Benjamin Franklin

0:00We've come to a fine-looking London house for today's programme. I'll just knock on the door. Built sometime around 1730, it was for some 17 years the home of our subject. If I tell you that we're near Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square, that probably won't help, unless you guess who it's going to be. So I'll head downstairs to the basement to see some more clues. They've let me in. Thank you very much, guys. Nice to see you. Nice to see you all here. It was the first de facto US embassy here in London. Not sure if that helps or not. But here on the wall, there's a plaque to the famous man who lived here.

0:47A brown plaque, not the customary blue one. Born 1706 in Boston, Massachusetts. 1757, moved to London as agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly. 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence, then sailed for France, where he negotiates a treaty that helps the breakaway United States defeat the British and win the war. Welcome, Benjamin Franklin, one of the key founding fathers to Great Lives on Radio 4. I can almost feel your presence in this room.

1:29We've come to the top of the house to sit down with my guests. First, our nominator, John Studzinski, another American in London, banker and philanthropist. First moved here in 1984. But before we find out a bit more about you, John, tell us why you're nominating Ben Franklin and about your connection to this house. Well, Ben Franklin is the real deal. He's someone I have identified with for a long time. I almost feel, in the context of living another life, I could have been his apprentice. you know he had that wonderful quote it is prodigious the quality of good that may come from one man if it will make it his business and he talked about the common good and a lot of the way I look at life is what are we doing to enhance the common good but he's as he's as fresh and timely today as almost anyone and and the house John well the house is a project I was invited to be engaged in as a charity, Ben Franklin House Museum, for 20 years, the only remaining residence where Franklin actually had lived.

2:44He lived here from 1757 to 1775, and with money from the British government and the American government, we bought this house back as one and the only legacy of Franklin. Of course, he was here during that period as the ambassador from Pennsylvania to England. Is there one thing that impresses you most about him? When I went to the opening night of Hamilton in the after party, I said to Lin-Manuel Miranda, what am I missing? You've got Hamilton, you've got Washington, you've got Jefferson. Where's Franklin? And he said, oh, studs. We had to completely leave out Franklin. He would dwarf everyone else because he was such a big personality.

3:34He was not only larger than life, but he embodied everything. Remember, he's the only person out of the original founding fathers that was involved in drafting and signing, actually signing. He's the only one that signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So he's very unique in terms of his perspective on American history. A polymath, and we're hardly going to have time to touch on all the things that he did. Inventor, politician, scientist, greatest president of the United States, who was never president of the United States, it was said about him. He was born in Boston when it was a city of some 12 ,000 people and still part of the British Empire.

4:19And in a moment we'll find out from our second guest something about his early life. But John, what brought him to London and to this house for that big chunk of his life? Well, he was sent as an ambassador. And he ultimately, what he did during this whole period, this was the early seeds of the tension between the colonies and George III. And he was a great diplomat, but he also had the ability to bring in the French. by bringing in the French, he brought in the capital to actually provide a lot of the financial support for the American Revolution. Has he shaped your career? His curiosity has always shaped my career, and I've always felt that one should never operate in your comfort zone.

5:05And when you look at Franklin with his curiosity, not only his inventions, but his writings, You know, today you think about who would be the Franklin equivalent today. You know, would it be Elon Musk? Would it be Bill Gates? Would it be Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg? He was all those things. Would it be the Prince of Wales when he was being innovative about climate? You know, he redefines polymath. He certainly does. And to help us with that is Kathleen Burke, Professor Emerita and author of Old World, New World, Great Britain and America from the Beginning. And can we start, Cathy, with Franklin's beginnings?

5:46Who was this man? Who were his parents? What was he like in his earlier years? His parents were first-generation immigrants from England who came over for economic reasons and for religious reasons. And I think what's important is that as a young boy, he has always been a reader. his father wasn't all that encouraging because he wanted him to be a tradesman and essentially that's what franklin wanted as well and he grew up that way and he brought the whole idea of tradesman middling class democracy drove him all of his life and always signed his name ben franklin printer absolutely that's what he put on his tombstone gosh his father was a tallow chandler He made candles, which became increasingly necessary in the States.

