Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Stephen Covey, the guru of the genre, referred to Franklin’s system in developing his bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and a national chain of stores now sell “FranklinCovey Organizers” and other paraphernalia featuring Franklin’s ideas. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the self-help shelves of bookstores were filled with titles such as Ben’s Book of Virtues: Ben Franklin’s Simple Weekly Plan for Success and Happiness; Ben Franklin’s 12 Rules of Management: The Founding Father of American Business Solves Your Toughest Problems; Benjamin Franklin’s the Art of Virtue: His Formula for Successful Living; The Ben Franklin Factor: Selling One to One; and Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Principals for Successful Living from the Life of Benjamin Franklin.18

  In the academic world, Franklin was the subject of generally favorable books as the three hundredth anniversary of his birth approached. In The First American, H. W. Brands of Texas A&M sympathetically described the evolution of Franklin’s character in a solid and balanced narrative biography. “To genius he joined a passion for virtue,” he concluded. In 2002, Edmund S. Morgan, the retired and revered Sterling Professor of History at Yale, wrote a wonderfully astute character analysis based on an exhaustive reading of Franklin’s papers. “We may discover,” Morgan declared, “a man with a wisdom about himself that comes only to the great of heart.”19

  In the popular imagination, Franklin came to be viewed as a figure of fun, rather than as the serious thinker admired by Hume or the political manipulator resented by Adams. During an era that was at times trivial and untroubled, filled with sexual winks and unfettered entrepreneurship, Franklin was enlisted into the spirit. He became a jovial lecher dabbling in statecraft in such plays as 1776 and Ben Franklin in Paris, a sprightly old spokesman for everything from cookies to mutual funds, and a genial sage whose adages were designed to entertain rather than intimidate aspiring young workers.

  “Today we know Benjamin Franklin mainly from an old advertising image: an elderly man in knickers, long coat, and spectacles, with a bald crown and long hair—a zealot foolishly determined to fly a kite during a thunderstorm,” the historian Alan Taylor has written. “He no longer arouses either controversy or adulation—merely laughter. We only dimly sense his importance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the paragon of, and the pattern for, American middle-class values.”20

  To the social commentator David Brooks, this anodyne version of Franklin embodies both the entrepreneurial and moral tenor of America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He was the one historic figure from the American pantheon, Brooks wrote, “who would be instantly at home in an office park.”

  He’d probably join the chorus of all those techno-enthusiasts who claim that the internet and bio-tech breakthroughs are going to transform life on earth wonderfully; he shared that passion for progress. At the same time, he’d be completely at home with the irony and gentle cynicism that is the prevailing conversational tone in those buildings…

  But then, Franklin would be at home in much of contemporary America. He’d share the values of the comfortably middle class; he was optimistic, genial, and kind, and his greatest flaw was his self-approving complacency. One can easily picture him traipsing through a shopping mall enchanted by the cheerful abundance and the clever marketing. At the same time, he’d admire all the effort young Americans put into civic activism, and the way older Americans put religion to good use through faith-based community organizations.

  Franklin had been unfairly attacked over the years, Brooks concluded, by romantics whose real targets were capitalism and middle-class morality. “But now the main problem is excess Franklinism, and we’ve got to figure out how to bring to today’s America the tragic sense and the moral gravity that was so lacking in its Founding Yuppie.”21

  The Ledger Book

  This perceived lack of moral gravity and spiritual depth is the most serious charge against Franklin. In both his life and his writings, he sometimes displayed a lack of commitment, anguish, poetry, or soul. A sentence he wrote to his sister Jane in 1771 captured this complacency and dearth of passion: “Upon the whole, I am much disposed to like the world as I find it, and to doubt my own judgment as to what would mend it.”22

  His religious beliefs, especially early in life, were largely a calculus of what credos would prove useful for people to believe, rather than an expression of sincere inner convictions. Deism was appealing, but he discovered it was not all that helpful, so he gave it a moral gloss and seldom troubled his soul with questions about grace, salvation, the divinity of Christ, or other profound issues that did not lend themselves to practical inquiry. He was at the other extreme from the anguished soul-searching Puritans. As he had no factual evidence about what was divinely inspired, he settled instead for the simple creed that the best way to serve God was doing good to others.

  His moral beliefs were likewise plain and earthly, focused on practical ways to benefit others. He espoused the middle-class virtues of a shopkeeper, and he had little interest in proselytizing about higher ethical aspirations. He wrestled more with what he called “errata” than he did with sin.

  As a scientist, he had a feel for the mechanical workings of the world but little appreciation for abstract theories or the sublime. He was a great experimenter and clever inventor, with an emphasis on things useful. But he had neither the temperament nor the training to be a profound conceptualizer.

  In most of the endeavors of his soul and mind, his greatness sprang more from his practicality than from profundity or poetry. In science he was more an Edison than a Newton, in literature more a Twain than a Shakespeare, in philosophy more a Dr. Johnson than a Bishop Berkeley, and in politics more a Burke than a Locke.

