Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
Presented on: Thursday, January 10, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic America: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau
Presentation 2 of 13
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: New World Man
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, January 10, 1985
Transcript:
Our task is the most difficult one, and that is to appreciate why the American tradition is so valuable. And the difficulty is because the models and prototypes that we're appreciating, the history, are out of place when applied to our own experience. So we have a very difficult task to establish what an American reality might be, and we are sore pressed to use European or Asian models for our apprehension, as is usually done in textbooks. And in trying to make this distinction for you, I'm going to open up for you tonight with the opening lines of a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to one of the most famous scientists of the 18th century, Joseph Priestley. This was written in London, September 19th, 1772. Priestley, you'll recall, was one of the great early chemists, one of the discoverers of oxygen and one of the finest scientific minds of his time. Franklin writes to him, "Dear Sir, In the affair of so much importance to you, wherein you ask my advice, I cannot, for want of sufficient premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please, I will tell you how."
And this is the difference: with someone like Franklin, the emphasis was not so much on a solution as upon a method of discovery. And the American experience is a method for exploring the human condition, to discover what, in fact, is there. Not to manipulate conditions so as to cause an echo in the material world of what we would expect to find. This is extremely difficult to appreciate, and of course the lack of appreciation of this very fine point skews the understanding of our great tradition.
Now, in Franklin's own autobiography, he very often attempts to place the firm grasp of events upon the capacity of man to envision for himself clearly, out of his experience, the sense of right, the sense of propriety, the sense of what we would today call justice, were it not such a glib phrase... but that this justice, this propriety, this good, is impossible to tell beforehand, and only through codifying our approach, our experience, do we have any chance at all of approaching some realistic idea of what is actually occurring with us (this? 4:52).
To put it simply, Franklin is an American yogi, and discovered for himself the timeless procedure that, if you organize one aspect of reality completely, all the other aspects will organize themselves around that center. All we have to do is establish some core, some continuity, some beginning, correctly, and all the threads come together. For Franklin, coming as he did out of the Boston of the early 18th Century, the difficulty for him, as we mentioned last week, his family had one of his relatives, one of his mother's relatives had been one of the poor women seized in the Salem village witchcraft trials. And the point of those witchcraft trials that bent most heavily upon Franklin was the point that Cotton Mather constantly brought up in his writings, that there are mysteries in life, and in questions such as the witchcraft trials, it is not up to Man to forgive or to rectify, but up to God.
For Franklin, this was an abrogation of our capacities; that there must be some way for Man to understand, and in his autobiography, Franklin wrote that once he was assured by many friends that one should be a little more pious, and a little more religious. He writes, he replied that "if I made that kind of offer for Christ's sake, I should not miss of a reward. And I returned, don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ's sake but for your sake. One of our common acquaintance, Joe Cousley (?? 7:28) remarked that, knowing it to be a custom of the saints when they received any favor, to shift the burden of the obligation from off their own shoulders and place it in Heaven. I had contrived to fix it on Earth."
And so Franklin is a great lightning rod in himself, grounding the responsibilities to Man. Making Man the center of the ethical world. And taking the metaphysical possibilities, with their endless labyrinthian reverberations, and bringing them to the only focus that is possible for us to deal with -- that is, ourselves as individuals. And so for Benjamin Franklin, and for the American tradition, it is not so much a development of consciousness as European thought found itself for the last five hundred years exploring, but the American experience was the cultivation of character, which was different, and sought to establish that only by a disciplined approach could an individual hope to discover the truth of a matter.
Now, for Franklin, realizing his own shortcomings, recognizing that he'd grown up in a very talented family -- if you'll remember, the Franklins -- the word Franklin comes from English history. In Chauncer, we have the Franklin's Tale; the Franklins were free people; they were never indentured servants, they were never slaves, they were never indebted to any of the manors, as far back as anyone can tell. The Franklins were always craftspeople who were free, independent. They were the first middle class, even in the Middle ages. The family had always discussed matters quite openly together, and Franklin kept this notion of discussing among other people, close other people. And so the idea of a family leapt in Franklin's mind from just his blood relations, who he left behind in Boston and when he got to Philadelphia he established a new kind of family. When he came back from his journey to England, in 1727, he established with 11 or 12 other young men, a club called the Junto -- J-U-N-T-O -- and this club was semi secret; it was not an open, public club. And they tried to limit the membership to just twelve; I think the first person to drop out was a man who was a mathematician, who was very argumentative, and Franklin said that he always found mathematicians to be quibblers about fine points, and never realizing that there was a scope of development to be had, and not to be a stickler for victory on a certain point or another, but to amplify the dialogue, and thus come into possession of an increased awareness, an increased perception of the field of relevance.
And so the Junto became a new family for Franklin; and in fact, the Junto kept up its membership for the better part of more than 30 years. Many of the members became distinguished in the province of Pennsylvania, but Franklin was always the leader. He was always the individual who was the center. And we must now use a metaphor in order to envision Franklin. The closest figure I can think of, in our time, to Franklin now, almost two and a half centuries ago, is Mahatma Gandhi. Franklin was always experimenting with himself, always attempting to pare down his life: his life substances, his tasks, keeping everything at a bare minimum so as to notice changes that would go on.
