One of Franklin's greatest inventions is the character A Bit Franklin. He creates it, he polishes it. He does it through Poor Richard and through his autobiography. His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature. He gets off the boat but draggled, and uses coins to tip the boatmen. He buys three puffy rolls and gives one away to somebody. He says, you're always more generous when you're very poor than when you're very rich,
because you don't want people to think you're poor. He writes that scene for posterity and also for his son, who has become very pretentious and was a royal governor back then. He's saying, remember, your humble roots were tradesmen, were not part of an aristocracy.
So he had figured out a little bit of mythmaking even at the very beginning.
But as Shakespeare teaches us, we sometimes become the mask we wear, and so Ben Franklin, by showing how industrious he could be by having the pretense of humility, even if he couldn't have the reality, was able to make himself into this type of character that he portrays both in Poor Richard's Almanac and in the autobiography.
Ben Franklin was perhaps the quintessential American character. He created the type through his writing style, through the aphorisms of Poor Richard's Almanac, through his picturesque autobiography, and in many ways itself humble, industrious, and hopeful. The new American spirit felt familiar and appealing to colonists and eventually to a nation eager to forge its own identity. And while the character Franklin created was in many ways close to Franklin
the person, in others it was painfully far away. In this second episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals how Franklin wrote the American identity into being and just how far Franklin's own life strayed from this national ideal. You describe beautifully how he came to represent this certain part of the American character. And it includes practicality, it
includes compromise. Were there any sort of seminal incidents in his childhood that you feel like shaped this orientation towards what became a kind of American character, a central American character.
When Franklin is growing up in Boston, he had been indentured to his brother, who is a publisher, newspaper editor, and printer. Franklin knew he had to be self educated. He knew that his father decided not to send him to Harvard, and so every night he would read and study at his brother's print shop and publishing house. He embarked on a self improvement course. He was one of
America's great self taught people. And what he did was he took down volumes of The Spectator, a daily that was being published in London, with wonderful essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. And what Franklin would do is he would turn the essays into poetry. And he thought it would help him increase his vocabulary because he would have to think of different words that would either rhyme
or have the right meter. And he would read the essays, take notes, jumble up his notes, and then a few days later, see if he could recreate the essay, and then he would go back and correct. He said, every now and then I could write it even better, I could improve it, which made me think I would become a tolerable writer. Well, not only does he become a tolerable writer, he becomes the best and most popular writer
in America. He also read Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good because Boston then was pretty much ruled by a Puritan theocracy. Puritan preachers like Cotton Mather were always talking about God's grace, that we got salvation through God's grace alone, whereas Benjamin Franklin is much more simple. He'd believed that, well, maybe you could earn your way into the good grace of the Lord by doing good works and helping your fellow citizens.
So Franklin's early years are spent teaching himself to write moral education, less religious than the puritanical world he lived in, but focused on practicality and contributing to the world around him. But even if he was indentured to his brother, he was still indentured, and naturally he chafed at that, and the fundamental unfairness of it, along with his core character,
led him to push back. He has this sort of maybe inborn but natural resistance to authority, and he abandons the apprenticeship, which was, as I understand it, quite a big deal at the time.
Right He becomes apprentice to his older brother, and his older brother was very strict in dealing with him and didn't let him write for the paper, which is why Franklin writes under the pseudonym and fakes his handwriting, and it's called Silence Do Good. It's a triumph of the imagination because here you have a fifteen or sixteen year old kid who had never left Boston, but he's writing in the voice of a widowed, elderly woman who lives
in the countryside. And this is part of Franklin's magic, which is he has that sense of spunky imagination and a colloquial sense to him. Other people at the time, like Jonathan Edwards are writing in this grand rhetoric about centers in the hands of an angry god. But Benjamin Franklin as a kid almost invents this vernacular auschus cracker barrel style that you see in Mark Twain and Will Rogers and others that pokes fun at the pretensions of
the elite. He became the best writer of his time because he had such a colloquial voice.