  In his personal life as well, there was likewise a lack of soulful commitment and deep passion. He frequented many antechambers, but few inner chambers. His love of travel reflected the spirit of a young runaway, one who had run from his family in Boston, from Deborah when he first thought of marrying, and from William just before his wedding. Throughout his life he had few emotional bonds tying him to any one place, and he seemed to glide through the world the way he glided through relationships.

  His friendships with men often ended badly: his brother James, his friends John Collins and James Ralph, his printing partners Samuel Keimer and Hugh Meredith. He was a sociable man who liked clubs that offered enlightening conversations and activities, but the friendships he formed with his fellow men were more affable than intimate. He had a genial affection for his wife, but not enough love to prevent him from spending fifteen of the last seventeen years of their marriage an ocean away. His relationship with her was a practical one, as was the case with his London landlady, Margaret Stevenson. With his many women admirers, he preferred flirting rather than making serious commitments, and he retreated into playful detachment at any sign of danger. His most passionate relationship was with his son William, but that fire turned into ice. Only to his grandson Temple did he show unalloyed affection.

  He could also, despite his professed belief in the virtue of sincerity, come across as conniving. He wrote his first hoax at 16 and the last on his deathbed; he misled his employer Samuel Keimer when scheming to start a newspaper; he perfected indirection as a conversational artifice; and he utilized the appearance of virtue as well as its reality. “In a place and a time that celebrated sincerity while practicing insincerity, Franklin seemed far too accomplished at the latter,” Taylor notes. “Owing to his smooth manner and shifting tactics, Franklin invited suspicions far beyond his actual intent to trick.”23

  All of which has led some critics to dismiss even Franklin’s civic accomplishments as the mundane aspirations of a shallow soul. The apotheosis of such criticism is in Vernon Parrington’s famous Main Currents in American Thought:

  A man who is less concerned with the golden pavements of the City of God than that the cobblestones on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia should be well and evenly laid, who troubles less
to save his soul from burning hereafter than to protect his neighbors’ houses by organizing an efficient fire-company, who is less regardful of the light that never was on sea or land than of a new-model street lamp to light the steps of a belated wayfarer—such a man, obviously, does not reveal the full nature of human aspiration.24

  It is Parrington’s haughty use of the word “obviously” that provides us with a good launching point for a defense of Franklin. “Obviously,” perhaps, to Parrington and others of rarefied sensibility whose contributions to society are not so mundane as a library, university, fire company, bifocals, stove, lightning rod, or, for that matter, democratic constitutions. Their disdain is in part a yearning for the loftier ideals that could sometimes seem lacking in Franklin’s soul. Yet it is also, in part, a snobbery about the earthly concerns and middle-class values that he appreciated.

  So how are we, as Franklin the bookkeeper would have wished, to balance the ledger fairly? As he did in his own version of a moral calculus, we can list all the Pros on the other side and determine if, as I think is the case, they outweigh the Cons.

  First we must rescue Franklin from the schoolbook caricature of a genial codger flying kites in the rain and spouting homespun maxims about a penny saved being a penny earned. We must also rescue him from the critics who would confuse him with the character he carefully crafted in his Autobiography.25

  When Max Weber says that Franklin’s ethics are based only on the earning of more money, and when D.H. Lawrence reduces him to a man who pinched pennies and morals, they betray the lack of even a passing familiarity with the man who retired from business at 42, dedicated himself to civic and scientific endeavors, gave up much of his public salaries, eschewed getting patents on his inventions, and consistently argued that the accumulation of excess wealth and the idle indulgence in frivolous luxuries should not be socially sanctioned. Franklin did not view penny saving as an end in itself but as a path that permitted young tradesmen to be able to display higher virtues, community spirit, and citizenship. “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright,” both he and Poor Richard proclaimed.26

  To assess Franklin properly, we must view him, instead, in all his complexity. He was not a frivolous man, nor a shallow one, nor a simple one. There are many layers to peel back as he stands before us so coyly disguised, both to history and to himself, as a plain character unadorned by wigs and other pretensions.

  Let’s begin with the surface layer, the Franklin who serves as a lightning rod for the Jovian bolts from those who disdain middle-class values. There is something to be said—and Franklin said it well and often—for the personal virtues of diligence, honesty, industry, and temperance, especially when they are viewed as a means toward a nobler and more benevolent end.

  The same is true of the civic virtues Franklin both practiced and preached. His community improvement associations and other public endeavors helped to create a social order that promoted the common good. Few people have ever worked as hard, or done as much, to inculcate virtue and character in themselves and their communities.27

  Were such efforts mundane, as Parrington and some others charge? Perhaps in part, but in his autobiography, after recounting his effort to pave Philadelphia’s streets, Franklin provided an eloquent defense against such aspersions:

  Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that though dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.28

  Likewise, although a religious faith based on fervor can be inspiring, there is also something admirable about a religious outlook based on humility and openness. Charles Angoff has charged that “his main contribution to the religious question was little more than a good-natured tolerance.” Well, perhaps so, but the concept of good-natured religious tolerance was in fact no small advance for civilization in the eighteenth century. It was one of the greatest contributions to arise out of the Enlightenment, more indispensable than that of the most profound theologians of the era.

