September 5, 2024 • 32 mins
From writing under pen names in the newspaper as a teenager, to the Poor Richard maxims we all know, to the autobiography he created to show the path toward American virtues, Ben Franklin literally wrote the books on what it means to be American. But how close was the real Ben Franklin to the character he created?
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
One of Franklin's greatest inventions is the character A Bit Franklin.
He creates it, he polishes it. He does it through
Poor Richard and through his autobiography. His arrival in Philadelphia
is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature.
(00:33):
He gets off the boat but draggled, and uses coins
to tip the boatmen. He buys three puffy rolls and
gives one away to somebody. He says, you're always more
generous when you're very poor than when you're very rich,
because you don't want people to think you're poor. He
writes that scene for posterity and also for his son,
(00:56):
who has become very pretentious and was a royal governor
back then. He's saying, remember, your humble roots were tradesmen,
were not part of an aristocracy.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So he had figured out a little bit of mythmaking
even at the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
But as Shakespeare teaches us, we sometimes become the mask
we wear, and so Ben Franklin, by showing how industrious
he could be by having the pretense of humility, even
if he couldn't have the reality, was able to make
himself into this type of character that he portrays both
(01:32):
in Poor Richard's Almanac and in the autobiography.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Ben Franklin was perhaps the quintessential American character. He created
the type through his writing style, through the aphorisms of
Poor Richard's Almanac, through his picturesque autobiography, and in many
ways itself humble, industrious, and hopeful. The new American spirit
felt familiar and appealing to colonists and eventually to a
(02:08):
nation eager to forge its own identity. And while the
character Franklin created was in many ways close to Franklin
the person, in others it was painfully far away. In
this second episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals
how Franklin wrote the American identity into being and just
how far Franklin's own life strayed from this national ideal.
(02:43):
You describe beautifully how he came to represent this certain
part of the American character. And it includes practicality, it
includes compromise. Were there any sort of seminal incidents in
his childhood that you feel like shaped this orientation towards
what became a kind of American character, a central American character.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
When Franklin is growing up in Boston, he had been
indentured to his brother, who is a publisher, newspaper editor,
and printer. Franklin knew he had to be self educated.
He knew that his father decided not to send him
to Harvard, and so every night he would read and
(03:25):
study at his brother's print shop and publishing house. He
embarked on a self improvement course. He was one of
America's great self taught people. And what he did was
he took down volumes of The Spectator, a daily that
was being published in London, with wonderful essays by Joseph
(03:45):
Addison and Richard Steele. And what Franklin would do is
he would turn the essays into poetry. And he thought
it would help him increase his vocabulary because he would
have to think of different words that would either rhyme
or have the right meter. And he would read the essays,
take notes, jumble up his notes, and then a few
days later, see if he could recreate the essay, and
(04:08):
then he would go back and correct. He said, every
now and then I could write it even better, I
could improve it, which made me think I would become
a tolerable writer. Well, not only does he become a
tolerable writer, he becomes the best and most popular writer
in America. He also read Cotton Mather's Essays to Do
(04:28):
Good because Boston then was pretty much ruled by a
Puritan theocracy. Puritan preachers like Cotton Mather were always talking
about God's grace, that we got salvation through God's grace alone,
whereas Benjamin Franklin is much more simple. He'd believed that, well,
(04:49):
maybe you could earn your way into the good grace
of the Lord by doing good works and helping your
fellow citizens.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So Franklin's early years are spent teaching himself to write
moral education, less religious than the puritanical world he lived in,
but focused on practicality and contributing to the world around him.
But even if he was indentured to his brother, he
was still indentured, and naturally he chafed at that, and
the fundamental unfairness of it, along with his core character,
(05:17):
led him to push back. He has this sort of
maybe inborn but natural resistance to authority, and he abandons
the apprenticeship, which was, as I understand it, quite a
big deal at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Right He becomes apprentice to his older brother, and his
older brother was very strict in dealing with him and
didn't let him write for the paper, which is why
Franklin writes under the pseudonym and fakes his handwriting, and
it's called Silence Do Good. It's a triumph of the
imagination because here you have a fifteen or sixteen year
(05:54):
old kid who had never left Boston, but he's writing
in the voice of a widowed, elderly woman who lives
in the countryside. And this is part of Franklin's magic,
which is he has that sense of spunky imagination and
a colloquial sense to him. Other people at the time,
like Jonathan Edwards are writing in this grand rhetoric about
(06:17):
centers in the hands of an angry god. But Benjamin
Franklin as a kid almost invents this vernacular auschus cracker
barrel style that you see in Mark Twain and Will
Rogers and others that pokes fun at the pretensions of
the elite. He became the best writer of his time
(06:38):
because he had such a colloquial voice.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
He goes on to use anonymous writing or pseudonymous writing
throughout his career, even up to major diplomatic incidents later
in life. Can you explain a little bit about why
he uses pseudonyms. Is it a wink wink kind of
pseudonym or is it pure Inneymi. The great thing about
the colonial period is you could write under a pseudonym
(07:05):
and you had some anonymity. But eventually people can find out.
And indeed his brother finds out that young Benjamin is
a run doing Silence do Good. So it's good.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
It gave people a lot of freedom to speak, but
it still put a little bit of a leash on
how far they were willing to go.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
But not too much of a leish under the pseudonym's
silence do Good. But he was still in Boston writing
for his brother's paper.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
He tests the limits, and Silence do Good says, I
have a natural aversion to tyranny, and an he trampling
over my rights makes my blood boil exceedingly. That's how
you know I'm an American. And this is ingrained in Franklin,
especially since he was indentured to his brother. And eventually
he runs away and breaks the indenture agreement he had
(07:57):
made and secretly goes into Filhiladelphia.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
And this is the moment in his autobiography, that famous
scene of Franklin walking off the boat with just a
few coins in his pocket, and this picture of how
the world sees him, a young, plucky naif, sharing his
roles and confident in the opportunities ahead. You write that
he became the country's first unabashed public relations expert, and
(08:24):
the first subject of his public relations was himself.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yes, even as a young printer opening a shop in Philadelphia,
he makes a point of carting the paper he needs
through the streets back and forth to show that he's
diligent in working, rather than having Sarven's other people do it.
