The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  But Ben Franklin is not an aristocrat. He loves “we, the middling people,” so he becomes friends with all the printers and Dr. Johnson and David Hume, the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment. He is already a bit of a celebrity. And, weirdly, he replicates his home life in England, because he has Deborah Franklin as his common-law wife in America. And in London he has Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, who sets up house with him, and he lives with her there.

  DR: With his common-law wife, he had two children, a son who dies young—

  WI: Frankie.

  DR:—and then a daughter, and then he had the illegitimate son with somebody whom we don’t know. And over in London—

  WI: He has no children there, but he has a family and basically adopts Polly Stevenson, who is Margaret Stevenson’s daughter.

  DR: While he’s over there, he’s trying to make the case that we shouldn’t tax the colonies so much. Then he gets into a problem because the Stamp Act is proposed by Parliament, and Benjamin Franklin is supposed to be against it. [The Stamp Act, passed in 1765, taxed the paper used by the colonists for printed documents and newspapers.] What happens?

  WI: This is something everybody in this room can relate to. His great strength, but sometimes his problem, was that he always believed you could find a middle ground and compromise on things.

  DR: You can’t do that?

  WI: You cannot on the Stamp Act, apparently. He sort of goes along with it and then there’s a blowup in Pennsylvania: “Hey, you were supposed to fight taxation, and look what you’re doing. You’re kowtowing to Parliament.” By having left the colonies and gone to England, he has lost touch with his constituents.

  DR: He’s over there for more than a dozen years.

  WI: Yeah. And he’s lost touch with the fact that they’re becoming more and more radical. Then he has to get the Stamp Act repealed, which he does.

  DR: He gets it repealed, and then people in England say, “You’re going to stay here. You’re one of us now. You’re more of an Englishman than an American.” But then what happens? Why does he become unpopular in England and have to leave?

  WI: He becomes more radicalized by the late 1770s, because various ministers for the colonies like Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough [later Marquess of Downshire] and others keep imposing taxes from London. [Hill served as secretary of state for the colonies from 1768 to 1772.]

  And then he gets involved in a complicated affair I won’t get into, which involves some letters from the royal governor of Massachusetts called the Hutchinson Letters, which he leaks. [Franklin leaked the letters to Samuel Adams, and they were published in the Boston Gazette, creating a political uproar.]

  He gets called in front of what’s called the Cockpit in Parliament. Imagine the Senate Foreign Relations Hearing Room but writ large as a battlefield.

  He’s called for a hearing and is humiliated. He’s refusing to dress up for the proceedings. He’s wearing this blue frock coat. And he gets so upset that in April of 1775 he sails back to America.

  And when he gets home, nobody knows quite if he will declare for independence. Because in 1775, two-thirds of the people in the colonies were in favor of sticking with Britain.

  DR: Because he had lived in England so long, did some people in the colonies think he was a spy?

  WI: They think he is a spy. They’re not sure which way he’s going to go. Sam and John Adams are like, “Whoa, is he going to be with us or against us?”

  The reason it’s complicated is that illegitimate son we talked about, who I said was becoming very aristocratic, does indeed become the Loyalist governor of New Jersey. Franklin is waiting to have a meeting with his son William, and he tells William, “I’m now abandoning the cause of unity and I’m going to become a rebel,” and then makes a big declaration in 1775 that he’s on the side of independence.

  DR: He gets elected to the Second Continental Congress, and he’s appointed to a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence.

  WI: That’s been one of the times that Congress really created a good committee. It has Jefferson, John Adams, and Franklin on it, along with two others.

  DR: Jefferson writes the Declaration, but Franklin is a printer and a writer, so he edits it.

  WI: In this building is the coolest document I’ve ever dealt with. It’s the first draft of the Declaration of Independence—Jefferson’s first draft that he submits to Franklin and Adams.

  He writes a wonderful letter to Franklin—even though they’re living next door in Philadelphia—saying, “Would the good Dr. Franklin, in all of his wisdom, please look over this draft?” People were nicer to editors back then than when I was an editor. Franklin looks at it, and as you know, there’s that second paragraph, which is awesome.

  DR: Jefferson writes, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” and Franklin as an editor says, “ ‘Sacred and undeniable’ is three words. Let’s make it ‘self-evident.’ ”

  WI: If you look at the draft, there’s Franklin’s printer’s pen—you know, heavy black printer’s pen that you use to do backslashes. If you’re an old editor like me, you know how to backslash something, which means you’re really taking it out. And he writes “self-evident,” not simply to save words, but because he wanted to show that we were creating a new type of nation based on rationality and reason, not on the dictates of a religion.

  He had been friends with David Hume, as I said, when he was in London, and Hume had come up with the notion of “self-evident truths.” But then the sentence goes on, and it says that all men are created equal, and you see what I am pretty sure is and most historians think is John Adams’s insert: “They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” So in the editing of this document you can see them balancing the role of divine providence and the role of rationality and reason, just in that half sentence.