  In both his life and his writings, Franklin became a preeminent proponent of this creed of tolerance. He developed it with great humor in his tales and with an earnest depth in his life and letters. In a world that was then (as, alas, it still is now) bloodied by those who seek to impose theocracies, he helped to create a new type of nation that could draw strength from its religious pluralism. As Garry Wills argued in his book Under God, this “more than anything else, made the United States a new thing on earth.”29

  Franklin also made a more subtle religious contribution: he detached the Puritan spirit of industriousness from the sect’s rigid dogma. Weber, with his contempt for middle-class values, disdained the Protestant ethic, and Lawrence felt that Franklin’s demystified version of it could not sate the dark soul. This ethic was, however, instrumental in instilling the virtue and character that built a nation. “He remade the Puritan in him into a zealous bourgeois,” writes John Updike, whose novels explore these very themes, “and certainly this is his main meaning for the American psyche: a release into the Enlightenment of the energies cramped under Puritanism.” As Henry Steele Commager declared in The American Mind, “In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.”30

  So, does Franklin deserve the accolade, accorded by his great contemporary David Hume, of America’s “first philosopher”? To some extent, he does. Disentangling morality from theology was an important achievement of the Enlightenment, and Franklin was its avatar in America. In addition, by relating morality to everyday human consequences, Franklin laid the foundation for the most influential of America’s homegrown philosophies, pragmatism. His moral and religious thinking, when judged in the context of his actions, writes James Campbell, “becomes a rich philosophical defense of service to advance the common good.” What it lacked in spiritual profundity, it made up for in practicality and potency.31

  What about the charge that Franklin was too much of a compromiser instead of a heroic man of principle? Yes, he played both sides for a few years in the 1770s, when he was trying to mediate between England and America. Yes, he was somewhat squishy in dealing with the Stamp Act. He had taught himself as a young tradesman to avoid disputatious assertions, and his habit of benignly smiling while he listened to all sorts of people made him seem at times duplicitous or insinuating.

  But once again, there’s something to be said for Franklin’s outlook, for his pragmatism and occasional willingness to compromise. He believed in having the humility to be open to different opinions. For him that was not merely a practical virtue, but a moral one as well. It was based on the tenet, so fundamental to most moral systems, that every individual deserves respect. During the Constitutional Convention, for example, he was willing to compromise some of his beliefs to play a critical role in the conciliation that produced a near-perfect document. It could not have been accomplished if the hall had contained only crusaders who stood on unwavering principle. Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make democracies.

  More important, Franklin did in fact believe, uncompromisingly, in a few high principles—very important ones for shaping a new nation—that he stuck to throughout his life. Having learned from his brother a resistance to establishment power, he was ever unwavering in his opposition to arbitrary authority. That led him to be unflinching in opposing the unfair tax policies the Penns tried to impose, even when it would have served his personal advantage to go along. It also meant that, despite his desire to find a compromise with Britain during the 1770s, he adhered firmly to the principle that American citizen
s and their legislatures must not be treated as subservient.

  Similarly, he helped to create, and came to symbolize, a new political order in which rights and power were based not on the happen-stance of heritage but on merit and virtue and hard work. He rose up the social ladder, from runaway apprentice to dining with kings, in a way that would become quintessentially American. But in doing so he resolutely resisted, as a matter of principle, sometimes to a fur-capped extreme, taking on elitist pretensions.

  Franklin’s belief that he could best serve God by serving his fellow man may strike some as mundane, but it was in truth a worthy creed that he deeply believed and faithfully followed. He was remarkably versatile in this service. He devised legislatures and lightning rods, lotteries and lending libraries. He sought practical ways to make stoves less smoky and commonwealths less corrupt. He organized neighborhood constabularies and international alliances. He combined two types of lenses to create bifocals and two concepts of representation to foster the nation’s federal compromise. As his friend the French statesman Turgot said in his famous epigram, Eripuit cœlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis, he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.

  All of this made him the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become. Indeed, the roots of much of what distinguishes the nation can be found in Franklin: its cracker-barrel humor and wisdom; its technological ingenuity; its pluralistic tolerance; its ability to weave together individualism and community cooperation; its philosophical pragmatism; its celebration of meritocratic mobility; the idealistic streak ingrained in its foreign policy; and the Main Street (or Market Street) virtues that serve as the foundation for its civic values. He was egalitarian in what became the American sense: he approved of individuals making their way to wealth through diligence and talent, but opposed giving special privileges to people based on their birth.