Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

As a result of his mock debates with Collins, Franklin began to tailor for himself a persona that was less contentious and confrontational, which made him seem endearing and charming as he grew older—or, to a small but vocal cadre of enemies, manipulative and conniving. Being “disputatious,” he concluded, was “a very bad habit” because contradicting people produced “disgusts and perhaps enmities.” Later in his life he would wryly say of disputing: “Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinburgh.” Instead, after stumbling across some rhetoric books that extolled Socrates’ method of building an argument through gentle queries, he “dropped my abrupt contradiction” style of argument and “put on the humbler enquirer” of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.” Although he later abandoned the more annoying aspects of a Socratic approach, he continued to favor gentle indirection rather than confrontation in making his arguments.35

Franklin honed the Socratic method he found so useful for winning arguments without antagonizing opponents. He would ask Keimer questions that seemed innocent and tangential but eventually exposed his logical fallacies.

“Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high. Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.”

A secret to being more revered than resented, he learned, was to display (at least when he could muster the discipline) a self-deprecating humor, unpretentious demeanor, and unaggressive style in conversation.

a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.

Man is a sociable being, and it is, for aught I know, one of the worst punishments to be excluded from society.

There is really something strangely cheering to the spirits in the meeting of a ship at sea, containing a society of creatures of the same species and in the same circumstances with ourselves, after we had been long separated and excommunicated as it were from the rest of mankind. I saw so many human countenances and I could scarce refrain from that kind of laughter which proceeds from some degree of inward pleasure.

Commonality

Franklin was the consummate networker. He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life. This approach was displayed when he formed a club of young workingmen in the fall of 1727, shortly after his return to Philadelphia, that was commonly called the Leather Apron Club and officially dubbed the Junto. Franklin’s small club was composed of enterprising tradesmen and artisans, rather than the social elite who had their own fancier gentlemen’s clubs. At first, the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own. There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers.

Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.

Discussions were to be conducted “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least feign) naïve curiosity to avoid contradicting people in a manner that could give offense.

Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.”

The other sins on his list were, in order: seeming uninterested, speaking too much about your own life, prying for personal secrets (“an unpardonable rudeness”), telling long and pointless stories (“old folks are most subject to this error, which is one chief reason their company is so often shunned”), contradicting or disputing someone directly, ridiculing or railing against things except in small witty doses (“it’s like salt, a little of which in some cases gives relish, but if thrown on by handfuls spoils all”), and spreading scandal (though he would later write lighthearted defenses of gossip).

“When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.” Instead, he would agree in parts and suggest his differences only indirectly. “For these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me,” he recalled when writing his autobiography. This velvet-tongued and sweetly passive style of circumspect argument would make him seem sage to some, insinuating and manipulative to others, but inflammatory to almost nobody. The method would also become, often with a nod to Franklin, a staple in modern management guides and self-improvement books.

Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.

“She argued that scandal spoiled all good conversation, and I insisted without it there could be no such thing.”

People will eventually give you the credit, he noted, if you don’t try to claim it at the time. “The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”

“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

“At present we are like separate filaments of flax before the thread is formed, without strength because without connection,”

“He found electricity a curiosity and left it a science.”

The scientist and statesman would henceforth be interwoven, each strand reinforcing the other, until it could be said of him, in the two-part epigram that the French statesman Turgot composed, “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”16

In his later life, as we shall see, he became one of America’s most active abolitionists, one who denounced slavery on moral grounds and helped advance the rights of blacks.

Franklin was always industrious, and in America he famously believed in also giving the appearance of being industrious. But in France, where the appearance of pleasure was more valued, Franklin knew how to adopt the style. As Claude-Anne Lopez notes, “In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.”3

Another time, he was playing with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. “Ah,” said the duchess, “we do not take Kings so.” Replied Franklin in a famous quip: “We do in America.”

“We are sent hither to consult, not to contend, with each other,”

“Declarations of a fixed opinion, and of determined resolution never to change it, neither enlighten nor convince us,” he said. “Positiveness and warmth on one side, naturally beget their like on the other.”

When Hamilton favored making the president a near-monarch to be chosen for life, Franklin noted that he provided living proof that a person’s life sometimes lasted longer than his mental and physical prime. Instead, it would be more democratic to relegate the president to the role of average citizen after his term. The argument that “returning to the mass of the people was degrading,” he said, “was contrary to republican principles. In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors and sovereigns. For the former therefore to return among the latter was not to degrade but to promote them.”

Elbridge Gerry, arguing against a large standing army, lasciviously compared it to a standing penis: “An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.”30

Most men, indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the Pope that the only difference between our two churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrine is, the Romish Church is infallible, and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister said: “I don’t know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right.”

when a town in Massachusetts named itself Franklin in 1785 and asked him to donate a church bell, he told them to forsake the steeple and build a library, for which he sent “books instead of a bell, sense being preferable to sound.”45