And he cares a lot about not only the reality
(08:51):
of being diligent, but just showing people how diligent he is.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Let's talk about Poor Richard.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When he had a print shop, with his his own
colloaquial style and wit, he's able to do a really
fun almanac. He calls it Poor Richard's Almanac. That's his pseudonym.
But in this case everybody knew it was Ben Franklin
who was doing it. In the almanac, he has all
sorts of maxims wisdom from the ages. A penny saved
(09:19):
is a penny earned early to bed, early to rise,
And we sometimes mistake the real Benjamin Franklin for those maxims.
I mean, he was never early to bed, an early
to rise type person. But through that voice he's able
to create an unpretentious ethic throughout his whole life. He
(09:42):
wants to poke fun at the pretensions of the elite,
and that's what he starts doing through Poor Richard common
folk wisdom.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Did people at the time start to see him this
way as embodied by poor Richard?
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, I think everybody knew he was writing these almanacs,
but it was all part of the fun. People knew
Benjamin Franklin. He was not exactly a very priggish person.
One of the secrets to his humor and to his
personality was self deprecation. It was not exactly humility, but
(10:17):
it was the good pretense of humility. He would poke
fun at himself, and especially poor Richard could do it.
At one point one year instead of Poor Richard writing
the forward to the almanac, is poor Richard's wife Bridget. Now,
of course this has all been Franklin doing it, but
poor Richard's wife talks about the experiments that poor Richard's
(10:40):
doing and how it'd be better off if he learned
how to earn a living. So that notion of a
self deprecation as a way to be influential and charming
and perhaps settle some disputes is something that Franklin perfected.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But Franklin himself was far from perfect. When he returned
after the break, we take a look at a family
life that was marked by both tragedy and neglect, and
also a wonderfully broad sense of what family in this
new country could meet. We haven't talked about his personal
(11:31):
life yet.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, Franklin has a very complicated family life. At one point,
he has an illegitimate son named William, and he takes
responsibility for the son, brings the son in, and he
ends up forming a common law marriage with Deborah, person
who had seen him straggling off the boat when he
(11:53):
first was a runaway from Boston. But her husband had
disappeared and so she couldn't get married married again because
of the bigamy laws. But she and Franklin create a
common law marriage and it becomes a very practical thing.
She's the bookkeeper, she's the person helping run the shop,
and it's somewhat typical of Franklin. He's not a deeply
(12:16):
romantic person. They have a beautiful daughter named Sally that
becomes very close to Franklin, and they have a child
named Frankie. And it was pretty tragic because, just as
nowadays we fight over vaccinations, that was a big fight
back then, and Franklin's brother had fought against inoculations. And
(12:39):
even though Benjamin Franklin believed that he had not yet
inoculated his young son, Frankie because he was too young,
and he ends up dying a smallpox and this effects
Benjamin Franklin the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Was it a scandal when he took in his illegitimate son?
Was that something that his enemies would use against him
or was that something that was normal that people would
view that as virtuous.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Well, children born out of wedlock were rather common back then,
it wasn't totally usual for a father to take responsibility.
But Benjamin Franklin not only takes total responsibility for William
and raising him, but ends up with Deborah and they
raise him together. It does get used against him years
(13:24):
later in some political campaigns where they talk about it,
but it never really hurt him, and he took great
pride in having raised William.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
A lot of families today could relate to grandparents taking
in children, unusual family relationships, people being brought into the family,
made part of the family who aren't even blood relatives.
I feel like that is something in Franklin adopting that
and enthusiastically embracing it. It's something that people today could
connect with.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, I think that Franklin always had a resistance to
the notion of aristocracy. And you know, in England and
in to some extent in America, you had children born
illegitimately or out of wedlock or not part of the arishex.
Franklin thought that was ridiculous. It becomes complicated because William
(14:14):
has a son born out of wedlock of his own
who doesn't actually take in right away. He puts him
in foster care. But eventually Temple Franklin gets brought into
the family by Benjamin Franklin, and so there's Benjamin Franklin
helping to raise his grandson, not quite letting everybody know
(14:35):
the real relationship. But eventually Temple Franklin becomes very close
to Benjamin Franklin, and so he brings the whole family together.