He recounts in his autobiography how he used to eat his porridge every day out of an earthen bowl, with an old pewter spoon. And how one day his wife served him porridge, his regular porridge, at the regular time, in a china bowl with a silver spoon. And he was absolutely shocked at this because his wife Deborah was one of these very staid, excellent women who took care of things. And he says in his autobiography, "They had been bought for me by my wife without my knowledge and had cost her the enormous sum of three and twenty shillings, for which she had no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of the neighbors." (Laughter)
Franklin was enough of a humane man to realize that he might have gone a little too far; in fact, he writes, "This was the first appearance of plate and china in our house, which afterwards, in a course of years, as our wealth increased, augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value." So, once the door was open, of course, she had her way. Deborah Franklin, incidentally, I have a color photo here, was quite an excellent woman... She was the young woman who had seen Benjamin Franklin on his first day in Philadelphia, when he was penniless, carrying those loaves of bread under his arm...and he was a mess, and she had said "You're a mess," and he said something like, "I know," and they had courted off and on, and he had gone off to England and had sent just one letter in 18 months, which is not very responsive... She had married another man named Rogers; they found out later that he had another wife, and so it was annulled. She didn't like him anyway (laughter), and Franklin admired her courage and her honesty in being able to stand up to her family and her neighbors, with all the potential shame involved at having gone off and married some man who already had a wife. Franklin admired this quality of her character. And she was also venturesome like he, willing to experiment with life. And so Deborah and Benjamin were married in 1730. For what it's worth, they used to address each other in old age, in their letters, as "My Dear Child," the one to the other, the each to the other: "My Dear Child..."
I have somewhere here one of Deborah Franklin's letters; I don't know whether.... I'll read you just a few lines; now, women were not usually educated in these days; it was something for a woman to be able to write. So this was from Deborah Franklin; this is April 7, 1765.
"April 7; This day is complete five months since you left your one house. I did reserve a letter from the cape, since that not one line. I do suppose that you did write by the January packet, but that is not arrived just yet. Miss Wickoff came and told me that you was arrived and was well, that her brother had wrote her he had seen you. Mr Neet (SP? 16:41) has wrote that you was well, and Miss Graham has wrote all, so that she had the pleasure of a visit from you, and several have wrote that you was well. All these are county's air (??? 16:55), as pleasing as such things can be. But a letter would tell me how your poor arm was, and how you was on your voyage and how you are, an everything is with you, which I want very much to know. (Laughs, laughter :) ....And there is nothing worthy of a man's love more than his woman.
(17:24)
Franklin, in attempting to find out "what he was," what he was made of, what could come out from himself, began constructing a plan of action, very much like a yoga ??? (17:42) con/Khan who will sit down and choose a number of disciplines and go through them month after month, or year after year, in order to construct for himself some kind of a geometry of meaning, and then expand his capacities into a trigonometric progression and "display" himself so he can understand what is this phenomenon that I evidently manifest. For Franklin, he was interested in character. And so his net, as it were, was a way to portion out the various degrees of character, and his first list, and it's called in the Autobiography "The Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection." This first list was a complete survey of all the virtues; and he came up with twelve, rather than the classical seven.
(18:53)
The first one was Temperance; and he said of Temperance, "eat not til dullness, drink not to elevation." The second was Silence. "Speak not, but what which may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation." And then, I'll just list the others...
Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, ....and the Twelfth was Chastity.
(19:31)
And someone reminded him, looking over this list, I think someone in the Junto, said this is really, quietly, an affront to yourself to think that you have completed this survey; so Franklin said "You're quite right," and Franklin added a thirteenth which is called Humility... (Laughter)..... just to make sure that he did complete it all. (Laughter)
Once he had this list, then, he attempted then to examine himself, retrospectively, twice a day, on these accounts. He would run through this list in his mind.
(20:15) In order to keep his day very much the same, day after day, he also ordered his day, a whole 24 hours. And it ran something like this:
Rise at 5:00 o'clock in the morning....it doesn't say here but when he rose at 5:00, he used to get up, still naked, and sit in the cold air and run through the list and to see whether in his sleep or in his memory from (the) previous day, whether something could be observed. And he would do this, sitting almost like a Primal Man.
(21:05) So this would be at five o'clock, then at six o'clock he would dress, and contrive the day's business; in other words he would go through his mind and lay out what was going to be done today, so that he had to learn to portion out ahead of time what could be done in a day, so that he was training his mind to conceive, in the amounts of what could actually be accomplished, within a working day.
He trained himself specifically not to think in terms of what we could do in the next month or the next year, or something like that. No daydreaming; no speculation. "What can be done today? And in what order? And then to try and prosecute this, according to the plan of action.
After breakfast, he went to work from eight until noon, and he worked those four hours, and then he took an hour off, which was to read or look over his accounts. In other words, he was keeping track of his accounts, or what he had done during the first four hours, and then he worked four more hours in the afternoon.
Then at six o'clock in the evening, his note is "to put things in their place," supper, music or diversion, conversation.... and then at nine o'clock was the examination of the day. Had the day gone according to plan? Had he been unreasonable in making up his order of the day? Had he expected too much from himself? Could he have gotten more out of it?
