Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin, Comma printer. He'd believed that being a leather agran, meaning somebody who owned a shop opened up in the morning, served people, that was the heart of who we were going to be as a nation. As a young printer, he had composed partly as a joke, an epithet that he thought could be used for himself.
And it said, the body of B.
Franklin Printer like the cover of an old book, its contents worn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding. Lies here for food for worms. But the book shall not be lost, for it will appear once more in a new and more elegant addition, revived and corrected by his author. It's a totally wonderful thing, a pilgrim making progress in the hands of a benevolent God. But of course Franklin was a simple person. Just before he died, he made something simpler that would be placed over his grave.
There would just be a plain tombstone with the inscription Benjamin and Deborah Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin lived a life for the ages. He died at eighty four years old after what was a magnificently long life for his time, and in those years he lived at least five lives as a scientist, a writer, a businessman, a diplomat, and finally as a founder and framer of the United States. But how can we understand Franklin's legacy? How did you think about the wrongs he had made over a lifetime, and how did this moral evolution and the progression of his beliefs get woven into
America's own moral fabric. In this final episode, Walter Isaacson details how Franklin's late in life actions, from ceding a nomination to a younger candidate to embracing abolition, defined both him and his newborn country.
When George Washington arrives for the Constitutional Convention, one of the first things he does is he has a dinner at Franklin's house. They brag out casks of ale. Franklin has built this new house on Market Street in Philadelphia, and Franklin would make this grand and every day to
the Constitutional Convention. Because he has gout and he has trouble walking, they carry Franklin the few blocks from Market Street to what we now call Independence Hall on sort of a chair carried by four prisoners from the jail. The only other person who could have possibly been the president of the Convention and thus likely to be the
first president besides Washington would have been Benjamin Franklin. But he's pushing eighty then, and as we know today, that's a bit old to be president, maybe, and so he asks for permission to be the one who nominates Washington. The fundamental thing to understand about the Constitutional Convention was that they'd gotten it wrong the first time around the Articles of Confederation, and they hadn't created really a central government.
It was just thirteen different states that were confederated with each other but not doing well, and so they couldn't do things like figure out tariff so tray that easily. And they have to go back to the idea that Benjamin Franklin originally proposed in the seventeen fifties, the Albany Plan of Union, where you have a central government with
a congress that can do taxation. So what they end up at the Constitutional Convention is something that Franklin had pretty much proposed thirty years earlier, which is a federal system of government.
And so they're still leaning on his ideas but how was he viewed.
At the time.
He's the wise person who comes in, but to be honest, he's a little bit doddering. He tells long stories. At the convention. He makes proposals sometimes that people can't quite figure out is he totally serious about that. Famously, he makes a proposal that they should open with prayers each day, which was somewhat unusual because Franklin wasn't all that religious. He was a deist to believe that the Creator, but
not a god who intervened in our affairs. And yet in that speech he uses a phrase from the Bible. If a sparrow can't fall without the Good Lord knowing, then how can an empire arise?
And I think it was.
Mainly because he wanted to push a little bit of humility. We all had to keep in mind that there were powers greater than ourselves, and so even though he wasn't always taken that seriously, I think there were times when he set the mood.
Including bringing people from the convention to his house to describe what he was doing there and what role that played.
You know, if you look at the US Capitol now, there's beautiful scenes painted in one of the rooms of the Founding of America, and one of the ad is a picture in the backyard of Benjamin Franklin under the shade of the tree, where he's trying to calm things down. Franklin always believed that one of his roles was calming royaled waters. And he even had a little scientific trick that he learned, which is how a small layer of
oil on the surface of water makes it calmer. And so in his walking stick he would put a little cruet of oil in one of the chambers and have a little button. So if he stood in front of Clapham Pond, say in England or river, he could wave his walking stick and then secretly press a button and the waters would get calmer for him. That became a metaphor. At the Constitutional Convention, he played that role he had played his whole life of trying to temper people's passions
calm things down. You need passionate people like a Sam Adams to get you into a revolution, but you also need somebody who spends his life figuring out how do you calm wild waters? And at the Convention he was particularly good at bringing contending people to his backyard, sitting under the shade of the tree, telling stories, sometimes pointless stories, but he would calm down the passions.
