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America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called “the middling people.”
freeholders came to be known as franklins, from the Middle English word “frankeleyn,” meaning freeman.
Wages in the New World were two to three times higher, and the cost of living was lower.
Josiah’s most prominent trait was captured in a phrase, deeply Puritan in its fealty to both industriousness and egalitarianism, that would be inscribed on his tombstone by his son: “Diligence in thy calling.”
The lesson his father drew was that visits from distant relatives “could not well be short enough for them to part good friends.” In Poor Richard’s almanac, Franklin would later put it more pithily: “Fish and guests stink after three days.”
History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
people are more likely to admire your work if you’re able to keep them from feeling jealous of you.
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.9
a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.
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.
“Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others . . . Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.”6
With scornful eye, I see your hate. And pity your unhappy fate.”
there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others. They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers). There fits Franklin.
“Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.”
“Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
Franklin ended his “Apology for Printers” with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to avoid all criticism.
“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”
The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him.
Poor Richard’s Almanack, which Franklin began publishing at the end of 1732, combined the two goals of his doing-well-by-doing-good philosophy: the making of money and the promotion of virtue.
“A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
“If you would keep your secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend.”
Franklin did not quite realize how radical it was for a private association to take over from the government the right to create and control a military force.
“Being thus unprotected by the government under which we live,” he wrote, “we do hereby, for our mutual defense and security, and for the security of our wives, children and estates . . . form ourselves into an Association.”
he was not driven by pecuniary motives; he declined to patent his famous inventions, and he took pleasure in freely sharing his findings.
Franklin would soon apply his scientific style of reasoning—experimental, pragmatic—not only to nature but also to public affairs. These political pursuits would be enhanced by the fame he had gained as a scientist. 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.”
What made him a bit of a rebel, and later much more of one, was his inbred resistance to establishment authority. Not awed by rank, he was eager to avoid importing to America the rigid class structure of England.
he believed in encouraging and providing opportunities for all people to succeed based on their diligence, hard work, virtue, and ambition.
His strength as a political thinker, as in other fields, was more practical than abstract.
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.
As a private citizen, he had proposed various civic improvement schemes, such as the library, fire corps, and police patrol.
A majority of the colonies started out as Proprietary ones, but by the 1720s most had become Royal colonies directly ruled by the king and his ministers. Only Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware remained under their Proprietors until the Revolution.)
the French. Their goal was to confine the British settlers to the East Coast by building a series of forts along the Ohio River that would create a French arc from Canada to Louisiana.
When news of Washington’s defeats reached Philadelphia in May 1754, just before the Albany conference, Franklin wrote an editorial in the Gazette. He blamed the French success “on the present disunited state of the British colonies.” Next to the article he printed the first and most famous editorial cartoon in American history: a snake cut into pieces, labeled with names of the colonies, with the caption: “Join, or Die.”13
colonies. “The assemblies did not adopt it as they all
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
If he felt the tug of his family, it was not particularly strong, because he had a mirror one in London.
the most brutal of modern attack ads pale in comparison to the barrage of pamphlets in the 1764 Assembly election. Pennsylvania survived them, as did Franklin, and American democracy learned that it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free expression. As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech.
“I want much to hear how that tea is received,” Franklin worriedly wrote a friend in late 1773. Parliament had added to the indignity of its continued tariff on tea by passing new regulations that gave the corrupt East India Company a virtual monopoly over the trade. Franklin urged calm, but the radicals of Boston, led by Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty, did not. On December 16, 1773, after a mass rally in the Old South Church, some fifty patriots disguised as Mohawk Indians went down to the wharves and dumped 342 chests of tea worth £10,000 into the sea.
there was still no consensus, except among the radical patriots in the Massachusetts delegation, about whether the war that had just erupted should be waged for independence or merely for the assertion of American rights within a British Empire that could still be preserved.
Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority,
he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.
Already the greatest American scientist and writer of his time, he would display a dexterity that would make him the greatest American diplomat of all times.
Sir: It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honor & success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling, my love of peace, my respect for your good qualities, and my pity of your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its jealousies, suspicions & fancies that others mean you ill,
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Franklin also waged his public relations campaign, as he had in England, with some anonymous pieces in the press.
he relied on the spies he knew were in his midst—how
a man of that background would never have been able to rise so high in Europe.
“In colonial America it was sinful to look idle, in France it was vulgar to look busy.”
Franklin had indeed often used the phrase about there being no such thing as a bad peace or a good war, and he would repeat it to dozens of other friends after the Revolution ended.
