Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

  Franklin, however, added his own distinctive flair. He used his pseudonym to permit himself some ironic distance, and he ginned up a running feud with his rival Titan Leeds by predicting and later fabricating his death. As his ad in the Pennsylvania Gazette immodestly promised:

  Just published for 1733: Poor Richard: An Almanack containing the lunations, eclipses, planets motions and aspects, weather, sun and moon’s rising and setting, highwater, etc. besides many pleasant and witty verses, jests and sayings, author’s motive of writing, prediction of the death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds…By Richard Saunders, philomath, printed and sold by B. Franklin, price 3s. 6d per dozen.53

  Years later, Franklin would recall that he regarded his almanac as a “vehicle for conveying instruction among the common folk” and therefore filled it with proverbs that “inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue.” At the time, however, he also had another motive, about which he was quite forthright. The beauty of inventing a fictional author was that he could poke fun at himself by admitting, only half in jest, through the pen of Poor Richard, that money was his main motivation. “I might in this place attempt to gain thy favor by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than that of the public good; but in this I should not be sincere,” Poor Richard began his first preface. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife…has threatened more than once to burn all my books and Rattling-Traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family.”54

  Poor Richard went on to predict “the inexorable death” of his rival Titan Leeds, giving the exact day and hour. It was a prank borrowed from Jonathan Swift. Leeds fell into the trap, and in his own almanac for 1734 (written after the date of his predicted death) called Franklin a “conceited scribbler” who had “manifested himself a fool and a liar.” Franklin, with his own printing press, had the luxury of reading Leeds before he published his own 1734 edition. In it, Poor Richard responded that all of these defamatory protestations indicate that the real Leeds must indeed be dead and his new almanac a hoax by someone else. “Mr. Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary.”

  In his almanac for 1735, Franklin again ridiculed his “deceased” rival’s sharp responses—“Titan Leeds when living would not have used me so!”—and also caught Leeds in a language mishap. Leeds had declared it was “untrue” that he had himself predicted that he would “survive until” the date in question. Franklin retorted that if it were untrue that he survived until then, he must therefore be “really defunct and dead.” “ ’Tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks,” Poor Richard jibed, “no man living would or could write such stuff.”55

  Even after Leeds in fact did die in 1738, Franklin did not relent. He printed a letter from Leeds’s ghost admitting “that I did actually die at that time, precisely at the hour you mentioned, with a variation only of 5 minutes, 53 seconds.” Franklin then had the ghost make a prediction about Poor Richard’s other rival: John Jerman would convert to Catholicism in the coming year. Franklin kept up this jest for four years, even while he had, once again, the contract to print Jerman’s almanac. Jerman’s good humor finally ran out, and in 1743 he took his business back to Bradford. “The reader may expect a reply from me to R——S——rs alias B——F——ns way of proving me no Protestant,” he wrote, adding that because “of that witty performance [he] shall not have the benefit of my almanack for this year.”56

  Franklin had fun hiding behind the veil of Poor Richard, but he also occasionally enjoyed poking through the veil. In 1736 he had Poor Richard deny rumors that he was just a fiction. He would not, he said, “have taken any notice of so idle a report if it had not been for the sake of my printer, to whom my enemies are pleased to ascribe my productions, and who it seems is as unwilling to father my offspring as I am to lose credit of it.” The following year, Poor Richard blamed his printer (Franklin) for causing some mistakes in the weather forecasts by moving them around to fit in holidays. And in 1739, he lamented that his printer was pocketing his profits, but added, “I do not grudge it him; he is a man I have great regard for.”

  Richard and Bridget Saunders did, in many ways, reflect Benjamin and Deborah Franklin. In the almanac for 1738, Franklin had the fictional Bridget take a turn at writing the preface for Poor Richard. This was shortly after Deborah Franklin had bought her husband the china breakfast bowl, and it came at the time when Franklin’s newspaper pieces were poking fun at the pretensions of wives who acquire a taste for fancy tea services. Bridget Saunders announced to the reader that year that she read the preface her husband had composed, discovered he had “been slinging some of his old skits at me,” and tossed it away. “Cannot I have a little fault or two but all the country must see it in print! They have already been told at one time that I am proud, another time that I am loud, and that I have a new petticoat, and abundance of such kind of stuff. And now, forsooth! all the world must know that Poor Dick’s wife has lately taken a fancy to drink a little tea now and then.” Lest the connection be missed, she noted that the tea was “a present from the printer.”57