(23:00) And then, he went to sleep at ten, and then woke up at five. And he attempted to do this, every day, every day, every day. And following this plan of action, this 24-hour regimen, along with this list of 13 character traits, Franklin began to keep such tight control over what he was noticing coming up in himself -- that he began to become an almost magnetic personality to the other members of the Junto, in fact to many other of the individuals in Philadelphia.
Out of this, Franklin began to perceive original ideas; they were not speculative ideas made up, so much as the ideas began to occur to him fully formed, as they will do if one practices this technique long enough.
(24:10) One of the first ideas that came to him was that there should be some collection of books that circulated among people. He had gotten so much out of his own reading, he had gotten so much out of books he couldn't possibly have gotten any other way... He loved John Bunyan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan), read his works assiduously, he loved the writings of Lawrence Shakesbury (??)... He even loved Cotton Mather's essay on Doing Good. He was a great appreciateur of John Locke, and many of the other great Enlightenment figures of the early English Enlightenment.
(24:57) So Franklin got the first idea of a lending library. And it was a penetrating notion. Because not only did he get to collect the books together, and then pass them out through correspondence, through mail or loaning them out, but he got to know who was reading in Philadelphia -- what they were reading -- and very sharp, wonderful Ben Franklin got what they call today in the business world, the "prime mailing list." (Laughter) He knew whom to contact, you see... (chuckles)... And in this way, Franklin became, of course, the number one prospect for printing. This was his business, and just about anybody who was literate knew of Ben Franklin, and through his lending library, knew a lot about his ideas, his frugality, the proverbial "frugal Ben Franklin."
He used to occasionally walk through the streets of Philadelphia with a wheelbarrow, wheeling his paper back from the wharves, so everyone could see "penny pincher Ben Franklin, he doesn't waste a dime... Let's give him some business." That sort of an outlook.
(26:20) So the lending library came out of this. The second thing that came out was something he wished to persevere and of course to not have a chance to, he wanted to have a society called the Free and Easy Society; he loved that title and it was just beautiful for him. He writes of it in this way:
"My ideas at that time were that the sect should be begun and spread at first among young and single men only; that each person should be initiated, should not only declare his assent to such a creed, but should have exercised himself with the thirteen weeks' examination, and practice of the Virtues, as in the beforementioned model. That the existence of such a society should be kept a secret 'til it was become considerable, to prevent solicitations for the admission of improper persons, but that the Members should each of them search among his acquaintance for ingenious, well-disposed youths, to whom, with prudent caution, the scheme should be gradually communicated. That the Members should engage to afford their advice, their assistance, their support to each other, in promoting one another's interests, business and advancement in life. That for distinction, we should be called The Society of The Free and Easy."
(27:51) Now, this is a profound notion. Franklin moved the idea of a blood family to the idea of a "family of friends," and now he was getting the indication that one could extend that kind of a family to an amplitude that was almost unheard of. These are the first stirrings of the idea of a United States; the first glimmers that there might be such a condition of all free men helping each other to be free. Not of establishing a kingdom; but of establishing a realm. Not a kingdom that could be owned but a realm that could be experienced.
All of this happening in the 1730s; and while Franklin was working on this, extending himself in whatever ways he could, it occurred to him that the Junto, which was the practical arm for him, of meeting, and they met generally once a month, and one of their techniques for discussion in order to allay arguments was that when tensions got to a certain point, they would pause for the duration that it took to drink a glass of water. And this would calm everything down.
(29:38) And they also met once a year, to present papers to each other and to discuss some of the more important events of the year; and it occurred to Franklin, "Why not amplify this in a printed form?" But the printed form that occurred to him, because he was a popularizer in the best sense of the word, was not so much to put out a volume of essays or dissertations, but out of this came "Poor Richard's Almanac." And Poor Richard's Almanac started in 1732. Franklin in his autobiography recounts the beginning this way:
"In 1732 I first published my Almanac, under the name Richard Saunders. It was continued by me for about 25 years, commonly called "Poor Richard's Almanac." I endeavored to make it entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand copies." Which was an awful lot in the 1730s, in Philadelphia...
(31:04) There were other Almanacs; but what made Poor Richard's Almanac a gem was the humanity encased within its approach. The whole notion of the qualities of character are inseparable from Franklin's personality. The man simply cannot be seen, cannot be appreciated until we insist on seeing the penetration of the qualities of character; and then Franklin looms as someone new, in this field of history.
(31:48) Here's the first Poor Richard's Almanac, (holds up book), and it's published by Benjamin Franklin, but the author is supposed to be Richard Saunders. And he writes in the beginning that in fact he was thinking of publishing an Almanac for many years, but that he had a good friend named Titan Leeds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds) who had assured him that as long as he was alive, Richard Saunders should not go into this kind of a publishing act.... but then Saunders writes "I had a premonition that Titan Leeds, my good friend, was going to die as of such and such a date, and so I bring this Almanac out because it will be published after my friend has died, and therefore I won't have all of this moral qualm. He writes in here, in fact,
"He dies, by my calculation, made at his request, on October 17, 1733, three hours and twenty nine minutes, p.m., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Venus." And then he puts Titan Leeds' own calculations in here, "By his own calculations, he will survive until the 26th of the same month, with small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these nine years past, but at length he is inclined to agree with my judgment." (Laughter)
(32:23) This was for openers. (Laughter) But you couldn't put it down; there was no tv in those days, and this was very interesting. In fact, as one went through the Almanac, Franklin placed all kinds of interesting little quips, in and around the letters, in and around the figures. And so people would be reading the most ordinary information: a table of the Kings of England, the month of January and here are all the dates... and it says in here, about every other line, it says....hmmmm.... "Never spare the parson's wine, nor the baker's pudding. Visits should be short, like a winter's day, lest your true troublesome hasten away (?)...... A house without Woman and firelight is like a body without soul or spread.... Kings and birds often worry their keepers"...
