In his middle age , during the seventeen years he lodged for long periods at 36 Craven Street, just off the Strand, Benjamin Franklin became addicted to what he called his ‘air bath’. Every morning, he would strip naked, throw open the windows and pass half an hour reading or writing in the nude, before dossing down refreshed for another hour or so, sometimes answering the door in the buff to startled postmen. Franklin was a total immerser; he bathed in the cold morning breeze, just as he plunged into the freezing Thames, or wallowed in the company of London wags and wits, or, above all, absorbed himself in his scientific investigations. He was a theorist of everything – swimming, for example. As a boy, he taught himself the different strokes from Melchisédech Thévenot’s Art de nager, then devised flippers for his feet (later adopted by Jacques Cousteau) and paddles for his hands. Each fresh experience presented itself to him as an opportunity for experiment. While thousands were weeping at George Whitefield’s outdoor meeting in Philadelphia, Franklin, instead of getting closer to hear the preacher better, walked away to reach the limit of Whitefield’s voice and so calculate the maximum number of people who could fit within the area – and therefore how many troops a Roman general could have addressed at a time (25,000, he thought).
Despite his podgy physique, he had great strength and stamina. In his prime, he once swam from Cheyne Walk to Blackfriars and thought of opening a swimming school for noblemen. As a printer’s apprentice in Boston, he would carry two heavy sets of type up and down stairs while in London his fellow apprentices struggled with a single set. His ingenuity never let up. He was equally resourceful in old age, devising the first bifocals when his sight began to fail. The invention of his which bequeathed the most pleasure to posterity was Franklin’s armonica – a development of the old pastime of rubbing wet fingers around the rims of different-sized glasses to produce notes of different pitch. Franklin’s treadle spun the glasses, allowing the player to produce the most delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the brilliant simplicity of Franklin’s kite, a pointed wire attached to a silk handkerchief stretched over a wooden frame and tethered to the ground by a length of twine, with a dangling house key to collect the electric charge, which in a thunderstorm in June 1752, in a field just north of Philadelphia, irrefutably showed the connection between lightning and electricity.
Yet, perhaps because of his very variousness, Franklin’s biographers often dismiss these devices and discoveries as a string of hobbies, so many diversions from his statesmanship. Gordon Wood, in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article, asserts that ‘Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.’ More patronising still, Franklin is presented as a tinkerer who didn’t really understand the science. Walter Isaacson, in his popular Life, declares that ‘Franklin had a feel for the mechanical workings of the world but little appreciation for abstract theories,’ and had ‘neither the temperament nor the training to be a profound conceptualiser’. Carl Van Doren allots only 27 of his 782 pages to Franklin’s science. Esmond Wright’s Franklin of Philadelphia gives the subject only 11 of his 400 pages. Even the latest addition, Kevin Hayes’s Undaunted Mind, devotes only 20 of 380 pages to what some of these authors seem to think of as Ben’s Stinks.
It is Richard Munson’s mission to explode these delusions, and he does so with ease and some elegance in his exemplary short Life, which concentrates on Franklin’s scientific endeavours. He is supported by Hayes’s more extended treatment, which, despite underplaying the science, gives a fascinating account of Franklin’s travels and of the piles of books he squirrelled away wherever he went. Between them, they present a portrait of an intellect not to be underestimated, even when Franklin is at his most frolicsome and whimsical. For the ins and outs of his public career, you need also to consult the more political biographies. Hayes has himself published a shorter Life of Franklin for the Reaktion Critical Lives series (2022), where he records the political career in vivid detail, together with a mass of fresh anecdotes and Franklin’s coarser jokes, usually about turds and farts. But these two books do, I think, convey the essential truth. Franklin himself made it clear that he preferred talking science with his ‘philosophical friends’ to discussing politics with ‘all the grandees of the earth’. Munson points out the ways in which the great scientists of Franklin’s time (and ours) have paid tribute to his originality. Joseph Priestley in his History and Present State of Electricity (1767) declared Franklin’s discoveries ‘the greatest, perhaps, that have been made in the whole compass of philosophy since the time of Sir Isaac Newton’. Priestley’s essay is largely a hymn to Franklin, not only for his discoveries but for the honesty and diffidence of his methods. Franklin encouraged others to build on what he called his ‘short hints and imperfect experiments’. Part of practising science was to construct ‘many pretty systems’ that we ‘soon find ourselves obliged to destroy’. Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn could not have put it better. In fact, Kuhn begins The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by echoing Priestley and identifying Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity as an example of a new and instantly convincing ‘paradigm’, which ‘was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from other competing modes of scientific activity’. Franklin created a new vocabulary to describe the way electricity works: conductor and insulator, condenser and battery, plus and minus charges. It’s not simply that he taught the world how to rig up a lightning conductor (he installed one on his own house and another on St Paul’s Cathedral). He was master of the theory too. Kant called him ‘the Prometheus of recent times’. It was because he was already an international superstar of science that this provincial printer was invited into the political counsels of great men.
