Benjamin Franklin and the Rosicrucian Pietists

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Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 1 of 13

Benjamin Franklin and the Rosicrucian Pietists
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, January 3, 1985

Transcript:

The date is January 3rd, 1985, this is the beginning of a new set of lectures, on Hermetic America -- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, by Roger Weir.

The first lecture, January 3rd, is Benjamin Franklin and the Rosicrucian Platis (sp).

All of these lectures are taped, of course, and the tapes are available.... and these tapes will be reaching a somewhat larger audience than usual. Aside from the audience that is here, sets of these tapes are going to go to the places of retirement in various places in this country. The citizenry of this country is getting fed up with being shunted off as at sixty five or seventy, seventy five, our minds do not have to necessarily atrophy and age, and one can play just so much shuffleboard.

So, this series is going to go to an undetermined number of retired persons, so we welcome them to the audience. This idea, of course, is a pet project of my longtime companion, John Reichlein (sp?), and supported by another friend of mine, 79, who is unable to attend the lectures but follows them by tapes, Dr. James Ingebressen (sp?), who used to be Secretary of the PRS (explain?) A third friend, who should also be mentioned, who really has the responsibility for this series, is my friend, Mr. A Russell Schlagel, of Baltimore, MD, who is going to be 85 years old in the next day or so; we wish him a Happy Birthday.

The genesis of this was that, some two or almost three years ago now, Mr. Schlagel, who had, for better than sixty years, wondered about his ancestry. He knew about the, uh, more famous ancestors to himself, the Schlagel brothers who were the great moving forces of German Romanticism, uh, August Wilhelm Schlagel did all the translations of Shakespeare into German, and I think they’re still read in his translation from time to time. And many other wonderful ancestors. But the ones that no one would talk about were those secretly rumored to be Rosacrucians, and through a long life, Mr. Schlagel never gave up what exactly were the Rosacrucians -- what did they believe in -- and how come his family seemed to be important in them, and no one would talk about it.

So I spent about six months with Mr. Hall (WHO IS MR HALL?), looking into this aspect, and in order to clear up that story, we had to tell the story of the entire Western Esoteric Tradition, from its rebirth in Foccino’s (sp?) Italy, to its final arrival on the shore of the United States in 1694. And one of the key threads that we found was the Schlagel family. The various vicissitudes that a secret society necessarily had to undertake to preserve itself, protect itself, was slowly revealed by innuendo and implication through following Mr. Schlagel’s honorable family. I delivered a whole series on this at the Gnostic Society, some two years ago, and wrote a book on it... which is still awaiting Mr. Hall’s introduction, and presumably some time it will be published, produced. I also, in connection with this, delivered a couple of Saturday lectures here, on the contact, the bridging, of the Rosacrucians, to the United States, but we had to leave the story there. And in talking with Mr. Schlagel, our three favorite early Americans, were Franklin, Jefferson, and Emerson. And in trying to put this series together, thinking it through, feeling it through, I began to gain an insight that, although Emerson was a major figure, that the real bright star in the Transcendentalist Movement was Thoreau. And so we put in Thoreau, not to denigrate Mr. Emerson, for whom I have the greatest respect, but it is Thoreau who has the key. Because, only when we understand the peculiar nature of the Americans, can we see Thoreau’s enormous sage-like presence at a transformative period in world history. And it is only when we can appreciate Thoreau on the level of one of the great sages of all time, that Franklin and Jefferson finally make the kind of sense that they hoped some day their ancestors in spirit would make out of their work.

And so we have to move from Franklin to Jefferson to Thoreau, in order to understand this movement. The series following this will continue by taking one step backwards. The first person in the second series is going to be James Fenimore Cooper, because it was Cooper who first perceived the incredible relationship between the Native Americans and the landscape. That Nature is not simply an idea... Nature is not simply a context for someone like Rousseau to row a boat in and have some experience, occasionally... but Nature has an eminent spiritual tone, which makes a people and gives the integration to their lives. And it was Cooper who perceived in amplification that Americans had become quite distinctly different from Europeans. Not by virtue of their minds -- or even by virtue of their bodies. And it is true that the landscapes gave us a new proportion of what Man might do, and that the ideas of a whole nation set free, not just a handful of privileged aristocrats, was an enormous idea. But Cooper perceived that there is such a thing as a spiritual tone and that that is conferred upon a people by the natural living context.

And from Cooper’s Indians, we have to move to the second person, the distinguished Henry Adams, whose family included the most distinguished line of political representation in this country up until this day. His great grandfather was the second President of the United States and his grandfather was the sixth President, and his father was our Ambassador to England during the Civil War. And Henry Adams, trying to understand the changes in the United States after the Civil War, when it was losing contact with its spirit, went back and wrote a tremendous history of the United States in the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. And (he) came to an understanding, which was very close to one which we’ll present here -- that history moves in intelligible phases in cycles which can be understood, and that the United States had entered into a very deep contract with reality and its cycles, its phases, were no longer European. But that the control of the structure of the country had sought to imitate the European, and thus we were heading for a disaster.

And the third person in that series, the next one to follow this, will be William James, who discovered that a pluralistic universe is more characteristic of the American spirit than anything else. And the movement from the Indians to the Universe, through the American historical perspective of Henry Adams, will set us up, then, to begin with the third series, and the third series will begin with that most underestimated and misunderstood President, Woodrow Wilson, who proposed the League of Nations, who as an American saw that the national content of our history was leading to disaster. And that in order to be true to our spirit and our principles, we had to open ourselves to the world, and transform the world as we had transformed ourselves, in our best moments. And of course, all of that was rejected and the League of Nations, like the United Nations after it, atrophied, because it did not have the proper spiritual energy in it. For if we are not to cooperate with a/the New World, it simply will not happen.