(34:32) And so you'd be reading this epistical information, and blinking into your attention would be a couple of words and oh, later on the words would continue... "He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir." (Chuckles. Laughter...)
(34:56) And this was the perfect technique for Franklin. His idea that we should keep track.... we should have all kinds of statistics and ledgers, and Americans love nothing more than to keep score. "Any game you want to play, but let's keep score, and let's keep statistics on it so we know that So and So has stolen the most bases for a left-handed catcher in the last 45 years. But in between that, we would like to know who is this? What kind of a character does he have, what about his family..." and everything else, and so Franklin sets this tone, a very American tone, almost inscrutable to other people, it's a juxtaposition of the net of keeping track of the momentary changes, and interspersed into it are all the qualities of human character. So that these two coming together, these two concerns coming together, form a unity which makes somewhat a different kind of a person. All of the Poor Richard's Almanacs began to sell, and in fact Franklin was just overwhelmed by the response. He even made up other characters, he made up a wife for Richard Saunders. And I think about the eighth or ninth Poor Richard's Almanac, Bridget Saunders comes in, with her Pidgin English and that she would like the women to have a say every once in a while, and that she loved her husband but that she wished he wouldn't go off and leave everything in her lap all the time. So she began to appear...
(36:58) Along with publishing Poor Richard's Almanac, Franklin began to increase his printing business, and because he was so frugal, his monetary resources began to grow, and Franklin began to become quite an individual in Philadelphia. Also, his inventions began to show up. He invented the first fire brigade, and someone ascribed to him the invention of the hospital, but he said that it wasn't really he that had invented the hospital, but a friend of his, named Doctor Thomas Bond (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bond_(surgeon).
(37:44) He also became electable to various offices, and as his career proliferated, he would occasionally bring out pamphlets. He had done this since he was a teenager, and one of his famous pamphlets at this time was called "The Plain Truth." I think there is still a magazine called "The Plain Truth"... He said, "The Plain Truth, in which I stated our defenseless situation and strong lights ?? with the necessity of unity and discipline for our defense, and promised to propose in a few days an association to be generally signed for that purpose. The pamphlet had a sudden and surprising effect: I was called upon, for the instrument of association, and having settled the draft of it with a few friends, I appointed a meeting of citizens in the large dwelling before mentioned."
(38:56) Well, this pamphlet, the Plain Truth, began to bear fruit a number of years later. Franklin had begun to understand that in order to bring the largest fruition of his ideas that a new concept of the various colonies would have to be entertained. it wasn't quite clear in his mind, but the grasp, the intuitive grasp of it, was sharpening. He asked for a position, it was one of the few times in his life where he ever asked for a position; he wanted to become the Deputy Post Master General for Pennsylvania, and he was given the post, he knew everybody, he could pull strings. And then Franklin set about looking over the distribution of mail, and the process by which the mail was delivered, throughout the Colonies. And Franklin figured out the way to integrate the Postal Service from Maine to South Carolina....and that was the first thread in the Union.
(40:25) It was the integration of the Postal Service in the methodological approach of Benjamin Franklin that laid the first cable across this vast gulf of the idea that there could be such a thing as the United States. On such a slender beginning, rests our whole country.
A few years after this, not too long, two or three years after this, there was a meeting in Albany, New York, and at this meeting there was, as some of you may recall, the Albany Plan of Union, and Franklin was the most outspoken representative at this group....and had printed up for this meeting a poster (holds up paper) which read, on the bottom, "Join or Die," and had a serpent that was divided up into a number of different parts. "Join or Die."
(41:35) Later on, this would become the "Don't Tread on Me" flag, when the serpent would be joined together. This was in 1754, 22 years before the Declaration of Independence. Our friend Jefferson was oh, just a youngster at this time. He writes here, in the autobiography, that he felt somehow that England was not understanding the need for the Colonies to have a definite say, not only just in their taxation but also in their defensive posture. That one had to be current, on location to understand the Colonies, and that the individuals who were attempting to control the Colonies were sitting there in London, in their clubs, Franklin knew very well.
And so it devolved upon the Colonial government of Pennsylvania in 1757 to decide that the only way in which they could get a hold, a handle on the situation at all, was to send someone to London to be there on the spot to speak for them. And they sent Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin would spend almost all the years between 1757 and 1774 in London. He would come back for just two years, in 1762-1764; but most of his life from 1757 to 1774 would be spent in London.
And when Franklin went there in 1757, he was purely the representative, we would say the public relations man, for the merchants of Philadelphia and those farmers of Pennsylvania....but while he was there, the colonies of Georgia, and of Massachusetts, New Jersey, all began to send their business to Franklin, saying, "will you represent us?"