  DR: Jefferson is much younger than Franklin—about thirty-seven years younger. He looks up to him. He takes his edits. When the Declaration of Independence is approved, and we declare independence, what happens to Franklin? Does he remain in Philadelphia?

  WI: Well, no. First of all, he gets to help print it, because he’s a printer. They use what we now call Franklin Gothic as the font. It’s a great thing.

  But in order to make that document any good, we had to get France in on our side in the war—even back then, France was a bit of a handful—and there’s only one person who can do it. He’s in his seventies. But he is larger than life.

  Other than Jerry Lewis, we have never produced somebody that the French were so gaga for. Poor Richard’s Almanack is selling more in France as Les Maximes du Bonhomme Richard Bonhomme Richard is the name of U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones’s ship because Franklin, when he gets there, gets it funded.

  They send Franklin over in a wartime journey across an ocean that is controlled by the enemy, meaning British warships. He goes to try to convince France to come in on our side.

  He does it in two ways. First of all, he realizes that the American Revolution, with all due respect to us, was not the central act in this play. This was part of a long war between Britain and France that had played out in the French and Indian War and had played out all over Europe, and that, naturally, we should get France in on our side. Like Henry Kissinger, he’s a brilliant balance-of-power diplomat.

  Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, is the French foreign minister. Franklin writes these letters that say, “Here’s the balance of power. If you and the Bourbon pact”—meaning France, the Netherlands, and Spain—“come in with us against England, you’ll have navigation rights on the Mississippi.” It is a perfect triangular balance.

  But then he does something really cool. He builds a printing press at Passy, his place in Paris, because he realizes you have to win the hearts and minds of the people. It was a battle for public diplomacy. He prints the Declaration and the Virginia Declaration of Rights, all the documents coming out of America, because the notion of liberty, equality,
fraternity is welling up in France.

  He wins the battle for French opinion. He brings one of these things to the steps of the Académie Française and hands it to Voltaire, who hugs him. There are about twenty thousand people there to watch this great meeting, at which point the French say, “Okay, okay, we’re in on your side.”

  DR: So France supports the United States, and we win the war. Does Franklin come back?

  WI: He doesn’t come back right away. [Franklin returned from Paris in 1785.]

  He has done this remarkable thing of weaving what you would call realism, meaning balance of power and diplomacy, and idealism, which is appealing to the ideals of people around the world. That’s what we still try to do today, but he does it better. So after the war, he negotiates a treaty with England.

  DR: By himself or with other people?

  WI: He does it with John Adams and John Jay.

  A spy who was working for the British, Edward Bancroft, is his valet. Franklin uses that by allowing the British to know that we might still stick with the French if they don’t sign fast.

  DR: They sign the Treaty of Paris in 1783, and he stays.

  WI: He loves science, and they’re doing balloon experiments and he can’t leave. So he and his grandson are there during the balloon experiments. They’re also all into this new romantic science, like mesmerism [a system of hypnotic induction], created by Franz Mesmer, and the king asks him to test out these things. So he becomes a scientist there for two years before he returns home.

  DR: His illegitimate son had an illegitimate son. That’s the grandson you mentioned?

  WI: Right. And he and his son are fighting over the affection of Temple, the grandson. When he finally does go home, William, the royal governor of New Jersey and estranged son of Ben Franklin, is now living in England in Portsmouth as a refugee Loyalist who had been traded to England. On the way home, taking Temple with him, the grandson, Franklin stops in Portsmouth, they divvy up the family proceeds, and he and the grandson head off to America.

  DR: He comes home, and what he finds in America is that the Articles of Confederation aren’t working so well.

  WI: They’re terrible. It’s a mess.

  DR: So they have a constitutional convention, and he managed to get invited to that.

  WI: He is eighty-one years old in 1787, and so he’s exactly twice as old as the other people—as the average age there—and he becomes the great sage at the Constitutional Convention, the person who pushes this notion of “we can find the common ground here.”

  He has a huge impact. The famous speech was the call for prayers, which he does partly because he just thinks it will calm everybody down. But the main thing he does is that the convention, as you know from your high school history, had broken down in that long, hot summer on the big state / little state issue and proportional representation, an equal vote for each state. And it’s unclear whether they’re going to get a constitution.

  Franklin gives one of the best speeches, which everybody here should read because you have to deal with this every day. He finally gets up. He’s been pretty quiet.

  He’s actually been in favor of a single house—just an elected House of Representatives, not the Senate—but he proposes a full compromise: a House of Representatives to provide proportional representation, direct election, and a Senate that has equal votes for all the states.

  He says, “When we were young tradesmen in Philadelphia, we had a joint of wood that didn’t quite fit together. You’d take a little from one side and then shave a little from others until you had a joint that would hold together for centuries. And so too, we here at this convention must each part with some of our demands if we’re going to have a constitution that will hold together.”

