Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set
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George Lange/Contour by Getty Images: 171
Courtesy Pixar: 238
Kim Kulish: 305
John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images: 327
Michael O’Neill: 340
Monica M. Davey—EPA: 358
Jin Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images: 368
Bob Pepping/Contra Costa Times/Zuma Press: 411
Bebeto Matthews—AP: 444
Courtesy of Mike Slade: 452
Kimberly White—Reuters: 490
John G. Mabanglo/EPA: 560
A Portfolio of Diana Walker Photos
For almost thirty years, photographer Diana Walker has had special access to her friend Steve Jobs. Here is a selection from her portfolio.
At his home in Woodside, 1982: He was such a perfectionist that he had trouble buying furniture.
In his kitchen: “Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western world as well as its capacity for rational thought.”
At Stanford, 1982: “How many of you are virgins? How many of you have taken LSD?”
With the Lisa: “Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
With John Sculley in Central Park, 1984: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”
In his Apple office, 1982: Asked if he wanted to do market research, he said, “No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”
At NeXT, 1988: Freed from the constraints at Apple, he indulged his own best and worst instincts.
With John Lasseter, August 1997: His cherubic face and demeanor masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled that of Jobs.
At home working on his Boston Macworld speech after regaining command of Apple, 1997: “In that craziness we see genius.”
Sealing the Microsoft deal by phone with Gates: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.”
At Boston Macworld, as Gates discusses their deal: “That was my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It made me look small.”
With his wife, Laurene Powell, in their backyard in Palo Alto, August 1997: She was the sensible anchor in his life.
At his home office in Palo Alto, 2004: “I like living at the intersection of the humanities and technology.”
From the Jobs Family Album
In August 2011, when Jobs was very ill, we sat in his room and went through wedding and vacation pictures for me to use in this book.
The wedding ceremony, 1991: Kobun Chino, Steve’s Sōtō Zen teacher, shook a stick, struck a gong, lit incense, and chanted.
With his proud father Paul Jobs: After Steve’s sister Mona tracked down their biological father, Steve refused ever to meet him.
Cutting the cake in the shape of Half Dome with Laurene and his daughter from a previous relationship, Lisa Brennan.
Laurene, Lisa, and Steve: Lisa moved into their home shortly afterward and stayed through her high school years.
Steve, Eve, Reed, Erin, and Laurene in Ravello, Italy, 2003: Even on vacation, he often withdrew into his work.
Dangling Eve in Foothills Park, Palo Alto: “She’s a pistol and has the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met. It’s like payback.”
With Laurene, Eve, Erin, and Lisa at the Corinth Canal in Greece, 2006: “For young people, this whole world is the same now.”
With Erin in Kyoto, 2010: Like Reed and Lisa, she got a special trip to Japan with her father.
With Reed in Kenya, 2007: “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever, which was that I really wanted to see Reed graduate.”
And just one more from Diana Walker: a 2004 portrait at his house in Palo Alto.
FOOTNOTES
1 Raskin died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, not long after Jobs was diagnosed with the disease.
2 The firm changed its name from frogdesign to frog design in 2000 and moved to San Francisco. Esslinger picked the original name not merely because frogs have the ability to metamorphose, but as a salute to its roots in the (f)ederal (r)epublic (o)f (g)ermany. He said that “the lowercase letters offered a nod to the Bauhaus notion of a non-hierarchical language, reinforcing the company’s ethos of democratic partnership.”
Kissinger: A Biography
The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
(with Evan Thomas)
Pro and Con
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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Copyright © 2003 by Walter Isaacson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Isaacson, Walter.
Benjamin Franklin and the invention of America : an American life / Walter Isaacson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Franklin, Benjamin, 1706–1790. 2. Statesmen—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1775–1783. 4. United States—Politics and government—1783–1789. 5. Scientists—United States—Biography. 6. Inventors—United States—Biography. 7. Printers—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
E302.6F8I83 2003
973.3’092—dc21
[B] 2003050463
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-6084-8
ISBN-10: 0-7432-6084-8
eISBN: 978-1-4516-7760-7
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
To Cathy and Betsy, as always…
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of America
CHAPTER TWO
Pilgrim’s Progress: Boston, 1706–1723
CHAPTER THREE
Journeyman: Philadelphia and London, 1723–1726
CHAPTER FOUR
Printer: Philadelphia, 1726–1732
CHAPTER FIVE
Public Citizen: Philadelphia, 1731–1748
CHAPTER SIX
Scientist and Inventor: Philadelphia, 1744–1751
CHAPTER SEVEN
Politician: Philadelphia, 1749–1756
CHAPTER EIGHT
Troubled Waters: London, 1757–1762
CHAPTER NINE
Home Leave: Philadelphia, 1763–1764
CHAPTER TEN
Agent Provocateur: London, 1765–1770
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rebel: London, 1771–1775
CHAPTER TWELVE
Independence: Philadelphia, 1775–1776
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Courtier: Paris, 1776–1778
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Bon Vivant: Paris, 1778–1785
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Peacemaker: Paris, 1778–1785
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sage: Philadelphia, 1785–1790
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Epilogue
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Conclusions
Cast of Characters
Chronology
Currency Conversions
Acknowledgments
Sources and Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Chapter One
Benjamin Franklin
and the Invention
of America
His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street. But wait a minute. There’s something more. Peel back a layer and we
can see him as a 65-year-old wry observer, sitting in an English country house, writing this scene, pretending it’s part of a letter to his son, an illegitimate son who has become a royal governor with aristocratic pretensions and needs to be reminded of his humble roots.