In the first episode, we heard about how Franklin's scientific background taught him that imperfection shouldn't stop one from moving forward, for example, voting for the Constitution, because the process of experimentation involved continual improvement upon an idea. Walter noted that his vote to move the imperfect Constitution into action was also the result of a long life and a healthy dose of humility.
He said, when we were young tradesmen here in Philadelphia, and we had a joint of wood or a table that didn't fully hold together, you take a little from one side and shave a little from the other, until you had a joint that would hold together for centuries. And so too we hear this convention must each part was some of our demands. There were things that he believed in, such as a single chamber legislature instead of a House and a Senate, but he changes his mind.
He ends up proposing the compromise of having a House of representatives as proportional votes versus a Senate in which the equal votes per state, an idea that the Connecticut delegation proposed had gone down in flames. But when Franklin does it in the detailed way that he proposed it
and it passed, he gets the balance just right. He gave a speech he said, I'm not sure I'll ever approve it, for having lived long experienced many instances of being obliged to change my opinion on important subjects which I thought I was right but found out otherwise. It's that notion that you don't have to go to war and go to battle over every single thing. You should be willing to say I might be wrong on these things,
I might have some humility. Let all compromise and see if we can agree on things.
That seems like a manifestation of his experience and also of his pr mastery and sort of understanding that the Constitution is also something you have to sell to people. You have to sell it as an imperfect document, and to get ahead of that and say, yes, you will see imperfections at it, but it's the best thing we're going to get.
Yeah, it's the best thing that can come out of human hand. One of the things he learned early in life was the importance of humility, or is he sometimes put it at least having the pretense of humility. You might pause for a second and say, well, I could be wrong about that. Let me indulge the wisdom of people around me and see if we can come to an accommodation. And that's not very heroic. That doesn't get you on cable TV these days, fighting for the last
perfect thing you want. But it's the way democracies get made. Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.
I want to make sure we don't pass over this moment, that the idea that Franklin was the only viable candidate to be the leader of the early United States other than Washington, and he said I removed myself from this competition. Did that echo come up for you at all when Biden did the same. I mean, people have pulled out for different reasons, but has anyone done it in that explicit way.
Well, both Franklin and Washington, there's a lot of credit in their careers. Franklin during the Constitutional Convention realizes that he's too old to take charge and be the first president and wants Washington to do it. Then, of course, famously, at the end of Washington's second term, he says, all right, I'm gonna step aside. I'm going to be like Cincinnatus,
the old Roman, and go back to my farm. That notion of voluntarily forsaking power is at the heart of what a democracy is, a peaceful transfer of power and people who are in it not for themselves and for power, but for the democracy itself.
You see that in.
Benjamin Franklin, and then you see it again in George Washington, And nowadays it's important to do what Biden did at times and step aside and on certainly when we look at our elections, to believe in the peaceful transfer of power when.
We come back.
Franklin addresses the biggest mistake on his life's list of errata and shows us that you can change for the better at any age. So after the Constitutional Convention, I mean, it's just extraordinary how long he's lived and how much he's accomplished at this point. But there's sort of one more turn left for him, in a sense, his becoming an abolitionist.
Throughout his life, he had kept this ledger of errors he had made and how he had rectified. It begins with him running away from his intenture to his brother. He rectifies it by taking care of his brother's son after his brother dies.
Well, the last.
Great errata, more than an erato, a moral deep laughed, was tolerating slavery. Franklin was not as advanced as Don Adams and others were. He's certainly more advanced than Jefferson and some of the Virginians were. And then he becomes truly at the forefront when he takes over the Society for the Abolition of slavery and says, not only do we have to abolish slavery, we have to have all sorts of actions that will bring freed slaves into the
educated and working mainstream of our middle class. And he writes very long in detailed methods of making sure that we get the formerly enslaved people into an equal position
in society, to find employment, to find internships. And it may have not been the most profound ethical theory ever, but it was a very practical one, and it was totally intertwined to democracy, to believing more than any of the other founders, he believed in the wisdom of the common person and that we should have as much democracy as possible. And so at the end of his life he starts writing these tracks about how bad slavery is.