  Poor Richard’s delightful annual prefaces never, alas, became as famous as the maxims and sayings that Franklin scattered in the margins of his almanacs each year, such as the most famous of all: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Franklin would have been amused by how faithfully these were praised by subsequent advocates of self-improvement, and he would likely have been even more amused by the humorists who later poked fun at them. In a sketch with the ironic title “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” Mark Twain jibed, “As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents, experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration. My parents used to have me up before nine o’clock in the morning sometimes when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest where would I have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.” Groucho Marx, in his memoirs, also picked up the theme: “‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man you-know-what.’ This is a lot of hoopla. Most wealthy people I know like to sleep late, and will fire the help if they are disturbed before three in the afternoon…You don’t see Marilyn Monroe getting up at six in the morning. The truth is, I don’t see Marilyn Monroe getting up at any hour, more’s the pity.”58

  Most of Poor Richard’s sayings were not, in fact, totally original, as Franklin freely admitted. They “contained the wisdom of many ages and nations,” he said in his autobiography, and he noted in the final edition “that not a tenth part of the wisdom was my own.” Even a near version of his “early to bed and early to rise” maxim had appeared in a collection of English proverbs a century earlier.59

  Franklin’s talent was inventing a few new maxims and polishing up a lot of older ones to make them pithier. For example, the old English proverb “Fresh fish and new-come guests smell, but that they are three days old” Franklin made: “Fish and visitors stink in three days.” Likewise, “A muffled cat is no good mouser” became “The cat in gloves catches no mice.” He took the old saying “Many strokes fell great oaks” and gave it a sharper moral edge: “Little strokes fell great oaks.” He also sharpened “Three may keep a secret if two of them are away” into “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” And the Scottish saying that “a listening damsel and a speaking castle shall never end with honor” was turned into “Neither a fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.”60

  Even though most of the maxims were adopted from others, they offer insight into his notions of what was useful and amusing. Among the best are:

  He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir…Eat to live, and not live to eat…H
e that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas…Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage…Necessity never made a good bargain…There’s more old drunkards than old doctors…A good example is the best sermon…None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing…A Penny saved is Twopence clear…When the well’s dry we know the worth of water…The sleeping fox catches no poultry…The used key is always bright…He that lives on hope dies farting [he later wrote it as “dies fasting,” and the early version may have been a misprint]…Diligence is the mother of good luck…He that pursues two hares at once does not catch one and lets the other go…Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices…Kings and bears often worry their keepers…Haste makes waste…Make haste slowly…He who multiplies riches multiplies cares…He’s a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom…No gains without pains…Vice knows she’s ugly, so puts on her mask…The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine…Love your enemies, for they will tell you your faults…The sting of a reproach is the truth of it…There’s a time to wink as well as to see…Genius without education is like silver in the mine…There was never a good knife made of bad steel…Half the truth is often a great lie…God helps them that help themselves.

  What distinguished Franklin’s almanac was its sly wit. As he was completing his 1738 edition, he wrote a letter in his newspaper, using the pen name “Philomath,” that poked at his rivals by giving sarcastic advice about writing almanacs. A requisite talent, he said, “is a sort of gravity, which keeps a due medium between dullness and nonsense.” This is because “grave men are taken by the common people for wise men.” In addition, the author “should write sentences and throw out hints that neither himself nor anybody else can understand.” As examples, he cited some phrases used by Titan Leeds.61

  In his final edition, completed while on his way to England in 1757, Franklin would sum things up with a fictional speech by an old man named Father Abraham who strings together all of Poor Richard’s adages about the need for frugality and virtue. But Franklin’s wry tone was, even then, still intact. Poor Richard, who is standing in the back of the crowd, reports at the end: “The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.”62

  All of this made Poor Richard a success and his creator wealthy. The almanac sold ten thousand copies a year, surpassing its Philadelphia rivals. John Peter Zenger, whose famous 1735 libel trial was covered by Franklin’s paper, bought thirty-six dozen one year. James’s widow sold about eighty dozen a year. Father Abraham’s speech compiling Poor Richard’s sayings was published as The Way to Wealth and became, for a time, the most famous book to come out of colonial America. Within forty years, it was reprinted in 145 editions and seven languages; the French one was entitled La Science du Bonhomme Richard. Through the present, it has gone through more than thirteen hundred editions.

  Like Franklin’s moral perfection project and Autobiography, the sayings of Poor Richard have been criticized for revealing the mind of a penny-saving prig. “It has taken me many years and countless smarts to get out of that barbed wire moral enclosure that Poor Richard rigged up,” wrote D. H. Lawrence. But that misses the humor and irony, as well as the nice mix of cleverness and morality, that Franklin deftly brewed. It also mistakenly confuses Franklin with the characters he created. The real Franklin was not a moral prude, and he did not dedicate his life to accumulating wealth. “The general foible of mankind,” he told a friend, is “in the pursuit of wealth to no end.” His goal was to help aspiring tradesmen become more diligent, and thus more able to be useful and virtuous citizens.