And it's not a big distinction made.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
As Franklin star Rose, he traveled first to the colonies
and then also abroad to England eventually France too. It's
like a lot of ambitious people in big careers. Was
hard on his family, but it wasn't clear that it
made a big difference to Franklin.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Franklin's love of travel was not very good for his
marriage to Deborah, because as far as we know, Deborah
never spent a night away from Philadelphia. And one can
blame Benjamin Franklin for always being away from going up
and down the coast of America doing the postal system
and then going to England and staying there. But also
(15:26):
Deborah Franklin was her choice. He wanted her to come
to England, but she never ever wanted to travel, especially
across the ocean, and she was perfectly content, although by
the end of her life a little bit sad staying
at home without Benjamin Franklin there. When he arrives in London,
(15:46):
he does something interesting, which is he almost recreates his
life back in Philadelphia. He finds a landlady, missus Stevenson,
who treats him almost as if an unromantic husband arrangement
of convenience where she looks after him and she has
a daughter about the same age as Sally, and he
(16:10):
becomes a father figure to Polly Stevenson flirts with her
as well. I mean, it's all a little bit odd,
but there he is, having a comfortable domestic life in
London that's not all that different from the one he
had in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And was there something about the fact that those weren't
deep attachments, that they weren't really his family that enabled
him to have an anchor but also be so much
out in the world.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
There were no real ties that bound him. I mean,
he's quite happy to spend many years going to England
and then going back and forth, as opposed to somebody
who feels tied down. But it was part of his
own personality, a natural aversion to anything that would restrain
his liberty.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
It was that aversion to tyranny that helped him to
break free from his intentured service to his brother as
a young man. But it was hard to square the
completely untethered, somewhat selfish version of Franklin with the moral
characters and poor Richard in Silence do Good? Was there
real Ben Franklin so unsentimental and when he broke his
(17:16):
apprenticeship was he severed from his family? Did he remain
close to his family even after he was in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
When Franklin runs away from his apprenticeship to his brother,
he does it secretly at night, and for a long
time the family has no idea where he went. I mean,
he goes to Philadelphia and gets himself a job there,
and at one point, after he becomes successful, he goes
back to Boston. He's got some silver coins in his
(17:45):
pocket and he shows off, goes in to see his brother,
and his brother, of course, is very annoyed by it.
Franklin realized he had shown pride there and that he
had alienated it brother. And throughout his life Franklin kept
a ledger of the mistakes he had made. He called
(18:06):
him Erota on how he tried to rectify it, and
mistake number one in his ledger book was running away
from his indentured service to his brother and alienating himself
from his brother. And then the way he rectified it
is when his brother died, he took his brother's son underwing,
(18:27):
and Benjamin Franklin helped set him up in business, helped
educate him, and it was his way of doing that
balance of trying to reconcile himself to his family. He
was very close to his youngest sister, Jane, and their
letters are truly delightful. That's how we know about Franklin's
(18:50):
battle against pride and desire to at least have the
pretense of humility. And I think that relationship was probably
the most enduring of his life.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
When we come back, Franklin's autobiographical writings reveal the super
awkward way he chose his wife, and how his belief
in meritocracy didn't necessarily extend to a rejection of nepotism.
(19:30):
We know about Franklin because he wrote so much and
so well. It's how we get a sense of who
he was and the kind of personality he made for
the world to see the mix of poor Richard and
silence do good and of course the Franklin we see
in his autobiography, and it's through his writings that Walter
met him too.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Back then they want digitized, I'd go to Yale Library.
I think it had had forty or fifty feet of shelves.
And he has such an approachable style of writing that
it made it to you could write a history of
him that was storytelling because we have all of his letters,
his notes as journal, the anecdotes he wrote as a fifteen, sixteen,
(20:10):
seventeen year old, and I became entranced with Benjamin Franklin,
the inventor, the scientist, the state crafter, the writer, but
also the storyteller.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Much like Walter's stroll through Franklin's handwritten letters and notebooks,
ben Franklin's autobiography gives us a glimpse into how Franklin
worked to mold his character, how he was on this
continuous campaign of self improvement. But that warts and all
story wasn't just for future Americans hoping to follow in
Franklin's footsteps. It was also written for one young man
in particular.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
William loved a book called The Habits of the well
Born and Practices, And so he become somebody who hangs
around with the dukes and the urals and the aristocracy,
and is very good at putting on airs and pretenses,
which his father doesn't like. That's one of the reasons
his father writes the autobiography. It starts with the words,
dear son, and it says, hey, remember who we are,
(21:07):
a middle class people. We don't have the pretensions of
the aristocracy. But one of the cool things about Franklin
is sees a little bit upfront about his moral failings,
makes fun of him, sometimes makes us realize, well, he's human,
all too human, and in some ways I think that
makes him more inspiring and more of a role model.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Sometimes Franklin told on himself a little more subtly, like
what he writes about his system for making decisions, something
that would be very familiar to fans of Stephen Covey
and fans of workplace efficiency in general.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Whenever he had a decision to make, he did a calculus.
He took a piece of paper and on one side
of the paper he wrote all the reasons for something,
the pros, and then on the other side he wrote
all the things against all the cons and he designed
weights to each of the factors, and he'd say, does
(22:01):
the pros outweigh the cons or not? And it was
his bookkeeping mentality, his sort of very scientific and experimental
way of doing things. And he even does it when
he's trying to decide whether to take Deborah as his
common law wife. Now I love the notion of doing
(22:21):
a calculus to figure out how to make tough decisions,
but one criticism of Franklin is to do it when
trying to decide whether to get married or not. There
was a little something unromantic about his calculus.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
If you decide pro and get married, you should probably
not let your spouse see the pro con list after.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
That, definitely, And I think he has poor Richard say
keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shot
after a marriage. In other words, once you've made your decision,
tolerate the flaws of the other person.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
So often Franklin's writing is cheeky. He fills his autobiography
with wit and happily winks at the reader as he
relais his tales. But while the style is entirely his own,
the structure of his biography is lifted from another work,
a book that influenced him decades earlier, back when he
was still an apprentice in his brother's print shop.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
He really identified with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress because it's about
a person making his way in the world, trying to
be moral, trying to be practical, and it was a journey.
And if you read Franklin's autobiography, it's really the first
self made person memoir we have. But it's written in
(23:38):
the style of a real pilgrim's progress, a very practical
Ben Franklin making his progress in the world.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
He made his life into a pilgrim's progress.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
When Fredlin was a young tradesman in Philadelphia, Franklin embarked
on what he called grandly his moral perfection project. Now
you have to know there's a bit of a sense
of irony when he's writing about this in his autobiography.
