September 12, 2024 • 29 mins
Few people remember that Benjamin Franklin was America’s wealthiest self-made man. After being denied a formal education and then indentured to his own brother, he launched America's first media empire. But while Franklin could be a ruthless businessman, he was out for more than himself—he knew his success was predicated on a strong middle class, a new, American idea. So he started civic ventures like fire departments, street sweepers, and public libraries. But it wasn't until he became a postmaster that he realized why the colonies needed to band together as a nation.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
I think about Ben Franklin all the time. I remember
being with Elon Musk right when he bought Twitter, and
he was trying to decide do you print everything is
a total free speech? Does it become raucous? Or is
there any limits to what you put on it? And
I went back to when Ben Franklin was in his
early twenties and a printer in Philadelphia and he had
(00:40):
a newspaper. He writes apology for printers, which is still
one of the best defenses of free speech. She says
all voices should be allowed, because if you let the
printer decide what should be enter out, you'd only hear
the opinion of printers. And Franklin said, if truth and
false did he have fair play, then truth will win out.
(01:03):
But Franklin realizes after a while that's not always the case. Sometimes,
as Franklin says in Poor Richard, a lie can make
it all the way around the world while the truth
is still putting on its shoes. And he does a
test for himself. He had to figure out when do
you refuse to print something you know as salacious or
(01:24):
malicious or untrue. And at one point he was going
to get paid to publish something scurreless, and it was
so salacious, and he said, well, is it really worth
the money? And to try to determine whether I'd publish
it or not, I purchased this a small piece of bread.
I went home and lay on the floor, slept on
(01:46):
the floor, ate only bread and water. And I realized
that I could live that way if I had to,
and it was better to be proud of what I did.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
As a printer, a publisher, and a postmaster. Benjamin Franklin
launched America's first great media empire. But that's not exactly
how we picture him. For most of us, he's the
funny writer or the old guy with a kite, not
America's wealthiest self made businessman. But Franklin's ambitious. He devoured
any book he could get his hands on, formed clubs
(02:26):
to learn from his peers, jousted with his competitors, and
constantly innovated seeking new efficiencies. And while it might be
enough to appreciate Franklin for the business savant that he was,
what he learned during those years, from the ethical questions
he wrestled with to the observations he made while traveling
for work, gave tremendous insight into the founding father he
(02:46):
would become and the democracy he wanted to build. In
this third episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals
how Franklin's identity as a printer and businessman let him
on a path not just to become a revolutionary, but
to understanding the shape America's democracy would need to take.
(03:21):
Can you walk us through how Ben Franklin created his
print operation in Philadelphia, starting from showing up in the
city with a few coins in his pocket.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
When he straggles up Market Street. But draggled, he's able
to get a job in one of the print shops
there an apprentice, and he works very hard for a
sort of ne'er do well printer named Samuel Kimo. And
in the end Franklin becomes much more of the star
of the town.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Partially because he's good at doing his own pr right.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
But Franklin's ambitious. He's a young printer who knows how
to ingratiate himself, and I think Keemar, his boss, becomes
quite resentful, but Franklin eventually breaks away to start his
own printing shop.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And you write that it takes a while for him
to get going. He's got his ups and downs. And
there's one little anecdote that I wanted to talk about,
which is not one of the biggest ones in the book,
but it felt like it encapsulated some of that, which
is he somehow connects with Governor Keith, governor of the
Pennsylvania Colony, and he's going to be sent to London
to buy printing equipment to set himself up as a printer.
(04:28):
And the governor's promised him this, and then he arrives
in London and turns out it was a completely false promise,
that there was no money to buy the equipment, and
he's very sanguine about it. And you write for Franklin
it was an insight into human foibles rather than evil.
He wished to please everybody, Franklin later said of Keith,
and having little to give, he gave expectations.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Franklin looked at a guy like Governor Keith, who had
promised him a lunge and credit. But then he said, well,
he was just trying to please me. And I think
that a bill to say, hey, we shouldn't ascribe deep
evil motives to people. We should be tolerant that becomes
ingrained in Franklin. So let's talk about his print shop.
(05:10):
He's still pretty young when he starts it, going into
competition with all these established printers. How does he distinguish
himself when he had a print shop? He realized, you
want him to be successful just printing things like the Bible,
because people bought a Bible once in their lifetime, maybe
or twice. So he realizes an almanac is a way
to go. People would have to buy it every year.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Sensing what people wanted and how to create demand was
just one of the ways Franklin distinguished himself as a businessman.
Another was his humor. Turns out, Franklin's sense of humor
wasn't just a natural part of his writing. It was
good business too, giving him a real advantage in the marketplace.
Could he have made it if he hadn't been the
writer that he was.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I think being a humorous writer was key to his
success because his new paper becomes more lively than the
rivals his almanac. He pokes fun at the other almanac makers.
He has poor Richard in the almanac predicting that we're
going to die, and he gets into these fake rivalries
and battles, public battles where they're poking fun at each other.
