Interviewer: So I'm here
with Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute,
and it looks like we're going to be talking
about Benjamin Franklin.
So one question I have is he's
clearly considered one of the founding fathers,
but he's the one that was never president.
So why do we care so much about him?
Walter: You know he's the unintimidating founder.
The one who winks at us from history's stage.
He's older than the rest,
so by the time we have a country,
you know, he's in his late 80s,
a little too old to be president,
but he's the one who was the glue who brings us together.
He also helps invent the American character.
That sort of spunky, chatty, populist, democratic person
who wants to bring people together and,
form a new type of nation based on the unity
of various different types of peoples and ethnic groups,
so he gets that America is going
to be a middle class nation,
more even than George Washington, or Jefferson,
or Madison, or John Adams,
who are much more from the elite.
You know, this is a shopkeeper.
He's middle class.
Interviewer: So just to get a sense of his life,
we have a timeline up here,
and I drew the timeline ahead of time
because I do find it confusing.
He wasn't in America his whole life
and he wasn't in one town his whole life.
Walter: He was, he lived 84 years,
and he was America's best scientist, inventor,
diplomat, writer, business strategist,
and one of the most practical of our political thinkers,
and he does it in various phases of his life.
He is born in Boston,
the tenth son of a Puritan refugee to Boston,
and he runs away as a kid,
so then he goes to London
for a little while to buy printing equipment,
to work and make enough money to buy printing equipment,
and then he comes to Philadelphia
in his early 20s in order to be a printer,
and then he becomes a great businessman.
He not only has a print shop,
but he has a newspaper, a publishing business.
He franchises his print shops up and down the coast.
He creates the American postal system
in order to tie together a lot
of his printing and publishing houses,
and then semi-retires in Philadelphia
to become a civic leader.
To do things like his electricity experiments,
which were very important,
but also to do things like founding a lot of civic groups,
like what becomes the University of Pennsylvania.
So most of that period he's become a middle-class shopkeeper
and then become sort of the head
of the good business group in Philadelphia.
Interviewer: This is a pretty interesting period
because as he likes to recount,
he kinda showed up in Philadelphia penniless
at a fairly young age,
and then over this time period he becomes,
as you just mentioned, kind of a leader of his community.
Walter: That is another reason
why he is the American archetype.
He is a self-made man.
He's a Horatio Alger myth.
The rags to riches.
He does take great pride, in his autobiography,
talking about coming into Philadelphia
with only three coins in his pocket all bedraggled,
and yet his remarkable rise in the world as he calls it,
when he opens a print shop, does the newspaper,
creates Poor Richard's Almanac.
Suddenly he's the most successful business entrepreneur
in all of the American colonies,
and that's the first time we've ever had in our history
a person who was just a poor runaway become one
of the richest and most successful businessmen.
Interviewer: Just to understand his,
and we'll in other videos,
we'll go into more depth in all these periods,
but why did he, he ran away,
he was working for his brother and he just didn't get along?
Walter: Well he apprenticed to his brother,
and that's something that's interesting
when you look at the early colonies.
An apprenticeship is when you sign over
that you're going to work seven, eight years
until you're at least 21 for somebody else.
You get just at most small wages, and you're bound.
It's not, of course, like being a slave,
but it's also not like being a free man.
You were bound as an apprentice.
Unseen interviewer: He was apprenticed
under his brother when he was 12.
Walter: Who was a printer and ran a newspaper in Boston,
and Franklin does not,
this makes him an American too,
he doesn't like arbitrary authority.
He doesn't like his brother being his boss.
He doesn't like the theocratic authority in Boston.
He wants freedom, so he runs away.
Interviewer: He literally had to run away
because he owed his brother time as an apprentice.
Walter: Right, he had signed an indenture.
He was apprenticed to his brother.
He could not legally leave.
He actually pulls off a little trick on his brother,
because his brother has to pretend that Ben
is running the newspaper because his brother is
in a little bit of trouble,
so with that trick,
he knew that his brother could not send
somebody out to capture him.
So late at night he runs away by sea,
leaves Boston, and ends up about a week later
bedraggled and wet and almost penniless in Philadelphia.
Interviewer: But then he immediately goes to London.
Why does he go to London in this time period?
Walter: Well he wants to be a printer,
and this is the good old days,
there are about ten newspapers in Philadelphia.
He wants to make the 11th.
He wants a print shop.
He had worked for his brother as a printer.
His brother was a printer,
so that's the trade he knew,
but in order to be a printer,
you had to have a printing press
and fonts and stuff like that.
So he runs away to Philadelphia to set up shop,
and he realizes he needs to buy the printing equipment,
and he wants to go to London himself to get it.
One of his backers in Philadelphia,
an older man he met,
said he would pay for it,
but the guy reneged on the deal,
so Franklin goes to London
and has to get a job there in order to make
enough money to buy his printing equipment.
Interviewer: I see, and that's why he had to stay there,
get the equipment, come back,
and that's kind of what launched his
Walter: Yeah, and then he comes back
with his printing equipment a couple of years later,
and that's what launches him
on his career as a publisher and printer.
Interviewer: And it was really kind of
near the end of this phase,
I guess his midlife, that as you mentioned,
he's a civic leader, inventor,
and we'll talk more about that in depth,
and that's kind of what launches him
into his role as a,
I guess for lack of a better word, founding father.
Walter: Well exactly.
He becomes a civic leader in Philadelphia.
He becomes a bit of a political leader
in Philadelphia in the assembly,
and then Pennsylvania as a colony
decides it needs an ambassador to London,
because we're having all the problems
with the British Parliament and their ministers
and they were imposing taxes,
and they were doing all sorts of bad things,
and so he's like being
an ambassador of the colonies to London.
He was appointed by the Pennsylvania Assembly,
but four or five other colonies,
Massachusetts and others,
decided we'll use him too.
He'll be our ambassador as well.
You've got to remember,
we were not one country back then.
We were just a collection of colonies.
So each of the colonies had to decide
who to send as their ambassador.
So he spends a lot of time, really,
over almost a 20-year period,
off and on in London,
acting as an ambassador of the colonies,
trying to keep us together as an empire,
prevent the American Revolution.
But in 1775 he basically fails,
comes back to Philadelphia in 1776,
becomes part of the Continental Congress,
and helps write the Declaration of Independence.
Then right after they do it,
he has to go to Paris,
even though he's a bit old by then,
because in order to make the Declaration a reality,
we had to get France in on our side in the war.
So there's about nine years in Paris,
acting as an ambassador to Paris,
and he's successful in getting France
in on our side in the war,
and then as a pretty old man, as he's pushing 80,
he comes back to what is then the United States
and helps write the Constitution
at the Constitutional Convention
and is a very elder statesman.
Interviewer: Wow! Fascinating life.
Walter: Oh, it's totally amazing, and an American life too.
It helps define what an American is and what a country is.