He goes on to use anonymous writing or pseudonymous writing throughout his career, even up to major diplomatic incidents later in life. Can you explain a little bit about why he uses pseudonyms. Is it a wink wink kind of pseudonym or is it pure Inneymi. The great thing about the colonial period is you could write under a pseudonym and you had some anonymity. But eventually people can find out. And indeed his brother finds out that young Benjamin is a run doing Silence do Good. So it's good.
It gave people a lot of freedom to speak, but it still put a little bit of a leash on how far they were willing to go.
But not too much of a leish under the pseudonym's silence do Good. But he was still in Boston writing for his brother's paper.
He tests the limits, and Silence do Good says, I have a natural aversion to tyranny, and an he trampling over my rights makes my blood boil exceedingly. That's how you know I'm an American. And this is ingrained in Franklin, especially since he was indentured to his brother. And eventually he runs away and breaks the indenture agreement he had made and secretly goes into Filhiladelphia.
And this is the moment in his autobiography, that famous scene of Franklin walking off the boat with just a few coins in his pocket, and this picture of how the world sees him, a young, plucky naif, sharing his roles and confident in the opportunities ahead. You write that he became the country's first unabashed public relations expert, and the first subject of his public relations was himself.
Yes, even as a young printer opening a shop in Philadelphia, he makes a point of carting the paper he needs through the streets back and forth to show that he's diligent in working, rather than having Sarven's other people do it. And he cares a lot about not only the reality of being diligent, but just showing people how diligent he is.
Let's talk about Poor Richard.
When he had a print shop, with his his own colloaquial style and wit, he's able to do a really fun almanac. He calls it Poor Richard's Almanac. That's his pseudonym. But in this case everybody knew it was Ben Franklin who was doing it. In the almanac, he has all sorts of maxims wisdom from the ages. A penny saved is a penny earned early to bed, early to rise, And we sometimes mistake the real Benjamin Franklin for those maxims. I mean, he was never early to bed, an early
to rise type person. But through that voice he's able to create an unpretentious ethic throughout his whole life. He wants to poke fun at the pretensions of the elite, and that's what he starts doing through Poor Richard common folk wisdom.
Did people at the time start to see him this way as embodied by poor Richard?
Yeah, I think everybody knew he was writing these almanacs, but it was all part of the fun. People knew Benjamin Franklin. He was not exactly a very priggish person. One of the secrets to his humor and to his personality was self deprecation. It was not exactly humility, but it was the good pretense of humility. He would poke fun at himself, and especially poor Richard could do it. At one point one year instead of Poor Richard writing
the forward to the almanac, is poor Richard's wife Bridget. Now, of course this has all been Franklin doing it, but poor Richard's wife talks about the experiments that poor Richard's doing and how it'd be better off if he learned how to earn a living. So that notion of a self deprecation as a way to be influential and charming and perhaps settle some disputes is something that Franklin perfected.
But Franklin himself was far from perfect. When he returned after the break, we take a look at a family life that was marked by both tragedy and neglect, and also a wonderfully broad sense of what family in this new country could meet. We haven't talked about his personal life yet.
Yeah, Franklin has a very complicated family life. At one point, he has an illegitimate son named William, and he takes responsibility for the son, brings the son in, and he ends up forming a common law marriage with Deborah, person who had seen him straggling off the boat when he first was a runaway from Boston. But her husband had disappeared and so she couldn't get married married again because
of the bigamy laws. But she and Franklin create a common law marriage and it becomes a very practical thing. She's the bookkeeper, she's the person helping run the shop, and it's somewhat typical of Franklin. He's not a deeply romantic person. They have a beautiful daughter named Sally that becomes very close to Franklin, and they have a child named Frankie. And it was pretty tragic because, just as nowadays we fight over vaccinations, that was a big fight
back then, and Franklin's brother had fought against inoculations. And even though Benjamin Franklin believed that he had not yet inoculated his young son, Frankie because he was too young, and he ends up dying a smallpox and this effects Benjamin Franklin the rest of his life.
Was it a scandal when he took in his illegitimate son? Was that something that his enemies would use against him or was that something that was normal that people would view that as virtuous.