(06:16):
But if you're in a jousting battle with Benjamin Franklin
poking fun, he's going to win.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
You know.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
He's got the more pockish sense of humor. And so
in the end, his almanacs were valued more, his newspaper
was valued more. And he was smart about publishing. He
published novels, Pamela, the first novel published in America. Franklin
has a good sense for what the public wants. He's
a good salesperson.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
But even with something like Poor Richard, he's always figuring
out how to make another product. Like after printing year
after year of Almanacs, he figures out he can create
a best of compilation.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Right, definitely, and it's called The Weight of Wealth, The
Sayings of Poor Richard, and it was by far the
biggest selling book in the colonies for years.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
But it wasn't just the content that made Franklin wealthy.
He was savvy about other parts of the business too,
striking deals to ensure his newspapers and books got premium
placement and distribution. And even that wasn't enough for Franklin.
He realized that if he could control the distribution, he
could squash the competition, and so he laid the groundwork
(07:26):
for a monopoly.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
When Franklin was a printer in Philadelphia, he had a
competitor named Andrew Bradford. They competed against each other in
many areas, but they also cooperated, just like you might
find Apple and Microsoft competing and cooperating. They even published
a PSALM book together and split the costs. But one
(07:49):
thing that really heightened their competition was that Bradford was
the postmaster and that was a great advantage. He got
to favor his own content, and Soanklin at first pushes
against him and tries to get the Postmaster General to
order Bradford to carry Franklin's papers as well. But eventually
(08:11):
Franklin's able to rest away from Bradford the Philadelphia postmastership,
and Franklin then says, I'm going to create an open system,
and he does that, but then he gets mad at
Bradford again, and for a while he's keeping Bradford from
sending things through. But as usual, Franklin gets to the
right place and eventually we have a US postal system
(08:34):
that's a platform for everybody, and it's an open system.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
The thing I love about this story is there's also
if one of them doesn't want to carry the other's papers,
there's this sort of backdoor way to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah. What was great is when they would deny each
other the right to use the postal system, you could
just bribe the writers to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
There's always a side door if you have cash to
hold out.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Nowadays we wrestled with should internet service providers be able
to favor certain content or should all content be on
a level playing field. It goes back to Franklin and
Bradford in Philadelphia, finally, after a lot of struggle back
and forth, saying an open system is better.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Even as Franklin controlled so much of the printing industry,
he remains committed to fair play. He believed competition at
a marketplace of opinions created a healthier society, and any
streaks of ruthlessness always seemed to be tamed by his
greater sense of civic duty.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Franklin did not believe that much in monetizing intellectual property.
He never patented or copyrighted anything he did, and he
could have done it with some of his writings. He
could have said I'm going to take a copyright out
on the sayings of Poor Richard. However, he knew that
the sayings of Poor Richard were things that he had
(09:59):
taken in from previous writers in the past two or
three centuries who had said clever things, and Franklin might
polish him up a bit. And so he was not
a strong believer in the type of intellectual property that
we would call copyrights or trademarks or patents.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I feel like we should say he was really good
at making money. I mean, he did very well for himself.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
He was very successful as a printer and a publisher,
and he always looked after his interests, you know, making
sure he got the contract to do the paper currency,
and that is newspaper advocated for paper currency. On the
other hand, he doesn't take out patents on his scientific inventions.
He said, we all benefit from things that went before.
(10:46):
We should put these into the commons, whether it's a
Franklin stove or the lightning rod.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It really is fascinating, Like, on the one hand, he's
quickly on a path to being incredibly wealthy, and he's
doing all the innovative and sometimes cutthroat business things like
taking over the post office and trying to stamp out
his competition. And then he's always so civic minded. He's
always thinking about the middle class. It's almost at the
core of his identity.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Right when he gets to Philadelphia and he becomes a tradesman,
he creates what's called the Leather Apron Club or the Junto,
and it doesn't try to replicate the clubs for the
very rich, aristocratic elite of Philadelphia. It's just supposed to
be for the tradesman, the artist, and the shopkeepers what
he called we the middling people. That's why it was
(11:36):
called a leather apron club. They put on leather aprons
in the morning and open up their shop. And he
felt that the civic life of America would be driven
by a middle class.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
When we come back, we dive into the revolutionary impact
of the Leather Apron Club and the surprising ways its
legacy still lives on today. People might have a vision
(12:08):
of a printer or a newspaperman today a publisher and
who they are and where they came from. But this
was a real blue collar job. Then did you explain
that in what Franklin means when he describes himself as
a leather apron man.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin,
Common Printer. And it was because he believed that being
a leather apron, meaning somebody owned a shop opened up
in the morning, served people that market street, middle class
values was the heart of who we were going to
be as a nation, rather than trying to create the
(12:46):
class system in England and the pretensions of the elite
and the aristocracy. And so that notion of a printer
as a shopkeeper and publisher was something he always had
a pride in. Now this was something rather new in England.
You had had an aristocracy and a working class, and
(13:08):
but that wasn't a prosperous, vibrant middle class. And Franklin
knew that a strong America would come from having a
thriving class of small business owners.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So the leather Apron Club banded together in this new
model to do good in the community, partially out of
a sense of moral righteousness, but also out of practicality.
