ON BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Episode 3: Industry

I think about Ben Franklin all the time. I remember being with Elon Musk right when he bought Twitter, and he was trying to decide do you print everything is a total free speech? Does it become raucous? Or is there any limits to what you put on it? And I went back to when Ben Franklin was in his early twenties and a printer in Philadelphia and he had a newspaper. He writes apology for printers, which is still

As a printer, a publisher, and a postmaster. Benjamin Franklin launched America's first great media empire. But that's not exactly how we picture him. For most of us, he's the funny writer or the old guy with a kite, not America's wealthiest self made businessman. But Franklin's ambitious. He devoured any book he could get his hands on, formed clubs to learn from his peers, jousted with his competitors, and

When he straggles up Market Street. But draggled, he's able to get a job in one of the print shops there an apprentice, and he works very hard for a sort of ne'er do well printer named Samuel Kimo. And in the end Franklin becomes much more of the star of the town.

Partially because he's good at doing his own pr right.

But Franklin's ambitious. He's a young printer who knows how to ingratiate himself, and I think Keemar, his boss, becomes quite resentful, but Franklin eventually breaks away to start his own printing shop.

And you write that it takes a while for him to get going. He's got his ups and downs. And there's one little anecdote that I wanted to talk about, which is not one of the biggest ones in the book, but it felt like it encapsulated some of that, which is he somehow connects with Governor Keith, governor of the Pennsylvania Colony, and he's going to be sent to London to buy printing equipment to set himself up as a printer.

Franklin looked at a guy like Governor Keith, who had promised him a lunge and credit. But then he said, well, he was just trying to please me. And I think that a bill to say, hey, we shouldn't ascribe deep evil motives to people. We should be tolerant that becomes ingrained in Franklin. So let's talk about his print shop. He's still pretty young when he starts it, going into competition with all these established printers. How does he distinguish

Sensing what people wanted and how to create demand was just one of the ways Franklin distinguished himself as a businessman. Another was his humor. Turns out, Franklin's sense of humor wasn't just a natural part of his writing. It was good business too, giving him a real advantage in the marketplace. Could he have made it if he hadn't been the writer that he was.

I think being a humorous writer was key to his success because his new paper becomes more lively than the rivals his almanac. He pokes fun at the other almanac makers. He has poor Richard in the almanac predicting that we're going to die, and he gets into these fake rivalries and battles, public battles where they're poking fun at each other. But if you're in a jousting battle with Benjamin Franklin poking fun, he's going to win.

You know.

He's got the more pockish sense of humor. And so in the end, his almanacs were valued more, his newspaper was valued more. And he was smart about publishing. He published novels, Pamela, the first novel published in America. Franklin has a good sense for what the public wants. He's a good salesperson.

But even with something like Poor Richard, he's always figuring out how to make another product. Like after printing year after year of Almanacs, he figures out he can create a best of compilation.

Right, definitely, and it's called The Weight of Wealth, The Sayings of Poor Richard, and it was by far the biggest selling book in the colonies for years.

But it wasn't just the content that made Franklin wealthy. He was savvy about other parts of the business too, striking deals to ensure his newspapers and books got premium placement and distribution. And even that wasn't enough for Franklin. He realized that if he could control the distribution, he could squash the competition, and so he laid the groundwork for a monopoly.

When Franklin was a printer in Philadelphia, he had a competitor named Andrew Bradford. They competed against each other in many areas, but they also cooperated, just like you might find Apple and Microsoft competing and cooperating. They even published a PSALM book together and split the costs. But one thing that really heightened their competition was that Bradford was

The thing I love about this story is there's also if one of them doesn't want to carry the other's papers, there's this sort of backdoor way to make it happen.

Yeah. What was great is when they would deny each other the right to use the postal system, you could just bribe the writers to do it.

There's always a side door if you have cash to hold out.

Nowadays we wrestled with should internet service providers be able to favor certain content or should all content be on a level playing field. It goes back to Franklin and Bradford in Philadelphia, finally, after a lot of struggle back and forth, saying an open system is better.

Even as Franklin controlled so much of the printing industry, he remains committed to fair play. He believed competition at a marketplace of opinions created a healthier society, and any streaks of ruthlessness always seemed to be tamed by his greater sense of civic duty.

