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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life Kindle Edition
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin’s life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Walter Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the runaway apprentice who became, over the course of his eighty-four-year life, America’s best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard’s Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation’s alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution.
In this colorful and intimate narrative, Isaacson provides the full sweep of Franklin’s amazing life, showing how he helped to forge the American national identity and why he has a particular resonance in the twenty-first century.
Review
The New Yorker Energetic, entertaining, and worldly.
The New York Times In its common sense, clarity and accessibility, it is a fitting reflection of Franklin's sly pragmatism....This may be the book that most powerfully drives a new pendulum swing of the Franklin reputation.
The New York Times Book Review A thoroughly researched, crisply written, convincingly argued chronicle.
About the Author
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Amazon.com Review
From the Artist
Review
"The New York Times" In its common sense, clarity and accessibility, it is a fitting reflection of Franklin's sly pragmatism....This may be the book that most powerfully drives a new pendulum swing of the Franklin reputation.
"The New Yorker" Energetic, entertaining, and worldly.
"The Washington Post Book World" The most readable full-length Franklin biography available. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.
From AudioFile
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Benjamin Franklin
An American LifeBy Walter IsaacsonSimon & Schuster
Copyright © 2003 Walter IsaacsonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743533645
Excerpt
Chapter One: Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of America
His arrival in Philadelphia is one of the most famous scenes in autobiographical literature: the bedraggled 17-year-old runaway, cheeky yet with a pretense of humility, straggling off the boat and buying three puffy rolls as he wanders up Market Street. But wait a minute. There's something more. Peel back a layer and we can see him as a 65-year-old wry observer, sitting in an English country house, writing this scene, pretending it's part of a letter to his son, an illegitimate son who has become a royal governor with aristocratic pretensions and needs to be reminded of his humble roots.
A careful look at the manuscript peels back yet another layer. Inserted into the sentence about his pilgrim's progress up Market Street is a phrase, written in the margin, in which he notes that he passed by the house of his future wife, Deborah Read, and that "she, standing at the door, saw me and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward ridiculous appearance." So here we have, in a brief paragraph, the multilayered character known so fondly to his author as Benjamin Franklin: as a young man, then seen through the eyes of his older self, and then through the memories later recounted by his wife. It's all topped off with the old man's deft little affirmation - "as I certainly did" - in which his self-deprecation barely cloaks the pride he felt regarding his remarkable rise in the world.
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us. George Washington's colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today. Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating. But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time.
He was, during his eighty-four-year-long life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America's unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.
But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America's first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
Partly, it was a matter of image. As a young printer in Philadelphia, he carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious. As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage. In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues - diligence, frugality, honesty - of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.
But the image he created was rooted in reality. Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as
"B. Franklin, printer."
From these attitudes sprang what may be Franklin's most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were some of his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called "the middling people." Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens.
The complex interplay among various facets of Franklin's character - his ingenuity and unreflective wisdom, his Protestant ethic divorced from dogma, the principles he held firm and those he was willing to compromise - means that each new look at him reflects and refracts the nation's changing values. He has been vilified in romantic periods and lionized in entrepreneurial ones. Each era appraises him anew, and in doing so reveals some assessments of itself.
Franklin has a particular resonance in twenty-first-century America. A successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity, he would have felt right at home in the information revolution, and his unabashed striving to be part of an upwardly mobile meritocracy made him, in social critic David Brooks's phrase, "our founding Yuppie." We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan for a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas. He would laugh at the latest joke about a priest and a rabbi, or about a farmer's daughter. We would admire both his earnestness and his self-aware irony. And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, the pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues, and spiritual values.
Some who see the reflection of Franklin in the world today fret about a shallowness of soul and a spiritual complacency that seem to permeate a culture of materialism. They say that he teaches us how to live a practical and pecuniary life, but not an exalted existence. Others see the same reflection and admire the basic middle-class values and democratic sentiments that now seem under assault from elitists, radicals, reactionaries, and other bashers of the bourgeoisie. They regard Franklin as an exemplar of the personal character and civic virtue that are too often missing in modern America.
Much of the admiration is warranted, and so too are some of the qualms. But the lessons from Franklin's life are more complex than those usually drawn by either his fans or his foes. Both sides too often confuse him with the striving pilgrim he portrayed in his autobiography. They mistake his genial moral maxims for the fundamental faiths that motivated his actions.
His morality was built on a sincere belief in leading a virtuous life, serving the country he loved, and hoping to achieve salvation through good works. That led him to make the link between private virtue and civic virtue, and to suspect, based on the meager evidence he could muster about God's will, that these earthly virtues were linked to heavenly ones as well. As he put it in the motto for the library he founded, "To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine." In comparison to contemporaries such as Jonathan Edwards, who believed that men were sinners in the hands of an angry God and that salvation could come through grace alone, this outlook might seem somewhat complacent. In some ways it was, but it was also genuine.
Whatever view one takes, it is useful to engage anew with Franklin, for in doing so we are grappling with a fundamental issue: How does one live a life that is useful, virtuous, worthy, moral, and spiritually meaningful? For that matter, which of these attributes is most important? These are questions just as vital for a self-satisfied age as they were for a revolutionary one.
Copyright © 2003 by Walter Isaacson
Continues...
Excerpted from Benjamin Franklinby Walter Isaacson Copyright © 2003 by Walter Isaacson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateJuly 31, 2003
- File size25305 KB
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- ASIN : B000FBJG4U
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (July 31, 2003)
- Publication date : July 31, 2003
- Language : English
- File size : 25305 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 608 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0684807610
- Best Sellers Rank: #24,455 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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About the author
Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.