The members knew that their businesses all had a better
shout of success if the city was thriving, if the
streets were clean, and if the people had money in
their pockets to spend.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
One of the Poor Richard Almanac sayings is about doing
well by doing good, and this describes Franklin, which is
he wants to do civic good, but he also knows
you can profit by it when you start with his
heat put A little things like keeping the streets, he said,
might seem like a minor thing that some dust may
(14:03):
get in somebody's eye, But if you multiply that to
the whole community, you see why we all have to
work together. And so what is JONTO or Leather Apron
Club does is at every meeting they talk about what
is it that a fellow member of the club might
need and might help them in business? What ways can
(14:25):
we help the commerce of Philadelphia, What new ideas might
we profit from. And so he was always mixing his
civic virtue with doing well by himself, like making sure
that the other members of the Leather Apron Club used
him as a printer. So they form all sorts of
(14:46):
ideas and associations, to have a volunteer street sweeping core,
to have a volunteer fire department.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
And people now maybe have a hard time conceptualizing the
era where some of the things that he came up
with didn't already exist. For instance, you've mentioned the volunteer
firefighting or even the militias that he'd helped set up
prior to him coming up with them. What was happening
around a fire before Franklin's set up one of these associations.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, you had people who either paid for protection, or
people would pay for constable watches and stuff. But what
he realizes is, especially with fires, but even with crime,
that you can't just have certain people protect their own homes.
The whole community has to pull together to do it.
(15:36):
Fire on one home in Milk Street hurts every home
on Milk Street, and so there are things we have
to join together to do. One of the essences of
democracy is figuring out what should be done in the commons,
what should be done by government, what should be left
to the private sphere. And this notion that we gather
(16:00):
together in civic associations. It's so perplexed Tokeville. When he
writes about democracy in America, he says Americans are the
most individualistic people, and yet somehow they keep forming associations.
And this is in conflict. But for Benjamin Franklin, it
wasn't in conflict at all. As poor Richard said, he
(16:21):
who drinks alone let him catch his horse alone, which
means it's not easy to catch a runaway horse unless
you have friends helping you do it. And so that
notion of governing ourselves through civic associations and then eventually
of public private partnerships with local government and then later
on colonial and national government, that becomes a new concept
(16:48):
of how we were going to create in America. That's
elevated both self reliance as well as community and civic association.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And also the lending library was a big part of
what role did that play.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Among the things the Leather Apron Club does is it
creates the first sort of public library where they all
agreed in the club to put their books together so
other people could borrow them. And soon they have a
room that they rent and it becomes away. As Franklin
(17:22):
puts it, that the average tradesperson in America, the average shopkeeper,
could be just as well informed, is just as educated
as some of the elite or aristocracy. One of the
amusing things Franklin figured out when he is starting his
library is that he asked one of the wealthier privileged
(17:45):
people of Philadelphia, who didn't particularly like the young striving
Benjamin Franklin if he could borrow a particular book, and
he borrows it and then returns it and is very
grateful for it and talks about how influential the book is.
And after that the person he borrowed the book from
loves Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin says, what I learned is
(18:08):
sometimes when you allow a person to do you a favor,
they will like you more than if you're doing favors
for them.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I love that lesson. And you describe these things coming
together beginning in these clubs. If we creates this library,
people can teach themselves. They can educate themselves, which is
exactly what someone would do after being denied the opportunity
to go to Harvard.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
He extends that to the Academy for the Education of
Youth that becomes University of Pennsylvania. Both Franklin and Jefferson
or exemplars of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson, when he creates
a university that becomes the University of Virginia, talks about
taking the most elite thinkers and bringing them into a
(18:53):
new quote natural aristocracy. Franklin, when he creates what becomes
the University of Pennsylvania. Believes the goal is to take
all people, no matter how brilliant they are or just
industrious they are, and say everybody will benefit from learning.
That education should not just be for the well born
(19:14):
and for the elite, but it should become something that
every striving person in America had a right to go
borrow a book from a library, or to be part
of an academy for the education of youth.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
For someone who joked about struggling with humility and whose
name ended up on so many things, from the Franklin
Stove to the one hundred Dollars Bill, Franklin loved to
play with anonymity in his writing, and he did it
too in his work with the Leather Apron Club.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Whenever he proposed a civic association, he might write a
letter to the newspaper, but he said he was always
very careful to make it that sounded like it was
his suggestion. In fact, sometimes he would write letters to
his newspaper under a pseudonym and say it's been posed
that maybe we should have a volunteer fire department. He said,
it's amazing how much you can get done if you
(20:07):
aren't interested in taking the credit for it.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
He also didn't seem to see any contradiction between being
this sort of pr man for himself, building up his
image so that he could use his image, and also
being the person who slid these ideas in underneath the
door so that other people would think they were theirs.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
One of his clever insights is if you don't take
credit for something, if you give somebody else the credit
for an idea, it'll later become known that you were
really the person who came up with it. It'll give you
a lot more benefit to your reputation.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
While the Leather Apron Club was all about banding together
with other shopkeepers to help one another in the city
of Philadelphia, for Franklin was also about helping himself in
the bottom line, the whole doing well by doing good
maxim But Franklin's affects in his way of encouraging conversation
sometimes made people question his intentions. You sort of write
(21:11):
that for a man of his fame, he didn't have
as many disputes as you might expect. He was able
to resolve a lot of them, but he does start
having these conflicts with other printers and eventually with the
Penn family, And how does he sort of navigate when
he feels like someone is a raid against him.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
In his Leather Apron Club, they had a way of
discussing things that he felt would stop it from being
too disputatious, Like if you disagreed with somebody, instead of
contradicting them, you'd ask questions. That made Franklin charming at times,
But after a while this indirectness, slyly asking questions in
(21:54):
order to get his point across, he ends up alienating
people who think he's not a fourth right principled person.