We are indispensible. And we must give our consent, and our blessing, for that New World to be born. But the roots of it lie, mysteriously, 300 years into the past, and for that we have to drift back away from Los Angeles, away from our time, and go back and try to imagine the beginnings of Pennsylvania.

The British Crown owed some sixteen thousand pounds to the father of William Penn, and in order to settle that debt, the Crown gave an enormous tract of land which, in Europe, was called a ‘wilderness,’ but which we know today was the home of half a million American Indians, who kept the land in such sacred trust that, to European eyes, it was a wilderness -- uninhabited. It was, in fact, an Eden, a paradise. And the coming to this country was almost an act of discovering Paradise.

In fact, when the followers (of) William Penn, afterwards, came to the New World, they often brought two books with them: one of them was the Bible; the other was, ironically, symbolically, entitled “The Paradise Garden.” And “The Paradise Garden” had been written by a man named Johann Arndt. And Johann Arndt is one of the founders of the Rosacrucian order. Arndt, who was second only to Luther in the Reformation in importance, found himself -- he died in 1621 -- but found himself involved with trying to extend the notion that human life was a mystery and that Christianity, as a religion, was not a doctrine to be believed in, but was a way to be practiced. It was a way of life, and it was a peculiar way of life, because it integrated all of the human family into a unity.

And along with “The Paradise Garden,” which was a huge tome, some, um, almost a thousand pages thick when it was printed, (was) often collected. The other great work by Johann Arndt, was called “True Christianity.” And in “True Christianity,” we find the following quotation, which will set a tone for us.
“Should a man now cling with his heart on this world, and weigh down his noble soul with temporal things, even though his soul is nobler, and much better, than the whole world? Man is the noblest of creatures, since he carries the image of God in Christ, therefore, as we earlier said, Man was not created for the sake of the world; but the world for the sake of Man, because he carries the image of God in Christ, which is so noble that the whole world, with all its wealth, is not able to bring a soul into being or raise up the image of God. For this reason, Christ had to die so that the corrupted and dying image of God in Man (could) once again be renewed through the Holy Spirit. And so that Man might once again be the house and dwelling place of God in eternity.”

This is the tone of Johann Arndt, and this was the tone of the core of the esoteric Rosacrucian doctrine, that the world must be made transparent by a spiritual vision of Man, and that in this making the world transparent, in energizing the spiritual vision, there was a point where the world blacks out and one experiences a death to materiality. And only when that occurs does the alchemical transformation occur, where one’s own self must become transparent. And when this happens, the world again ‘occurs,’ reborn, anew. For it was blocked out, it was in its negrito, it was in its dark night of the soul, only by virtue of the fact that Man had seen the profane as a negative. And only when the world was spiritualized did it again re-occur as a positive as a world, and that this was the essential nature of the New Jerusalem.

Pursuant to this, a whole new development happened in European esoteric thought. They moved away from alchemy; they moved away from all of the experiments with “angelology” (?) and various heirarchical orders. And in its place, a new kind of interior dedication of a Christian yoga was invented and envisaged. But the difficulty here was the fact that it worked.

And as it worked, as it became more practicable, and there became communities of several hundreds of individuals practicing this type of interior illumination, its negative, inevitably blacked-out counterpart also came to be in the world. And along with the great triumph of the German pietist esoteric communities came exoterically the negative complementary to their activity. I refer now to the great Witch Hunts.

And the Witch Hunts manifested themselves nowhere more virulently than Danvers, MA, outside of Salem, the village, in the early 1690s. In fact, the year 1692-93 (is) a horror story to read and recount, and in the accusations, the killings, the murders of young women, one of those women who was murdered was a young woman who was an ancestor of Benjamin Franklin. She was from the Folger family, and the Folger family, if you recall, now one of the ancestors of the Folger family, Henry Clay Folger, who made his great fortune with Standard Oil, became the president of the corporation... founded the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He had it built right on Capitol Hill. And he had all the documents from the 17th and 18th century collected and put there. And it was called the Shakespeare Library, because Shakespeare was the key to the individual transformative control of this tremendous energy. But of course, all of this was passed on secretly through the family lines.

Early in that history, though, the Folger family passed that fearfulness on to young Benjamin Franklin in family tradition, because he was born in 1706, just 13 years after the event. In some of the stories that they would tell in the Franklin household, was that Grandpa used to have to read his bible taped to the underside of a stool, and he would read it to the family and they would talk openly about the Scriptures and the meaning and not pay any attention to any of the doctrines that the Church was trying to foist on them. And they would keep one of the children at the door as a lookout, and if anyone would approach the house, they would turn the stool over and everyone (would) go back to weaving or knitting. And so a free-thinking, highly individualistic strain of looking at experience primarily as an individual personal occurrence came into the Folger family and with it came into Benjamin Franklin’s life through his mother.

On his father’s side, the Franklins had lived some three centuries in Northamptonshire, England, the village of Ecton... and later on Franklin would go there and look up the registry... and the word ‘Franklin’ actually can be spelled in a Middle English Way so that it reads almost like “From France,” as in “Frank.” Franklins, if you’ll remember, in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” there is a Franklin. They were independent individuals who were not bonded to any feudal manor, who were able to move across the countryside, free, or to settle wherever they wished, because they were independently wealthy. Because a characteristic of the Franklins, and this was a class of people, rather than a family name, now, the characteristic of the Franklins was that they knew how to do things. They knew how to dye; they could dye wool, they could dye silk, they knew how to print, they knew how to handle the thousand and one tasks that have to be done -- that take technical knowledge -- that are passed on as a family trade. And each of the sons in the Franklin families would be given a specific task, they would take a survey of what was needed, what was going to be needed coming up. Well, So-and-So who’s been dying wool for all these years is getting pretty old, so let’s teach young John, then, how to dye wool, so he’ll be ready when a position is ready for him.