Well, children born out of wedlock were rather common back then, it wasn't totally usual for a father to take responsibility. But Benjamin Franklin not only takes total responsibility for William and raising him, but ends up with Deborah and they raise him together. It does get used against him years later in some political campaigns where they talk about it, but it never really hurt him, and he took great pride in having raised William.
A lot of families today could relate to grandparents taking in children, unusual family relationships, people being brought into the family, made part of the family who aren't even blood relatives. I feel like that is something in Franklin adopting that and enthusiastically embracing it. It's something that people today could connect with.
Yeah, I think that Franklin always had a resistance to the notion of aristocracy. And you know, in England and in to some extent in America, you had children born illegitimately or out of wedlock or not part of the arishex. Franklin thought that was ridiculous. It becomes complicated because William has a son born out of wedlock of his own who doesn't actually take in right away. He puts him
in foster care. But eventually Temple Franklin gets brought into the family by Benjamin Franklin, and so there's Benjamin Franklin helping to raise his grandson, not quite letting everybody know the real relationship. But eventually Temple Franklin becomes very close to Benjamin Franklin, and so he brings the whole family together. And it's not a big distinction made.
As Franklin star Rose, he traveled first to the colonies and then also abroad to England eventually France too. It's like a lot of ambitious people in big careers. Was hard on his family, but it wasn't clear that it made a big difference to Franklin.
Franklin's love of travel was not very good for his marriage to Deborah, because as far as we know, Deborah never spent a night away from Philadelphia. And one can blame Benjamin Franklin for always being away from going up and down the coast of America doing the postal system and then going to England and staying there. But also
Deborah Franklin was her choice. He wanted her to come to England, but she never ever wanted to travel, especially across the ocean, and she was perfectly content, although by the end of her life a little bit sad staying at home without Benjamin Franklin there. When he arrives in London, he does something interesting, which is he almost recreates his
life back in Philadelphia. He finds a landlady, missus Stevenson, who treats him almost as if an unromantic husband arrangement of convenience where she looks after him and she has a daughter about the same age as Sally, and he becomes a father figure to Polly Stevenson flirts with her as well. I mean, it's all a little bit odd, but there he is, having a comfortable domestic life in London that's not all that different from the one he had in Philadelphia.
And was there something about the fact that those weren't deep attachments, that they weren't really his family that enabled him to have an anchor but also be so much out in the world.
There were no real ties that bound him. I mean, he's quite happy to spend many years going to England and then going back and forth, as opposed to somebody who feels tied down. But it was part of his own personality, a natural aversion to anything that would restrain his liberty.
It was that aversion to tyranny that helped him to break free from his intentured service to his brother as a young man. But it was hard to square the completely untethered, somewhat selfish version of Franklin with the moral characters and poor Richard in Silence do Good? Was there real Ben Franklin so unsentimental and when he broke his apprenticeship was he severed from his family? Did he remain close to his family even after he was in Philadelphia.
When Franklin runs away from his apprenticeship to his brother, he does it secretly at night, and for a long time the family has no idea where he went. I mean, he goes to Philadelphia and gets himself a job there, and at one point, after he becomes successful, he goes back to Boston. He's got some silver coins in his pocket and he shows off, goes in to see his brother, and his brother, of course, is very annoyed by it. Franklin realized he had shown pride there and that he
had alienated it brother. And throughout his life Franklin kept a ledger of the mistakes he had made. He called him Erota on how he tried to rectify it, and mistake number one in his ledger book was running away from his indentured service to his brother and alienating himself from his brother. And then the way he rectified it is when his brother died, he took his brother's son underwing, and Benjamin Franklin helped set him up in business, helped educate him, and it was his way of doing that
balance of trying to reconcile himself to his family. He was very close to his youngest sister, Jane, and their letters are truly delightful. That's how we know about Franklin's battle against pride and desire to at least have the pretense of humility. And I think that relationship was probably the most enduring of his life.
When we come back, Franklin's autobiographical writings reveal the super awkward way he chose his wife, and how his belief in meritocracy didn't necessarily extend to a rejection of nepotism. We know about Franklin because he wrote so much and
so well. It's how we get a sense of who he was and the kind of personality he made for the world to see the mix of poor Richard and silence do good and of course the Franklin we see in his autobiography, and it's through his writings that Walter met him too.