John Adams called him insinuating, And so even though he's
extraordinarily popular, he's able to rub people the wrong way
(22:15):
sometimes and make enemies of the people he went into
business with.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
But for all his flaws, Franklin was still a uniter,
someone who had an incredible ability to bring people of
differing persuasions together. When we return from break, we learned
how Franklin's business trips up and down the East Coast
gave him a unique perspective on the colonies, and how
a little cartoon he published quickly became a call to arms.
(22:54):
I want to talk a little bit about why Benjamin
Franklin is so fixated on becoming Postmaster General. Why is
it that's so key to his business empire.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Once Franklin has the most successful content and the printing house,
he also pushes and becomes the postmaster. He realizes, just
as the cable titans of today realize, that if you
own the content, you own the distribution system, if you
have franchises, if you are able to do the printing
(23:25):
and the publishing, that becomes the path to make him
the most successful self made business person in America. So
it becomes the first great media empire.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
In seventeen forty eight, at the age of forty two,
Franklin retires from daily life at the printing shop, but
he definitely doesn't stop working. Instead, he hangs up his
leather apron to concentrate on grander ambitions further afield from
Market Street. Some of those include the scientific experiments we
heard about earlier, but in seventeen fifty three he also
(23:58):
gets to work building a small or postal system as
Postmaster General.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Before he became a deputy colonial postmaster, if you wanted
to send a letter from Philadelphia to Boston, it often
had to travel all the way to London and back.
But he created a postal wrote. He was able to
franchise print shops up and down the coast with his
former workers or his cousin, sets them up in the
(24:23):
printing business, shares the Poor Richard's Almanac and the news
with him, helps them become postmasters, and then ties them
all together. And then he traveled up and down the coast,
both looking in on the print shops that he had franchised,
but also making sure that each postal stop connected and
that the postmasters and colonial postal system worked. And it
(24:46):
gave him a unique perspective.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
His love of travel and his desire to sort of
get out into the world and escape the provincialism of
wherever he was. How did that sort of shape his
early views of how America could form.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Franklin becomes the most traveled person in colonial America. He
would take tours up and down the colonies as postmaster.
Partly it helped his business, but most important, it allowed
him to see the colonies as potentially one unified country.
So he's at the forefront of this notion of union.
(25:28):
Up until then, the Virginians had very little in common
with people from Massachusetts or even Pennsylvania. But he was
very sociable, so he would go into each town from
Charleston up to Boston and he would make friends, and
it helped him form what he eventually created as an
American Philosophical Society, which is people up and down the
(25:51):
coast to exchange correspondence about scientific ideas. But it also
helped him establish a notion of a unified country with
common enter.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Even after he gave up his daily work as a printer,
Ben Franklin kept a hand in the press, so if
he ever felt a need, it was easy to get
something into print. In seventeen fifty four, early into his
stint as Deputy Postmaster General, and in the early months
of the French and Indian War, he used that perch
to make a bold statement, one that would change the
(26:21):
course of American history. Could you describe the join together
or Die cartoon?
Speaker 1 (26:26):
The different colonies were not working together on things like
a common defense in the French and Indian War, and
so he drew a picture of a snake that was
cut into thirteen segments for each of the colonies, and
he just said under it, join or die without being
(26:47):
put together, without holding together it will die, and he's
saying the colonies should form a union.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I just loved the idea of a political cartoon of
a single image being so influential.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Was the first editorial cartoon ever published in America. Is
supposed to advocate for a position. Ben Franklin wants the
colonies to join together in some loose union to be
able to assert their own rights as colonies and also
fight off the threats from the French and Indian wars,
(27:20):
and this notion of a colonial unity becomes important to him.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
In the next episode, we watch Franklin's evolution from someone
merely suggesting the colonies should unite to a full fledged
revolutionary and we witness how this decision tears this family apart.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Everybody's wondering what side is he going to be on?