And just as his very first published writings were done as hoaxes under a pseudonym Silence do Good Letters when he was a teenager, his last great publication was once again a hoax under a pseudonym, which was a letter from the Divan of Algiers in which he's talking in the voice of an Arab leader defending the right to
enslave captured Christians. And what he's doing is eviscerating the arguments made by some of the Southern senators against the petition he had presented for the abolition of slavery.
And I feel like there's two questions in that evolution. I think people today would ask why did it take till the end of his life for him to get there? And what enabled him to evolve in that way?
Well, Franklin often of He wrote one essay early on which was not very good and was anti German, anti immigrant, also showed not much sympathy for the enslaved. And then he revised it and he said, I had a natural proclivity for my own race. But you may think, why is that? Why didn't I question it? Why did I
feel this way? And One of the things that helps him on his evolution is he does get involved in these schools for the education of the children of freed slaves in the seventeen forties seventeen fifties, and he's amazed at the power of education. And he writes about the great minds of these young children and how well they do, and he says that helped change my mind. Franklin said,
my morality is a simple and a pragmatic one. The best way we can serve our creator is dedicate your life to making things better for the people around you, for serving other people, and to give opportunities for each person to rise in the world the way he did. One of the beauties of Benjamin Franklin is that he's part of the moral arc of America. He's continually improving as we are as a nation, and usually a slight bit ahead.
And there's something about doing that into your seventies and eighties that also implies that it never stops.
Yeah.
I think he felt he was on a never ending quest for self improvement, self knowledge, for learning things, but also on a never ending quest to bend the moral arc of his life towards better things. And I think that should be a template for our country. That notion of continuing self improvement of both ourselves in our civic lives is one of the important things that Benjamin Franklin teaches us.
This is something that I feel as a little bit in the air right now when national politics is so divisive that people will say, focus on your community, focus on the people around you. And Franklin did focus on the most national politics, but it feels like he built his outlook around his community and making changes in his local environment.
Yes, he felt that politics would work best from the ground up when you start with, as he put it, little things like keeping the streets swept. You see why we all have to work together at the community level. And he felt that would be a model for how a big politics would work. That we would all understand what can we do in a practical way to give
everybody an opportunity to have a good life. Education was very much a private thing people could afford, it would pay, and he said, no, we have to have an academy for the education of youths because education is not just an individual benefit. It benefits the whole community. Likewise, fire protection, all the things that would hold a community together. He said, let's just find practical ways to do it rather than politicizing it. We're still fighting about that. Well, should there
be national health, should there be public health things? Should we have insurance associations? And Franklin always felt that you could give people a sense of individualism but also a sense that they could work together as a community.
One of the things that you return to in the book is his comfort with democracy. And he's more comfortable with democracy than some of the other founders. But now we have some questions about too much democracy, too much populism. Modern political figures take from Franklin. He did resist pure populism. There was a paston Boy's Revolt at one point, it's almost like the Tea Party re volt, in which it was anti immigrant and they were marching to Philadelphia, and
he helped raise a force that would stop them. And he realized it was up to each one of us, all of us, to have both a celebration of democracy but also the civic attributes, the feel for the common good, the feel for the security of our society that would help protect it from populist or for that matter, authoritarian or aristocratic excesses.
He didn't care for a mob No, he really didn't like mob rule. Even the Boston Tea Party that kind of appalled him, because he was at heart somebody who wanted moderation. When you put together the sense of founding this country, you need the most passionate people, and you have Samuel Adams and John Adams and really smart people like Jefferson and Hamilton, and people of high rectitude like Washington. But it's also useful to have the Franklins who know
how to pull people together. And well, maybe they're two ingratiating, but it could be worse things in life.
One of the ways people perceive him is through the eyes of these sort of maxims and industry, and it can make them sound a bit like a schoolmarm, like a person who's always going around instructing people about how they should behave And yet you look at his relationships and the clubs and the communities that he built around himself wherever he went, how did he manage to sort of pull people into his orbit.
When growing up in Puritan Boston, it was a very dogmatic time. Things were handed down. The preachers told you what was right and wrong. The opposite for him was being open minded not being sure of yourself until you test it all of your theories, and that means that as you go through life, what looks acceptable is no longer acceptable because you've tested it a bit more.
Did that in any way draw you to them? You don't strike me as extremely dogmatic.