And so the Franklins were free thinkers; they were independent people. And the Franklin and the Folger blood mixed in Benjamin Franklin. And so very early on, he was used to a wide-open family where the concourse of ideas was made imperative on a circumspection of the daily human life -- be alert to what is going on -- who is saying what -- keep yourself covered -- when you find good people, be open with them but always keep in mind that this is a world where tyranny is not just someone’s bad idea but is sometimes an inevitable outcom(ing) of the good that people try to do. Therefore, be circumspect, balance yourself, and keep your personal integrity above all else. This was the general tone and environment of Franklin’s background.

Of course, he was born in Boston, but he will go to Philadelphia, and we have to understand just a little more about the transition in Philadelphia.

William Penn’s tremendous legacy to Pennsylvania, and he wanted to just call it “Sylvania” for ‘great forest,’ but the King made him call it “Penn’s Sylvania,” he wanted to keep a property title there. As long as it was “Penn’s,” he could collect his monies, his taxes. His taxes were two beaver pelts and a fourth of all the gold and silver they could milk out of the natives. You see, the Spanish idea had infected the English, and even up into the 1700s, the English still had the Spanish Cortez mentality about native peoples: “They may be hiding gold, and it should belong to us.” You know the dollar sign? Those are the pillars of Hercules; that part of Gibraltar that used to be Spain’s, over the S for Spain; that’s what that dollar sign means: “It’s ours -- you may have it, but we have you, and therefore we have what you have, so fork it over.”

Franklin, moving to Pennsylvania, would discover in Pennsylvania this whole Rosacrucian background, intact but transformed. The first esoteric community to move to Pennsylvania, moved there in 1694; and they were mostly young men. There were 40 of them; that was a mystic number, four times ten, (is) forty. And on the way over, on the sea passage, the master who had been chosen for them died. And a young mystic was chosen as the new leader, not much older than the (other) boys, probably five, six years older, and his name was Kelpius, Johannes Kelpius (sp?). And we have here, in the Paris library, the little mystical notebook that Kelpius kept, in facsimile, on that voyage.

His major concern was to keep these young men together as a spiritual community, because what they were practicing was a kind of interpersonal Christian Rosacrucian yoga. And they all had to keep together, to keep the number 40 intact.

So they went....they landed on the Summer Solstice of 1694, and the first thing that they did -- because to those Pietistic Christians it was St. John’s Eve, they went up to one of the hillocks above Philadelphia and built a great huge fire, and they stood around it in a mystic circle and sang hymns to the Creator. And then as the fire burned down to the embers, they kicked the embers down the hill on all sides, as a mystic sign that they had arrived and were there to flourish.

It was an invading force not of soldiers with swords and spears but of missionaries of the spirit with songs and visions. And they built for themselves in what is today Fairfield (Fairview?) Park in Philadelphia on the banks of the Wissahicken (sp?) a monastery; a mystical monastery, Kelpius himself being an anchorite, hollowed out a cave in the side of the Wissahicken’s banks and lined it with stone and it’s still there to this day. One can go and see that.

But up on the hill, in the forest, they cleared out a space and they built a great community hall. And the name of this hall was to be “The Woman In The Wilderness.” It was an esoteric name, and here’s a description of that hall; this is from Julius Frederick Sackse’s (sp?) (27:30) “The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania.” It’s a history of the first twelve years of that reign. He writes, “This tract was on what is now, after the lapse of two centuries, still known as ‘The Ridge.’ It was then supposed to be the highest point of land vacant in the vicinity of Germantown (a suburb of early Philadelphia), and was part of the range of hills which formed the rugged dell through which curled a crystal stream, the Wissahicken, over rock and ledge, until the waters mixed with the placid Sheyskull (??? 28:08). Here the necessary ground was cleared and a log house built upon the highest point of the tract. The structure was forty feet square, true to the cardinal points of the compass. It was for the use of the forty brethren, whose number as before stated, was arrived at according to the esoteric symbolism of the Rosacrucian fraternity. It was especially designed for their various requirements, and is said to have contained a large room, or “saal” (S-A-A-L) for their religious and musical services.”

Now, the emphasis here is that the esoteric ordering of their practice was based on a Pythagorean understanding of numbers and harmony and music. Much changed over the centuries, much refined. The man who would, incidentally, in the next generation, receive this mystical understanding of music and numbers in Europe would be Johann Sebastian Bach, whose 300th anniversary comes this year. This gives you an idea of the interpenetration, now, that the world was experiencing at this time.

So they had this large forty foot square room for religious and musical services, in addition to a schoolroom in a separate camera, or cell like rooms, for recluse theosophists. When we get to a certain stage of development, you had to be by yourself, and you had to be by yourself for a long duration of time, sometimes years on end, because the old fourteenth-century route from Meister Eckhart and Johann Toller, they come from the age where many of these forms of Christian meditation were honed and refined by the recluses and anchorites of the fourteenth century, where they would literally wall themselves in to a little cell within a church.