Is he going to remain a loyalist to the crown
or be on the side of revolution And before he
can announce it, he has to have a meeting with
his son William.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
That's next time on Benjamin Franklin. 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, Lizzy Jacobs,
who's our editor. Social media by Dara Potts. This show
was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The
(28:17):
executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalletoscope,
it was executive pduced by Mangeshatigador, with an assist from
Ozwalishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban,
Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Kerry Lieberman,
Nathan Otowski and Ali Gammit. And if you like podcasts
(28:39):
about inventions what they mean for humanity, check out my
other show, shell Game, about how it created an AI
clone and set it loose on the world. It's a
shell Game dot co. And for more shows from Kalletoscope,
be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC. Thanks so much
for listening in
I think about Ben Franklin all the time. I remember
being with Elon Musk right when he bought Twitter, and
he was trying to decide do you print everything is
a total free speech? Does it become raucous? Or is
there any limits to what you put on it? And
I went back to when Ben Franklin was in his
early twenties and a printer in Philadelphia and he had
(00:40):
a newspaper. He writes apology for printers, which is still
one of the best defenses of free speech. She says
all voices should be allowed, because if you let the
printer decide what should be enter out, you'd only hear
the opinion of printers. And Franklin said, if truth and
false did he have fair play, then truth will win out.
(01:03):
But Franklin realizes after a while that's not always the case. Sometimes,
as Franklin says in Poor Richard, a lie can make
it all the way around the world while the truth
is still putting on its shoes. And he does a
test for himself. He had to figure out when do
you refuse to print something you know as salacious or
(01:24):
malicious or untrue. And at one point he was going
to get paid to publish something scurreless, and it was
so salacious, and he said, well, is it really worth
the money? And to try to determine whether I'd publish
it or not, I purchased this a small piece of bread.
I went home and lay on the floor, slept on
(01:46):
the floor, ate only bread and water. And I realized
that I could live that way if I had to,
and it was better to be proud of what I did.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
As a printer, a publisher, and a postmaster. Benjamin Franklin
launched America's first great media empire. But that's not exactly
how we picture him. For most of us, he's the
funny writer or the old guy with a kite, not
America's wealthiest self made businessman. But Franklin's ambitious. He devoured
any book he could get his hands on, formed clubs
(02:26):
to learn from his peers, jousted with his competitors, and
constantly innovated seeking new efficiencies. And while it might be
enough to appreciate Franklin for the business savant that he was,
what he learned during those years, from the ethical questions
he wrestled with to the observations he made while traveling
for work, gave tremendous insight into the founding father he
(02:46):
would become and the democracy he wanted to build. In
this third episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals
how Franklin's identity as a printer and businessman let him
on a path not just to become a revolutionary, but
to understanding the shape America's democracy would need to take.
(03:21):
Can you walk us through how Ben Franklin created his
print operation in Philadelphia, starting from showing up in the
city with a few coins in his pocket.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
When he straggles up Market Street. But draggled, he's able
to get a job in one of the print shops
there an apprentice, and he works very hard for a
sort of ne'er do well printer named Samuel Kimo. And
in the end Franklin becomes much more of the star
of the town.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Partially because he's good at doing his own pr right.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
But Franklin's ambitious. He's a young printer who knows how
to ingratiate himself, and I think Keemar, his boss, becomes
quite resentful, but Franklin eventually breaks away to start his
own printing shop.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
And you write that it takes a while for him
to get going. He's got his ups and downs. And
there's one little anecdote that I wanted to talk about,
which is not one of the biggest ones in the book,
but it felt like it encapsulated some of that, which
is he somehow connects with Governor Keith, governor of the
Pennsylvania Colony, and he's going to be sent to London
to buy printing equipment to set himself up as a printer.
(04:28):
And the governor's promised him this, and then he arrives
in London and turns out it was a completely false promise,
that there was no money to buy the equipment, and
he's very sanguine about it. And you write for Franklin
it was an insight into human foibles rather than evil.
He wished to please everybody, Franklin later said of Keith,
and having little to give, he gave expectations.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Franklin looked at a guy like Governor Keith, who had
promised him a lunge and credit. But then he said, well,
he was just trying to please me. And I think
that a bill to say, hey, we shouldn't ascribe deep
evil motives to people. We should be tolerant that becomes
ingrained in Franklin. So let's talk about his print shop.
(05:10):
He's still pretty young when he starts it, going into
competition with all these established printers. How does he distinguish
himself when he had a print shop? He realized, you
want him to be successful just printing things like the Bible,
because people bought a Bible once in their lifetime, maybe
or twice. So he realizes an almanac is a way
to go. People would have to buy it every year.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Sensing what people wanted and how to create demand was
just one of the ways Franklin distinguished himself as a businessman.
Another was his humor. Turns out, Franklin's sense of humor
wasn't just a natural part of his writing. It was
good business too, giving him a real advantage in the marketplace.
Could he have made it if he hadn't been the
writer that he was.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I think being a humorous writer was key to his
success because his new paper becomes more lively than the
rivals his almanac. He pokes fun at the other almanac makers.
He has poor Richard in the almanac predicting that we're
going to die, and he gets into these fake rivalries
and battles, public battles where they're poking fun at each other.
(06:16):
But if you're in a jousting battle with Benjamin Franklin
poking fun, he's going to win.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
You know.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
He's got the more pockish sense of humor. And so
in the end, his almanacs were valued more, his newspaper
was valued more. And he was smart about publishing. He
published novels, Pamela, the first novel published in America. Franklin
has a good sense for what the public wants. He's
a good salesperson.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
But even with something like Poor Richard, he's always figuring
out how to make another product. Like after printing year
after year of Almanacs, he figures out he can create
a best of compilation.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Right, definitely, and it's called The Weight of Wealth, The
Sayings of Poor Richard, and it was by far the
biggest selling book in the colonies for years.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
But it wasn't just the content that made Franklin wealthy.
