October 3, 2024 • 35 mins
In this final episode of our series, host Evan Ratliff and biographer Walter Isaacson discuss Benjamin Franklin's remarkable late-in-life achievements-- from his last anonymous essay, to the way he empowered George Washington, to his evolution on slavery, to the beautiful way Philadelphia mourned its favorite son... oh, and they discuss Ben Franklin's favorite magic trick, too!
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Speaker 1 (00:13):
Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin,
Comma printer. He'd believed that being a leather agran, meaning
somebody who owned a shop opened up in the morning,
served people, that was the heart of who we were
going to be as a nation. As a young printer,
(00:36):
he had composed partly as a joke, an epithet that
he thought could be used for himself.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And it said, the body of B.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Franklin Printer like the cover of an old book, its
contents worn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding.
Lies here for food for worms. But the book shall
not be lost, for it will appear once more in
a new and more elegant addition, revived and corrected by
his author. It's a totally wonderful thing, a pilgrim making
(01:07):
progress in the hands of a benevolent God. But of
course Franklin was a simple person. Just before he died,
he made something simpler that would be placed over his grave.
There would just be a plain tombstone with the inscription
Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Benjamin Franklin lived a life for the ages. He died
at eighty four years old after what was a magnificently
long life for his time, and in those years he
lived at least five lives as a scientist, a writer,
a businessman, a diplomat, and finally as a founder and
framer of the United States. But how can we understand
(01:59):
Franklin's legacy? How did you think about the wrongs he
had made over a lifetime, and how did this moral
evolution and the progression of his beliefs get woven into
America's own moral fabric. In this final episode, Walter Isaacson
details how Franklin's late in life actions, from ceding a
nomination to a younger candidate to embracing abolition, defined both
(02:22):
him and his newborn country.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
When George Washington arrives for the Constitutional Convention, one of
the first things he does is he has a dinner
at Franklin's house. They brag out casks of ale. Franklin
has built this new house on Market Street in Philadelphia,
and Franklin would make this grand and every day to
the Constitutional Convention. Because he has gout and he has
(03:04):
trouble walking, they carry Franklin the few blocks from Market
Street to what we now call Independence Hall on sort
of a chair carried by four prisoners from the jail.
The only other person who could have possibly been the
president of the Convention and thus likely to be the
first president besides Washington would have been Benjamin Franklin. But
(03:28):
he's pushing eighty then, and as we know today, that's
a bit old to be president, maybe, and so he
asks for permission to be the one who nominates Washington.
The fundamental thing to understand about the Constitutional Convention was
that they'd gotten it wrong the first time around the
(03:48):
Articles of Confederation, and they hadn't created really a central government.
It was just thirteen different states that were confederated with
each other but not doing well, and so they couldn't
do things like figure out tariff so tray that easily.
And they have to go back to the idea that
(04:09):
Benjamin Franklin originally proposed in the seventeen fifties, the Albany
Plan of Union, where you have a central government with
a congress that can do taxation. So what they end
up at the Constitutional Convention is something that Franklin had
pretty much proposed thirty years earlier, which is a federal
(04:32):
system of government.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And so they're still leaning on his ideas but how
was he viewed.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
At the time.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
He's the wise person who comes in, but to be honest,
he's a little bit doddering. He tells long stories. At
the convention. He makes proposals sometimes that people can't quite
figure out is he totally serious about that. Famously, he
makes a proposal that they should open with prayers each day,
(05:01):
which was somewhat unusual because Franklin wasn't all that religious.
He was a deist to believe that the Creator, but
not a god who intervened in our affairs. And yet
in that speech he uses a phrase from the Bible.
If a sparrow can't fall without the Good Lord knowing,
then how can an empire arise?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And I think it was.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Mainly because he wanted to push a little bit of humility.
We all had to keep in mind that there were
powers greater than ourselves, and so even though he wasn't
always taken that seriously, I think there were times when
he set the mood.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Including bringing people from the convention to his house to
describe what he was doing there and what role that played.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know, if you look at the US Capitol now,
there's beautiful scenes painted in one of the rooms of
the Founding of America, and one of the ad is
a picture in the backyard of Benjamin Franklin under the
shade of the tree, where he's trying to calm things down.
(06:12):
Franklin always believed that one of his roles was calming
royaled waters. And he even had a little scientific trick
that he learned, which is how a small layer of
oil on the surface of water makes it calmer. And
so in his walking stick he would put a little
(06:34):
cruet of oil in one of the chambers and have
a little button. So if he stood in front of
Clapham Pond, say in England or river, he could wave
his walking stick and then secretly press a button and
the waters would get calmer for him. That became a metaphor.
At the Constitutional Convention, he played that role he had
(06:58):
played his whole life of trying to temper people's passions
calm things down. You need passionate people like a Sam
Adams to get you into a revolution, but you also
need somebody who spends his life figuring out how do
you calm wild waters? And at the Convention he was
(07:19):
particularly good at bringing contending people to his backyard, sitting
under the shade of the tree, telling stories, sometimes pointless stories,
but he would calm down the passions.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
In the first episode, we heard about how Franklin's scientific
background taught him that imperfection shouldn't stop one from moving forward,
for example, voting for the Constitution, because the process of
experimentation involved continual improvement upon an idea. Walter noted that
his vote to move the imperfect Constitution into action was
(07:56):
also the result of a long life and a healthy
dose of humility.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
He said, when we were young tradesmen here in Philadelphia,
and we had a joint of wood or a table
that didn't fully hold together, you take a little from
one side and shave a little from the other, until
you had a joint that would hold together for centuries.
And so too we hear this convention must each part
(08:21):
was some of our demands. There were things that he
believed in, such as a single chamber legislature instead of
a House and a Senate, but he changes his mind.
He ends up proposing the compromise of having a House
of representatives as proportional votes versus a Senate in which
the equal votes per state, an idea that the Connecticut
(08:43):
delegation proposed had gone down in flames. But when Franklin
does it in the detailed way that he proposed it
and it passed, he gets the balance just right. He
gave a speech he said, I'm not sure I'll ever
approve it, for having lived long experienced many instances of
being obliged to change my opinion on important subjects which
(09:07):
I thought I was right but found out otherwise. It's
that notion that you don't have to go to war
and go to battle over every single thing. You should
be willing to say I might be wrong on these things,
I might have some humility. Let all compromise and see
if we can agree on things.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
That seems like a manifestation of his experience and also
of his pr mastery and sort of understanding that the
Constitution is also something you have to sell to people.
You have to sell it as an imperfect document, and
to get ahead of that and say, yes, you will
see imperfections at it, but it's the best thing we're
going to get.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, it's the best thing that can come out of
human hand. One of the things he learned early in
life was the importance of humility, or is he sometimes
put it at least having the pretense of humility. You
might pause for a second and say, well, I could
be wrong about that. Let me indulge the wisdom of
people around me and see if we can come to
(10:06):
an accommodation. And that's not very heroic. That doesn't get
you on cable TV these days, fighting for the last
perfect thing you want. But it's the way democracies get made.
Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make
great democracies.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
I want to make sure we don't pass over this moment,
that the idea that Franklin was the only viable candidate
to be the leader of the early United States other
than Washington, and he said I removed myself from this competition.
Did that echo come up for you at all when
Biden did the same. I mean, people have pulled out
(10:45):
for different reasons, but has anyone done it in that
explicit way.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Well, both Franklin and Washington, there's a lot of credit
in their careers. Franklin during the Constitutional Convention realizes that
he's too old to take charge and be the first
president and wants Washington to do it. Then, of course, famously,
at the end of Washington's second term, he says, all right,
(11:08):
I'm gonna step aside. I'm going to be like Cincinnatus,
the old Roman, and go back to my farm. That
notion of voluntarily forsaking power is at the heart of
what a democracy is, a peaceful transfer of power and
people who are in it not for themselves and for power,
(11:32):
but for the democracy itself.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
You see that in.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Benjamin Franklin, and then you see it again in George Washington,
And nowadays it's important to do what Biden did at
times and step aside and on certainly when we look
at our elections, to believe in the peaceful transfer of
power when.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
We come back.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Franklin addresses the biggest mistake on his life's list of
errata and shows us that you can change for the
better at any age. So after the Constitutional Convention, I mean,
it's just extraordinary how long he's lived and how much
he's accomplished at this point. But there's sort of one
(12:13):
more turn left for him, in a sense, his becoming
an abolitionist.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Throughout his life, he had kept this ledger of errors
he had made and how he had rectified. It begins
with him running away from his intenture to his brother.
He rectifies it by taking care of his brother's son
after his brother dies.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Well, the last.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Great errata, more than an erato, a moral deep laughed,
was tolerating slavery. Franklin was not as advanced as Don
Adams and others were. He's certainly more advanced than Jefferson
and some of the Virginians were. And then he becomes
(12:54):
truly at the forefront when he takes over the Society
for the Abolition of slavery and says, not only do
we have to abolish slavery, we have to have all
sorts of actions that will bring freed slaves into the
educated and working mainstream of our middle class. And he
(13:15):
writes very long in detailed methods of making sure that
we get the formerly enslaved people into an equal position
in society, to find employment, to find internships. And it
may have not been the most profound ethical theory ever,
(13:36):
but it was a very practical one, and it was
totally intertwined to democracy, to believing more than any of
the other founders, he believed in the wisdom of the
common person and that we should have as much democracy
as possible. And so at the end of his life
(14:00):
he starts writing these tracks about how bad slavery is.
And just as his very first published writings were done
as hoaxes under a pseudonym Silence do Good Letters when
he was a teenager, his last great publication was once
again a hoax under a pseudonym, which was a letter
(14:23):
from the Divan of Algiers in which he's talking in
the voice of an Arab leader defending the right to
enslave captured Christians. And what he's doing is eviscerating the
arguments made by some of the Southern senators against the
petition he had presented for the abolition of slavery.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
And I feel like there's two questions in that evolution.
I think people today would ask why did it take
till the end of his life for him to get there?
And what enabled him to evolve in that way?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Well, Franklin often of He wrote one essay early on
which was not very good and was anti German, anti immigrant,
also showed not much sympathy for the enslaved. And then
he revised it and he said, I had a natural
proclivity for my own race. But you may think, why
(15:21):
is that? Why didn't I question it? Why did I
feel this way? And One of the things that helps
him on his evolution is he does get involved in
these schools for the education of the children of freed
slaves in the seventeen forties seventeen fifties, and he's amazed
at the power of education. And he writes about the
(15:45):
great minds of these young children and how well they do,
and he says that helped change my mind. Franklin said,
my morality is a simple and a pragmatic one. The
best way we can serve our creator is dedicate your
life to making things better for the people around you,
(16:07):
for serving other people, and to give opportunities for each
person to rise in the world the way he did.
One of the beauties of Benjamin Franklin is that he's
part of the moral arc of America. He's continually improving
as we are as a nation, and usually a slight
(16:28):
bit ahead.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
And there's something about doing that into your seventies and
eighties that also implies that it never stops.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
I think he felt he was on a never ending
quest for self improvement, self knowledge, for learning things, but
also on a never ending quest to bend the moral
arc of his life towards better things. And I think
that should be a template for our country. That notion
(16:56):
of continuing self improvement of both ourselves in our civic
lives is one of the important things that Benjamin Franklin
teaches us.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
This is something that I feel as a little bit
in the air right now when national politics is so
divisive that people will say, focus on your community, focus
on the people around you. And Franklin did focus on
the most national politics, but it feels like he built
his outlook around his community and making changes in his
(17:29):
local environment.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yes, he felt that politics would work best from the
ground up when you start with, as he put it,
little things like keeping the streets swept. You see why
we all have to work together at the community level.
And he felt that would be a model for how
a big politics would work. That we would all understand
(17:52):
what can we do in a practical way to give
everybody an opportunity to have a good life. Education was
very much a private thing people could afford, it would pay,
and he said, no, we have to have an academy
for the education of youths because education is not just
an individual benefit. It benefits the whole community. Likewise, fire protection,
(18:15):
all the things that would hold a community together. He said,
let's just find practical ways to do it rather than
politicizing it. We're still fighting about that. Well, should there
be national health, should there be public health things? Should
we have insurance associations? And Franklin always felt that you
(18:37):
could give people a sense of individualism but also a
sense that they could work together as a community.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
One of the things that you return to in the
book is his comfort with democracy. And he's more comfortable
with democracy than some of the other founders. But now
we have some questions about too much democracy, too much populism.
Modern political figures take from Franklin. He did resist pure populism.
(19:07):
There was a paston Boy's Revolt at one point, it's
almost like the Tea Party re volt, in which it
was anti immigrant and they were marching to Philadelphia, and
he helped raise a force that would stop them. And
he realized it was up to each one of us,
all of us, to have both a celebration of democracy
(19:29):
but also the civic attributes, the feel for the common good,
the feel for the security of our society that would
help protect it from populist or for that matter, authoritarian
or aristocratic excesses.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
He didn't care for a mob No, he really didn't
like mob rule. Even the Boston Tea Party that kind
of appalled him, because he was at heart somebody who
wanted moderation. When you put together the sense of founding
this country, you need the most passionate people, and you
have Samuel Adams and John Adams and really smart people
(20:09):
like Jefferson and Hamilton, and people of high rectitude like Washington.
But it's also useful to have the Franklins who know
how to pull people together. And well, maybe they're two ingratiating,
but it could be worse things in life.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
One of the ways people perceive him is through the
eyes of these sort of maxims and industry, and it
can make them sound a bit like a schoolmarm, like
a person who's always going around instructing people about how
they should behave And yet you look at his relationships
and the clubs and the communities that he built around
himself wherever he went, how did he manage to sort
(20:45):
of pull people into his orbit.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
When growing up in Puritan Boston, it was a very
dogmatic time. Things were handed down. The preachers told you
what was right and wrong. The opposite for him was
being open minded not being sure of yourself until you
test it all of your theories, and that means that
(21:09):
as you go through life, what looks acceptable is no
longer acceptable because you've tested it a bit more.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Did that in any way draw you to them? You
don't strike me as extremely dogmatic.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, I'm not very dogmatic. I was a journalist for many,
many years, and I tried.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Not to be partisan.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I tried to be open minded about everybody I covered,
from Ronald Reagan to Ted Kennedy. So Ben Franklin appealed
to me. I think we've lost that ability in our
democracy to be as open minded as we should be.
People grab on to a dogmatic view of the world,
(21:51):
to their preferred cable channel or their end of the
talk radio dial. With the evidence they get reinforces their
own dogma, rather than being open to all ideas, all
evidence the way Benjamin Franklin was.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
And if that open mindedness feels a little bit like
an endangered species right now, do you have a sense
of what the steps would be to try to bring
it back.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I think Benjamin Franklin would realize that we all have
a shared set of values at the local level, that
our potholes and dirty streets aren't partisan one way or
the other, and so I think he would want to
help restore democracy neighborhood by neighborhood by having more civic
(22:38):
associations to support their local hospital or their local firefighters,
just the way he did. I think the poison and
partisanship in our national politics has seat down to some
extent at the local level. I think Franklin would say
it could also work in reverse. We focus on what's
(22:59):
really good for our neighborhoods and our communities, then we
can leach the poison out of the national politics at
some point.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
When we come back.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
We read Benjamin Franklin's reviews. Is there anything that surprised
you over the years since the book came out in
terms of what people find in it or what they
pull out of it and express to you.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
One of things that surprises me a bit is that
the most passionate people who are the most partisan sometimes
embrace the book. Elon Mosk thought it was his favorite,
said he loved the book, And sometimes I feel like saying, Okay,
read it again, because it's not just about following your passion.
(23:50):
It's combining your passion with a little bit of humility,
so that you try to understand other people's passions as
well and find the common ground.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Maybe that's the fatal flo on Benjamin Franklin. He gave
us too much to work with, too many things for
you to grab onto to make your own Franklin philosophy.
You mentioned not canonizing Benjamin Franklin, and this actually brings
to mind. There was one point where he's in a
kind of gloomy state of mind and his friend's a
doctor and he writes, do you please yourself with the
(24:20):
fancy that you're doing good. You're mistaken. Half the lives
you save are not worth saving, which does point to
that he had complex moods just like anyone else. He
wasn't just a sunny, happy, go lucky guy, right.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
There was at times a little bit of gloominess in him,
at times, some anger in him, but he knew how
to channel it. He wasn't a brooding sort. And in general,
his optimism and it's just his cheery nature and his
desire to please people help define who he is.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And he was a detailed person.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
From his earliest civic assotion ciations to his negotiations in France.
He would micromanage every little bit of the ammunition and
the loans, and when he came up with plans for
things to be, sometimes twenty or thirty pages of how
it should work. Because while a lot of people think
(25:19):
God is in the great vision, he also realized that
God was in the details. That it really mattered that
you become geeky, that you put down every rule and regulation,
whether it's for how should the Academy of Youth in
Philadelphia teach swimming? To how should the French resupply our ammunition.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
It's almost like everything was an invention. The world was
there to be invented exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
He was a tinkerer and then an inventor, and then
just somebody who was ingenius in understanding how details wove
together to form the whole, and whether it's the flu
of the Franklin stove and how much it should be heated,
or whether it was the details of the Treaty of
(26:04):
Alliance with France. He liked to devise things. He liked
to be involved with the invention of things.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
It's clear that Walter Isaacson admires Franklin, and we had
talked about him sharing an anti dogmatic view of the
world with his subject, but I wondered if they shared
also a quality common among people who write about the.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
World for a living.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
You describe Franklin as graced and afflicted with the traits
so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift
and Addison One's too often of wanting to participate in
the world while also remaining a detached observer. And now
I wonder how much were you writing about yourself?
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Oh? Totally.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I mean one of the things when you're a journalist,
like I've been most of my career, is you realize
you're not in the arena and you become a bit detached.
You're just watching other people do things, perhaps even trying
to have a veneer of objectivity, as if you don't
have a dog in that hunt.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
You're just observing.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I think there's something yearning that we have, or
I had in that position of maybe I should be
in the arena and maybe, like Addison's Weft or Franklin,
maybe now should get more involved in things. So I
understood Franklin's evolution from being a humorous, wry poor Richard
(27:28):
Almanac writing observer of the foibles of the elite to
being somebody who then went into politics and statecraft.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
It kind of brings to mind something from your own
story when you moved from Washington back to New Orleans,
and then later you got involved in post Katrina New
Orleans and tried to help the city recover. And that
feels very Ben Franklin to me, getting involved in your
local community. I'm wondering if that move felt that way
to you, to try to return to what you can
(28:00):
affect in the world around you.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yes, I knew that I was never going to run
for national office or run for president and do things,
but I figured, how do you then get more involved?
And then Katrina happened, and my really beloved Tone Down
was flooded, my childhood home was flooded, and I went
back and I became the vice chairman of the Louisiana
(28:23):
Recovery Authority, and then.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Moved back to New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Maybe some people will look at our current political climb
and say, I've got to run for Senate or something.
But I think the way most of us can do
it is say, let me be involved in the things
that make our civic life better. I think we can
all get more engaged in the civic life of our community,
which is the way Benjamin Franklin started his road to
(28:50):
defining American democracy. And even if we're not going to
run for Senate or run for president, that's the pathway
to applying the life lessons from ben Franklin to the
needs we now have in a troubled democracy.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I think part of.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
What's so interesting about Franklin is that he seems to
go in and out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Franklin's age of Enlightenment, which was very practical, very empirical,
very scientific, gets replaced in the early eighteen hundreds by
an era that values romanticism more than rationality, and so
Franklin a bit goes out of style. The romantic poets
make fun of him. I think it was the poet
(29:32):
John Keats said that he was just a man of
thrifty maxims. Franklin was and never a sublime man. But
I think we see the pendulum swinging back and forth
through American history. But the middle class values of industry
and honesty and frugality, and of civic mindedness and having
(29:55):
a local police and fire departments that are supported the
these are not lowly mundane values. These are fundamental values
to keeping a democracy on an even deeal.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
And in his own time among some of his peers,
Franklin was never really in fashion. John Adams, the second
President of the United States, fellow author of the Declaration
of Independence, and sharer of a hotel room, while having
a cold thought Franklin might be too open minded.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
John Adams had been his antagonist, a friend and sort
of a rival for power throughout the Revolution. And Adams
was a very passionate religious person, and initially he looked
down on Franklin's sort of vague tolerance of all religions.
(30:50):
But eventually, after Franklin dies, even John Adams mellows on him.
He realizes that there's something beautiful about Franklin's outlook. Franklin
believed in a God that created everybody, and he said,
if that's what the Good Lord did, then everybody is
(31:13):
worth equal respect. And so the best way to be religious,
the best way to serve the Lord, is to be
tolerant of different religions in different ethnic groups. That notion
of religious toleration initially offended deeply spiritual religious people. There
was one historian, Charles Angoff, who makes fun of Franklin
(31:37):
and says all that he really contributed to America was
this sort of good natured religious tolerance. What heavens, that
is the essential thing that America gave to the world.
In a period in which most countries had established religions
and would fight religious wars. Country that not only tolerated,
(32:02):
but respected each person's right to speak and to worship
as they pleased.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
This was a.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Whole new thing. And during his lifetime Franklin donated to
the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia.
And one point to the new hall that was being
built next Independence Hall, which was for visiting preachers. He said,
if the muffed eye of Constantinople were to send somebody
here to teach us ismam, we should listen and we
(32:30):
should learn. And on his deathbad he was the largest
individual contributor to make the Israel Synagogue, the first synagogue
built in Philadelphia. The concept of good natured religious tolerance
was actually no small advance for civilization back then in
the eighteenth century. It was the greatest of contributions to
(32:53):
rise not only from the Enlightenment, but from the founding
of America, the nation not as a tribe, but as
out of many, one epluribus union, and that notion that
people of all different faiths, of all different backgrounds get
to come here and get to be equal citizens. That
(33:14):
tolerance and respect for different ways of doing things becomes
America's gift.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
At its best. But it has to keep finding its
best over and over again.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It does, especially now when we're falling prey to some
of the sectarian intolerance, the tribalism, even the nationalism that
sort of says we don't like people from different cultures
coming here. That is anathema to the democracy that Benjamin
(33:46):
Franklin and others created two hundred and fifty three hundred
years ago. When Franklin was dying, he helped organize the
preyed for Independence Day, and he helped make sure that
it was left by all the different denominations so it
could show this idea of religious tolerance. And so too,
(34:09):
when he died, every preacher, minister and preach in Philadelphia
linked arms with the rabbi of the Jews and march
with his casket to the grave. That what he was
fighting for back then, and that's of course what was
still fighting for in the world today.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson, so stedd by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound design by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs is our editor. Social media by
Dara Potts.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
The show was.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive
producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it
was executive produced by Mangeshtetikadur, with an assist from Other
Volition Kostaslinos and Kate Osborn. Special thanks to Amanda Urban,
Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Kerrie Lieberman,
(35:10):
Nathan Otowski and Ali Gavin. And if you like podcasts
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 at
Shellgame dot co. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be
sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Thanks so much for listening.
Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin,
Comma printer. He'd believed that being a leather agran, meaning
somebody who owned a shop opened up in the morning,
served people, that was the heart of who we were
going to be as a nation. As a young printer,
(00:36):
he had composed partly as a joke, an epithet that
he thought could be used for himself.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
And it said, the body of B.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Franklin Printer like the cover of an old book, its
contents worn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding.
Lies here for food for worms. But the book shall
not be lost, for it will appear once more in
a new and more elegant addition, revived and corrected by
his author. It's a totally wonderful thing, a pilgrim making
(01:07):
progress in the hands of a benevolent God. But of
course Franklin was a simple person. Just before he died,
he made something simpler that would be placed over his grave.
There would just be a plain tombstone with the inscription
Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
Benjamin Franklin lived a life for the ages. He died
at eighty four years old after what was a magnificently
long life for his time, and in those years he
lived at least five lives as a scientist, a writer,
a businessman, a diplomat, and finally as a founder and
framer of the United States. But how can we understand
(01:59):
Franklin's legacy? How did you think about the wrongs he
had made over a lifetime, and how did this moral
evolution and the progression of his beliefs get woven into
America's own moral fabric. In this final episode, Walter Isaacson
details how Franklin's late in life actions, from ceding a
nomination to a younger candidate to embracing abolition, defined both
(02:22):
him and his newborn country.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
When George Washington arrives for the Constitutional Convention, one of
the first things he does is he has a dinner
at Franklin's house. They brag out casks of ale. Franklin
has built this new house on Market Street in Philadelphia,
and Franklin would make this grand and every day to
the Constitutional Convention. Because he has gout and he has
(03:04):
trouble walking, they carry Franklin the few blocks from Market
Street to what we now call Independence Hall on sort
of a chair carried by four prisoners from the jail.
The only other person who could have possibly been the
president of the Convention and thus likely to be the
first president besides Washington would have been Benjamin Franklin. But
(03:28):
he's pushing eighty then, and as we know today, that's
a bit old to be president, maybe, and so he
asks for permission to be the one who nominates Washington.
The fundamental thing to understand about the Constitutional Convention was
that they'd gotten it wrong the first time around the
(03:48):
Articles of Confederation, and they hadn't created really a central government.
It was just thirteen different states that were confederated with
each other but not doing well, and so they couldn't
do things like figure out tariff so tray that easily.
And they have to go back to the idea that
(04:09):
Benjamin Franklin originally proposed in the seventeen fifties, the Albany
Plan of Union, where you have a central government with
a congress that can do taxation. So what they end
up at the Constitutional Convention is something that Franklin had
pretty much proposed thirty years earlier, which is a federal
(04:32):
system of government.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
And so they're still leaning on his ideas but how
was he viewed.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
At the time.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
He's the wise person who comes in, but to be honest,
he's a little bit doddering. He tells long stories. At
the convention. He makes proposals sometimes that people can't quite
figure out is he totally serious about that. Famously, he
makes a proposal that they should open with prayers each day,
(05:01):
which was somewhat unusual because Franklin wasn't all that religious.
He was a deist to believe that the Creator, but
not a god who intervened in our affairs. And yet
in that speech he uses a phrase from the Bible.
If a sparrow can't fall without the Good Lord knowing,
then how can an empire arise?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And I think it was.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Mainly because he wanted to push a little bit of humility.
We all had to keep in mind that there were
powers greater than ourselves, and so even though he wasn't
always taken that seriously, I think there were times when
he set the mood.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
Including bringing people from the convention to his house to
describe what he was doing there and what role that played.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
You know, if you look at the US Capitol now,
there's beautiful scenes painted in one of the rooms of
the Founding of America, and one of the ad is
a picture in the backyard of Benjamin Franklin under the
shade of the tree, where he's trying to calm things down.
(06:12):
Franklin always believed that one of his roles was calming
royaled waters. And he even had a little scientific trick
that he learned, which is how a small layer of
oil on the surface of water makes it calmer. And
so in his walking stick he would put a little
(06:34):
cruet of oil in one of the chambers and have
a little button. So if he stood in front of
Clapham Pond, say in England or river, he could wave
his walking stick and then secretly press a button and
the waters would get calmer for him. That became a metaphor.
At the Constitutional Convention, he played that role he had
(06:58):
played his whole life of trying to temper people's passions
calm things down. You need passionate people like a Sam
Adams to get you into a revolution, but you also
need somebody who spends his life figuring out how do
you calm wild waters? And at the Convention he was
(07:19):
particularly good at bringing contending people to his backyard, sitting
under the shade of the tree, telling stories, sometimes pointless stories,
but he would calm down the passions.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
In the first episode, we heard about how Franklin's scientific
background taught him that imperfection shouldn't stop one from moving forward,
for example, voting for the Constitution, because the process of
experimentation involved continual improvement upon an idea. Walter noted that
his vote to move the imperfect Constitution into action was
(07:56):
also the result of a long life and a healthy
dose of humility.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
He said, when we were young tradesmen here in Philadelphia,
and we had a joint of wood or a table
that didn't fully hold together, you take a little from
one side and shave a little from the other, until
you had a joint that would hold together for centuries.
And so too we hear this convention must each part
(08:21):
was some of our demands. There were things that he
believed in, such as a single chamber legislature instead of
a House and a Senate, but he changes his mind.
He ends up proposing the compromise of having a House
of representatives as proportional votes versus a Senate in which
the equal votes per state, an idea that the Connecticut
(08:43):
delegation proposed had gone down in flames. But when Franklin
does it in the detailed way that he proposed it
and it passed, he gets the balance just right. He
gave a speech he said, I'm not sure I'll ever
approve it, for having lived long experienced many instances of
being obliged to change my opinion on important subjects which
(09:07):
I thought I was right but found out otherwise. It's
that notion that you don't have to go to war
and go to battle over every single thing. You should
be willing to say I might be wrong on these things,
I might have some humility. Let all compromise and see
if we can agree on things.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
That seems like a manifestation of his experience and also
of his pr mastery and sort of understanding that the
Constitution is also something you have to sell to people.
You have to sell it as an imperfect document, and
to get ahead of that and say, yes, you will
see imperfections at it, but it's the best thing we're
going to get.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
Yeah, it's the best thing that can come out of
human hand. One of the things he learned early in
life was the importance of humility, or is he sometimes
put it at least having the pretense of humility. You
might pause for a second and say, well, I could
be wrong about that. Let me indulge the wisdom of
people around me and see if we can come to
(10:06):
an accommodation. And that's not very heroic. That doesn't get
you on cable TV these days, fighting for the last
perfect thing you want. But it's the way democracies get made.
Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make
great democracies.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
I want to make sure we don't pass over this moment,
that the idea that Franklin was the only viable candidate
to be the leader of the early United States other
than Washington, and he said I removed myself from this competition.
Did that echo come up for you at all when
Biden did the same. I mean, people have pulled out
(10:45):
for different reasons, but has anyone done it in that
explicit way.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Well, both Franklin and Washington, there's a lot of credit
in their careers. Franklin during the Constitutional Convention realizes that
he's too old to take charge and be the first
president and wants Washington to do it. Then, of course, famously,
at the end of Washington's second term, he says, all right,
(11:08):
I'm gonna step aside. I'm going to be like Cincinnatus,
the old Roman, and go back to my farm. That
notion of voluntarily forsaking power is at the heart of
what a democracy is, a peaceful transfer of power and
people who are in it not for themselves and for power,
(11:32):
but for the democracy itself.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
You see that in.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Benjamin Franklin, and then you see it again in George Washington,
And nowadays it's important to do what Biden did at
times and step aside and on certainly when we look
at our elections, to believe in the peaceful transfer of
power when.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
We come back.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Franklin addresses the biggest mistake on his life's list of
errata and shows us that you can change for the
better at any age. So after the Constitutional Convention, I mean,
it's just extraordinary how long he's lived and how much
he's accomplished at this point. But there's sort of one
(12:13):
more turn left for him, in a sense, his becoming
an abolitionist.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Throughout his life, he had kept this ledger of errors
he had made and how he had rectified. It begins
with him running away from his intenture to his brother.
He rectifies it by taking care of his brother's son
after his brother dies.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Well, the last.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Great errata, more than an erato, a moral deep laughed,
was tolerating slavery. Franklin was not as advanced as Don
Adams and others were. He's certainly more advanced than Jefferson
and some of the Virginians were. And then he becomes
(12:54):
truly at the forefront when he takes over the Society
for the Abolition of slavery and says, not only do
we have to abolish slavery, we have to have all
sorts of actions that will bring freed slaves into the
educated and working mainstream of our middle class. And he
(13:15):
writes very long in detailed methods of making sure that
we get the formerly enslaved people into an equal position
in society, to find employment, to find internships. And it
may have not been the most profound ethical theory ever,
(13:36):
but it was a very practical one, and it was
totally intertwined to democracy, to believing more than any of
the other founders, he believed in the wisdom of the
common person and that we should have as much democracy
as possible. And so at the end of his life
(14:00):
he starts writing these tracks about how bad slavery is.
And just as his very first published writings were done
as hoaxes under a pseudonym Silence do Good Letters when
he was a teenager, his last great publication was once
again a hoax under a pseudonym, which was a letter
(14:23):
from the Divan of Algiers in which he's talking in
the voice of an Arab leader defending the right to
enslave captured Christians. And what he's doing is eviscerating the
arguments made by some of the Southern senators against the
petition he had presented for the abolition of slavery.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
And I feel like there's two questions in that evolution.
I think people today would ask why did it take
till the end of his life for him to get there?
And what enabled him to evolve in that way?
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Well, Franklin often of He wrote one essay early on
which was not very good and was anti German, anti immigrant,
also showed not much sympathy for the enslaved. And then
he revised it and he said, I had a natural
proclivity for my own race. But you may think, why
(15:21):
is that? Why didn't I question it? Why did I
feel this way? And One of the things that helps
him on his evolution is he does get involved in
these schools for the education of the children of freed
slaves in the seventeen forties seventeen fifties, and he's amazed
at the power of education. And he writes about the
(15:45):
great minds of these young children and how well they do,
and he says that helped change my mind. Franklin said,
my morality is a simple and a pragmatic one. The
best way we can serve our creator is dedicate your
life to making things better for the people around you,
(16:07):
for serving other people, and to give opportunities for each
person to rise in the world the way he did.
One of the beauties of Benjamin Franklin is that he's
part of the moral arc of America. He's continually improving
as we are as a nation, and usually a slight
(16:28):
bit ahead.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
And there's something about doing that into your seventies and
eighties that also implies that it never stops.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
I think he felt he was on a never ending
quest for self improvement, self knowledge, for learning things, but
also on a never ending quest to bend the moral
arc of his life towards better things. And I think
that should be a template for our country. That notion
(16:56):
of continuing self improvement of both ourselves in our civic
lives is one of the important things that Benjamin Franklin
teaches us.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
This is something that I feel as a little bit
in the air right now when national politics is so
divisive that people will say, focus on your community, focus
on the people around you. And Franklin did focus on
the most national politics, but it feels like he built
his outlook around his community and making changes in his
(17:29):
local environment.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yes, he felt that politics would work best from the
ground up when you start with, as he put it,
little things like keeping the streets swept. You see why
we all have to work together at the community level.
And he felt that would be a model for how
a big politics would work. That we would all understand
(17:52):
what can we do in a practical way to give
everybody an opportunity to have a good life. Education was
very much a private thing people could afford, it would pay,
and he said, no, we have to have an academy
for the education of youths because education is not just
an individual benefit. It benefits the whole community. Likewise, fire protection,
(18:15):
all the things that would hold a community together. He said,
let's just find practical ways to do it rather than
politicizing it. We're still fighting about that. Well, should there
be national health, should there be public health things? Should
we have insurance associations? And Franklin always felt that you
(18:37):
could give people a sense of individualism but also a
sense that they could work together as a community.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
One of the things that you return to in the
book is his comfort with democracy. And he's more comfortable
with democracy than some of the other founders. But now
we have some questions about too much democracy, too much populism.
Modern political figures take from Franklin. He did resist pure populism.
(19:07):
There was a paston Boy's Revolt at one point, it's
almost like the Tea Party re volt, in which it
was anti immigrant and they were marching to Philadelphia, and
he helped raise a force that would stop them. And
he realized it was up to each one of us,
all of us, to have both a celebration of democracy
(19:29):
but also the civic attributes, the feel for the common good,
the feel for the security of our society that would
help protect it from populist or for that matter, authoritarian
or aristocratic excesses.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
He didn't care for a mob No, he really didn't
like mob rule. Even the Boston Tea Party that kind
of appalled him, because he was at heart somebody who
wanted moderation. When you put together the sense of founding
this country, you need the most passionate people, and you
have Samuel Adams and John Adams and really smart people
(20:09):
like Jefferson and Hamilton, and people of high rectitude like Washington.
But it's also useful to have the Franklins who know
how to pull people together. And well, maybe they're two ingratiating,
but it could be worse things in life.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
One of the ways people perceive him is through the
eyes of these sort of maxims and industry, and it
can make them sound a bit like a schoolmarm, like
a person who's always going around instructing people about how
they should behave And yet you look at his relationships
and the clubs and the communities that he built around
himself wherever he went, how did he manage to sort
(20:45):
of pull people into his orbit.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
When growing up in Puritan Boston, it was a very
dogmatic time. Things were handed down. The preachers told you
what was right and wrong. The opposite for him was
being open minded not being sure of yourself until you
test it all of your theories, and that means that
(21:09):
as you go through life, what looks acceptable is no
longer acceptable because you've tested it a bit more.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Did that in any way draw you to them? You
don't strike me as extremely dogmatic.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Yeah, I'm not very dogmatic. I was a journalist for many,
many years, and I tried.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Not to be partisan.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I tried to be open minded about everybody I covered,
from Ronald Reagan to Ted Kennedy. So Ben Franklin appealed
to me. I think we've lost that ability in our
democracy to be as open minded as we should be.
People grab on to a dogmatic view of the world,
(21:51):
to their preferred cable channel or their end of the
talk radio dial. With the evidence they get reinforces their
own dogma, rather than being open to all ideas, all
evidence the way Benjamin Franklin was.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
And if that open mindedness feels a little bit like
an endangered species right now, do you have a sense
of what the steps would be to try to bring
it back.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
I think Benjamin Franklin would realize that we all have
a shared set of values at the local level, that
our potholes and dirty streets aren't partisan one way or
the other, and so I think he would want to
help restore democracy neighborhood by neighborhood by having more civic
(22:38):
associations to support their local hospital or their local firefighters,
just the way he did. I think the poison and
partisanship in our national politics has seat down to some
extent at the local level. I think Franklin would say
it could also work in reverse. We focus on what's
(22:59):
really good for our neighborhoods and our communities, then we
can leach the poison out of the national politics at
some point.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
When we come back.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
We read Benjamin Franklin's reviews. Is there anything that surprised
you over the years since the book came out in
terms of what people find in it or what they
pull out of it and express to you.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
One of things that surprises me a bit is that
the most passionate people who are the most partisan sometimes
embrace the book. Elon Mosk thought it was his favorite,
said he loved the book, And sometimes I feel like saying, Okay,
read it again, because it's not just about following your passion.
(23:50):
It's combining your passion with a little bit of humility,
so that you try to understand other people's passions as
well and find the common ground.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Maybe that's the fatal flo on Benjamin Franklin. He gave
us too much to work with, too many things for
you to grab onto to make your own Franklin philosophy.
You mentioned not canonizing Benjamin Franklin, and this actually brings
to mind. There was one point where he's in a
kind of gloomy state of mind and his friend's a
doctor and he writes, do you please yourself with the
(24:20):
fancy that you're doing good. You're mistaken. Half the lives
you save are not worth saving, which does point to
that he had complex moods just like anyone else. He
wasn't just a sunny, happy, go lucky guy, right.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
There was at times a little bit of gloominess in him,
at times, some anger in him, but he knew how
to channel it. He wasn't a brooding sort. And in general,
his optimism and it's just his cheery nature and his
desire to please people help define who he is.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
And he was a detailed person.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
From his earliest civic assotion ciations to his negotiations in France.
He would micromanage every little bit of the ammunition and
the loans, and when he came up with plans for
things to be, sometimes twenty or thirty pages of how
it should work. Because while a lot of people think
(25:19):
God is in the great vision, he also realized that
God was in the details. That it really mattered that
you become geeky, that you put down every rule and regulation,
whether it's for how should the Academy of Youth in
Philadelphia teach swimming? To how should the French resupply our ammunition.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
It's almost like everything was an invention. The world was
there to be invented exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
He was a tinkerer and then an inventor, and then
just somebody who was ingenius in understanding how details wove
together to form the whole, and whether it's the flu
of the Franklin stove and how much it should be heated,
or whether it was the details of the Treaty of
(26:04):
Alliance with France. He liked to devise things. He liked
to be involved with the invention of things.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
It's clear that Walter Isaacson admires Franklin, and we had
talked about him sharing an anti dogmatic view of the
world with his subject, but I wondered if they shared
also a quality common among people who write about the.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
World for a living.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
You describe Franklin as graced and afflicted with the traits
so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift
and Addison One's too often of wanting to participate in
the world while also remaining a detached observer. And now
I wonder how much were you writing about yourself?