Maybe the most famous example of this is the illustrious Julian of Norwich. Mother Julian, who had herself walled in when she was still quite a vigorous young lady, and for many many decades was one of the great religious geniuses of England. And her idea in her book was that religious experience is shown, and she called her book “Showings,” and that we are shown not by ideation and not by material practice but in a spiritual way, we are shown a continuity which is eternal. And that once shown this, we then show ourselves through resonance what the material world means. And what the intellectual relationships in the material world signify and mean.

All of this, greatly refined over the centuries, had come into posession in early Philadelphia of this intent community. So they had this large room for their singing, and later on there would be dancing... They also had rooms for the recluse activities; but then surmounting the roof was a lantern or observatory, for observation of the heavens, because everything needed to be coordinated. Because what needed to be changed was the Earth, and one had to start in an accurate way and not only order yourself by the cardinal directions of the compass, but you had to order yourself in terms of the cycles of the celestial seasons and manifestations.

So they put this telescope, which is now in the American Philosophical Society Museum in Philadelphia... I think it was Franklin who made sure that it got there. Here are some of the scientific members who were continually at watch at night with the telescope and other instruments, being on the lookout for various celestial phenomenon, because they believed there was a concurrence between celestial phenomena and the physical manifestation, and that Man must keep pace with the Heavens in its revelatory showings of the phases of manifestations in world history.

The early Rosacrucian manifestos, you may recall, came after there were two supernovas just within a few years of each other, in the early 17th century, one in the sign of Cygnus, the Swan, the other in the sign of Sagitarius, the Archer. This happened in 1604 and 1608, and these were mystical signs at that time, that it was time to move, that the heavens had declared it by their kinds of trumpets.

So they had this telescope and other instruments so that, as Saxy (?) writes, “in case the bridegroom came in the middle of the night, their lamps would be found to be filled and trimmed. This crude observatory, having for its object matters both mystical and astronomical was without doubt the first astronomical set up in the province. And surmounting this structure,” that is the structure that had the instruments in it, “was raised a peculiar cross emblem in such a position that the first rays of the sun as it rose in the east would flood the mystic symbol with a rosette hue. And the circle contained a great cross in the middle, so that it had a very familiar sign. Those of who know music know that one annotates a musical manuscript with this symbol, and it means that “you have made an error in your annotation. Go back to the harmony and rewrite it in accordance with the harmony.” This is how things are linked together in this world. Very few things are happenstance; the adults have never left it to the idiots, and when time is right, the books are open and the voices speak.

All of this happened in the 1690s in Philadelphia. But as that community went through its experience, taken away from Europe and put into the New World, the Old American Indian spirit began to suffuse them, and a change, a transformation came about. They had moved according to an association progression kind of integration but were attentive to a symbol transformation integration, and it was through that attentiveness that the spirit of the American wilderness penetrated into them.

And we find that within the first generation, slowly they left the monastery, they left the community, and went out and began buying tracts of land and began farming those tracts of land and making experiments with various inventions to help their work. And the communities, instead of going into an interior yoga, opened out in what Jung would call an “anti adromea” (?? 36:06) -- a complete obversal of the value vectors, and began infusing all the countryside around Philadelphia within about a hundred miles, with their activities.

The tone was, “We can make this a better world but we have to get up off our pews to do it. We have to leave our anchorite cells to do it...and there is a lot of work to be done, so let us be about our business.

And within two generations, all of the descendants of these Rosacrucians were what we would call “hard working Americans” -- farmers, most of them, agriculturalists, and from time to time, still carrying the seed, still carrying the basic family traditions, they would set up various communities like at Frauden (? 37:00), and they would send youngsters there to be schooled, or they would send individuals who were still attuned to the old ways, still too mystical to farm properly, and give them a place to be.

A lot of the esoteric symbolism then penetrated and evolved into the folk art of Pennsylvania, and you find in the German and Dutch folk art of Pennsylvania a lot of the old European esoteric mystery symbols. Mr. Hall has a tremendous collection of this type of material, which he keeps here in the library.

So Benjamin Franklin, who would be born into a family that was both free thinkers and independent people, not belonging to anyone, and a family who had suffered under the witchcraft trials found himself moving to a city where this tremendous change had just taken place -- and the story of how he got to Philadelphia is one that is worth telling; he told it himself with very few emendations necessary in his autobiography, and we’ll get to that after we have a little bit of a break.

So let’s have some coffee and some tea....and let’s sell some cassettes!!”

(Applause)

“One of the best books on the witchcraft phenomenon is that written by George Lyman Kittridge, called “Witchcraft in Olden New England.” And if you recall, Kittridge is one of the great literary scholars of his day, and Kittridge did works on Chaucer and various other greats, and his book is quite fine. It has been reprinted many times, this one reprinted as recently as 1958, and I’m sure there’s been an edition since then.

The difficulty was, in witchcraft and in esoteric orders, was that we have the power to manifest super-normal powers... and while discipline can control these super-normal powers, those who do not have them are in jeopardy from just the wild card nature of what one cannot understand, what might happen.

And so the whole movement degenerated very quickly into an atmosphere of suspicion and tenuousness, and we have to understand some of the life of Franklin as maturing in this potpourri. So when we come to Franklin, we come now to the first “real” American, the first individual who was wide open and doesn’t have anything like a belief structure, has been given an awful lot of material, but has been assured that he has the personal right to choose as he would, from this array; that he must make his own decisions, and that when the time comes he will find the wisdom within himself from his life experience to do this.

Franklin said of himself that he could never remember a time when he could not read, he learned to read so early. I learned to read at age three, so I imagine that it is quite possible that Franklin was reading while still literally a baby.