He was savvy about other parts of the business too,
striking deals to ensure his newspapers and books got premium
placement and distribution. And even that wasn't enough for Franklin.
He realized that if he could control the distribution, he
could squash the competition, and so he laid the groundwork
(07:26):
for a monopoly.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
When Franklin was a printer in Philadelphia, he had a
competitor named Andrew Bradford. They competed against each other in
many areas, but they also cooperated, just like you might
find Apple and Microsoft competing and cooperating. They even published
a PSALM book together and split the costs. But one
(07:49):
thing that really heightened their competition was that Bradford was
the postmaster and that was a great advantage. He got
to favor his own content, and Soanklin at first pushes
against him and tries to get the Postmaster General to
order Bradford to carry Franklin's papers as well. But eventually
(08:11):
Franklin's able to rest away from Bradford the Philadelphia postmastership,
and Franklin then says, I'm going to create an open system,
and he does that, but then he gets mad at
Bradford again, and for a while he's keeping Bradford from
sending things through. But as usual, Franklin gets to the
right place and eventually we have a US postal system
(08:34):
that's a platform for everybody, and it's an open system.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
The thing I love about this story is there's also
if one of them doesn't want to carry the other's papers,
there's this sort of backdoor way to make it happen.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah. What was great is when they would deny each
other the right to use the postal system, you could
just bribe the writers to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
There's always a side door if you have cash to
hold out.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Nowadays we wrestled with should internet service providers be able
to favor certain content or should all content be on
a level playing field. It goes back to Franklin and
Bradford in Philadelphia, finally, after a lot of struggle back
and forth, saying an open system is better.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Even as Franklin controlled so much of the printing industry,
he remains committed to fair play. He believed competition at
a marketplace of opinions created a healthier society, and any
streaks of ruthlessness always seemed to be tamed by his
greater sense of civic duty.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Franklin did not believe that much in monetizing intellectual property.
He never patented or copyrighted anything he did, and he
could have done it with some of his writings. He
could have said I'm going to take a copyright out
on the sayings of Poor Richard. However, he knew that
the sayings of Poor Richard were things that he had
(09:59):
taken in from previous writers in the past two or
three centuries who had said clever things, and Franklin might
polish him up a bit. And so he was not
a strong believer in the type of intellectual property that
we would call copyrights or trademarks or patents.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I feel like we should say he was really good
at making money. I mean, he did very well for himself.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
He was very successful as a printer and a publisher,
and he always looked after his interests, you know, making
sure he got the contract to do the paper currency,
and that is newspaper advocated for paper currency. On the
other hand, he doesn't take out patents on his scientific inventions.
He said, we all benefit from things that went before.
(10:46):
We should put these into the commons, whether it's a
Franklin stove or the lightning rod.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It really is fascinating, Like, on the one hand, he's
quickly on a path to being incredibly wealthy, and he's
doing all the innovative and sometimes cutthroat business things like
taking over the post office and trying to stamp out
his competition. And then he's always so civic minded. He's
always thinking about the middle class. It's almost at the
core of his identity.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
Right when he gets to Philadelphia and he becomes a tradesman,
he creates what's called the Leather Apron Club or the Junto,
and it doesn't try to replicate the clubs for the
very rich, aristocratic elite of Philadelphia. It's just supposed to
be for the tradesman, the artist, and the shopkeepers what
he called we the middling people. That's why it was
(11:36):
called a leather apron club. They put on leather aprons
in the morning and open up their shop. And he
felt that the civic life of America would be driven
by a middle class.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
When we come back, we dive into the revolutionary impact
of the Leather Apron Club and the surprising ways its
legacy still lives on today. People might have a vision
(12:08):
of a printer or a newspaperman today a publisher and
who they are and where they came from. But this
was a real blue collar job. Then did you explain
that in what Franklin means when he describes himself as
a leather apron man.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin,
Common Printer. And it was because he believed that being
a leather apron, meaning somebody owned a shop opened up
in the morning, served people that market street, middle class
values was the heart of who we were going to
be as a nation, rather than trying to create the
(12:46):
class system in England and the pretensions of the elite
and the aristocracy. And so that notion of a printer
as a shopkeeper and publisher was something he always had
a pride in. Now this was something rather new in England.
You had had an aristocracy and a working class, and
(13:08):
but that wasn't a prosperous, vibrant middle class. And Franklin
knew that a strong America would come from having a
thriving class of small business owners.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
So the leather Apron Club banded together in this new
model to do good in the community, partially out of
a sense of moral righteousness, but also out of practicality.