(44:21) And strange as it seemed to Franklin, as time went on, he found himself more and more the spokesman for the New World, in the Old. And it occurred to him in 1765, and we'll get to that after the break, it occurred to him at a certain poignant time in 1765, that they were on a razor's edge of possibility; that history had come to some great watershed, and Franklin was the first to understand the reasons why there needed to be a United States.
And we'll get to that after the break, but I think we'd better have some tea and coffee now.
END OF SIDE 1
Our task is the most difficult one, and that is to appreciate why the American tradition is so valuable. And the difficulty is because the models and prototypes for appreciating the history are out of place when applied to our own experience. So we have a very difficult task to establish what an American reality might be, and we are sore-pressed to use European or Asian models for our apprehension, as is usually done in textbooks. And in trying to make this distinction for you, I'm going to open up tonight with the opening lines of a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to one of the most famous scientists of the 18th century, Joseph Priestley. This was written in London, September 19th, 1772. Priestley, if you'll recall, was one of the great early chemists, one of the discoverers of oxygen and one of the finest scientific minds of his time. Franklin writes to him, "Dear Sir, In the affair of so much importance to you, wherein you ask my advice, I cannot, for want of sufficient premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please, I will tell you how."
And this is the difference: with someone like Franklin, the emphasis was not so much on a solution as upon a method of discovery. And the American experience is a method for exploring the human condition, to discover what, in fact, is there. Not to manipulate conditions so as to cause an echo in the material world of what we would expect to find. This is extremely difficult to appreciate, and of course the lack of appreciation of this very fine point skews the understanding of our great tradition.
Now, in Franklin's own autobiography, he very often attempts to place the firm grasp of events upon the capacity of man to envision for himself clearly, out of his experience, the sense of right, the sense of propriety, the sense of what we would today call justice, were it not such a glib phrase... but that this propriety, this justice, this good, is impossible to tell beforehand, and only through codifying our approach, our experience, do we have any chance at all of approaching some realistic idea of what is actually occurring with this.
To put it simply, Franklin is an American yogi, and discovered for himself the timeless procedure that if you organize one aspect of reality completely, all the other aspects will organize themselves around that center. All we have to do is establish some core, some continuity, some beginning, correctly, and all the threads come together. For Franklin, coming as he did out of the Boston of the early 18th Century, the difficulty for him, as we mentioned last week, his family had one of their... one of his mother's relatives had been one of the poor women seized in the Salem village witchcraft trials. And the point of those witchcraft trials that bent most heavily upon Franklin was the point that Cotton Mather constantly brought up in his writings, that there are mysteries in life, and in questions such as the witchcraft trials, it is not up to man to forgive or to rectify, but up to God.
For Franklin, this was an abrogation of our capacities; that there must be some way for man to understand, and in his autobiography, Franklin wrote once that while he was assured by many friends that one should be a little more pious, and a little more religious. He writes, he replied that, "If I made that kind of offer for Christ's sake, I should not miss of a reward. And I returned, don't let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ's sake but for your sake. One of our common acquaintance, jocosely remarked that, knowing it to be a custom of the saints when they received any favor, to shift the burden of the obligation from off their own shoulders and place it in Heaven. I had contrived to fix it on Earth."
And so Franklin is a great lightning rod in himself, grounding the responsibilities to man. Making man the center of the ethical world. And taking the metaphysical possibilities, with their endless labyrinthian reverberations, and bringing them to the only focus that is possible for us to deal with that is, ourselves as individuals. And so for Benjamin Franklin, and for the American tradition, it is not so much a development of consciousness as European thought found itself for the last five hundred years exploring, but the American's experience was the cultivation of character, which was different, and sought to establish that only by a disciplined approach could an individual hope to discover the truth of a matter.
Now, for Franklin, realizing his own shortcomings, recognizing that he'd grown up in a very talented family -- if you'll remember, the Franklins -- the word Franklin comes from English history. In Chaucer, we have the Franklin's Tale; the Franklins were free people; they were never indentured servants, they were never slaves, they were never indebted to any of the manors, as far back as anyone can tell. The Franklins were always craftspeople who were free, independent. They were the first middle class, even in the Middle ages. The family had always discussed matters quite openly together, and Franklin kept this notion of discussing among other people, close other people. And so the idea of a family leapt in Franklin's mind from just his blood relations, who he left behind in Boston and when he got to Philadelphia he established a new kind of family. When he came back from his journey to England, in 1727, he established with 11 or 12 other young men, a club called the Junto J-U-N-T-O and this club was semi-secret; it was not an open, public club. And they tried to limit the membership to just twelve; I think the first person to drop out was a man who was a mathematician, who was very argumentative, and Franklin said that he always found mathematicians to be quibblers about fine points, and never realizing that there was a scope of development to be had, and not to be a stickler for victory on a certain point or another, but to amplify the dialogue, and thus come into possession of an increased awareness, an increased perception of the field of relevance.
And so the Junto became a new family for Franklin; and in fact, the Junto kept up its membership for the better part of more than 30 years. Many of the members became distinguished in the province of Pennsylvania, but Franklin was always the leader. He was always the individual who was the center. And we must now use a metaphor in order to envision Franklin. The closest figure I can think of, in our time, to Franklin now, almost two and a half centuries ago, is Mahatma Gandhi. Franklin was always experimenting with himself, always attempting to pare down his life: his life substances, his tasks, keeping everything to a bare minimum so as to notice changes that would go on.