We need to straighten the record, not only for reasons of accuracy but because it may help us to understand better Franklin’s years of public service. For the characteristics of his political career – immersion in detail, alertness to the evidence, readiness to be corrected or converted, perseverance, intense practicality and extraordinary energy – are the same as those which mark his scientific investigations. All his life, he remained as open to experience as his bare bottom was to the chilly winds of Craven Street.
How did he acquire this insatiable curiosity, this unruffled coolness? He had, after all, the hardest of beginnings. His father, Josiah, had emigrated to America from a village in Northants in 1683 ‘to enjoy the exercise of religion with freedom’, but his brand of Calvinism was about all he found to enjoy when he got there. Benjamin was the fifteenth of Josiah’s seventeen children by two wives. At the age of ten he was taken out of school to help his father scratch a living as a soap boiler. Thereafter, he was the autodidact to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood – the first of many noms de plume that Benjamin adopted for his squibs and satires.
When James was briefly banged up for criticising the colony’s leaders, his 16-year-old brother found himself in charge of the Courant, and lost no time in making mischief. Mistress Dogood quoted from an essay by ‘Cato’ in the London Journal which advanced the daring claim that ‘without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty without freedom of speech.’ It was through the cheek of the teenage Franklin that these words began their career in American debate, finishing up inscribed on a wall in the House of Representatives.
After James was released, he was so furious that he not only refused to release his brother from his articles but got him blacklisted by Boston’s other printers. Franklin decided to do a runner and persuaded a friend to slip him onto a sloop bound for New York, on the grounds that he had ‘got a naughty girl with child’ and needed to get out of town. On his return from his subsequent sojourn across the Atlantic, Franklin did in fact father an illegitimate child by an unknown mother. This child, William, was also to father an illegitimate son, Temple Franklin, who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the biographers seem a little reluctant to point out the coincidence. Franklin himself admitted in his Autobiography that the ‘hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience’. Such lapses he described as ‘Errata’, out of keeping with the famous programme of self-improvement that he drew up for himself, adding ‘Humility’ to his twelve original virtues after a Quaker friend informed him of his ‘overbearing and rather insolent’ attitude. The Autobiography, sadly unfinished, is engaging and self-revealing, but humility is not its salient attribute.
Franklin always knew what he wanted, and was determined to get it. Throughout his penniless youth, he struggled against devious rivals in the printing business and idle and drunken colleagues who often let him down. But he not only managed to build a hugely profitable printing business, which was soon printing the paper currency of the colony (paper money was one of his pet enthusiasms), he also built up a property empire across North America – British officials granted him tracts in Nova Scotia totalling 11,500 acres. At the same time, he began a parallel career as a dispenser of homely wisdom in the annual issues of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, stringing out an endless series of adages, some old, some of his own coining, such as ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise,’ to the delight of his many readers. He was thus both a leading exponent of the new capitalism and one of its most energetic promoters.
Max Weber leads off his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with long quotations from Franklin’s Advice to a Young Tradesman and Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich, beginning with his most memorable maxim: ‘Remember, that time is money.’ Weber claims that Franklin’s advice about the way to achieve worldly success, above all financial success, contains the spirit of capitalism ‘in almost classical purity and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct relationship to religion’. Here, Weber was spot on. From boyhood, Franklin had been bored rigid by sermons and skipped churchgoing as often as he could. The freedom of religion which Josiah had crossed the Atlantic to enjoy was transmuted by his son into a freedom from religion. The world that fascinated him in its every aspect was a world in which God played no part. His missteps were errata, not sins. He plunged into every kind of disputation, except the religious kind. He overflowed with ideas about physics, biology, demography, politics and history – everything but theology.