END OF SIDE 1

“It’s quite possible that Franklin was reading while still literally a baby. His wonderful Uncle Thomas, who wrote tomes and tomes of essays in a secret script -- essays on religion and esoteric matters, assured young Ben that he could have these books if he would master the secret script. And Ben says that he did that, but that it was so long ago, he politely says in 1771, writing, and he says “I’ve quite now forgotten it.”

A very discreet man...(chuckling)... always was a discreet man... He was also assured of the fact that he was going to live a long life, in fact his father lived to be 89 and his mother lived until 85. Many of the Franklins were long-lived. So he set himself to a long, productive life; his parents arrived in 1685, so they came very early on, and Ben was one of the younger children, the youngest boy, and all of his elder brothers had been put into various trades, and when it came time for Ben, the fact that he could read so young convinced his father that perhaps he should be put into college training, and be made a priest. But of course, one had to go to a preparatory school, and there one had to master two things, primarily: one had to master reading and writing (which was very easy for Ben) and also arithmetic, at which he was lousy. He never learned arithmetic properly. His accounts were accurately kept because he labored over them, knowing he was liable to make errors, and if you look at Ben Franklin’s accounts, there are lots of little Xs to scratch out numbers that were wrong, and new numbers in the columns... So Ben’s wonderful, careful keeping track of his thrift was due to the fact that he didn’t trust himself to remember. (Chuckles)

He of course was taken around then by the father, if he couldn’t be a priest, so what can you do? So the father spent about a year taking young Benjamin Franklin around to all the trades there were in Boston, and the young boy loved it; he got to see everyone. He said, “I have had the most wonderful romance with craftsmen.” He said, “I would like nothing better than to watch a good craftsman at his art,” that “this was a source of great pleasure to me.” So he got to see the whole array of life, all the possibilities extant in Boston. None of them appealed to him. What appealed to him was reading. He liked to sit down with books; he’d read everything he could borrow, and everything that the family, with all of its relatives, had to offer... So finally the father got the idea that, while his eldest son James was a printer, maybe he’d better apprentice Ben to his brother.

Well, James did not have the proper Christian spirit. He looked upon his younger brother as a businessman would look upon an indentured servant, and he felt it was up to him to discipline Benjamin, and Benjamin -- being a very spry, rather strong young lad, often arguments would come to fisticuffs. Of course, James was bigger, and older, and so he and Ben didn’t hit it off very well. But Ben had to learn his early printing trade with his brother.

Now, his brother started a newspaper called the New England Courant, and Franklin says it was the second newspaper in Boston (actually it was the third), and in the New England Courant a small group of friends of James Franklin did the writing of the articles, and in order to make it a best-selling newspaper, they would put various articles under pen names into this newspaper, sort of a beefed-up Ann Landers or Penthouse “Letters,” and so forth, but in terms of the Boston of the 1720s.

Well, young Ben Franklin began to try his hand at writing, and the first thing that came out -- he printed it up himself, I mean, he had his brother’s press, and he had this tremendous idea -- so he wrote a little play called “The Lighthouse Tragedy” and he printed up a number of copies and he took it out, and because he was used to hawking the papers of the New England Courant, well, he hawked his own play, and pretty soon “The Lighthouse Tragedy” was the rave of Boston, everyone was reading it.

And so young Ben’s fancy began to sway, and he thought, “Well, maybe I’m an unsung playwright.” So he wrote a second play, and he wrote it on Edward Teach, who was better known as Blackbeard the Pirate. And this became a best seller also, and young Ben was on his way. Well, the brother, and the family probably, also, didn’t like the idea of one of their kind going so public and so ostentatious, so they rapped his knuckles a little bit over this material. So Ben, true to the family form, went underground, and instead of writing plays, began to write letters to The New England Courant and signed them “Silence Dogood.” (Audience laughter). These were very, very risque, and risky, letters for the time, and in fact 14 “Silence Dogood” letters made it into The New England Courant, and young Ben would be working at the type fonts and he would hear these mature men and friends of his older brother talking about this incredible author, who could this be, writing these fantastic jibes and paradoxes and so forth, and he would snicker a little bit and keep his silence.

We have, in “The Collected Works of Franklin,” which are now finally being published by Yale University Press in connection with the American Philosophical Society, and we have all these Silence Dogood letters. Because of lack of time, I can’t get to them for you (LINK HERE: http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/courant/silencedogood1.htm), but the tone of The New England Courant began to be a bit too jocular for the authorities, and so as they do, they call you in. And they say, “You’ve stepped out of line.” And they told James Franklin that he would have to stop publishing The New England Courant. Well, that was the edict, that was the law, but he was a Franklin...and after all, they said that he should stop publishing it, so he simply changed the name on the masthead and he put “Benjamin Franklin: Publisher of The New England Courant.” And Benjamin Franklin, of course, thinking to himself that fate was favoring him, ran a wonderful, explicit article of why the authorities shouldn’t be given too much heed, and it ran something like this in the first paragraph. This is February the eleventh, 1723. He is...let’s see. If he was born in 1706...well, he’s seventeen years old:

“Long has the press groaned in bringing forth a(n) hateful but numerous brood of party pamphlets, malicious scribbles and Billingsgate ribaldry, the rancor and bitterness it has unhappily infused into men’s minds, and to what degree it has soured and leavened the tempers of persons formally esteemed; some of the most sweet and affable is too well known here to need any further proof or representation of the matter. No generous or impartial person then can blame the present undertaking, which is designed purely for the diversion and merriment of the reader.” In other words, we have a right to our entertainments, and the authorities be damned.