He recounts in his autobiography how he used to eat his porridge every day out of an earthen bowl, with an old pewter spoon. And how one day his wife served him porridge, his regular porridge at the regular time, in a china bowl with a silver spoon. And he was absolutely shocked at this because his wife Deborah was one of these very staid, excellent women who took care of things. And he says in his autobiography, "They had been bought for me by my wife without my knowledge and had cost her the enormous sum of three and twenty shillings, for which she had no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of the neighbors." (Laughter)
Franklin was enough of a humane man to realize that he might have gone a little too far; in fact, he writes, "This was the first appearance of plate and china in our house, which afterwards, in a course of years, as our wealth increased, augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value." So, once the door was open, of course, she had her way. Deborah Franklin, incidentally, I have a color photo here, was quite an excellent woman... She was the young woman who had seen Benjamin Franklin on his first day in Philadelphia, when he was penniless, carrying those loaves of bread under his arm... and he was a mess, and she had said "You're a mess," and he said something like, "I know," and they had courted off and on, and then he had gone off to England and had sent just one letter in 18 months, which is not very responsive... She had married another man named Rogers; they found out later that he had another wife, and so it was annulled. She didn't like him anyway (laughter), and Franklin admired her courage and her honesty in being able to stand up to her family and her neighbors, with all the potential shame involved at having gone off and married some man who already had a wife. Franklin admired this quality of her character. And she was also venturesome like he, willing to experiment with life. And so Deborah and Benjamin were married in 1730. For what it's worth, they used to address each other in old age, in their letters, as "My Dear Child," the one to the other, the each to the other: "My Dear Child..."
I have somewhere here one of Deborah Franklin's letters; I don't know whether... I'll read you just a few lines; now, women were not usually educated in these days; it was something for a woman to be able to write. So this was from Deborah Franklin; this is April 7, 1765.
"April 7; This day is complete five months since you left your one house. I did reserve a letter from the cape, since that not one line. I do suppose that you did write by the January packet, but that is not arrived as yet. Miss Wikeof came and told me that you was arrived and was well, that her brother had wrote her he had seen you. Mr. Neet has wrote that you was well, and Miss Graham has wrote all, so that she had the pleasure of a visit from you, and several have wrote that you was well. All these accounts are as pleasing as such things can be. But a letter would tell me how your poor arm was, and how you was on your voyage and how you are, and everything is with you, which I want very much to know." (Laughs, laughter) And there is nothing worthy of a man's love more than his woman.
Franklin, in attempting to find out "what he was," what he was made of, what could come out from himself, began constructing a plan of action, very much like a yoga khan who will sit down and choose a number of disciplines and go through them month after month, or year after year, in order to construct for himself some kind of a geometry of meaning, and then expand his capacities into a trigonometric progression and "display" himself so that he can understand what is this phenomenon that I evidently manifest. For Franklin, he was interested in character. And so his net, as it were, was a way to portion out the various degrees of character, and his first list, and it's called in the autobiography "The Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection." This first list was a complete survey of all the virtues; and he came up with twelve, rather than the classical seven.
The first one was temperance; and he said of temperance, "Eat not 'til dullness, drink not to elevation." The second was Silence. "Speak not, but what which may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation." And then, I'll just list the others: order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, and the twelfth was chastity.
And someone reminded him, looking over this list, I think someone in the Junto, said this is really, quietly, an affront to yourself to think that you have completed this survey; so Franklin said, "You're quite right," and Franklin added a thirteenth which is called humility... (Laughter) just to make sure that he did complete it all. (Laughter)
Once he had this list, then, he attempted then to examine himself, retrospectively, twice a day, on these accounts. He would run through this list in his mind. In order to keep his day very much the same, day after day, he also ordered his day, a whole 24 hours. And it ran something like this:
Rise at five o'clock in the morning... It doesn't say here but when he rose at 5:00, he used to get up still naked and sit in the cold air and run through the list and to see whether in his sleep or in his memory from (the) previous day, (whether) something could be observed. And he would do this, sitting almost like a primal man. So this would be at five o'clock, then at six o'clock he would dress, and contrive the day's business; in other words he would go through his mind and lay out what was going to be done today, so that he had to learn to portion out what could be done in a day ahead of time, so that he was training his mind to conceive, in the amounts of what could actually be accomplished, within a working day.
He trained himself specifically not to think in terms of what we could do in the next month or the next year, or something like that. No daydreaming; no speculation. What can be done today? And in what order? And then to try and prosecute this, according to the plan of action.
After breakfast, he went to work from eight until noon, and he worked those four hours, and then he took an hour off, which was to read or look over his accounts. In other words, he was keeping track of exactly what he had done during the first four hours, and then he worked for four more hours in the afternoon.
Then at six o'clock in the evening, his note is "put things in their place," supper, music or diversion, conversation... and then at nine o'clock was the examination of the day. Had the day gone according to plan? Had he been unreasonable in making up his order of the day? Had he expected too much from himself? Could he have gotten more out of it? And then, he went to sleep at ten, and then woke up at five. And he attempted to do this, every day, every day, every day. And following this plan of action, this 24-hour regimen, along with this list of 13 character traits, Franklin began to keep such tight control over what he was noticing coming up in himself that he began to become almost a magnetic personality to the other members of the Junto, in fact to many of the other individuals in Philadelphia.