He's looking back at it somewhat amused because it's this
very earnest sort of thing. But he made a list
(24:11):
of virtues and values that you were supposed to have
if you were going to be successful, and they're very
pragmatic values. There's temperance, there's silence, there's order, there's resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness,
and tranquility. And after he made the list, his friend said, Franklin,
(24:36):
you're really proud of that list, but you are to
add one thing. And he said, what's that? And the
friend says, humility. You might want to try that one
for a change. If you look at the list of
virtues and values, they're not honor and duty and classical virtues. Instead,
(24:56):
they're very Ben Franklin like, they're things like frug reality, industry,
moderation that just make you a good citizen.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Silence is one that feels like it's sometimes in short supply.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, I love the fact that silence is on the list.
He says, speak not but what may benefit others, avoid
trifling conversations. And nowadays we're always in the cable TV
and social media world trying to have our hot takes.
(25:29):
But at various important parts of his life, including when
he's being grilled by a committee of Parliament during the
lead up to the American Revolution, Franklin just stands there silently.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Even in his earlier writings The Silence Do Good Essays,
he would point out the hypocrisy of the strict morality
of the times, and in himself.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Franklin was very good at writing in the voice of women.
Silence Do Good the very first thing he writes as
a teenager. It's in a woman's voice, And when he
gets to Philadelphia, he writes the story of Polly Baker,
a woman who was on trial for having five illegitimate children.
(26:13):
Polly Baker, she argues she was doing good for the world,
bringing five children in and she had relied on the
promises made to her by men, and men had broken
those promises. And she says that at least I'm taking responsibility. Remember,
Franklin had an illegitimate child and he took responsibility for it.
(26:34):
So he's poking fun at men who have illegitimate children
and then look down on the women. And at the
end of the piece is funny. She's in front of
the magistrates, even hints that one of the magistrates may
have been amongst those who misled her, and at the
end she's acquitted. The interesting thing is that throughout his
life Franklin had pretty much the same style that he
(26:57):
developed in the Silence Do Good Essays. He wrote hoaxes
and parodies, He wrote him in conversational style, and even
on his deathbed he's writing a parody of a speech
that you can almost hear Silence do Good, giving.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
The sort of virtues of writing with simplicity and humor
those started in his teenage years and not just carried through.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
One of the Silence Do Good Essays is an attack
on Harvard, the elite college where he was supposed to go,
but then his father decided not to send him there
and so he has silence do good in a dream
thinking about sending kids to Harvard and how only rich
kids got to go, and they consulted their purses Franklin
(27:42):
wrights as opposed to their brains. And he said, Harvard
only knows how to turn out dunches and blockheads who
can enter a room genteely, something they could have learned
better in dancing school. And so it was him being
self aware. And this is just a teenage boy, but
throughout his life he's always poking fun at credentialism and
(28:05):
the pretensions of the elite.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
It feels like something that's in a way so modern.
Now you have people, particularly running for public office, who
go to Harvard or Yale and then still poke fun
at it, still disclaim the elite status that comes from
attending those institutions.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
America's always had mixed feelings about elite credentials. People like
to brag they go to Harvard or Yale, you see
it in a JD Vance, but also they want to
poke at the pretensions of the elite. And it's the
same as it was in.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Franklin jer It's funny that there is a presidential candidate
running today. Trump who does brag about attending the university
that Benjamin Franklin began.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, I'm not sure how Benjamin Franklin would feel that
the first US president to come out of the university
that he created was Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Franklin didn't think it was very American to have anything
like an aristocracy. He was self made and thought it
was important for people to make their own ways. But
it was easier in theory than in practice. Even someone
who so thoroughly believes in sort of meritocracy and pulling
yourself up, he is always trying to help his grandson
get a position somewhere. He can't quite get this grandson
(29:22):
can't quite get a foothold.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yeah, you know, they can't really help himself. He's got
this charming grandson, very good looking, but who isn't exactly
the strongest character, and so he's always trying to get
him appointment to be the secretary to the delegation in
France and other political appointment. So there's a little bit
(29:45):
of nepotism there. It doesn't quite work. Temple doesn't amount
to do much. I feel like it almost comes back
to silence, do good. He hates nepotism and elitism up
any stripe. He believes in this rugged meritocracy. It's how
he lived his life and made all u success, and
yet he can't help but want better for his grandson. Franklin,
(30:05):
like the rest of us, but more evidently, is always
wrestling with the virtues and the values, looking after his
own self interests but also what's good for the community.
He was the most successful self made person of his time,
and that's what his autobiography is about. But he also
felt that the pursuit of money for its own sake,
(30:28):
to have riches, to be an aristocrat, was unappealing. I
think the word he would use, and so even though
he becomes successful, he doesn't build grand mansions, he doesn't
patent his invention. He tries to do well, but not
be excessive, not put on airs, not be indulgent, and
(30:51):
he felt too that was part of America's character.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
On the next episode of On Franklin, we'll get into
Ben Franklin, the business savant and champion of the new
middle class, and find out how his cunning helped him
build the first American media empire.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
That made Franklin charming at times, but also he's able
to rub people the wrong way and make enemies of
the people he went into business with.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer, Lizzie Jacobs who is our editor. Social media
by Dara Potts. The show was engineered at CDM Sound
Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell
(31:41):
and Ali Perry. For Kalledyscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshetigador,
with an assist from Ozwalishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osborne. Special
thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, Will Pearson, Color Burnt,
Nikki Etour, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan on Tuski and Ali Gavin
And If you like podcasts about inventions what they mean
(32:03):
for humanity, check out my other show shell Game, about
how it created an AI clone and said it loose
on the world. It's a shell Game dot co and
for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope
dot NYC. Thanks so much for listening,
One of Franklin's greatest inventions is the character A Bit Franklin.