  Poor Richard’s almanacs do provide some useful insights into Franklin, especially into his wit and outlook. But by half hiding behind a fictional cutout, Franklin once again followed his Junto rule of revealing his thinking only through indirection. In that, he was acting according to the advice he put in Poor Richard’s mouth. “Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.”63

  *The fonts that Franklin ordered were those created in the early 1720s by the famed London type-maker William Caslon, and they are the model for the Adobe Caslon typeface used for the text in this book.

  Chapter Five

  Public Citizen

  Philadelphia, 1731–1748

  Organizations for the

  Common Good

  The essence of Franklin is that he was a civic-minded man. He cared more about public behavior than inner piety, and he was more interested in building the City of Man than the City of God. The maxim he had proclaimed on his first trip back from London—“Man is a sociable being”—was reflected not only in his personal collegiality, but also in his belief that benevolence was the binding virtue of society. As Poor Richard put it, “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.”

  This gregarious outlook would lead him, as a twentysomething printer during the 1730s, to use his Junto to launch a variety of community organizations, including a lending library, fire brigade, and night watchmen corps, and later a hospital, militia, and college. “The good men may do separately,” he wrote, “is small compared with what they may do collectively.”

  Franklin picked up his penchant for forming do-good associations from Cotton Mather and others, but his organizational fervor and galvanizing personality made him the most influential force in instilling this as an enduring part of American life. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations,” Tocqueville famously marveled. “Hospitals, prisons and schools take shape this way.”

  Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building. Franklin would have disagreed. A fundamental aspect of Franklin’s life, and of the American society he helped to create, was that individualism and communitarianism, so seemingly contradictory, were interwoven. The frontier attracted barn-raising pioneers who were ruggedly individualistic as well as fiercely supportive of their community. Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character.1

  Franklin’s subscription library, which was the first of its type in America, began when he suggested to his Junto that each member bring books to the clubhouse so that the others could use them. It worked well enough, but money was needed to supplement and care for the collection. So he decided to recruit subscribers who would pay dues for the right to borrow books, most of which would be imported from London.

  The Library Company of Philadelphia was incorporated in 1731, when Franklin was 27. Its motto, written by Franklin, reflected the connection he made between goodness and godliness:Communiter Bona profundere Deum est (To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine).

  Raising funds was not easy. “So few were the readers at the time in Philadelphia and the majority of us so poor that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay.” In doing so, he learned one of his pragmatic lessons about jealousy and modesty: he found that people were reluctant to support a “proposer of any useful project that might be supposed to raise one’s reputation.” So he put himself “as much as I could out of sight” and gave credit for the idea to his friends. This method worked so well that “I ever after practiced it on such occasions.” People will eventually give you the credit, he noted, if you don’t try to claim it at the time. “The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.”

  The choice of books, recommended by learned Philadelphians such as James Logan, a wealthy fur trader and gentleman scholar whom Franklin got the chance to befriend for this purpose, reflected Franklin’s practical nature. Of the first forty-five bought, there were nine on science, eight on history, and eight on politics; most of the rest were reference books. Ther
e were no novels, dramas, poetry, or great literature, other than two classics (Homer and Virgil).

  Franklin spent an hour or two each day reading the books in the library, “and thus repaired in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me.” His involvement also helped him climb socially: the Junto was composed mainly of poor tradesmen, but the Library Company allowed Franklin to elicit the patronage of some of the more distinguished gentlemen of the town and also begin a lifelong friendship with Peter Collinson, a London merchant who agreed to help acquire the books. Eventually, the idea of local subscription libraries caught on in the rest of the colonies, and so did the benefits. “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans,” Franklin later noted, and “made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” The Library Company thrives to this day. With 500,000 books and 160,000 manuscripts, it remains a significant historical repository and is the oldest cultural institution in the United States.2

  Franklin often floated his ideas for civic improvements by writing under a pseudonym for his paper. Using the name Pennsylvanus, he wrote a description of the “brave men” who volunteer to fight fires, and suggested that those who didn’t join them should help bear the expense of ladders, buckets, and pumps. A year later, in an essay he read to the Junto and subsequently published as a letter to his newspaper, he proposed the formation of a fire company. Again taking care not to claim credit, he pretended the letter was written by an old man (who, in declaring that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” sounded quite like Poor Richard). Philadelphia had a lot of spirited volunteers, he noted, but they lacked “order and method.” They should therefore consider following the example of Boston, he said, and organize into fire-fighting clubs with specific duties. Always a stickler for specifics, Franklin helpfully enumerated these duties in great detail: there should be wardens, who carry “a red staff of five feet,” as well as axmen and hookmen and other specialties.