Back then they want digitized, I'd go to Yale Library. I think it had had forty or fifty feet of shelves. And he has such an approachable style of writing that it made it to you could write a history of him that was storytelling because we have all of his letters, his notes as journal, the anecdotes he wrote as a fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year old, and I became entranced with Benjamin Franklin, the inventor, the scientist, the state crafter, the writer, but also the storyteller.
Much like Walter's stroll through Franklin's handwritten letters and notebooks, ben Franklin's autobiography gives us a glimpse into how Franklin worked to mold his character, how he was on this continuous campaign of self improvement. But that warts and all story wasn't just for future Americans hoping to follow in Franklin's footsteps. It was also written for one young man in particular.
William loved a book called The Habits of the well Born and Practices, And so he become somebody who hangs around with the dukes and the urals and the aristocracy, and is very good at putting on airs and pretenses, which his father doesn't like. That's one of the reasons his father writes the autobiography. It starts with the words, dear son, and it says, hey, remember who we are, a middle class people. We don't have the pretensions of
the aristocracy. But one of the cool things about Franklin is sees a little bit upfront about his moral failings, makes fun of him, sometimes makes us realize, well, he's human, all too human, and in some ways I think that makes him more inspiring and more of a role model.
Sometimes Franklin told on himself a little more subtly, like what he writes about his system for making decisions, something that would be very familiar to fans of Stephen Covey and fans of workplace efficiency in general.
Whenever he had a decision to make, he did a calculus. He took a piece of paper and on one side of the paper he wrote all the reasons for something, the pros, and then on the other side he wrote all the things against all the cons and he designed weights to each of the factors, and he'd say, does the pros outweigh the cons or not? And it was his bookkeeping mentality, his sort of very scientific and experimental
way of doing things. And he even does it when he's trying to decide whether to take Deborah as his common law wife. Now I love the notion of doing a calculus to figure out how to make tough decisions, but one criticism of Franklin is to do it when trying to decide whether to get married or not. There was a little something unromantic about his calculus.
If you decide pro and get married, you should probably not let your spouse see the pro con list after.
That, definitely, And I think he has poor Richard say keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shot after a marriage. In other words, once you've made your decision, tolerate the flaws of the other person.
So often Franklin's writing is cheeky. He fills his autobiography with wit and happily winks at the reader as he relais his tales. But while the style is entirely his own, the structure of his biography is lifted from another work, a book that influenced him decades earlier, back when he was still an apprentice in his brother's print shop.
He really identified with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress because it's about a person making his way in the world, trying to be moral, trying to be practical, and it was a journey. And if you read Franklin's autobiography, it's really the first self made person memoir we have. But it's written in the style of a real pilgrim's progress, a very practical Ben Franklin making his progress in the world.
He made his life into a pilgrim's progress.
When Fredlin was a young tradesman in Philadelphia, Franklin embarked on what he called grandly his moral perfection project. Now you have to know there's a bit of a sense of irony when he's writing about this in his autobiography. He's looking back at it somewhat amused because it's this very earnest sort of thing. But he made a list of virtues and values that you were supposed to have if you were going to be successful, and they're very
pragmatic values. There's temperance, there's silence, there's order, there's resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, and tranquility. And after he made the list, his friend said, Franklin, you're really proud of that list, but you are to add one thing. And he said, what's that? And the friend says, humility. You might want to try that one for a change. If you look at the list of
virtues and values, they're not honor and duty and classical virtues. Instead, they're very Ben Franklin like, they're things like frug reality, industry, moderation that just make you a good citizen.
Silence is one that feels like it's sometimes in short supply.
Yeah, I love the fact that silence is on the list. He says, speak not but what may benefit others, avoid trifling conversations. And nowadays we're always in the cable TV and social media world trying to have our hot takes. But at various important parts of his life, including when he's being grilled by a committee of Parliament during the lead up to the American Revolution, Franklin just stands there silently.
Even in his earlier writings The Silence Do Good Essays, he would point out the hypocrisy of the strict morality of the times, and in himself.
