Was Benjamin Franklin Really That Great?

A portrait of Franklin published in France during his lifetime.

(Library of Congress)

Born 300 years ago today, the most beloved of the Founding Fathers is not a man who can be easily summed up in a few paragraphs. As one of his biographers writes, he “seemed not to be one person, but a harmonious human multitude.” But for a quick survey to measure just what he did and where his greatness lay, let’s divide his life and accomplishments into five compartments, appraising him as (by no means in order of importance) a businessman; a founder of civic and cultural organizations; a literary figure; a scientist and inventor; and a politician and statesman.

Businessman: Born in Boston, Franklin was the thirteenth child of a candle- and soapmaker. Apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, he chafed under his sibling’s authority. At 17 he ran away to Philadelphia and found work as a printer’s assistant. At 22 he founded his own print shop, quickly becoming known as Philadelphia’s best, hardest-working printer. At 35 he was one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia; at 42, his fortune made, he retired from printing to turn his superabundant energies to other pursuits. He was clearly a truly first-class businessman.

Civic and Cultural Activist: To American Puritans like Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather, religious faith was a matter of inner grace, of hard-won spiritual purity. To the more practical-minded Franklin, one best served God through good works. Accordingly, he was perhaps Philadelphia’s most civic-minded inhabitant. He organized the city’s first fire department, made improvements in its police force, and streamlined its postal system (he was Philadelphia’s postmaster and eventually deputy postmaster of all the colonies). He formed the American Philosophical Society, which flourishes to this day. Finally, he was the guiding force behind the founding of the city’s first college, which became one of America’s great centers of learning, the University of Pennsylvania.

Literary Man: In 1732 Franklin began to publish his annual Poor Richard’s Almanack. Instead of simply offering the usual weather forecasts, tides, eclipses, and so on, he gave readers the witty proverbs and maxims that have lodged themselves in our national memory: “Haste makes waste,” “He that lies down with dogs shall rise with fleas,” etc. (Many of the Almanack’s wise sayings were borrowed from earlier sources; Franklin had a knack for polishing them.) The Almanack’s pithy inserts and prefaces made it a rousing success; it sold a remarkable 10,000 copies annually.

Although the Almanack has been called America’s first great humor classic, Franklin’s literary reputation rests chiefly on his Autobiography. That unfinished work, which portrays his rise from penniless waif to Pennsyvania burgher, was intended as a practical and moral guidebook, a self-help manual for America’s nascent middle class. Perhaps its best-known section describes the “project for attaining moral perfection” that he undertook in his mid-twenties.

Making a list of 13 virtues, from frugality to industry to humility, Franklin set about practicing one a week; the cycle completed, he repeated it. This sort of calculus has led many to recoil from him as a catchpenny moralist. “I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton, as Benjamin would have me,” wrote the British novelist D. H. Lawrence. To be fair to Franklin, he recognized that moral perfection was beyond his or anyone’s capacity; as he wrote in the Autobiography, “such extreme nicety as I exacted of myself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which, if it were known, would make me ridiculous.” As seriously as he took self-improvement, he could poke fun at himself, and this strain of self-deprecating humor runs throughout the Autobiography, a refreshing undercurrent. The Autobiography is a nuanced, textured work: no mere self-improvement guide but, in the opinion of many, the first great book produced in America.

Scientist and Inventor: Despite a mere two years of formal education, Franklin was America’s first scientist of renown, his legacy resting overwhelmingly on his work with electricity. In the 1740s, when he became fascinated with it, electricity was an unexplained phenomenon, a parlor trick that left audiences amazed and baffled. His experiments led him to a major conceptual breakthrough: Electricity, he concluded, was a single fluid characterized by positive and negative charges. (In addition to “positive,” “negative,” and “charge,” Franklin also coined the electrical terms “battery,” “condense,” and “conductor.”)

Intrigued by the similarity between lightning and electrical sparks, he suggested using an iron rod to draw off the electrical charge from a passing thunderhead. In 1752, in France, his proposed experiment was successfully carried out. In the same year, he conducted his famous kite-flying test, in which the charge gathered from a lightning bolt and stored in a Leyden jar showed the very same qualities as electricity generated in a lab.

Benjamin Franklin grew up at a time when lightning was regarded as an emblem of God’s wrath; here he had shown it to be a mere natural phenomenon. The discovery not only struck a blow for reason against superstition; it was a tremendous blow for safety. Lightning rods sprouted across Europe and America. As Franklin’s biographer Walter Isaacson writes, “Few scientific discoveries have been of such immediate service to humanity.”

Franklin's electrical experiments brought him instant fame. By the mid-1750s he was probably the best-known American in the world. But his work on electricity was just one episode in a life filled with scientific inquiry. He charted the Gulf Stream, made advances in weather forecasting, and speculated about everything from comets to color to blood circulation. He wasn’t so much a theorist as an inspired tinkerer. When he wasn’t flying kites in thunderstorms he was busy devising useful gadgets—his “Pennsylvania fireplace,” streamlined into the Franklin stove; bifocal glasses; and other inventions. In the end, his curiosity about nature was inseparable from his desire to advance the common good.

Politician and Statesman: From the mid-1750s on, politics claimed the bulk of Franklin’s attention. He spent most of the years from 1757 to 1775 in England, representing the colonies in a variety of affairs. This was a time of growing friction between America and England. With his natural conciliatory bent, he tried for years to play a compromiser’s role. It was not until the mid-1770s that he firmly sided with the rebels. In 1776, after helping Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence, he was sent to France to persuade the French to join the colonies in their war against England. It was a job of paramount importance. Without French military and financial help, the American revolt was doomed. Largely through Franklin’s shrewd diplomacy, France became the first nation to officially recognize the new American state.

As the British-American war was coming to a close, he was asked to help negotiate a treaty. His greatest coup was to extend the new nation’s westward frontier clear to the Mississippi. The 1783 treaty guaranteed American expansion; the historian H. W. Brands puts it “in the same league as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

When the latter document was hammered out, in 1787, the 81-year-old Franklin, frail and gout-ridden, played a central role. In fact, he was the only person to play a major role in shaping all of America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, the treaty with Britain, and the Constitution.

The Constitution enacted, he continued to involve himself in the new nation’s affairs. He was an increasingly vocal opponent of slavery, the only one of our founding fathers to actively campaign against what he called “this detestable traffic.” One of his final acts was to sign a message to Congress urging abolition.

He died on April 17, 1790. His funeral attracted almost 20,000 mourners, the largest crowd yet to assemble in Philadelphia. France, in the middle of its own revolution, announced a national period of mourning. Such a spectacular breadth of interests and accomplishments as Franklin’s would be impossible in our specialized era; a life so varied could not have occurred later than the dawn of modern times. Of course, this does not in the least detract from Franklin’s singularity. As the historian Carl Becker wrote, “Such a variety of experience would have confused and disoriented any man less happily endowed with a capacity for assimilating it.”

Tony Scherman is a freelance writer living in Upper Nyack, New York.