The driving force behind Poor Richard’s advice is always how to make money. This ‘philosophy of avarice’, as Weber calls it, was to provoke revulsion from poets and novelists down the ages. Keats said that Franklin was ‘not a sublime man’ but ‘a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims’. He was not literally a Quaker, but he moved among the Quakers of Philadelphia and shared their hostility to ostentation and ritual as well as their thirst for money-making. As Malcolm Muggeridge put it, ‘Quakers cater to the minor vices.’ Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree cornered the chocolate market. In the West Indies, Quakers planted tobacco too, or rather their slaves did. Britain’s great banks were often founded by Quakers – the Barclays, Lloyds and Gurneys (though Gurney’s came to a spectacular sticky end).
For Sinclair Lewis, Franklin was the incarnation of Babbitry and American materialism. D.H. Lawrence called Franklin ‘the pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat’, who ‘has done more to ruin old Europe than any Russian nihilist’ (although elsewhere in his Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence discovers other Americans who are quite different but no less American, such as Poe, Whitman and Melville). Nowhere is Lawrence’s denunciation of Franklin’s inadequacy as a human being more scorching than where he seizes on Resolution Number Twelve: ‘chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring.’ You cannot help feeling that Lawrence had a point.
But when we turn to Franklin’s political life, things look rather different: his coolness, his attention to facts, his freedom from prejudgment, even his indifference to religion, appear rather as strengths. He was drawn into public life by his philanthropy, which was instinctive and genuine. He invited friends to join him in founding a subscription library for Philadelphia, not much more than an overgrown village at the time, then a hospital, a fire brigade, an academy: all founded on the voluntary principle and some destined to become great national institutions (the Library of Congress, the University of Pennsylvania). When settlers on the frontier were menaced by French troops with the support of local tribes, Franklin overcame the pacifist objections of the Quakers who controlled the assembly and raised a militia, which he then led into combat, despite his total lack of military experience. In fact, he devised, almost singlehandedly, the public institutions of the colony. And when Pennsylvania ran into a financial impasse, owing to the inflexible greed of the brothers Penn, absentee landlords who lacked the public spirit of their founding father and refused to pay the taxes urgently needed to protect the colony, it was Franklin, still at this point a loyal subject of King George, who was sent to London to do the pleading. In Europe, he met all the great figures of the day: Voltaire, Condorcet, Marie-Antoinette, Captain Cook, Boswell, Johnson (on 1 May 1760, at a meeting to promote ‘the education of Negroes in America’). He also met the exponents of the free market Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville. But though he delighted in their company, he scarcely needed to pick their brains; they only told him what he already thought.
What Franklin did not fully appreciate was the huge gulf now beginning to separate the Americans from the British. He was at the start of a rapid and uncomfortable conversion from British loyalist to American patriot. This process began with his meeting with Lord Granville, president of the Privy Council. Granville was no blockheaded aristo; he was an educated bon viveur, who had won the friendship and admiration of Jonathan Swift during his spell in Ireland as Lord Lieutenant. Swift said that at Christ Church, Oxford, ‘with a singularity scarce to be justified, he carried away more Greek, Latin and philosophy than properly became a person of his rank’; he was also almost the only English nobleman able to speak German to the king. Both Munson and Hayes report the significance of this interview, but to get the full impact, we need to quote Franklin’s own account in his Autobiography. Granville does not hesitate to lay it on the line:
You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution; you contend that the king’s instructions to his governors are not laws, and think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them at your own discretion. But those instructions are not like the pocket instructions given to a minister going abroad, for regulating his conduct in some trifling point of ceremony. They are first drawn up by judges learned in the laws; they are then considered, debated, and perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the king. They are then, so far as they relate to you, the law of the land, for the king is the legislator of the Colonies.
Franklin gives as good as he gets:
I told his lordship that this was new doctrine to me. I had always understood from our charters that our laws were to be made by our assemblies, to be presented indeed to the king for his royal assent, but that being once given the king could not repeal or alter them. And as the assemblies could not make permanent laws without his assent, so neither could he make a law for them without theirs. He assured me I was totally mistaken.
