this show subsequently traveled to the Hayden Planetarium.
[35] His book Vietnam and America: A Documented History, which he co-edited with his wife Jane Franklin and Marvin Gettleman and Marilyn Young, was described by The New York Times as a "valuable anthology of crucial texts and records" which "tersely replays the bitter conflict.
Franklin's research about menhaden, a fish crucial in the food chain of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, helped spark a mass movement to protect them.
[42] Franklin's analysis was an interdisciplinary study in American environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural history from the 17th into the 21st centuries.
In a review in The Washington Post, his book was described as an "exhaustive examination of issues" using lucid prose "infused with an urgency that depends little on hyperbole and largely on careful documentation".
[7] The book played a leading role in restoring whales to New York and New Jersey waters, and also in persuading the Department of Commerce in 2020 to act to protect menhaden.
Sexual humiliation is the norm, and rape is endemic .... the huge cost of prisons is diverting funds from education and rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure.