Jul

8

Benjamin Franklin

Filed Under Reading Room 

Benjamin FranklinI don’t make a habit of picking up books with more than a few hundred pages, but I’ve been wanting to read former Time editor Walter Isaacson’s 590-page Benjamin Franklin for quite some time. Thanks to a long flight back and forth between Israel last month, I was able to do just that.

“Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us,” says Isaacson in the opening pages of this truly engaging read. I definitely appreciated the first half of the book more than the last half, most likely because the first half had so many details about Franklin and the historical events surrounding his life that I was not aware of.

Franklin is credited with doing a lot. From coming up with the idea for fire stations and libraries, to establishing the matching grant and the middle class, he would also, in January of 1751, start what is known today as the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to being “American’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist…,” Isaacson says Franklin was also “America’s first great publicist who continued to reinvent himself.”


Industry and Frugality
Benjamin Franklin was all about industry and frugality. These words are reoccurring throughout his life as both a mantra to live by and words to guide others by. He thought, along with the Puritans, that making money was a way to glorify God.

“A man [is] sometimes more generous when he has little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.”

The making of money and the promotion of virtue. These were the two goals of Poor Richard’s Almanack, which is where Franklin coined the term “doing well by doing good.” Sounds familiar, eh?

Never wanting money alone to be a pursuit, Franklin developed a little test for how he should respond if he was offered money to publish something when it violated his own principles.

To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from my pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind for the sake of gaining a more comfortable subsistence.

Influence
I think Issacson underestimates the impact that Franklin’s dad, Josiah, had on him as a young boy. In one story, Franklin recalls the times at the dinner table when his father “liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse which might tend to improve the minds of his children.” Says Isaacson, “Benjamin would get so engrossed in these conversations that he would forget the food that was served which instilled a ‘perfect inattention’–his own words–to food for the rest of his life.”

It was these times as a boy that would influence Franklin later in life to start what he called “junto” clubs. These gatherings of friends and neighbors would prove to be fertile soil for so many of Franklin’s achievements, especially his scientific pursuits. He didn’t keep his scientific experimenting to himself–he would commission his junto friends to get in on the action and see what they could develop too.

Because “industry” was so ingrained into his thinking, Franklin’s scientific pursuits were “pure intellectual curiosity” and then he would “seek a practical application for it.”

Issacson is wise to point out that “part of Franklin’s importance as a scientist was the clear writing he employed.” Franklin was insane about his attention to detail. He would draft copious notes on everything from his invention of a stove–and how every single piece of it works–to instructions for how his wife could better use the weather rod on the roof to predict a storm.

“People will eventually give you the credit if you don’t try to claim it at the time. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”

“Human felicity is produced…by little advantages that occur every day.”

“Throughout his life,” writes Isaacson, “Franklin would find himself torn (and amused) by the conflict between [Franklin's] professed desire to acquire the virtue of humility and his natural thirst for acclaim.”

Faith
Franklin was not the most devoted follower of faith–any faith really. He did believe in God, and would be considered a deist by most interpretations. Because of his ardent attention to being industrious, he was more interested in how faith could be applied to life’s behavior rather than faith’s belief. Once, after some badgering from a friend, Franklin attended a church for five weeks in a row. He found the sermons “uninteresting and unedifying since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim to be rather to make us good Presbyterians than good citizens.”

The Middle Class
Noting Franklin’s somewhat rebel persona and his “inbred resistance to establishment authority,” Issacson goes as far as crediting Franklin with inventing the middle class. “Not awed by rank, [Franklin] was eager to avoid importing to America the rigid class structure of England. Instead, even as a retired would-be gentlemen, he continued in his writings and letters to extol the diligence of the middling class of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and leather-aprons.”

As Issacson also notes, Franklin accurately predicted that “increased productivity would keep ahead of population growth, thus making everyone better off as the country grew.” “…What would restrain America’s population growth in the future was likely to be wealth rather than poverty, because richer people tended to be more ‘cautious’ about getting married and having children.”

In an humorous article written for the Gazette about Britain’s exporting of convicts to America–justified as a way to help the colonies grow–Franklin wrote that “such a tender parental concern in our Mother Country for the welfare of her children calls aloud for the highest returns of gratitude.”

So [Franklin] proposed that America ship a boatload of rattlesnakes back to England. Perhaps the change of climate might tame them, which is what the British claimed would happen to the convicts. Even if not, the British would get the better deal, “for the rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts his mischief, which the convict does not.”

Franklin and the Poor
Franklin was also interested in how the poor fit into society. He asked whether

“the laws peculiar to England which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence.” It was “godlike” and laudable, he added, “to relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures,” but might it not in the end “provide encouragements for laziness?” He added a cautionary tale about the New Englanders who decided to get rid of the blackbirds that were eating the corn crop. The result was that the worms the blackbirds used to eat proliferated and destroyed the grass and grain crops.

Saint or Sinner
Franklin’s son, his son’s son, and even his grandson’s son, were all illegitimate children. Talk about sins of the father!

An international traveler (he lived in France for much of his older adult life as he brokered the peace agreements between France, England and America), Franklin was an isolated man with a bulging rolodex. He didn’t know how to love or be loved, but flirted with the idea of love throughout his life. Although he wasn’t present during her death or funeral (he was in France), his own wife was more of a distant pen-pal than a close companion. Even his children were relationally distant.

It seems like men and women of historical significance always have some sort of shortcoming. Some sort of sacrifice that was made on behalf of their greater contribution to the world. For Benjamin Franklin, I think it was his genius that got him into trouble. And into the history books.

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