(Laughs) Well, this didn’t go over very well, and as a matter of fact, when they found out that young Benjamin was exercising his talents in writing in this way, more than just fisticuffs ensued. And so young Ben thought to himself, “these probably are not very good parts for me to hang around.” And he sold all of his books, garnered together what funds he could, and he got a letter which had been written by his brother freeing him from his indenture, in order to become the Publisher of The New England Courant, and left the other letter, which he had signed along with his brother, saying that secretly he still was a minor and still did owe his apprenticeship to his brother... He left that letter back, took the letter freeing himself and what monies he could, and caught a boat for New York, and he thought he’d try his hand at New York, and that was the place in the United States at the time where there were printers; one had to sail all that way. One of his kin would open up a newspaper in Providence not too long after that, but Ben went to New York.

And he got there, and he was told that there wasn’t really a position for him there, but that a relative of this man had a position for him in Philadelphia due to a death. Some compositor, very literate, named Rose, had died, and that Franklin would receive a job if he could make his way to Philadelphia. Well, Philadelphia was another hundred miles down the way, New York being about three hundred miles down from Boston, so he made his way. As a matter of fact, he walked most of the way. There was a ferry at that time, at Burlington, that would take you across the Delaware, and as Franklin walked, it took him a couple of days to walk to Burlington. It rained all the while, and he got soaking wet, and when he got to Burlington, people thought he might be a runaway, he looked a little shabby, a little worse for the wear, and he found out he had just missed the boat, and there wouldn’t be another boat for some three or four days, to Philadelphia.

Well, he was just getting over that when the spirit of adventure seized him, and he ran across some fellows who were going to row themselves down to Philadelphia, would he like to go along, and help row? He looked pretty strong, and in fact Franklin was a pretty fine swimmer; he prided himself on being a scientific swimmer, and he had no fear of water at night, he had read Thurneau’s (SP? - 12:02) book on swimming, and had added a few scientific strokes of his own, and in fact later on in England, Franklin impressed everybody by swimming 3 1/2 miles down the Thames. And this brought him fame and notoriety in London, he said that he could have, had he have realized his talent and the value, he could have made a killing in London teaching people how to swim. You know, the English don’t swim very well, for a maritime nation.

Well, he got on this boat and they started rowing; and it was dark, and there were of course no lights, no neon signs in those days, and they rowed throughout most of the night, and there was a heavy fog, as there usually is in the October season in that locale in our country, and they thought they’d rowed on right past Philadelphia. Maybe they’d just better make for shore, and of course everything capsized, and when they finally got to shore and they were dripping wet, they spent the rest of the night shivering and huddling, and in the morning they found they were in Cooper’s Creek, not very far from Philadelphia. So they righted the boat up and rowed themselves in, and Ben Franklin landed, Sunday morning, in Philadelphia, looking like a dripping wet whelp.

And as he walked up Market Street, one of the first young ladies to notice him was his future wife Deborah Reed (SP? 13:28 = Wikipedia has it both “READ” and “REED”), who thought he was a really strange looking character, and very suspicious, and he’d better move along. And so Franklin, realizing that he really needed to find some place to sit down, saw a whole crowd of people going into a meeting house, so he went in there, and it was a Quaker Meeting House.

So he sat down and of course at the meeting there no hymns being sung and everyone was sitting together and being together, and nice and warm and comfortable and Ben fell asleep. And after the meeting was over, they gently woke him up and told him that it was all finished, and would he please go on his way. So he went out and bought three great big huge rolls. He didn’t know what to call them, this was a whole different country as far as he was concerned; they didn’t have biscuits like they did in Boston, these people had these big pastry rolls. And so he ordered three pence worth, and he got three great big rolls, and so he walked with one of them under each arm down Market Street, down to Fourth and Market, chomping on one of these rolls, and he was completely filled up by this.... And he saw a woman in a rowboat with a couple of kids, and so he gave them the rolls.

Franklin had been an interesting dieter. He was one of the first scientific dieters in the colonies, and he had, of course, he said, the great propensity to be able to ignore food and to eat whatever was set before him. He said, later on, this stood him in good stead when he was a diplomat, because he could eat anybody’s cooking, anybody’s cuisine. But it was the vegetarian experiments....he was kind of like Ghandi was, he experimented with his diet, and he tried to cut down his food, mainly to save money. He realized that things were very expensive, and one of the ways he had saved money was that he had convinced his older brother James to give him half of what he had spent on food for him in cash each week. And Ben found out that he could live on half of that half, just buying vegetables, and save the other half, and that’s how he got most of his grubstake.

So he would carry on these experiments throughout the rest of his life; he at one time would not eat fish, although he loved fish... But on seeing a huge cod being brought into a ship... he felt disgusted because he didn’t like to see this cod killed, and he also felt sort of disgusted because he had given up eating fish, and when they cut the cod open, there were all these little fish inside. And, thinking of it in a reasonable way, he thought, “well, if one fish can eat another fish, I can eat that fish,” and he said he heartily dined on that cod... (Laughter...) And after that, he found himself interested to observe how reasonable men may become reasonable in almost any way they choose.... (Laughter...)

The arrival in Philadelphia was strange for him. He was unused to it, and when he got to the printer, the printer said, “well, I really don’t have a position for you, but there is a struggling man named Keimer, and he needs a printer, because he has a print shop and he doesn’t know how to run it.”