6:37And essentially, Franklin grew up as the son of what he considered the best sort of type of person to be, which was a tradesman, a tradesman. He always called himself a leather apron man. Yes. And he was the 15th child, I believe. He served an apprenticeship, or rather didn't, because he broke it in the middle and ran away illegally. Tell us about that. He was given as an apprentice to his elder brother. The problem was that his brother, Joshua, used to beat him, and he got tired of being beaten, and he ran away to Philadelphia. In some ways, what followed in his career was, not that he ran away from anything, but he was a rebellious person.

7:26Yes, that's why his father decided that no, indeed, he wouldn't be a minister, because he was rebellious, he was puckish, he did not like authority. He wanted to make his own life, and he ran off, and he did indeed make his own life, as we know. Yes, tell us a little bit about your early life. Did you run away? My early life, I grew up in Peabody, Massachusetts. my parents immigrated as babies to the United States 1919 1920 we grew up in a Polish Catholic Italian Jewish Irish neighborhood north of Boston my mother was a nurse and my father was an accountant my mother's great line was and this is something probably Franklin could have said she'd come in my bedroom in the morning at 5 a.m.

8:14to put open the curtains and say get up you can sleep when you're dead. And I almost felt, as I learned more and more about Franklin, that is something he would have said, because he was very disciplined about time, he was disciplined about his experiments, he was disciplined about a lot of things. And of course, I knew Franklin, and I followed Franklin, certainly long before I moved to London, and certainly long before I became engaged with this house and this project. He certainly was disciplined and needed to be discipline, given everything that he packed into his life. He was a relentless self-improver.

8:48Here, for example, is Franklin saying how he wanted to improve his writing after reading The Spectator magazine. He said, I thought the writing excellent and wished, if possible, to imitate it. He wrote that to his father. He was also a scientist, wasn't he, John? Well, of course, and everyone who's educated associates Franklin with conducting of electricity from lightning through the key, through the kite and the key. There are dozens and dozens of things you can read that he discovered. His organizing principle was that he wanted to find out things so they would be useful to people. And hence, that was the foundation of all his inventions.

9:28Yes, indeed, he not discovered electricity, but turned it to use. As John said, through the key, he brought it down from the heavens into a jar, essentially, so he could investigate it more. But he then came up with a lightning rod. 183 men over the past period of time had bell ringers that died because they were ringing bells. Because in those days, the idea was this was God. And therefore, if you rang the bells, that helped you against this appalling occurrence. But you know, ring the bells and all these poor bell ringers got electrocuted. So he was trying to make life better. Again, yes, he invented the battery.

10:10He invented bifocals, which is a great story in its own. The Franklin stove, which was modified and then became useful. There's something called the Baxi stove, which is still used in Britain, and it's his ideas. He had a lot of ideas. And the other thing I really liked about him is that when things were going to be done, he would write very detailed descriptions of what you ought to do. This is how you're going to accomplish it, pages and pages, so we can reconstruct what he was doing because of all the material in his papers. Let's bring him here to London, Cathy. Why did he come here in 1757?

10:47Because he was appointed agent or ambassador, if you prefer, for Pennsylvania by the Assembly because the assembly was fighting with the chaps called the proprietors, the pens, descendants of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who didn't want to be taxed. They wanted to be able to tell the assembly what to do. They were treating the state as if it was their private property. Well, that's rather what they thought it was, in fact, in essence. So he was lobbying and being a diplomat, trying to get the charter changed so that the people, the middling sorts of people, who, as far as he was concerned, were the great part of America, to have some control over their own lives.

11:32There's a David Martin portrait of him from 1767, where he now is beginning to look like something like an aristocrat. Take a look, John. He looks like a world statesman rather than a young apprentice who's run away from his job. I think the reality is we haven't mentioned the term enlightenment, But I think we have to remember that Franklin is a great advocate and product and icon of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment is something which really often one doesn't talk about in a transatlantic context very much, because it was something you associate with Europe, with France, with Germany, sometimes with the UK, but certainly less so with the United States.

12:16and that portrait, he looks very much like a child of the Enlightenment. And remember, a lot of the things he stood for had to do with enhancing the quality of life, the quality of society, and also a lot of his financial prudence. He was an entrepreneur. He sold his own business at the age of 42 and then turned around and reinvested the money in a number of other initiatives. So he was about as enlightened and proactive, very much a product of that period. In some ways, also, he kind of represented or came to represent the spirit of America. Science, the future, technology, curiosity, those things that they existed in the old world, but he encapsulated them.