He creates it, he polishes it. He does it through
Poor Richard and through his autobiography. His arrival in Philadelphia
is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature.
(00:33):
He gets off the boat but draggled, and uses coins
to tip the boatmen. He buys three puffy rolls and
gives one away to somebody. He says, you're always more
generous when you're very poor than when you're very rich,
because you don't want people to think you're poor. He
writes that scene for posterity and also for his son,
(00:56):
who has become very pretentious and was a royal governor
back then. He's saying, remember, your humble roots were tradesmen,
were not part of an aristocracy.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So he had figured out a little bit of mythmaking
even at the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
But as Shakespeare teaches us, we sometimes become the mask
we wear, and so Ben Franklin, by showing how industrious
he could be by having the pretense of humility, even
if he couldn't have the reality, was able to make
himself into this type of character that he portrays both
(01:32):
in Poor Richard's Almanac and in the autobiography.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Ben Franklin was perhaps the quintessential American character. He created
the type through his writing style, through the aphorisms of
Poor Richard's Almanac, through his picturesque autobiography, and in many
ways itself humble, industrious, and hopeful. The new American spirit
felt familiar and appealing to colonists and eventually to a
(02:08):
nation eager to forge its own identity. And while the
character Franklin created was in many ways close to Franklin
the person, in others it was painfully far away. In
this second episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals
how Franklin wrote the American identity into being and just
how far Franklin's own life strayed from this national ideal.
(02:43):
You describe beautifully how he came to represent this certain
part of the American character. And it includes practicality, it
includes compromise. Were there any sort of seminal incidents in
his childhood that you feel like shaped this orientation towards
what became a kind of American character, a central American character.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
When Franklin is growing up in Boston, he had been
indentured to his brother, who is a publisher, newspaper editor,
and printer. Franklin knew he had to be self educated.
He knew that his father decided not to send him
to Harvard, and so every night he would read and
(03:25):
study at his brother's print shop and publishing house. He
embarked on a self improvement course. He was one of
America's great self taught people. And what he did was
he took down volumes of The Spectator, a daily that
was being published in London, with wonderful essays by Joseph
(03:45):
Addison and Richard Steele. And what Franklin would do is
he would turn the essays into poetry. And he thought
it would help him increase his vocabulary because he would
have to think of different words that would either rhyme
or have the right meter. And he would read the essays,
take notes, jumble up his notes, and then a few
days later, see if he could recreate the essay, and
(04:08):
then he would go back and correct. He said, every
now and then I could write it even better, I
could improve it, which made me think I would become
a tolerable writer. Well, not only does he become a
tolerable writer, he becomes the best and most popular writer
in America. He also read Cotton Mather's Essays to Do
(04:28):
Good because Boston then was pretty much ruled by a
Puritan theocracy. Puritan preachers like Cotton Mather were always talking
about God's grace, that we got salvation through God's grace alone,
whereas Benjamin Franklin is much more simple. He'd believed that, well,
(04:49):
maybe you could earn your way into the good grace
of the Lord by doing good works and helping your
fellow citizens.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So Franklin's early years are spent teaching himself to write
moral education, less religious than the puritanical world he lived in,
but focused on practicality and contributing to the world around him.
But even if he was indentured to his brother, he
was still indentured, and naturally he chafed at that, and
the fundamental unfairness of it, along with his core character,
(05:17):
led him to push back. He has this sort of
maybe inborn but natural resistance to authority, and he abandons
the apprenticeship, which was, as I understand it, quite a
big deal at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
Right He becomes apprentice to his older brother, and his
older brother was very strict in dealing with him and
didn't let him write for the paper, which is why
Franklin writes under the pseudonym and fakes his handwriting, and
it's called Silence Do Good. It's a triumph of the
imagination because here you have a fifteen or sixteen year
(05:54):
old kid who had never left Boston, but he's writing
in the voice of a widowed, elderly woman who lives
in the countryside. And this is part of Franklin's magic,
which is he has that sense of spunky imagination and
a colloquial sense to him. Other people at the time,
like Jonathan Edwards are writing in this grand rhetoric about
(06:17):
centers in the hands of an angry god. But Benjamin
Franklin as a kid almost invents this vernacular auschus cracker
barrel style that you see in Mark Twain and Will
Rogers and others that pokes fun at the pretensions of
the elite. He became the best writer of his time
(06:38):
because he had such a colloquial voice.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
He goes on to use anonymous writing or pseudonymous writing
throughout his career, even up to major diplomatic incidents later
in life. Can you explain a little bit about why
he uses pseudonyms. Is it a wink wink kind of
pseudonym or is it pure Inneymi. The great thing about
the colonial period is you could write under a pseudonym
(07:05):
and you had some anonymity. But eventually people can find out.
And indeed his brother finds out that young Benjamin is
a run doing Silence do Good. So it's good.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
It gave people a lot of freedom to speak, but
it still put a little bit of a leash on
how far they were willing to go.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
But not too much of a leish under the pseudonym's
silence do Good. But he was still in Boston writing
for his brother's paper.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
He tests the limits, and Silence do Good says, I
have a natural aversion to tyranny, and an he trampling
over my rights makes my blood boil exceedingly. That's how
you know I'm an American. And this is ingrained in Franklin,
especially since he was indentured to his brother. And eventually
he runs away and breaks the indenture agreement he had
(07:57):
made and secretly goes into Filhiladelphia.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
And this is the moment in his autobiography, that famous
scene of Franklin walking off the boat with just a
few coins in his pocket, and this picture of how
the world sees him, a young, plucky naif, sharing his
roles and confident in the opportunities ahead. You write that
he became the country's first unabashed public relations expert, and
(08:24):
the first subject of his public relations was himself.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
Yes, even as a young printer opening a shop in Philadelphia,
he makes a point of carting the paper he needs
through the streets back and forth to show that he's
diligent in working, rather than having Sarven's other people do it.