Until this meeting, it seems that Franklin hoped it might still be possible to break the financial impasse with the appalling Penn brothers, perhaps with a nudge from the British government. Now he began to grasp the imperial mindset. The British ruling class – and most of the British public – did not know who the Americans were, and did not want to know. From now on, he became a tireless propagandist for the colonies. In 1766, he testified eloquently to the House of Commons against the Stamp Act, and helped to get it repealed, but only at the cost of the Declaratory Act, passed in the wake of the repeal, which asserted that Parliament had ‘full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever’.
From there, it was not such a long step to his serving on the committee, with Jefferson, to draft the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. In due course, this reluctant nationalist would become the only man to help draft and sign all four of the crucial documents in the evolution of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty of alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris which brought the war to an end and the Constitution. At each stage, however, he was led to the next step by the logic of the situation rather than by passion. To the end, he remained a rational patriot.
Nor did peace or old age bring his campaigning to an end. In youth, he had imbibed the racism of his time. He argued that the emerging country should be limited to the English and the Indians, ‘the lovely White and Red’, and exclude Blacks and Germans, whom he derided as ‘Palatine Boors who will never adopt our language or customs’. ‘Perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind.’ The Franklins kept slaves, and Benjamin took two with him to England. When one of them ran away, Franklin hauled him back to Craven Street, just as Jefferson did when his slaves ran away from Monticello. But after their slave-boy Othello died in Philadelphia in 1760, neither Franklin nor his wife, Deborah, ever bought another. Both were by now convinced abolitionists. When a gang of louts from Paxton, a village on the Pennsylvania frontier, massacred some Susquehanna Indians and marched on Philadelphia to kill the Indians there, Franklin organised the city’s defence, confronted the gang and persuaded them to disperse. He followed up this act of personal bravery with what John Updike called ‘Franklin’s fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet’, A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. During the Revolutionary Wars, the anti-slavery cause was put on hold. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin decided against proposing an anti-slavery provision, fearing that it would tear apart the fragile union. Yet just before he died, as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, he did petition Congress to end this ‘perpetual bondage’. Munson is surely right in surmising that Franklin was not surprised when the proposal was denounced and defeated. He was, if you like, putting down a marker for the future.
In the end, after all the japes and jaunts, all the inventions and excursions, there remains a certain emotional chill in Franklin, nowhere more so than in his treatment of Deborah, his common-law wife. They could not marry legally, because she had a runaway husband, a bad lot who might still be alive and whom she had only married because Franklin had broken off their earlier courtship and breezed off to Europe, where he was to spend years of their married life, including the final years when she was dying and longing to see him. He crossed the Atlantic eight times, but never thought of doing so when she was in extremis, nor is there any record of his grief after her death. Some of his earlier biographers (though not these two) exult when their man is free of this provincial woman with her hot temper and appalling spelling. You cannot help feeling that his affection for her did not run very deep, but that he was conscious of how much he owed her. She was, after all, an extremely capable manager of his printing works and other businesses; she adopted his illegitimate son, William; and she helped open a school for Black children in Philadelphia while he was gallivanting with savants and society hostesses in London and Paris.
For all Franklin’s human or inhuman failings, there is no doubting his legacy. You can see it in the robustness of the Constitution (now being stress-tested as never since the Civil War), which owes so much to Franklin’s meticulous labours on the finer details during the Convention, and to his willingness to change his mind. This was illustrated by what came to be called the Connecticut Compromise, under which the House of Representatives would be elected on the basis of population while states would hold equal votes in the Senate, and only the House could originate spending bills while the Senate would confirm executive officers. In a broader sense, it was Franklin’s longstanding insistence that the states must join together in a full-hearted union that helped to create what he called ‘Americanness’. At the same time, we cannot dodge Franklin’s unique two-fold contribution to the spirit of American life: on the one hand, its glorification of acquisitiveness; on the other, its technological zest. The tech bros, those inventive billionaires, with their insatiable greed and their intergalactic gizmos, are Franklin’s inheritors. And, like it or not, in the notorious photographs of them crowding into Trump’s second inauguration, we are seeing Franklin’s version of the American dream.