13:05Every American, I believe to this day, has a relationship with Ben Franklin. because if you look at his polymat origins and his character, I don't think, and Cathy can check me on this, I don't think he actually said a penny saved is a penny earned. He's associated with that, but he actually said that education paid the best form of interest. And that's the quintessential example of the American dream. Hard work, education, advancement. He also said that guests are like fish. they go off after three days. Cathy? They stink after three days is what Franklin actually wrote. Not very elegant, but evocative, I think.

13:47Might I just support what John said about the importance of the Enlightenment? Because there was something called the Republic of Letters, which was all these communications between the Europeans and Franklin. And what the Enlightenment was, was rationality. And you got that by following science, the natural world. and you also didn't get emotional. So it meant you thought in a rational way, you acted in a rational way and you tried to influence events in a rational way. That must have been the root of his Freemasonry because he was definitely a deist but he was not a Christian, I don't think.

14:28Towards the end of his life, he said he was having doubts about the divinity of Christ but he did believe in some sort of great divine purpose. Remember, the idea was that God was the great clockmaker in the sky. He set the pendulum going and then withdrew. And it was then up to men to decide what to do with it. You're listening to the great life of Benjamin Franklin, businessman, polymath, founding father of the United States, and a man who signed himself Printer. And we're recording today in the Georgian house where he lodged in London, which today you can visit both in person and online. Now let's get him back, John and Cathy, to America and to events for which he's probably best known.

15:13How involved was he in the revolution? He's older than some of the other famous names of that time. He was involved in the revolution because he had been in London and for ways he was treated, the decisions taken by Britain, By the time he got back to Pennsylvania, he was a convinced revolutionary. And after that time, he didn't hold back. He encouraged what was happening and did his best to organize things in a way that would facilitate the gathering of arms, the organizing of armies. And although he was a bit old to take a musket himself, he nominated George Washington as the commander-in-chief of the army, for example.

15:57So he was a revolutionary, and although he couldn't go out on the arms himself, he did everything he could behind to organise people, to encourage them to fight for America. And he was furious that the British government were trying to recoup all the debts they'd incurred during the Seven Years' War by hitting the colonies and the colonists with them. And in London, he'd heard the colonists described as the lowest of mankind, he wrote, almost a different species from the English, fit only to be snubbed, curbed, shackled and plundered. Do you think he was always instinctively in favour of independence?

16:36He doesn't talk about it, but I think he was always instinctively in favour of human rights and human dignity. And he had a very strong sense of right and wrong. and while you talked earlier about him not being a Christian, if you look at his values and his focus on the common good, he would have, as Kathy said, he would have been inherently repulsed by a lot of the principles he was hearing and was trying to be put upon the colonies. He was just always focused on fairness and transparency throughout his whole life. So these were his principles. He didn't become inherently political during this period.

17:24These were principles that were endemic in his own character, and now they were being put to very, very powerful use. To widen it out just a little bit, because John is dead right, of course, on what he's been saying, is that Franklin did not want revolution. He wanted America to be taken as an integral part of the British Empire. They were proud of being part of the most liberal empire the world had ever known. And he didn't want independence. He wanted the British to treat the Americans fairly. He was not inherently a revolutionary. I do not believe so. I believe he was inherently, as John says, a man going for fairness.

18:07So therefore, he didn't become a revolutionary until March 1775. Did he live his own personal life according to the principles of fairness and justice which he so passionately believed in as a public man? Just tell us very briefly about his private life. I don't think he was particularly fair in his private life. He made a lot of good friends, casual friends. He had very few long-standing friends, and he treated his family very badly. For example, he left his wife 15 years altogether, and he was in London. He was told she was dying. He was busy flirting and playing chess for political reasons, but he never came back to her.

18:52She had a stroke, and she died. I would echo Kathy's point. I don't think there's any record at all of Franklin having any very close personal friends or even a reasonable circle of friends. He had a broad range of acquaintances. And a lot of this came from the fact that, A, he liked his own company. B, he was curious. So his curiosity drove him to converse and engage with a broad group of people. And to a certain extent, he had put his own personal life on the back burner. And it really focused, when he was here, on trying to follow all these different projects, science, particularly diplomacy, and other aspects of his character.