  And he makes the argument that compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. That’s the essence of how you put things together. Then he asks them to line up by state to sign on to it.

  And they do, every state. It was clever, because there were a lot of people against it, but the people who were against it were the ones who wanted voting by state. So, by voting by state, he gets basic unanimity.

  DR: So Franklin becomes the only person to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Treaty of Paris, and the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with the French. Is that right?

  WI: The four great documents—and the fifth, which he wrote, is the Albany Plan of Union in 1754. It was the first time somebody had proposed that the colonies should unite and form their own government.

  DR: When it’s over, he walks out of Independence Hall, and a woman comes up to him and says, “Mr. Franklin, what have you done?”

  WI: “What have you wrought in there?” Mrs. Powell says. “What have you given us?” And he says, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

  DR: He only lives a few more years after that. He dies at eighty-four. Was he a religious person? Was he a deist? Was he a Christian?

  WI: He wrestles with it like we all do. In the book, I talk about each phase of his religious thinking.

  For a long while, as a young person, he’s a deist, which is sort of the Enlightenment science view of religion that there’s a Creator who made everything beautiful with all the laws of the universe, but our Creator is not a personal god that you can pray to really hard and the Seahawks will win the Super Bowl or something. God doesn’t intervene. He’s just the great Creator.

  Then Franklin says something interesting. He decides that deism is not for him. He said, “Even if it happens to be true, it’s not useful”—meaning it’s more useful to have a more fervent religious received wisdom from God.

  That was the interesting thing about Franklin. Almost everything he did, his first question was, “Is it useful?” He said, “I can’t wrestle with all the metaphysical questions of whether God exists or not, but I know what the most useful way is to have a religion.” And so he becomes nondenominational. During his life, he donates to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia.

  DR: What was his view on slavery? Was he not a slave owner at one point?

  WI: Yeah. And that’s interesting too, of course. He made a lot of errors in his life. He called them “errata,” and he kept a chart of them.

  The first error he makes is running away from his brother James when he was apprenticed to him and going to Philadelphia without permission. Then he has a second column in which he says, “How did I make up for it?” The way he makes up for it is that when James is dying, Franklin promises to educate his son. And he does, and puts him in business.

  All through his life he does this. But he made one great mistake that he said was larger than them all, which is he compromises on the issue of slavery.

  In his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, he had allowed advertising related to slavery [including slaves for sale and runaway alerts]. In fact, one of the ads says, “Inquire at the house of Deborah Read,” meaning his father-in-law’s house. He’d owned two household slaves. He frees them—one of them just leaves—and he frees them in his will. But he realizes he had compromised at the Constitutional Convention.

  He said, “Look, we’re going to not be able to solve this in the Constitution until you have the compromise.” That’s the one thing left. And so, at age eighty-one, he becomes president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, because he wants to try to rectify the moral error he had made.

  DR: His image is very well known because he had this long hair and kind of a balding head. Was that an affectation?

  WI: It was an affectation because he did not want to be pretentious, did not want to put on airs. He said, “We’re trying to create a new type of people who don’t have aristocratic habits.”

  DR: No wigs.

  WI: No powdered wigs. And we don’t have titles. It’s all going to be common people wearing [working clothes like the printer’s traditional] leather apron, including the blue coat he wears when he’s at the Cockp
it, which he puts back on when he signs the Treaty of Paris—as a symbol, this old coat.

  But when he goes to Paris for the first time, he’s lived in Philadelphia, London, and Boston. He’s not a wilderness dude. He likes Market Street, not the backwoods.

  But he realizes that the French have read Rousseau once too often, and they sort of think of Americans as the natural philosophers prancing around in the wilderness—“the natural man” of Rousseau. [The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) associated virtue with the natural state.]

  So when he goes to France, he wears no wig, but he wears a coonskin cap and a backwoods coat that somebody had given him. And in Paris, all the women start doing the coiffeur à la Franklin, which is making your hair look like a coonskin cap. I mean, he was pretty good.

  DR: If you look back on the Founding Fathers—let’s say Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin—who do you think actually had the biggest impact on the country at the time, and how would you assess Franklin?

  WI: Washington, probably. But let me answer in a slightly different way, which gets back to the innovators.

  When I was doing Franklin, I realized it wasn’t about one person. What you do, especially in business, but also in politics, is you build a team.

  The Founders are the greatest team ever fielded. You have somebody of great, high rectitude: George Washington. You have a couple of really brilliant people: Madison, Jefferson. You have very passionate visionaries: Sam Adams, his cousin John. And then you have somebody who can bring them all together: Ben Franklin.

  If you look at Intel, it’s like having Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, and Gordon Moore, Intel’s cofounders. You have to have a team that holds together. So I would be loath to say who’s the most important, but I think Franklin is indispensable, because there was nobody else in that role.