Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

Franklin was able to indulge on Craven Street the many eccentricities he had developed. One of these was taking hour-long “air baths” early each morning, during which he would open his windows and “sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever.”

hahah

an adroit feat of ambidexterity.

That was the crux of Franklin’s dilemma. He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, “in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman.”

i know the feeling

Hillsborough’s argument was clearly specious.

“Dear son,” he began, casting his account as a letter to William, whom he had not seen for seven years. The epistolary guise gave him the opportunity to be chatty and casual in his prose.

His goal, he declared, was to describe how he rose from obscurity to prominence and to provide some useful hints about how he succeeded, expressing hope that others might find them suitable to be imitated.

the four hour franklin

The strength of America, he wrote, was its proud freeholders and tradesmen, who had the right to vote on public affairs and ample opportunity to feed and clothe their families.7

Franklin spent another few days enjoying the intellectual circle there. He met with Adam Smith, who reportedly showed him some early chapters of the Wealth of Nations that he was then writing.

The Cause of Colds: Although germs and viruses had yet to be discovered, Franklin was one of the first to argue that colds and flu “may possibly be spread by contagion” rather than cold air.

The Study of Exercise: One way to prevent colds, he argued, was regular exercise. The best way to measure exercise, he argued, was not by its duration but “by the degree of warmth it produces in the body.” This was one of the first theories linking exercise to calories of heat. For example, he explained, walking a mile up and down stairs produced five times more body warmth than walking a mile on a level surface. When swinging weights, Franklin calculated that this raised his pulse from 60 to 100 beats per minute. Again, he rightly calculated that body “warmth generally increases with quickness of pulse.”

Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy. He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes.

Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

“Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”

gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people. As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

Franklin was also put in charge of establishing a system of paper currency, one of his long-standing passions. As usual, he immersed himself in many of the details. Using his botanical knowledge of the vein structures of different types of leaves, he personally drew the leaf designs for the various notes to make them harder to counterfeit.

Given his age and physical infirmities, Franklin might have been expected to contribute his expertise from the comfort of Philadelphia. But among his attributes was a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to be involved in practical details rather than detached theorizing. He was also, both as a teen and as a septuagenarian, revitalized by travel. Thus, he would find himself embarked on missions for the Congress in October 1775 and the following March.

Franklin noticed that one of their drummers had painted a rattlesnake on his drum emblazoned with the words “Don’t tread on me.” In an anonymous article, filled with bold humor and a touch of venom, Franklin suggested that this should be the symbol and motto of America’s fight. The rattlesnake, Franklin noted, had no eyelids, and “may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance.” It also never initiated an attack nor surrendered once engaged, and “is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage.” As for the rattles, the snake on the drum had thirteen of them, “exactly the number of the colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the snake which increased in number.” Christopher Gadsen, a delegate to the Congress from South Carolina, picked up the suggestion in Franklin’s article and subsequently designed a yellow flag with a rattlesnake emblazoned “Don’t Tread on Me.” It was flown in early 1776 by America’s first Marine units and later by many other militias.23