So Franklin went over and signed up with Keimer, and of course, Ben was pretty good and he began printing various pamphlets, but Keimer didn’t have too much business, and Ben began to think of himself as having exchanged the frying pan for the fire. When he wrote a letter to one of his brothers in law, a Captain Holmes, who was supposed to be sailing back to Boston, and Captain Holmes got the letter in the city, Burlington, where he had crossed the Delaware, and it happened that the Governor of Pennsylvania, Governor Keith was there. And Captain Holmes read this letter out loud. Governor Keith took a sudden liking to the fact that, as Benjamin Franklin said of Keith, “He was a good man, and wanted to give; and since he was a poor man, he had nothing to give but promises.” And so he decided he would look up Ben Franklin and become his patron. With promises. And he convinced the young man that he would just prepare himself that Governor Keith would set him up in the printing business as soon as he got his father’s permission. So Ben, taking people at their forthright honesty, and ha(ving) saved a little bit of money with Keimer, decided that he would go home with this letter from Governor Keith. He was going to be set up into business.

Well, he got back and his father was kind of interested to see that Ben, who’d been away for seven or eight months, looked pretty prosperous; his older brother James was absolutely perturbed because Ben reached in his pocket and put silver coins down on the counter and invited all the boys in the print shop to have a drink on him -- more money than James made probably in a whole week, and Ben was showing off. And he admitted in his autobiography that this was one of the errata of his life -- he notes (*in his autobiography) the various errata that he has... there are many.

The father would not hear of it, but he gave him his blessing to go back to Philadelphia, that he wouldn’t have to stay in Boston. Well, to cut a very complicated story short, Governor Keith made a proposal to Ben that he should go to London to learn the printers’ latest techniques, and also pick out his own equipment, and that he would give him letters of introduction. And so Ben made all the preparations to go to London.

And he got on the ship and he had made several chances to collect these letters from Governor Keith, and his secretary had put him off and said, well, he’s sort of busy now but the letters will be there. And later on he was told, the letters are on the ship and you’ll get them when the voyage is going; and when he was on the ship he was told “They’re packed away and we’ll find them.” So a friend of his named James Ralph decided to go with him, and he and James Ralph, since they didn’t have too much money, went down into steerage with the luggage and so forth.

But as so often happened in his life, Destiny took its hand and a very wealthy lawyer and his son who were going on the voyage, suddenly got a huge case -- a lawsuit over a ship’s goods, and he couldn’t go to London, he had to defend the case, so he gave his spot in the cabin, well furbished with foodstuffs and so forth, to Ben and his friend James Ralph. And another member of the cabin crew was a man named Dennon, a Quaker gentleman who was to become quite a friend to Ben Franklin.

And on this voyage over, it occurred to the wonderful Mr. Dennon/Devon?? (SP? 21:03), the honest Quaker, to fill Ben in on the character of Governor Keith; that some men would like to be good, but they don’t really have the circumstance and the willpower to be all that good, and that sometimes their mouths overshadow their capacities to fulfill by quite a bit, and in this case there probably wouldn’t be a letter for him.

Well, they got to England and Ben made his way. He stayed 18 months in England. And while he was there he worked at two print shops; the first one was called Palmer’s, and he did pretty well at Palmer’s. One of the first jobs that he got was printing a pamphlet, a religious tract pamphlet. And he sort of took umbrage at the fact that all these half-baked ideas were being put out... Why, he would take them to task and so he wrote a pamphlet of his own, on “Liberty and Necessity.” And he printed it up, printed a hundred copies. He says he burned most of the copies, but some of them got around and certain individuals got ahold of them. This is how it started:

“A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity Etc.
It is said, there is said to be a First Mover who is called God, Maker of the Universe. He is said to be all wise, all good, all powerful. These two propositions being allowed, and asserted by people of almost all sect and opinion, I have here supposed them granted, and laid them down as the foundation of my argument. What follows then, being a chain of consequences truly drawn from them, will stand or fall as they are true or false.”

And so he went on and later on it reads like this:
“All pain and uneasiness proceeds at first from and is caused by somewhat without and distinct from the mind itself. The soul must first be acted upon before it can react; in the beginning of infancy it is if it were not, and it is not conscious of its own existence, ‘til it has received the first sensation of pain. Then, and not before, it begins to feel itself; is roused and put into action. Then it discovers its powers and faculties and exerts the to expel the uneasiness. Thus is the machine set on work; this is Life.”

And he went on in that tone. He considered that it was rather ill-conceived, later in life; part of it was the exclusion of evil. He said since God had created this world and everything in it, it must be good, there was really nothing to worry about. Evil is hereby excluded! With all merit and demerit; why should we be keeping track -- everything here has its purpose, if only we could understand it. And he went on in this tone.

Well, it brought him into contact, through another printer’s, Watts -- with a number of distinguished individuals: Mandeville, who wrote “The Fable of The Bees,” became a confrere at the pubs, and also Sir Hans Sloane, who was Secretary to the Royal Society. At this time Sir Isaac Newton was President of the Royal Society. And Franklin had brought a few items with him; being a very sharp America, he realized he had to have a few aces in the hole, for when the going gets tough... Mark Twain later on would say the aces in the hole that Americans keep are some bad habits, (Laughter) so that when times get really tough we have something to give up. (Laughter)

Ben had brought with him a purse made out of asbestos, a very rare item, and Sir Hans Sloan was quite interested in this, the Royal Society had never had a handmade asbestos purse from the wilds of North America... And so Ben wrote him a little note: he said, “Dear Mr. Secretary, this is a one of a kind object, and I certainly now have it for sale, but the fact is that I have to leave this afternoon on a long, extended trip. If you wish to buy it you’ll have to see me now.” And he sent a rush messenger over (Laughing) and of course Sir Hans fell for the old Yankee con and invited him by return messenger to come over and bought it instantly, paid him a handsome sum.