And he cares a lot about not only the reality
(08:51):
of being diligent, but just showing people how diligent he is.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
Let's talk about Poor Richard.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
When he had a print shop, with his his own
colloaquial style and wit, he's able to do a really
fun almanac. He calls it Poor Richard's Almanac. That's his pseudonym.
But in this case everybody knew it was Ben Franklin
who was doing it. In the almanac, he has all
sorts of maxims wisdom from the ages. A penny saved
(09:19):
is a penny earned early to bed, early to rise,
And we sometimes mistake the real Benjamin Franklin for those maxims.
I mean, he was never early to bed, an early
to rise type person. But through that voice he's able
to create an unpretentious ethic throughout his whole life. He
(09:42):
wants to poke fun at the pretensions of the elite,
and that's what he starts doing through Poor Richard common
folk wisdom.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
Did people at the time start to see him this
way as embodied by poor Richard?
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, I think everybody knew he was writing these almanacs,
but it was all part of the fun. People knew
Benjamin Franklin. He was not exactly a very priggish person.
One of the secrets to his humor and to his
personality was self deprecation. It was not exactly humility, but
(10:17):
it was the good pretense of humility. He would poke
fun at himself, and especially poor Richard could do it.
At one point one year instead of Poor Richard writing
the forward to the almanac, is poor Richard's wife Bridget. Now,
of course this has all been Franklin doing it, but
poor Richard's wife talks about the experiments that poor Richard's
(10:40):
doing and how it'd be better off if he learned
how to earn a living. So that notion of a
self deprecation as a way to be influential and charming
and perhaps settle some disputes is something that Franklin perfected.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But Franklin himself was far from perfect. When he returned
after the break, we take a look at a family
life that was marked by both tragedy and neglect, and
also a wonderfully broad sense of what family in this
new country could meet. We haven't talked about his personal
(11:31):
life yet.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yeah, Franklin has a very complicated family life. At one point,
he has an illegitimate son named William, and he takes
responsibility for the son, brings the son in, and he
ends up forming a common law marriage with Deborah, person
who had seen him straggling off the boat when he
(11:53):
first was a runaway from Boston. But her husband had
disappeared and so she couldn't get married married again because
of the bigamy laws. But she and Franklin create a
common law marriage and it becomes a very practical thing.
She's the bookkeeper, she's the person helping run the shop,
and it's somewhat typical of Franklin. He's not a deeply
(12:16):
romantic person. They have a beautiful daughter named Sally that
becomes very close to Franklin, and they have a child
named Frankie. And it was pretty tragic because, just as
nowadays we fight over vaccinations, that was a big fight
back then, and Franklin's brother had fought against inoculations. And
(12:39):
even though Benjamin Franklin believed that he had not yet
inoculated his young son, Frankie because he was too young,
and he ends up dying a smallpox and this effects
Benjamin Franklin the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Was it a scandal when he took in his illegitimate son?
Was that something that his enemies would use against him
or was that something that was normal that people would
view that as virtuous.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Well, children born out of wedlock were rather common back then,
it wasn't totally usual for a father to take responsibility.
But Benjamin Franklin not only takes total responsibility for William
and raising him, but ends up with Deborah and they
raise him together. It does get used against him years
(13:24):
later in some political campaigns where they talk about it,
but it never really hurt him, and he took great
pride in having raised William.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
A lot of families today could relate to grandparents taking
in children, unusual family relationships, people being brought into the family,
made part of the family who aren't even blood relatives.
I feel like that is something in Franklin adopting that
and enthusiastically embracing it. It's something that people today could
connect with.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, I think that Franklin always had a resistance to
the notion of aristocracy. And you know, in England and
in to some extent in America, you had children born
illegitimately or out of wedlock or not part of the arishex.
Franklin thought that was ridiculous. It becomes complicated because William
(14:14):
has a son born out of wedlock of his own
who doesn't actually take in right away. He puts him
in foster care. But eventually Temple Franklin gets brought into
the family by Benjamin Franklin, and so there's Benjamin Franklin
helping to raise his grandson, not quite letting everybody know
(14:35):
the real relationship. But eventually Temple Franklin becomes very close
to Benjamin Franklin, and so he brings the whole family together.