The members knew that their businesses all had a better
shout of success if the city was thriving, if the
streets were clean, and if the people had money in
their pockets to spend.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
One of the Poor Richard Almanac sayings is about doing
well by doing good, and this describes Franklin, which is
he wants to do civic good, but he also knows
you can profit by it when you start with his
heat put A little things like keeping the streets, he said,
might seem like a minor thing that some dust may
(14:03):
get in somebody's eye, But if you multiply that to
the whole community, you see why we all have to
work together. And so what is JONTO or Leather Apron
Club does is at every meeting they talk about what
is it that a fellow member of the club might
need and might help them in business? What ways can
(14:25):
we help the commerce of Philadelphia, What new ideas might
we profit from. And so he was always mixing his
civic virtue with doing well by himself, like making sure
that the other members of the Leather Apron Club used
him as a printer. So they form all sorts of
(14:46):
ideas and associations, to have a volunteer street sweeping core,
to have a volunteer fire department.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
And people now maybe have a hard time conceptualizing the
era where some of the things that he came up
with didn't already exist. For instance, you've mentioned the volunteer
firefighting or even the militias that he'd helped set up
prior to him coming up with them. What was happening
around a fire before Franklin's set up one of these associations.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, you had people who either paid for protection, or
people would pay for constable watches and stuff. But what
he realizes is, especially with fires, but even with crime,
that you can't just have certain people protect their own homes.
The whole community has to pull together to do it.
(15:36):
Fire on one home in Milk Street hurts every home
on Milk Street, and so there are things we have
to join together to do. One of the essences of
democracy is figuring out what should be done in the commons,
what should be done by government, what should be left
to the private sphere. And this notion that we gather
(16:00):
together in civic associations. It's so perplexed Tokeville. When he
writes about democracy in America, he says Americans are the
most individualistic people, and yet somehow they keep forming associations.
And this is in conflict. But for Benjamin Franklin, it
wasn't in conflict at all. As poor Richard said, he
(16:21):
who drinks alone let him catch his horse alone, which
means it's not easy to catch a runaway horse unless
you have friends helping you do it. And so that
notion of governing ourselves through civic associations and then eventually
of public private partnerships with local government and then later
on colonial and national government, that becomes a new concept
(16:48):
of how we were going to create in America. That's
elevated both self reliance as well as community and civic association.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
And also the lending library was a big part of
what role did that play.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Among the things the Leather Apron Club does is it
creates the first sort of public library where they all
agreed in the club to put their books together so
other people could borrow them. And soon they have a
room that they rent and it becomes away. As Franklin
(17:22):
puts it, that the average tradesperson in America, the average shopkeeper,
could be just as well informed, is just as educated
as some of the elite or aristocracy. One of the
amusing things Franklin figured out when he is starting his
library is that he asked one of the wealthier privileged
(17:45):
people of Philadelphia, who didn't particularly like the young striving
Benjamin Franklin if he could borrow a particular book, and
he borrows it and then returns it and is very
grateful for it and talks about how influential the book is.
And after that the person he borrowed the book from
loves Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin says, what I learned is
(18:08):
sometimes when you allow a person to do you a favor,
they will like you more than if you're doing favors
for them.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I love that lesson. And you describe these things coming
together beginning in these clubs. If we creates this library,
people can teach themselves. They can educate themselves, which is
exactly what someone would do after being denied the opportunity
to go to Harvard.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
He extends that to the Academy for the Education of
Youth that becomes University of Pennsylvania. Both Franklin and Jefferson
or exemplars of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson, when he creates
a university that becomes the University of Virginia, talks about
taking the most elite thinkers and bringing them into a
(18:53):
new quote natural aristocracy. Franklin, when he creates what becomes
the University of Pennsylvania. Believes the goal is to take
all people, no matter how brilliant they are or just
industrious they are, and say everybody will benefit from learning.
That education should not just be for the well born
(19:14):
and for the elite, but it should become something that
every striving person in America had a right to go
borrow a book from a library, or to be part
of an academy for the education of youth.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
For someone who joked about struggling with humility and whose
name ended up on so many things, from the Franklin
Stove to the one hundred Dollars Bill, Franklin loved to
play with anonymity in his writing, and he did it
too in his work with the Leather Apron Club.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Whenever he proposed a civic association, he might write a
letter to the newspaper, but he said he was always
very careful to make it that sounded like it was
his suggestion. In fact, sometimes he would write letters to
his newspaper under a pseudonym and say it's been posed
that maybe we should have a volunteer fire department. He said,
it's amazing how much you can get done if you
(20:07):
aren't interested in taking the credit for it.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
He also didn't seem to see any contradiction between being
this sort of pr man for himself, building up his
image so that he could use his image, and also
being the person who slid these ideas in underneath the
door so that other people would think they were theirs.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
One of his clever insights is if you don't take
credit for something, if you give somebody else the credit
for an idea, it'll later become known that you were
really the person who came up with it. It'll give you
a lot more benefit to your reputation.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
While the Leather Apron Club was all about banding together
with other shopkeepers to help one another in the city
of Philadelphia, for Franklin was also about helping himself in
the bottom line, the whole doing well by doing good
maxim But Franklin's affects in his way of encouraging conversation
sometimes made people question his intentions. You sort of write
(21:11):
that for a man of his fame, he didn't have
as many disputes as you might expect. He was able
to resolve a lot of them, but he does start
having these conflicts with other printers and eventually with the
Penn family, And how does he sort of navigate when
he feels like someone is a raid against him.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
In his Leather Apron Club, they had a way of
discussing things that he felt would stop it from being
too disputatious, Like if you disagreed with somebody, instead of
contradicting them, you'd ask questions. That made Franklin charming at times,
But after a while this indirectness, slyly asking questions in
(21:54):
order to get his point across, he ends up alienating
people who think he's not a fourth right principled person.