A careful look at the manuscript peels back yet another layer. Inserted into the sentence about his pilgrim’s progress up Market Street is a phrase, written in the margin, in which he notes that he passed by the house of his future wife, Deborah Read, and that “she, standing at the door, saw me and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous appearance.” So here we have, in a brief paragraph, the multilayered character known so fondly to his author as Benjamin Franklin: as a young man, then seen through the eyes of his older self, and then through the memories later recounted by his wife. It’s all topped off with the old man’s deft little affirmation—“as I certainly did”—in which his self-deprecation barely cloaks the pride he felt regarding his remarkable rise in the world.1
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington’s colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with oro-tund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time.
He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.
But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
Partly, it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues—diligence, frugality, honesty—of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.
But the image he created was rooted in reality. Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as “B. Franklin, printer.”
From these attitudes sprang what may be Franklin’s most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were some of his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called “the middling people.” Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens.
The complex interplay among various facets of Franklin’s character—his ingenuity and unreflective wisdom, his Protestant ethic divorced from dogma, the principles he held firm and those he was willing to compromise—means that each new look at him reflects and refracts the nation’s changing values. He has been vilified in romantic periods and lionized in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself.
Franklin has a particular resonance in twenty-first-century America. A successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity, he would have felt right at home in the information revolution, and his unabashed striving to be part of an upwardly mobile meritocracy made him, in social critic David Brooks’s phrase, “our founding Yuppie.” We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan for a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas. He would laugh at the latest joke about a priest and a rabbi, or about a farmer’s daughter. We would admire both his earnestness and his self-aware irony. And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, the pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues, and spiritual values.2
Some who see the reflection of Franklin in the world today fret about a shallowness of soul and a spiritual complacency that seem to permeate a culture of materialism. They say that he teaches us how to live a practical and pecuniary life, but not an exalted existence. Others see the same reflection and admire the basic middle-class values and democratic sentiments that now seem under assault from elitists, radicals, reactionaries, and other bashers of the bourgeoisie. They regard Franklin as an exemplar of the personal character and civic virtue that are too often missing in modern America.
Much of the admiration is warranted, and so too are some of the qualms. But the lessons from Franklin’s life are more complex than those usually drawn by either his fans or his foes. Both sides too often confuse him with the striving pilgrim he portrayed in his autobiography. They mistake his genial moral maxims for the fundamental faiths that motivated his actions.
His morality was built on a sincere belief in leading a virtuous life, serving the country he loved, and hoping to achieve salvation through good works. That led him to make the link between private virtue and civic virtue, and to suspect, based on the meager evidence he could muster about God’s will, that these earthly virtues were linked to heavenly ones as well. As he put it in the motto for the library he founded, “To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine.” In comparison to contemporaries such as Jonathan Edwards, who believed that men were sinners in the hands of an angry God and that salvation could come through grace alone, this outlook might seem somewhat complacent. In some ways it was, but it was also genuine.
Whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attributes is most important? These are questions just as vital for a self-satisfied age as they were for a revolutionary one.
Chapter Two
Pilgrim’s Progress
Boston, 1706–1723
The Franklins of Ecton
During the late Middle Ages, a new class emerged in the villages of rural England: men who possessed property and wealth but were not members of the titled aristocracy. Proud but without great pretension, assertive of their rights as members of an independent middle class, these freeholders came to be known as franklins, from the Middle English word “frankeleyn,” meaning freeman.1
When surnames gained currency, families from the upper classes tended to take on the titles of their domains, such as Lancaster or Salisbury. Their t
enants sometimes resorted to invocations of their own little turf, such as Hill or Meadows. Artisans tended to take their name from their labor, be it Smith or Taylor or Weaver. And for some families, the descriptor that seemed most appropriate was Franklin.
The earliest documented use of that name by one of Benjamin Franklin’s ancestors, at least that can be found today, was by his great-great-grandfather Thomas Francklyne or Franklin, born around 1540 in the Northamptonshire village of Ecton. His independent spirit became part of the family lore. “This obscure family of ours was early in the Reformation,” Franklin later wrote, and “were sometimes in danger of trouble on account of their zeal against popery.” When Queen Mary I was engaged in her bloody crusade to reestablish the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Franklin kept the banned English Bible tied to the underside of a stool. The stool could be turned over on a lap so the Bible could be read aloud, but then instantly hidden whenever the apparitor rode by.2