Franklin was very good at writing in the voice of women. Silence Do Good the very first thing he writes as a teenager. It's in a woman's voice, And when he gets to Philadelphia, he writes the story of Polly Baker, a woman who was on trial for having five illegitimate children. Polly Baker, she argues she was doing good for the world, bringing five children in and she had relied on the promises made to her by men, and men had broken
those promises. And she says that at least I'm taking responsibility. Remember, Franklin had an illegitimate child and he took responsibility for it. So he's poking fun at men who have illegitimate children and then look down on the women. And at the end of the piece is funny. She's in front of the magistrates, even hints that one of the magistrates may have been amongst those who misled her, and at the
end she's acquitted. The interesting thing is that throughout his life Franklin had pretty much the same style that he developed in the Silence Do Good Essays. He wrote hoaxes and parodies, He wrote him in conversational style, and even on his deathbed he's writing a parody of a speech that you can almost hear Silence do Good, giving.
The sort of virtues of writing with simplicity and humor those started in his teenage years and not just carried through.
One of the Silence Do Good Essays is an attack on Harvard, the elite college where he was supposed to go, but then his father decided not to send him there and so he has silence do good in a dream thinking about sending kids to Harvard and how only rich kids got to go, and they consulted their purses Franklin wrights as opposed to their brains. And he said, Harvard only knows how to turn out dunches and blockheads who can enter a room genteely, something they could have learned
better in dancing school. And so it was him being self aware. And this is just a teenage boy, but throughout his life he's always poking fun at credentialism and the pretensions of the elite.
It feels like something that's in a way so modern. Now you have people, particularly running for public office, who go to Harvard or Yale and then still poke fun at it, still disclaim the elite status that comes from attending those institutions.
America's always had mixed feelings about elite credentials. People like to brag they go to Harvard or Yale, you see it in a JD Vance, but also they want to poke at the pretensions of the elite. And it's the same as it was in.
Franklin jer It's funny that there is a presidential candidate running today. Trump who does brag about attending the university that Benjamin Franklin began.
Yeah, I'm not sure how Benjamin Franklin would feel that the first US president to come out of the university that he created was Donald Trump.
Franklin didn't think it was very American to have anything like an aristocracy. He was self made and thought it was important for people to make their own ways. But it was easier in theory than in practice. Even someone who so thoroughly believes in sort of meritocracy and pulling yourself up, he is always trying to help his grandson get a position somewhere. He can't quite get this grandson can't quite get a foothold.
Yeah, you know, they can't really help himself. He's got this charming grandson, very good looking, but who isn't exactly the strongest character, and so he's always trying to get him appointment to be the secretary to the delegation in France and other political appointment. So there's a little bit of nepotism there. It doesn't quite work. Temple doesn't amount to do much. I feel like it almost comes back to silence, do good. He hates nepotism and elitism up
any stripe. He believes in this rugged meritocracy. It's how he lived his life and made all u success, and yet he can't help but want better for his grandson. Franklin, like the rest of us, but more evidently, is always wrestling with the virtues and the values, looking after his own self interests but also what's good for the community. He was the most successful self made person of his time,
and that's what his autobiography is about. But he also felt that the pursuit of money for its own sake, to have riches, to be an aristocrat, was unappealing. I think the word he would use, and so even though he becomes successful, he doesn't build grand mansions, he doesn't patent his invention. He tries to do well, but not be excessive, not put on airs, not be indulgent, and he felt too that was part of America's character.
On the next episode of On Franklin, we'll get into Ben Franklin, the business savant and champion of the new middle class, and find out how his cunning helped him build the first American media empire.
That made Franklin charming at times, but also he's able to rub people the wrong way and make enemies of the people he went into business with.
This show is based on the writing and research of Walter Isaacson. So stood by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed and sound designed by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our consulting producer, Lizzie Jacobs who is our editor. Social media by Dara Potts. The show was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalledyscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshetigador,
with an assist from Ozwalishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osborne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, Will Pearson, Color Burnt, Nikki Etour, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan on Tuski 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 said it loose on the world. It's a shell Game dot co and for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC. Thanks so much for listening,