Yeah, I'm not very dogmatic. I was a journalist for many, many years, and I tried.
Not to be partisan.
I tried to be open minded about everybody I covered, from Ronald Reagan to Ted Kennedy. So Ben Franklin appealed to me. I think we've lost that ability in our democracy to be as open minded as we should be. People grab on to a dogmatic view of the world, to their preferred cable channel or their end of the talk radio dial. With the evidence they get reinforces their own dogma, rather than being open to all ideas, all evidence the way Benjamin Franklin was.
And if that open mindedness feels a little bit like an endangered species right now, do you have a sense of what the steps would be to try to bring it back.
I think Benjamin Franklin would realize that we all have a shared set of values at the local level, that our potholes and dirty streets aren't partisan one way or the other, and so I think he would want to help restore democracy neighborhood by neighborhood by having more civic associations to support their local hospital or their local firefighters, just the way he did. I think the poison and partisanship in our national politics has seat down to some
extent at the local level. I think Franklin would say it could also work in reverse. We focus on what's really good for our neighborhoods and our communities, then we can leach the poison out of the national politics at some point.
When we come back.
We read Benjamin Franklin's reviews. Is there anything that surprised you over the years since the book came out in terms of what people find in it or what they pull out of it and express to you.
One of things that surprises me a bit is that the most passionate people who are the most partisan sometimes embrace the book. Elon Mosk thought it was his favorite, said he loved the book, And sometimes I feel like saying, Okay, read it again, because it's not just about following your passion. It's combining your passion with a little bit of humility, so that you try to understand other people's passions as well and find the common ground.
Maybe that's the fatal flo on Benjamin Franklin. He gave us too much to work with, too many things for you to grab onto to make your own Franklin philosophy. You mentioned not canonizing Benjamin Franklin, and this actually brings to mind. There was one point where he's in a kind of gloomy state of mind and his friend's a doctor and he writes, do you please yourself with the fancy that you're doing good. You're mistaken. Half the lives you save are not worth saving, which does point to
that he had complex moods just like anyone else. He wasn't just a sunny, happy, go lucky guy, right.
There was at times a little bit of gloominess in him, at times, some anger in him, but he knew how to channel it. He wasn't a brooding sort. And in general, his optimism and it's just his cheery nature and his desire to please people help define who he is.
And he was a detailed person.
From his earliest civic assotion ciations to his negotiations in France. He would micromanage every little bit of the ammunition and the loans, and when he came up with plans for things to be, sometimes twenty or thirty pages of how it should work. Because while a lot of people think God is in the great vision, he also realized that
God was in the details. That it really mattered that you become geeky, that you put down every rule and regulation, whether it's for how should the Academy of Youth in Philadelphia teach swimming? To how should the French resupply our ammunition.
It's almost like everything was an invention. The world was there to be invented exactly.
He was a tinkerer and then an inventor, and then just somebody who was ingenius in understanding how details wove together to form the whole, and whether it's the flu of the Franklin stove and how much it should be heated, or whether it was the details of the Treaty of Alliance with France. He liked to devise things. He liked to be involved with the invention of things.
It's clear that Walter Isaacson admires Franklin, and we had talked about him sharing an anti dogmatic view of the world with his subject, but I wondered if they shared also a quality common among people who write about the.
World for a living.
You describe Franklin as graced and afflicted with the traits so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison One's too often of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer. And now I wonder how much were you writing about yourself?
Oh? Totally.
I mean one of the things when you're a journalist, like I've been most of my career, is you realize you're not in the arena and you become a bit detached. You're just watching other people do things, perhaps even trying to have a veneer of objectivity, as if you don't have a dog in that hunt.
You're just observing.
And I think there's something yearning that we have, or I had in that position of maybe I should be in the arena and maybe, like Addison's Weft or Franklin, maybe now should get more involved in things. So I understood Franklin's evolution from being a humorous, wry poor Richard Almanac writing observer of the foibles of the elite to being somebody who then went into politics and statecraft.
It kind of brings to mind something from your own story when you moved from Washington back to New Orleans, and then later you got involved in post Katrina New Orleans and tried to help the city recover. And that feels very Ben Franklin to me, getting involved in your local community. I'm wondering if that move felt that way to you, to try to return to what you can affect in the world around you.