19:39You would never describe him as a narcissist. You would describe him as someone who was such, so curious and so ambitious and impatient that he didn't really have much time to build any sort of personal close friendships. He helped with Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence and then in 1776 was sent off to France, where he remained as ambassador for ten years. What was he doing there? What was his mission in Paris, Cathy? His mission in Paris was to try to get the French to give money and to help with a navy against the British. That's precisely why he was there. Indeed, by late 1777, he was able to sign a treaty of alliance with the French and a treaty of trade and commerce.

20:30And so he accomplished everything he was sent over to do. He convinced the French that since their largest, their biggest enemy was the British, this was a way to get at the British, was help America to become independent, and the implication was, but it didn't really work that way, the Americans would then help the French against the British. And it worked? Well, it depends on how you say it worked. You actually had the British agree they should keep Canada because, of course, French wanted it back. Quebec in particular was French speaking. But Franklin had enemies in the British political scene, and there was a limit to what he could actually accomplish.

21:14But what he was accomplished enabled the revolution to go on because without French help, the Americans would have lost. What was his role in drawing up the Constitution? This is after Britain had been defeated and sent packing and the victorious colonies all start arguing with each other and threatening to sink the entire project. Where does he come in here? The Constitution was not a million miles away from the sort of organizing principles he'd been trying to implement since 1754, the first plan of union he'd drawn up. What he did with the Constitution was the thing about Benjamin Franklin was he had a personal magnetism, he was seen as larger than life, and everyone didn't precisely kowtow, but they often agreed with what he said.

22:03And what he could do was he had always, since young manhood, decided you don't have confrontational discussions. You have Socratic, you speak carefully, you speak quietly, so that you, in a sense, lure people into agreeing with you. And he was able to keep all the discussion in the Constitutional Convention on a civilized level. and it made it possible for people who didn't agree, actually, with what was proposed, to agree with him, then you give a bit here and the other side gives a bit and it can be brought together in a perfect piece of furniture. So they met in Philadelphia. They thrashed out a compromise between states' rights and federal rights.

22:53That was signed in 1787. But, John, he was pretty ill by then. and he was coming towards the end of his life. Yes, but you have to remember, he was still pretty opinionated to the end. And of course, his great line, which is very, very relevant today with what's going on in the world, with autocracy, democracy being threatened, is, Kathy can comment on this, but democracy is a fine thing. When they were signing the documents of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Democracy is a fine thing if you're wise enough to keep it. And it'll be 250 years ago as of next year.

23:39It's not without relevance, is it, today? It's very timely. And he himself knew of the issues and the challenges and the fragility of democracy. He was very wise in that respect. And he yet put that challenge in front of the founding fathers. And I think today that challenge remains quite vivid and quite robust. Most countries at that time were monarchies. Monarchy was the status quo, the default option. What was Franklin's attitude to monarchy? On the one hand, he said that most people like kings. It's a kingly sort of world. But on the other hand, if you like rational democracy, which includes most people, including mostly the middling people, which is what he wanted, you don't go for kings.

24:32Yeah, Kathy, you say he had a no king philosophy. I think I've heard the phrase no king more recently in the United States. Yes, that's one way, as John might have said, the relevance of Benjamin Franklin is important today. Benjamin Franklin died at home in Philadelphia in 1790. A huge and important 18th century figure, not just in America, but in Europe too. Aged an impressive 84. Do you think he still matters? He definitely matters in terms of the importance of respect for democracy, if democracy is to be maintained. His science, I suppose, is now all water under the bridge. What does he mean to you as a modern figure?

25:19What is he telling you on your shoulder? I think you have to look at his personality, his curiosity, his entrepreneurialism, his adventurism in terms of wanting to invent and challenge, his interest in diplomacy, his interest in science and innovation. And he's as modern, as an 18th century product of the Enlightenment, as any of the characters today. And what I hope is that more young people will study Franklin robustly and learn from him, because I think he's a very powerful role model. He's a timeless role model. And the Franklin papers are housed at Yale. And one of the things I'm quite hopeful in with artificial intelligence, that we'll be able to package, that reconfigure those papers into some sort of hologram or personages of Franklin, and we would be able, the three of us, to be able to have a conversation in this group with Franklin through artificial intelligence.

26:25It might not be 100 % accurate, but it would certainly be illuminating. I wonder what he'd want to say. He probably would have quite a lot to say, starting with some of the main characters on the world stage right now. My thanks to you, John Studzinski, and to you, Kathy Burke, and also my thanks to this house, 36 Craven Street, where we've been recording today and where I can almost feel the presence of Ben Franklin with us. Thank you for listening.