Out of this, Franklin began to perceive original ideas; they were not speculative ideas made up, so much as the ideas began to occur to him fully formed, as they will do if one practices this sort of technique long enough. One of the first ideas that came to him was the idea that there should be some collection of books that circulated among people. He had gotten so much out of his own reading, he had gotten so much out of books that he couldn't possibly have gotten any other way... He loved John Bunyan read his works assiduously he loved the writings of Lord Shaftesbury. He even loved Cotton Mather's essay on doing good. He was a great appreciator of John Locke, and many of the other great Enlightenment figures of the early English Enlightenment.
So Franklin got the first idea for a lending library. And it was a penetrating notion because not only did he get to collect the books together, and then pass them out through correspondence, through mail or loaning them out, but he got to know who was reading in Philadelphia what they were reading and very sharp, wonderful Ben Franklin got what they call today in the business world, the "prime mailing list." (Laughter) He knew whom to contact, you see... (chuckles) And in this way, Franklin became, of course, the number one prospect for printing. This was his business, and just about anybody who was literate knew of Ben Franklin, and through his lending library, knew a lot about his ideas, his frugality, the proverbial "frugal Ben Franklin." He used to occasionally walk through the streets of Philadelphia with a wheelbarrow, wheeling his paper back from the wharves, so everyone could see "penny pincher Ben Franklin, he doesn't waste a dime... Let's give him some business." That sort of an outlook.
So the lending library came out of this. The second thing that came out was something he wished to persevere and of course to not have a chance to, he wanted to have a society called the Free and Easy Society; he loved that title and it was just beautiful for him. He writes of it in this way:
"My ideas at that time were that the sect should be begun and spread at first among young and single men only; that each person should be initiated, should not only declare his assent to such a creed, but should have exercised himself with the thirteen weeks' examination, and practice of the virtues, as in the before mentioned model. That the existence of such a society should be kept a secret 'til it was become considerable, to prevent solicitations for the admission of improper persons, but that the members should each of them search among his acquaintance for ingenious, well-disposed youths, to whom, with prudent caution, the scheme should be gradually communicated. That the members should engage to afford their advice, assistance, and support to each other, in promoting one another's interests, business, and advancement in life. That for distinction, we should be called The Society of The Free and Easy."
Now, this is a profound notion. Franklin moved the idea of a blood family to the idea of a "family of friends," and now he was getting the indication that one could extend that kind of a family to an amplitude that was almost unheard of. These are the first stirrings of the idea of a United States; the first glimmers that there might be such a condition of all free men helping each other to be free not of establishing a kingdom but of establishing a realm. Not a kingdom that could be owned but a realm that could be experienced.
All of this happening in the 1730s; and while Franklin was working on this, extending himself in whatever ways he could, it occurred to him that the Junto, which was the practical arm for him, of meeting, and they met generally once a month, and one of their techniques for discussion in order to allay arguments was that when tensions got to a certain point, they would pause for the duration that it took to drink a glass of wine. And this would calm everything down. And they also met once a year, to present papers to each other and to discuss some of the more important events of the year; and it occurred to Franklin, "Why not amplify this in a printed form?" But the printed form that occurred to him, because he was a popularizer in the best sense of the word, was not so much to put out a volume of collected essays or dissertations, but out of this came Poor Richard's Almanac. And Poor Richard's Almanac started in 1732. Franklin in his autobiography recounts the beginning this way:
"In 1732 I first published my almanac, under the name of Richard Saunders. It was continued by me (for) about 25 years, commonly called Poor Richard's Almanac. I endeavored to make it entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand copies." Which was an awful lot in the 1730s, in Philadelphia...
There were other almanacs; but what made Poor Richard's Almanac a gem was the humanity encased within its approach. The whole notion of the qualities of character are inseparable from Franklin's personality. The man simply cannot be seen, cannot be appreciated until we insist on seeing the penetration of the qualities of character; and then Franklin looms as someone new in this field of history.
Here's the first Poor Richard's Almanac, (holds up book), and it's published by Benjamin Franklin, but the author is supposed to be Richard Saunders. And he writes in the beginning that in fact he was thinking of publishing an almanac for many years, but that he had a good friend named Titan Leeds who had assured him that as long as he was alive, Richard Saunders should not go into this kind of a publishing act... but then Saunders writes, "I had a premonition that Titan Leeds, my good friend, was going to die as of such and such a date, and so I bring this almanac out because it will be published after my friend has died, and therefore I won't have all of this moral qualm. He writes in here, in fact, "He dies, by my calculation, made at his request, on October 17, 1733, three hours and twenty-nine minutes p.m., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Venus." And then he puts Titan Leeds' own calculations in here, "By his own calculations, he will survive until the 26th of the same month, with small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these nine years past, but at length he is inclined to agree with my judgment." (Laughter)
This was for openers. (Laughter) But you couldn't put it down; there was no tv in those days, and this was very interesting. In fact, as one went through the almanac, Franklin placed all kinds of interesting little quips, in and around the letters, in and around the figures. And so people would be reading the most ordinary information: a table of kings of England, the month of January and here are all the dates... and it says in here, about every other line, it says... hmmmm... "Never spare the parson's wine, nor the baker's pudding. Visits should be short, like a winter's day, lest your too troublesome hasten away... A house without woman and Firelight is like a body without soul or sprite... Kings and Bears often worry their keepers..."