Franklin did not believe that much in monetizing intellectual property. He never patented or copyrighted anything he did, and he could have done it with some of his writings. He could have said I'm going to take a copyright out on the sayings of Poor Richard. However, he knew that the sayings of Poor Richard were things that he had taken in from previous writers in the past two or three centuries who had said clever things, and Franklin might

I feel like we should say he was really good at making money. I mean, he did very well for himself.

He was very successful as a printer and a publisher, and he always looked after his interests, you know, making sure he got the contract to do the paper currency, and that is newspaper advocated for paper currency. On the other hand, he doesn't take out patents on his scientific inventions. He said, we all benefit from things that went before. We should put these into the commons, whether it's a Franklin stove or the lightning rod.

It really is fascinating, Like, on the one hand, he's quickly on a path to being incredibly wealthy, and he's doing all the innovative and sometimes cutthroat business things like taking over the post office and trying to stamp out his competition. And then he's always so civic minded. He's always thinking about the middle class. It's almost at the core of his identity.

Right when he gets to Philadelphia and he becomes a tradesman, he creates what's called the Leather Apron Club or the Junto, and it doesn't try to replicate the clubs for the very rich, aristocratic elite of Philadelphia. It's just supposed to be for the tradesman, the artist, and the shopkeepers what he called we the middling people. That's why it was called a leather apron club. They put on leather aprons

When we come back, we dive into the revolutionary impact of the Leather Apron Club and the surprising ways its legacy still lives on today. People might have a vision of a printer or a newspaperman today a publisher and who they are and where they came from. But this was a real blue collar job. Then did you explain that in what Franklin means when he describes himself as a leather apron man.

Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin, Common Printer. And it was because he believed that being a leather apron, meaning somebody owned a shop opened up in the morning, served people that market street, middle class values was the heart of who we were going to be as a nation, rather than trying to create the class system in England and the pretensions of the elite

So the leather Apron Club banded together in this new model to do good in the community, partially out of a sense of moral righteousness, but also out of practicality. The members knew that their businesses all had a better shout of success if the city was thriving, if the streets were clean, and if the people had money in their pockets to spend.

One of the Poor Richard Almanac sayings is about doing well by doing good, and this describes Franklin, which is he wants to do civic good, but he also knows you can profit by it when you start with his heat put A little things like keeping the streets, he said, might seem like a minor thing that some dust may get in somebody's eye, But if you multiply that to the whole community, you see why we all have to

And people now maybe have a hard time conceptualizing the era where some of the things that he came up with didn't already exist. For instance, you've mentioned the volunteer firefighting or even the militias that he'd helped set up prior to him coming up with them. What was happening around a fire before Franklin's set up one of these associations.

Well, you had people who either paid for protection, or people would pay for constable watches and stuff. But what he realizes is, especially with fires, but even with crime, that you can't just have certain people protect their own homes. The whole community has to pull together to do it. Fire on one home in Milk Street hurts every home on Milk Street, and so there are things we have

And also the lending library was a big part of what role did that play.

Among the things the Leather Apron Club does is it creates the first sort of public library where they all agreed in the club to put their books together so other people could borrow them. And soon they have a room that they rent and it becomes away. As Franklin puts it, that the average tradesperson in America, the average shopkeeper, could be just as well informed, is just as educated

I love that lesson. And you describe these things coming together beginning in these clubs. If we creates this library, people can teach themselves. They can educate themselves, which is exactly what someone would do after being denied the opportunity to go to Harvard.

He extends that to the Academy for the Education of Youth that becomes University of Pennsylvania. Both Franklin and Jefferson or exemplars of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson, when he creates a university that becomes the University of Virginia, talks about taking the most elite thinkers and bringing them into a new quote natural aristocracy. Franklin, when he creates what becomes

For someone who joked about struggling with humility and whose name ended up on so many things, from the Franklin Stove to the one hundred Dollars Bill, Franklin loved to play with anonymity in his writing, and he did it too in his work with the Leather Apron Club.

Whenever he proposed a civic association, he might write a letter to the newspaper, but he said he was always very careful to make it that sounded like it was his suggestion. In fact, sometimes he would write letters to his newspaper under a pseudonym and say it's been posed that maybe we should have a volunteer fire department. He said, it's amazing how much you can get done if you aren't interested in taking the credit for it.