Yes, I knew that I was never going to run for national office or run for president and do things, but I figured, how do you then get more involved? And then Katrina happened, and my really beloved Tone Down was flooded, my childhood home was flooded, and I went back and I became the vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, and then.
Moved back to New Orleans.
Maybe some people will look at our current political climb and say, I've got to run for Senate or something. But I think the way most of us can do it is say, let me be involved in the things that make our civic life better. I think we can all get more engaged in the civic life of our community, which is the way Benjamin Franklin started his road to
defining American democracy. And even if we're not going to run for Senate or run for president, that's the pathway to applying the life lessons from ben Franklin to the needs we now have in a troubled democracy.
I think part of.
What's so interesting about Franklin is that he seems to go in and out of fashion.
Franklin's age of Enlightenment, which was very practical, very empirical, very scientific, gets replaced in the early eighteen hundreds by an era that values romanticism more than rationality, and so Franklin a bit goes out of style. The romantic poets make fun of him. I think it was the poet John Keats said that he was just a man of thrifty maxims. Franklin was and never a sublime man. But I think we see the pendulum swinging back and forth
through American history. But the middle class values of industry and honesty and frugality, and of civic mindedness and having a local police and fire departments that are supported the these are not lowly mundane values. These are fundamental values to keeping a democracy on an even deeal.
And in his own time among some of his peers, Franklin was never really in fashion. John Adams, the second President of the United States, fellow author of the Declaration of Independence, and sharer of a hotel room, while having a cold thought Franklin might be too open minded.
John Adams had been his antagonist, a friend and sort of a rival for power throughout the Revolution. And Adams was a very passionate religious person, and initially he looked down on Franklin's sort of vague tolerance of all religions. But eventually, after Franklin dies, even John Adams mellows on him. He realizes that there's something beautiful about Franklin's outlook. Franklin believed in a God that created everybody, and he said, if that's what the Good Lord did, then everybody is
worth equal respect. And so the best way to be religious, the best way to serve the Lord, is to be tolerant of different religions in different ethnic groups. That notion of religious toleration initially offended deeply spiritual religious people. There was one historian, Charles Angoff, who makes fun of Franklin and says all that he really contributed to America was this sort of good natured religious tolerance. What heavens, that is the essential thing that America gave to the world.
In a period in which most countries had established religions and would fight religious wars. Country that not only tolerated, but respected each person's right to speak and to worship as they pleased.
This was a.
Whole new thing. And during his lifetime Franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church built in Philadelphia. And one point to the new hall that was being built next Independence Hall, which was for visiting preachers. He said, if the muffed eye of Constantinople were to send somebody here to teach us ismam, we should listen and we should learn. And on his deathbad he was the largest individual contributor to make the Israel Synagogue, the first synagogue
built in Philadelphia. The concept of good natured religious tolerance was actually no small advance for civilization back then in the eighteenth century. It was the greatest of contributions to rise not only from the Enlightenment, but from the founding of America, the nation not as a tribe, but as out of many, one epluribus union, and that notion that people of all different faiths, of all different backgrounds get
to come here and get to be equal citizens. That tolerance and respect for different ways of doing things becomes America's gift.
At its best. But it has to keep finding its best over and over again.
It does, especially now when we're falling prey to some of the sectarian intolerance, the tribalism, even the nationalism that sort of says we don't like people from different cultures coming here. That is anathema to the democracy that Benjamin Franklin and others created two hundred and fifty three hundred years ago. When Franklin was dying, he helped organize the preyed for Independence Day, and he helped make sure that it was left by all the different denominations so it
could show this idea of religious tolerance. And so too, when he died, every preacher, minister and preach in Philadelphia linked arms with the rabbi of the Jews and march with his casket to the grave. That what he was fighting for back then, and that's of course what was still fighting for in the world today.
This show is based on the writing and research of Walter Isaacson, so stedd by me Evan Ratliffe, produced, mixed and sound design by Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our consulting producer. Lizzie Jacobs 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 Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Mangeshtetikadur, with an assist from Other Volition Kostaslinos and Kate Osborn. Special thanks to Amanda Urban, Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etoor, Kerrie Lieberman,
Nathan Otowski 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 set it loose on the world. It's at Shellgame dot co. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Thanks so much for listening.