Franklin discovered that his friend, James Ralph, was keeping company with a very shady lady who had a child, in fact (James) moved out and (they) moved in together, and Ben thought this was a very strange occurrence. And so he began to look around for cheaper rooms for himself, and he found a room for about half the price that he’d been paying. And the landlady there was quite an interesting old woman, she almost never got out of bed, she was about seventy. But she liked to talk to Ben; he made pretty good sense. So she had Ben take care of keeping track of some of the other boarders. And one of the curious boarders was a recluse woman, a mystic who lived up in the attic garret. And Ben went up there one day, knocked on the door, and was admitted, and the rooms were entirely bare, except for a mattress and a table which had a cross on it, and that was all that was there. And in talking with her he found out that she had once been a very wealthy lady, and had given all her money away and had kept for herself only a dispensation of twelve pounds per year to live on, one pound per month. And that her subsistence was largely on a kind of watery gruel which she prepared for herself, and she was able to live for years on end in that religious retreat on that. And Ben came down the stairs ashamed of squandering so much money, and he looked for cheaper rooms (laughing, big audience laughter...)

But the little episode has a happy ending, he went to his landlady and said, “You know, I found even cheaper rooms, it’s kind of a dingy place, but it’s only going to cost me two shillings a week.” She said, “Well, I’ll tell you, I like your company and you can stay here for one shilling six a week.” (Laughter) And so Ben thought that was a wonderful idea, and he stayed on.

He spent 18 months in England, learning all the latest tricks of the printers’ trade; he became a master printer. One of the things that the printers noticed was his tremendous strength. They would carry with two hands one of these type fonts, and Franklin would carry one under each arm. And they began to notice that actually it was his diet that was different, and so Franklin began to talk to them and say Look, you’ve been drinking beer and I’ve been drinking water. Now the difference here is that you think you’re strong because you drink strong beer. But actually, the beer is what is making you weak, and it’s the water that’s making me strong, and you’re losing all the vital energy by having the water fermented and distilled and made into beer. So he began to convince some of them to give up beer and to take up water, and of course with this their sense of taste would change and they would change their diets and start eating his vegetable specialties, and pretty soon he said that their heads began to clear; you see, if they didn’t have a beer every half hour, they would sober up, and they began to do better work and pretty soon the shop began to run even better. And Mr. Watt noticed that production was going up and everything was being organized very nicely. Franklin had this talent of getting things done. Almost like an 18th century Gandhi, he knew how to get a whole collection of people working together.

The time came and Mr. Dennon, the Quaker, who was getting set to go back to Philadelphia, broached a business proposition to Ben. He said, “I’m a very successful businessman, and the reason I have come back to England was to pay all my debts, (that) I had borrowed a lot of money and had left many creditors when I fled England years ago. And I went to Pennsylvania and by my diligence I built up quite an estate. I have a great commercial store and I have paid back every single creditor; that’s why I came to England. And now I need somebody I can trust to help me keep accounts and run my store; I’d like to have you with me.” And so Ben decided to go in with Dennon, give up, he thought, printing forever, and he and Dennon went back in the same boat heading for Philadelphia. This was 1726; he was 20 years old.

And on the voyage back, there was, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of the voyage, and eclipse of the moon, which they watched, and Franklin describes it this way: “Friday, September 30th, 1726. I set up last night to observe an eclipse of the moon, which the calendar calculated for London informed us would happen at five o’clock in the morning, September 30th. It began with us at about eleven last night and continued ‘til near two this morning, darkening her body about six digits or one half; the middle of it being about half an hour after twelve, by which we may discover that we are on a meridian about four and a half hours from London, or 67 and a half degrees of longitude, and consequently have not much above one hundred leagues to run. This is the second eclipse we have had within these fifteen days. We lost our fellowship in the night but saw him again this morning, near two leagues to windward,” and so on, and he talks about an abundance of dolphins, which unfortunately they caught and ate...

And when he got back to Philadelphia, he went into business with Mr. Dennon, and in about six months both of them came down with ferocious illness. Franklin had pleurisy, which was usually fatal in those days, and Dennon died of his fever. And so Ben Franklin’s assiduosity was again dashed by circumstance. He found himself having to go back to Keimer, go back to the printer, and he was very sorry because Keimer was kind of maltreating him. And it was then that he noticed in his helping of the young men in his shop -- he began again sobering them up, helping them with their work habits -- that one fellow, a strapping young man named Hugh Meredith whose father was quite well to do, made a business proposition to Franklin. He said, “My father will set us up in business if you will teach me the printing business.” And so Ben agreed to this, and they sent off to London to get the equipment; in the meantime, they had three months to go with Keimer. And at that time a great printing opportunity came from the colony of New Jersey, who were going to be one of the first colonies to print money; and in order to print the money, which was an unheard-of situation in the colonies at that time, no one knew quite how to do it -- except for Ben Franklin.

He figured out a way in which to do a copper engraving impress, and because of his great honesty, kept the runs to exactly the specifications of the Governor of New Jersey. And this took about three months, in which time all the famous people in the colonies came by to see how the printing of the currency was going. And Ben Franklin kept, as he always did, a nice little notebook of names and addresses, and made sure that everybody understood that it was he, and not Keimer, who was the brains behind this. And everybody assured him that when he set up his print shop, why, they would give him (their) business. And so the day came when, without rough words, he walked out of Keimer’s print shop and into the beginnings of his own destiny. He was 22 years old, and he had just begun.


Well, next week we will take him on from there, and we’ll see the tremendous development of this individual.

(APPLAUSE!!!!!)

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