John Adams called him insinuating, And so even though he's
extraordinarily popular, he's able to rub people the wrong way
(22:15):
sometimes and make enemies of the people he went into
business with.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
But for all his flaws, Franklin was still a uniter,
someone who had an incredible ability to bring people of
differing persuasions together. When we return from break, we learned
how Franklin's business trips up and down the East Coast
gave him a unique perspective on the colonies, and how
a little cartoon he published quickly became a call to arms.
(22:54):
I want to talk a little bit about why Benjamin
Franklin is so fixated on becoming Postmaster General. Why is
it that's so key to his business empire.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Once Franklin has the most successful content and the printing house,
he also pushes and becomes the postmaster. He realizes, just
as the cable titans of today realize, that if you
own the content, you own the distribution system, if you
have franchises, if you are able to do the printing
(23:25):
and the publishing, that becomes the path to make him
the most successful self made business person in America. So
it becomes the first great media empire.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
In seventeen forty eight, at the age of forty two,
Franklin retires from daily life at the printing shop, but
he definitely doesn't stop working. Instead, he hangs up his
leather apron to concentrate on grander ambitions further afield from
Market Street. Some of those include the scientific experiments we
heard about earlier, but in seventeen fifty three he also
(23:58):
gets to work building a small or postal system as
Postmaster General.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Before he became a deputy colonial postmaster, if you wanted
to send a letter from Philadelphia to Boston, it often
had to travel all the way to London and back.
But he created a postal wrote. He was able to
franchise print shops up and down the coast with his
former workers or his cousin, sets them up in the
(24:23):
printing business, shares the Poor Richard's Almanac and the news
with him, helps them become postmasters, and then ties them
all together. And then he traveled up and down the coast,
both looking in on the print shops that he had franchised,
but also making sure that each postal stop connected and
that the postmasters and colonial postal system worked. And it
(24:46):
gave him a unique perspective.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
His love of travel and his desire to sort of
get out into the world and escape the provincialism of
wherever he was. How did that sort of shape his
early views of how America could form.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Franklin becomes the most traveled person in colonial America. He
would take tours up and down the colonies as postmaster.
Partly it helped his business, but most important, it allowed
him to see the colonies as potentially one unified country.
So he's at the forefront of this notion of union.
(25:28):
Up until then, the Virginians had very little in common
with people from Massachusetts or even Pennsylvania. But he was
very sociable, so he would go into each town from
Charleston up to Boston and he would make friends, and
it helped him form what he eventually created as an
American Philosophical Society, which is people up and down the
(25:51):
coast to exchange correspondence about scientific ideas. But it also
helped him establish a notion of a unified country with
common enter.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Even after he gave up his daily work as a printer,
Ben Franklin kept a hand in the press, so if
he ever felt a need, it was easy to get
something into print. In seventeen fifty four, early into his
stint as Deputy Postmaster General, and in the early months
of the French and Indian War, he used that perch
to make a bold statement, one that would change the
(26:21):
course of American history. Could you describe the join together
or Die cartoon?
Speaker 1 (26:26):
The different colonies were not working together on things like
a common defense in the French and Indian War, and
so he drew a picture of a snake that was
cut into thirteen segments for each of the colonies, and
he just said under it, join or die without being
(26:47):
put together, without holding together it will die, and he's
saying the colonies should form a union.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
I just loved the idea of a political cartoon of
a single image being so influential.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Was the first editorial cartoon ever published in America. Is
supposed to advocate for a position. Ben Franklin wants the
colonies to join together in some loose union to be
able to assert their own rights as colonies and also
fight off the threats from the French and Indian wars,
(27:20):
and this notion of a colonial unity becomes important to him.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
In the next episode, we watch Franklin's evolution from someone
merely suggesting the colonies should unite to a full fledged
revolutionary and we witness how this decision tears this family apart.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Everybody's wondering what side is he going to be on?
Is he going to remain a loyalist to the crown
or be on the side of revolution And before he
can announce it, he has to have a meeting with
his son William.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
That's next time on Benjamin Franklin. 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, Lizzy Jacobs,
who's our editor. Social media by Dara Potts. This show
was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The
(28:17):
executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalletoscope,
it was executive pduced by Mangeshatigador, with an assist from
Ozwalishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban,
Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Kerry Lieberman,
Nathan Otowski and Ali Gammit. And if you like podcasts
(28:39):
about inventions what they mean for humanity, check out my
other show, shell Game, about how it created an AI
clone and set it loose on the world. It's a
shell Game dot co. And for more shows from Kalletoscope,
be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC. Thanks so much
for listening in
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