He also didn't seem to see any contradiction between being this sort of pr man for himself, building up his image so that he could use his image, and also being the person who slid these ideas in underneath the door so that other people would think they were theirs.

One of his clever insights is if you don't take credit for something, if you give somebody else the credit for an idea, it'll later become known that you were really the person who came up with it. It'll give you a lot more benefit to your reputation.

While the Leather Apron Club was all about banding together with other shopkeepers to help one another in the city of Philadelphia, for Franklin was also about helping himself in the bottom line, the whole doing well by doing good maxim But Franklin's affects in his way of encouraging conversation sometimes made people question his intentions. You sort of write that for a man of his fame, he didn't have

In his Leather Apron Club, they had a way of discussing things that he felt would stop it from being too disputatious, Like if you disagreed with somebody, instead of contradicting them, you'd ask questions. That made Franklin charming at times, But after a while this indirectness, slyly asking questions in order to get his point across, he ends up alienating people who think he's not a fourth right principled person.

But for all his flaws, Franklin was still a uniter, someone who had an incredible ability to bring people of differing persuasions together. When we return from break, we learned how Franklin's business trips up and down the East Coast gave him a unique perspective on the colonies, and how a little cartoon he published quickly became a call to arms. I want to talk a little bit about why Benjamin

Once Franklin has the most successful content and the printing house, he also pushes and becomes the postmaster. He realizes, just as the cable titans of today realize, that if you own the content, you own the distribution system, if you have franchises, if you are able to do the printing and the publishing, that becomes the path to make him the most successful self made business person in America. So it becomes the first great media empire.

In seventeen forty eight, at the age of forty two, Franklin retires from daily life at the printing shop, but he definitely doesn't stop working. Instead, he hangs up his leather apron to concentrate on grander ambitions further afield from Market Street. Some of those include the scientific experiments we heard about earlier, but in seventeen fifty three he also gets to work building a small or postal system as Postmaster General.

Before he became a deputy colonial postmaster, if you wanted to send a letter from Philadelphia to Boston, it often had to travel all the way to London and back. But he created a postal wrote. He was able to franchise print shops up and down the coast with his former workers or his cousin, sets them up in the printing business, shares the Poor Richard's Almanac and the news with him, helps them become postmasters, and then ties them

His love of travel and his desire to sort of get out into the world and escape the provincialism of wherever he was. How did that sort of shape his early views of how America could form.

Franklin becomes the most traveled person in colonial America. He would take tours up and down the colonies as postmaster. Partly it helped his business, but most important, it allowed him to see the colonies as potentially one unified country. So he's at the forefront of this notion of union. Up until then, the Virginians had very little in common

Even after he gave up his daily work as a printer, Ben Franklin kept a hand in the press, so if he ever felt a need, it was easy to get something into print. In seventeen fifty four, early into his stint as Deputy Postmaster General, and in the early months of the French and Indian War, he used that perch to make a bold statement, one that would change the course of American history. Could you describe the join together or Die cartoon?

The different colonies were not working together on things like a common defense in the French and Indian War, and so he drew a picture of a snake that was cut into thirteen segments for each of the colonies, and he just said under it, join or die without being put together, without holding together it will die, and he's saying the colonies should form a union.

I just loved the idea of a political cartoon of a single image being so influential.

Was the first editorial cartoon ever published in America. Is supposed to advocate for a position. Ben Franklin wants the colonies to join together in some loose union to be able to assert their own rights as colonies and also fight off the threats from the French and Indian wars, and this notion of a colonial unity becomes important to him.

In the next episode, we watch Franklin's evolution from someone merely suggesting the colonies should unite to a full fledged revolutionary and we witness how this decision tears this family apart.

Everybody's wondering what side is he going to be on? Is he going to remain a loyalist to the crown or be on the side of revolution And before he can announce it, he has to have a meeting with his son William.

That's next time on Benjamin Franklin. 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, Lizzy Jacobs, who's our editor. Social media by Dara Potts. This show was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalletoscope, it was executive pduced by Mangeshatigador, with an assist from