And so you'd be reading this epistical information, and blinking into your attention would be a couple of words and oh, later on the words would continue... "He's a fool that makes his doctor his heir." (Chuckles. Laughter.) And this was the perfect technique for Franklin. His idea that we should keep track... We should have all kinds of statistics and ledgers, and Americans love nothing more than to keep score. "Any game you want to play, but let's keep score, and let's keep statistics on it so we know that so and so has stolen the most bases for a left-handed catcher in the last 45 years. But in between that, we would like to know who is this? What kind of a character does he have, what about his family..." and everything else, and so Franklin sets this tone, a very American tone, very inscrutable to other people, it's a juxtaposition of the net of keeping track of the momentary changes, and interspersed into it are all the qualities of human character. So that these two coming together, these two concerns coming together, form a unity which makes somewhat a different kind of a person. All of the Poor Richard's almanacs began to sell, and in fact Franklin was just overwhelmed by the response. He even made up several other characters he made up a wife for Richard Saunders. And I think about the eighth or ninth Poor Richard's Almanac, Bridget Saunders comes in, with her Pidgin English saying that she would like the women to have a say every once in a while, and (that) she loved her husband but that she wished he wouldn't go off and leave everything in her lap all the time. So she began to appear... Along with publishing Poor Richard's Almanac, Franklin began to increase his printing business, and because he was so frugal, his monetary resources began to grow, and Franklin began to become quite an individual in Philadelphia. Also, his inventions began to show up. He invented the first fire brigade, and someone ascribed to him the invention of the hospital, but he said that it wasn't really he that had invented the hospital, but a friend of his, named Doctor Thomas Bond. He also became electable to various offices, and as his career proliferated, he would occasionally bring out pamphlets. He had done this since he was a teenager, and one of his famous pamphlets at this time was called The Plain Truth. I think there is still a magazine called The Plain Truth... He said, "The Plain Truth, in which I stated our defenseless Situation in strong Lights, with the Necessity of Union and Discipline for our Defense, and promised to propose in a few Days an Association to be generally signed for that purpose. The Pamphlet had a sudden and surprising Effect. I was called upon, for the Instrument of Association. And having settled the Draft of it with a few Friends, I appointed a Meeting of Citizens in the large Building before-mentioned."
Well, this pamphlet, The Plain Truth, began to bear fruit a number of years later. Franklin had begun to understand that in order to bring the largest fruition of his ideas that a new concept of the various colonies would have to be entertained. It wasn't quite clear in his mind, although the grasp, the intuitive grasp of it, was sharpening. He asked for a position, it was one of the few times in his life he ever asked for a position; he wanted to become the Deputy Post Master General for Pennsylvania, and he was given the post, he knew everybody, he could pull the strings. And then Franklin set about looking over the distribution of mail and the process by which the mail was delivered throughout the Colonies. And Franklin figured out the way to integrate the Postal Service from Maine to South Carolina... and that was the first thread in the Union. It was the integration of the Postal Service in the methodological approach of Benjamin Franklin that laid the first cable across this vast gulf of the idea that there could be such a thing as the United States. On such a slender beginning, rests our whole country.
A few years after this, not too long two or three years after this there was a meeting in Albany, New York, and at this meeting there was, as some of you may recall, the Albany Plan of Union, and Franklin was the most outspoken representative at this group... and had printed up for this meeting a poster (holds up paper) which read, on the bottom, "Join or Die," and it had a serpent that was divided up into a number of different parts. "Join or Die."
Later on, this would become the "Don't Tread on Me" flag, when the serpent would be joined together. This was in 1754, 22 years before the Declaration of Independence. Our friend Jefferson was still just a youngster at this time. He writes here, in the autobiography, that he felt somehow that England was not understanding the need for the Colonies to have a definite say, not only just in their taxation but in their defensive posture. That one had to be current, on location in order to understand the Colonies, and that the individuals who were attempting to control the Colonies were sitting there in London, in their clubs, Franklin knew very well.
And so it devolved upon the Colonial government of Pennsylvania in 1757 to decide that the only way in which they could get a hold, a handle on the situation at all, was to send someone to London to be there on the spot to speak for them. And they sent Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin would spend almost all the years between 1757 to 1774 in London. He would come back for just two years in 1762-1764, but most of his life from 1757 to 1774 would be spent in London.
And when Franklin went there in 1757, he was purely the representative, we would say the public relations man, for the merchants of Philadelphia and for those farmers of Pennsylvania... but as he was there, the colonies of Georgia, Massachusetts, (and) New Jersey all began to send their business to Franklin, saying, "Will you represent us?" And strange as it seemed to Franklin, as time went on, he found himself more and more the spokesman for the New World, in the Old. And it occurred to him in 1765 and we'll get to that after the break it occurred to him at a certain poignant time in 1765 that they were on a razor's edge of possibility; that history had come to some great watershed, and Franklin was the first to understand the reasons why there needed to be a United States.
And we'll get to that after the break, but I think we'd better have a little tea and coffee now.
END OF RECORDING