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Oh? Totally.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I mean one of the things when you're a journalist,
like I've been most of my career, is you realize
you're not in the arena and you become a bit detached.
You're just watching other people do things, perhaps even trying
to have a veneer of objectivity, as if you don't
have a dog in that hunt.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
You're just observing.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
And I think there's something yearning that we have, or
I had in that position of maybe I should be
in the arena and maybe, like Addison's Weft or Franklin,
maybe now should get more involved in things. So I
understood Franklin's evolution from being a humorous, wry poor Richard
(27:28):
Almanac writing observer of the foibles of the elite to
being somebody who then went into politics and statecraft.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
It kind of brings to mind something from your own
story when you moved from Washington back to New Orleans,
and then later you got involved in post Katrina New
Orleans and tried to help the city recover. And that
feels very Ben Franklin to me, getting involved in your
local community. I'm wondering if that move felt that way
to you, to try to return to what you can
(28:00):
affect in the world around you.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yes, I knew that I was never going to run
for national office or run for president and do things,
but I figured, how do you then get more involved?
And then Katrina happened, and my really beloved Tone Down
was flooded, my childhood home was flooded, and I went
back and I became the vice chairman of the Louisiana
(28:23):
Recovery Authority, and then.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Moved back to New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Maybe some people will look at our current political climb
and say, I've got to run for Senate or something.
But I think the way most of us can do
it is say, let me be involved in the things
that make our civic life better. I think we can
all get more engaged in the civic life of our community,
which is the way Benjamin Franklin started his road to
(28:50):
defining American democracy. And even if we're not going to
run for Senate or run for president, that's the pathway
to applying the life lessons from ben Franklin to the
needs we now have in a troubled democracy.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I think part of.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
What's so interesting about Franklin is that he seems to
go in and out of fashion.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Franklin's age of Enlightenment, which was very practical, very empirical,
very scientific, gets replaced in the early eighteen hundreds by
an era that values romanticism more than rationality, and so
Franklin a bit goes out of style. The romantic poets
make fun of him. I think it was the poet
(29:32):
John Keats said that he was just a man of
thrifty maxims. Franklin was and never a sublime man. But
I think we see the pendulum swinging back and forth
through American history. But the middle class values of industry
and honesty and frugality, and of civic mindedness and having
(29:55):
a local police and fire departments that are supported the
these are not lowly mundane values. These are fundamental values
to keeping a democracy on an even deeal.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
And in his own time among some of his peers,
Franklin was never really in fashion. John Adams, the second
President of the United States, fellow author of the Declaration
of Independence, and sharer of a hotel room, while having
a cold thought Franklin might be too open minded.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
John Adams had been his antagonist, a friend and sort
of a rival for power throughout the Revolution. And Adams
was a very passionate religious person, and initially he looked
down on Franklin's sort of vague tolerance of all religions.
(30:50):
But eventually, after Franklin dies, even John Adams mellows on him.
He realizes that there's something beautiful about Franklin's outlook. Franklin
believed in a God that created everybody, and he said,
if that's what the Good Lord did, then everybody is
(31:13):
worth equal respect. And so the best way to be religious,
the best way to serve the Lord, is to be
tolerant of different religions in different ethnic groups. That notion
of religious toleration initially offended deeply spiritual religious people. There
was one historian, Charles Angoff, who makes fun of Franklin
(31:37):
and says all that he really contributed to America was
this sort of good natured religious tolerance. What heavens, that
is the essential thing that America gave to the world.
In a period in which most countries had established religions
and would fight religious wars. Country that not only tolerated,
(32:02):
but respected each person's right to speak and to worship
as they pleased.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
This was a.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Whole new thing. And during his lifetime Franklin donated to
the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia.
And one point to the new hall that was being
built next Independence Hall, which was for visiting preachers. He said,
if the muffed eye of Constantinople were to send somebody
here to teach us ismam, we should listen and we
(32:30):
should learn. And on his deathbad he was the largest
individual contributor to make the Israel Synagogue, the first synagogue
built in Philadelphia. The concept of good natured religious tolerance
was actually no small advance for civilization back then in
the eighteenth century. It was the greatest of contributions to
(32:53):
rise not only from the Enlightenment, but from the founding
of America, the nation not as a tribe, but as
out of many, one epluribus union, and that notion that
people of all different faiths, of all different backgrounds get
to come here and get to be equal citizens. That
(33:14):
tolerance and respect for different ways of doing things becomes
America's gift.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
At its best. But it has to keep finding its
best over and over again.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
It does, especially now when we're falling prey to some
of the sectarian intolerance, the tribalism, even the nationalism that
sort of says we don't like people from different cultures
coming here. That is anathema to the democracy that Benjamin
(33:46):
Franklin and others created two hundred and fifty three hundred
years ago. When Franklin was dying, he helped organize the
preyed for Independence Day, and he helped make sure that
it was left by all the different denominations so it
could show this idea of religious tolerance. And so too,
(34:09):
when he died, every preacher, minister and preach in Philadelphia
linked arms with the rabbi of the Jews and march
with his casket to the grave. That what he was
fighting for back then, and that's of course what was
still fighting for in the world today.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
This show is based on the writing and research of
Walter Isaacson, so stedd by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed
and sound design by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our
consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs is our editor. Social media by
Dara Potts.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
The show was.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive
producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it
was executive produced by Mangeshtetikadur, with an assist from Other
Volition Kostaslinos and Kate Osborn. Special thanks to Amanda Urban,
Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Kerrie Lieberman,
(35:10):
Nathan Otowski and Ali Gavin. And if you like podcasts
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 at
Shellgame dot co. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be
sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Thanks so much for listening.
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