And it's not a big distinction made.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
As Franklin star Rose, he traveled first to the colonies
and then also abroad to England eventually France too. It's
like a lot of ambitious people in big careers. Was
hard on his family, but it wasn't clear that it
made a big difference to Franklin.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Franklin's love of travel was not very good for his
marriage to Deborah, because as far as we know, Deborah
never spent a night away from Philadelphia. And one can
blame Benjamin Franklin for always being away from going up
and down the coast of America doing the postal system
and then going to England and staying there. But also
(15:26):
Deborah Franklin was her choice. He wanted her to come
to England, but she never ever wanted to travel, especially
across the ocean, and she was perfectly content, although by
the end of her life a little bit sad staying
at home without Benjamin Franklin there. When he arrives in London,
(15:46):
he does something interesting, which is he almost recreates his
life back in Philadelphia. He finds a landlady, missus Stevenson,
who treats him almost as if an unromantic husband arrangement
of convenience where she looks after him and she has
a daughter about the same age as Sally, and he
(16:10):
becomes a father figure to Polly Stevenson flirts with her
as well. I mean, it's all a little bit odd,
but there he is, having a comfortable domestic life in
London that's not all that different from the one he
had in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
And was there something about the fact that those weren't
deep attachments, that they weren't really his family that enabled
him to have an anchor but also be so much
out in the world.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
There were no real ties that bound him. I mean,
he's quite happy to spend many years going to England
and then going back and forth, as opposed to somebody
who feels tied down. But it was part of his
own personality, a natural aversion to anything that would restrain
his liberty.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
It was that aversion to tyranny that helped him to
break free from his intentured service to his brother as
a young man. But it was hard to square the
completely untethered, somewhat selfish version of Franklin with the moral
characters and poor Richard in Silence do Good? Was there
real Ben Franklin so unsentimental and when he broke his
(17:16):
apprenticeship was he severed from his family? Did he remain
close to his family even after he was in Philadelphia.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
When Franklin runs away from his apprenticeship to his brother,
he does it secretly at night, and for a long
time the family has no idea where he went. I mean,
he goes to Philadelphia and gets himself a job there,
and at one point, after he becomes successful, he goes
back to Boston. He's got some silver coins in his
(17:45):
pocket and he shows off, goes in to see his brother,
and his brother, of course, is very annoyed by it.
Franklin realized he had shown pride there and that he
had alienated it brother. And throughout his life Franklin kept
a ledger of the mistakes he had made. He called
(18:06):
him Erota on how he tried to rectify it, and
mistake number one in his ledger book was running away
from his indentured service to his brother and alienating himself
from his brother. And then the way he rectified it
is when his brother died, he took his brother's son underwing,
(18:27):
and Benjamin Franklin helped set him up in business, helped
educate him, and it was his way of doing that
balance of trying to reconcile himself to his family. He
was very close to his youngest sister, Jane, and their
letters are truly delightful. That's how we know about Franklin's
(18:50):
battle against pride and desire to at least have the
pretense of humility. And I think that relationship was probably
the most enduring of his life.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
When we come back, Franklin's autobiographical writings reveal the super
awkward way he chose his wife, and how his belief
in meritocracy didn't necessarily extend to a rejection of nepotism.
(19:30):
We know about Franklin because he wrote so much and
so well. It's how we get a sense of who
he was and the kind of personality he made for
the world to see the mix of poor Richard and
silence do good and of course the Franklin we see
in his autobiography, and it's through his writings that Walter
met him too.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
Back then they want digitized, I'd go to Yale Library.
I think it had had forty or fifty feet of shelves.
And he has such an approachable style of writing that
it made it to you could write a history of
him that was storytelling because we have all of his letters,
his notes as journal, the anecdotes he wrote as a fifteen, sixteen,
(20:10):
seventeen year old, and I became entranced with Benjamin Franklin,
the inventor, the scientist, the state crafter, the writer, but
also the storyteller.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
Much like Walter's stroll through Franklin's handwritten letters and notebooks,
ben Franklin's autobiography gives us a glimpse into how Franklin
worked to mold his character, how he was on this
continuous campaign of self improvement. But that warts and all
story wasn't just for future Americans hoping to follow in
Franklin's footsteps. It was also written for one young man
in particular.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
William loved a book called The Habits of the well
Born and Practices, And so he become somebody who hangs
around with the dukes and the urals and the aristocracy,
and is very good at putting on airs and pretenses,
which his father doesn't like. That's one of the reasons
his father writes the autobiography. It starts with the words,
dear son, and it says, hey, remember who we are,
(21:07):
a middle class people. We don't have the pretensions of
the aristocracy. But one of the cool things about Franklin
is sees a little bit upfront about his moral failings,
makes fun of him, sometimes makes us realize, well, he's human,
all too human, and in some ways I think that
makes him more inspiring and more of a role model.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Sometimes Franklin told on himself a little more subtly, like
what he writes about his system for making decisions, something
that would be very familiar to fans of Stephen Covey
and fans of workplace efficiency in general.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Whenever he had a decision to make, he did a calculus.
He took a piece of paper and on one side
of the paper he wrote all the reasons for something,
the pros, and then on the other side he wrote
all the things against all the cons and he designed
weights to each of the factors, and he'd say, does
(22:01):
the pros outweigh the cons or not? And it was
his bookkeeping mentality, his sort of very scientific and experimental
way of doing things. And he even does it when
he's trying to decide whether to take Deborah as his
common law wife. Now I love the notion of doing
(22:21):
a calculus to figure out how to make tough decisions,
but one criticism of Franklin is to do it when
trying to decide whether to get married or not. There
was a little something unromantic about his calculus.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
If you decide pro and get married, you should probably
not let your spouse see the pro con list after.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
That, definitely, And I think he has poor Richard say
keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shot
after a marriage. In other words, once you've made your decision,
tolerate the flaws of the other person.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
So often Franklin's writing is cheeky. He fills his autobiography
with wit and happily winks at the reader as he
relais his tales. But while the style is entirely his own,
the structure of his biography is lifted from another work,
a book that influenced him decades earlier, back when he
was still an apprentice in his brother's print shop.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
He really identified with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress because it's about
a person making his way in the world, trying to
be moral, trying to be practical, and it was a journey.
And if you read Franklin's autobiography, it's really the first
self made person memoir we have. But it's written in
(23:38):
the style of a real pilgrim's progress, a very practical
Ben Franklin making his progress in the world.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
He made his life into a pilgrim's progress.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
When Fredlin was a young tradesman in Philadelphia, Franklin embarked
on what he called grandly his moral perfection project. Now
you have to know there's a bit of a sense
of irony when he's writing about this in his autobiography.
He's looking back at it somewhat amused because it's this
very earnest sort of thing. But he made a list
(24:11):
of virtues and values that you were supposed to have
if you were going to be successful, and they're very
pragmatic values. There's temperance, there's silence, there's order, there's resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness,
and tranquility. And after he made the list, his friend said, Franklin,
(24:36):
you're really proud of that list, but you are to
add one thing. And he said, what's that? And the
friend says, humility. You might want to try that one
for a change. If you look at the list of
virtues and values, they're not honor and duty and classical virtues. Instead,
(24:56):
they're very Ben Franklin like, they're things like frug reality, industry,
moderation that just make you a good citizen.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Silence is one that feels like it's sometimes in short supply.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Yeah, I love the fact that silence is on the list.
He says, speak not but what may benefit others, avoid
trifling conversations. And nowadays we're always in the cable TV
and social media world trying to have our hot takes.
(25:29):
But at various important parts of his life, including when
he's being grilled by a committee of Parliament during the
lead up to the American Revolution, Franklin just stands there silently.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Even in his earlier writings The Silence Do Good Essays,
he would point out the hypocrisy of the strict morality
of the times, and in himself.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Franklin was very good at writing in the voice of women.
Silence Do Good the very first thing he writes as
a teenager. It's in a woman's voice, And when he
gets to Philadelphia, he writes the story of Polly Baker,
a woman who was on trial for having five illegitimate children.
(26:13):
Polly Baker, she argues she was doing good for the world,
bringing five children in and she had relied on the
promises made to her by men, and men had broken
those promises. And she says that at least I'm taking responsibility. Remember,
Franklin had an illegitimate child and he took responsibility for it.
(26:34):
So he's poking fun at men who have illegitimate children
and then look down on the women. And at the
end of the piece is funny. She's in front of
the magistrates, even hints that one of the magistrates may
have been amongst those who misled her, and at the
end she's acquitted. The interesting thing is that throughout his
life Franklin had pretty much the same style that he
(26:57):
developed in the Silence Do Good Essays. He wrote hoaxes
and parodies, He wrote him in conversational style, and even
on his deathbed he's writing a parody of a speech
that you can almost hear Silence do Good, giving.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
The sort of virtues of writing with simplicity and humor
those started in his teenage years and not just carried through.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
One of the Silence Do Good Essays is an attack
on Harvard, the elite college where he was supposed to go,
but then his father decided not to send him there
and so he has silence do good in a dream
thinking about sending kids to Harvard and how only rich
kids got to go, and they consulted their purses Franklin
(27:42):
wrights as opposed to their brains. And he said, Harvard
only knows how to turn out dunches and blockheads who
can enter a room genteely, something they could have learned
better in dancing school. And so it was him being
self aware. And this is just a teenage boy, but
throughout his life he's always poking fun at credentialism and
(28:05):
the pretensions of the elite.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
It feels like something that's in a way so modern.
Now you have people, particularly running for public office, who
go to Harvard or Yale and then still poke fun
at it, still disclaim the elite status that comes from
attending those institutions.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
America's always had mixed feelings about elite credentials. People like
to brag they go to Harvard or Yale, you see
it in a JD Vance, but also they want to
poke at the pretensions of the elite. And it's the
same as it was in.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
Franklin jer It's funny that there is a presidential candidate
running today. Trump who does brag about attending the university
that Benjamin Franklin began.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, I'm not sure how Benjamin Franklin would feel that
the first US president to come out of the university
that he created was Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Franklin didn't think it was very American to have anything
like an aristocracy. He was self made and thought it
was important for people to make their own ways. But
it was easier in theory than in practice. Even someone
who so thoroughly believes in sort of meritocracy and pulling
yourself up, he is always trying to help his grandson
get a position somewhere. He can't quite get this grandson
(29:22):
can't quite get a foothold.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Yeah, you know, they can't really help himself. He's got
this charming grandson, very good looking, but who isn't exactly
the strongest character, and so he's always trying to get
him appointment to be the secretary to the delegation in
France and other political appointment. So there's a little bit
(29:45):
of nepotism there. It doesn't quite work. Temple doesn't amount
to do much. I feel like it almost comes back
to silence, do good. He hates nepotism and elitism up
any stripe. He believes in this rugged meritocracy. It's how
he lived his life and made all u success, and
yet he can't help but want better for his grandson. Franklin,
(30:05):
like the rest of us, but more evidently, is always
wrestling with the virtues and the values, looking after his
own self interests but also what's good for the community.
He was the most successful self made person of his time,
and that's what his autobiography is about. But he also
felt that the pursuit of money for its own sake,
(30:28):
to have riches, to be an aristocrat, was unappealing. I
think the word he would use, and so even though
he becomes successful, he doesn't build grand mansions, he doesn't
patent his invention. He tries to do well, but not
be excessive, not put on airs, not be indulgent, and
(30:51):
he felt too that was part of America's character.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
On the next episode of On Franklin, we'll get into
Ben Franklin, the business savant and champion of the new
middle class, and find out how his cunning helped him
build the first American media empire.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
That made Franklin charming at times, but also he's able
to rub people the wrong way and make enemies of
the people he went into business with.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer, Lizzie Jacobs who is our editor. Social media
by Dara Potts. The show was engineered at CDM Sound
Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell
(31:41):
and Ali Perry. For Kalledyscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshetigador,
with an assist from Ozwalishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osborne. Special
thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, Will Pearson, Color Burnt,
Nikki Etour, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan on Tuski and Ali Gavin
And If you like podcasts about inventions what they mean
(32:03):
for humanity, check out my other show shell Game, about
how it created an AI clone and said it loose
on the world. It's a shell Game dot co and
for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope
dot NYC. Thanks so much for listening,
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