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After meticulously describing the events before, during and after the American Revolution, Isaacson’s summed up Franklin’s contributions by pointing out that he was the only person to sign all four of its founding papers: the Declaration of Independence, the treaty with France, the peace accord with Britain, and the Constitution.
It was interesting to learn that Franklin’s proposed experiments to show that lightning was electricity and that metal rods could be used to snatch lightning from the sky were communicated to his English friend Peter Collinson in 1750, which were presented to the Royal Society in London and then widely published. It was translated into French in early 1752. King Louis XV asked that the lab tests be performed for Franklin, which they were in February by three Frenchmen. On encouragement from the King, the three went on to perform the lightning rod experiment on May 10, 1752. This was before the famous Kite experiment performed by Franklin, assisted by his son William, in June 1752. He was thus well-known and respected before he was sent to France as Ambassador, and his fame certainly helped with securing the aid of France in the Revolutionary War, without which History would likely be very different.
In describing Franklin’s scientific contributions and inventions, Isaacson went much beyond Electricity and the Lightning Rod. Some of Franklin’s discoveries included that dark fabrics absorb heat better than bright ones and northeaster storms travel up the coast from the south in the opposite direction from their winds. He and Captain Timothy Folger published the Gulf Stream Chart detailing the North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns. Besides the lightning rod, Franklin also invented the bifocal lens and a wood-burning stove that could be built into fireplaces to maximize heat while minimizing smoke and drafts. For his achievements, he received honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard and the College of William and Mary. On the other side of the pond, he received honorary doctorate degrees from Oxford University and the University of St. Andrews. He was elected the first American member of the Royal Society of London.
The path of Franklin as a writer was rather interesting. His formal education consisted of two years at Boston’s Latin School but did not graduate. Most of his education he picked up on his own through voracious reading. Among his favorite books were John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” and Cotton Mather’s “Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good.”. In particular, he was fond of reading the deft essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in The Spectator, a London daily that flourished in 1711-12. These essays probed the vanities and values of contemporary life. Franklin began writing and publishing essays under various pseudonyms, the first one being “Silence Dogood” in his brother James’ paper in Boston and later a series of “Busy-Body Essays” in Andrew Bradford’s paper Mercury in Philadelphia. These writings were not only satires and criticisms of contemporary issues but they also contained Franklin’s self-help rules. When Sir William Keith, then Governor of Pennsylvania, saw a letter Franklin wrote to a brother-in-law explaining why he was happy in Philadelphia and had no desire to return to Boston, the Governor was so impressed that “a missive so eloquent had been written by a lad so young”, he pledged to sponsor Franklin to England to procure printing equipment for a second newspaper in Philadelphia. So Benjamin went to England for the first time in 1723, at the age of 17. The pledge was never honored by the Governor.
Franklin became a popular writer when he published Poor Richard Almanack in his own paper the Pennsylvania Gazette under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders”. His fame as a writer was further consolidated with the publication of his autobiography. Although the autobiography was incomplete and published after his death, it has become one of the classics of the genre. It is amusing that the one book David Crockett carried to his death at the Alamo was Franklin’s autobiography.
Franklin’s relationship with his family members, as well as his extraordinary ability to befriend a number of ladies, in America, London, as well as in Paris, is told in exquisite detail in the book. One of these lady friends, Polly Stevenson, travelled from London to Philadelphia to be with him in his final days and was at his bedside when he died. It is sad to read that he and his wife, Deborah, was an ocean apart during 15 of their last 17 years of marriage and he was not present when she died. Franklin and his son William were on opposite sides of the American Revolutionary War and they never reconciled. It was also sad to learn that many of Franklin’s French friends were brutally killed during the French Revolution. On the other hand, it was amusing to read about Franklin’s suggestion to a young lady friend on the art of procuring pleasant dreams. Humors such as this are scattered throughout the book.
It is surprising that a person as accomplished as Franklin had drawn fierce criticisms from people who had not made significant contributions to society. These are summarized in the last chapter of the book, which ends with Isaacson's strong rebuttal to these criticisms.
Many well-known quotes attributed to Franklin first appeared in Poor Richard Almanack, ranging from the amusing, serious, to profound. I think Franklin would be delighted to see this review ending with several of the quotes below:
“Fish and visitors stink in three days.”
“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.”
“Religion is important, but too much of it is worse than none at all.”
Isaacson develops four themes in the life of Franklin; each is quintessentially American. First is an almost reflexive resistance to arbitrary authority. Beginning with the bucking of his printer apprenticeship to his older brother, James, in Boston in his teenage years and ending with his leadership in the American Revolution as an octogenarian, Franklin always bridled against heavy hands of authority. Almost from birth, Franklin retained what Isaacson calls an “inbred resistance to established authority.”
That is not to say that Franklin was a natural born revolutionary. Quite the contrary, according to Isaacson. To begin with, in addition to hostility to authority, Franklin also possessed an equally strong aversion to disorder and mob behavior. In the early 1760s, Franklin was “an enthusiastic and unabashed royalist,” Isaacson says, and prior to the 1770s remained “a proud and loyal Englishman, one who sought to strengthen his majesty’s empire rather than seek independence for the American colonies.” That loyalty was steadily eroded as the British tightened their grip on colonial life. It was, Isaacson writes, a steady collection of “personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts” that finally pushed Franklin into the rebel camp.
Second, Franklin maintained an unshakable belief in the value of merit, virtue, and hard work. He was his own best example of the good things that come to those who work hard and apply their talents to useful endeavors. The breadth of Franklin’s contribution is eye-popping. He developed significant improvements to such critical eighteenth-century devices as the heating stove and street lamps. He designed an entirely new musical instrument, the “armonica.” He organized the development of major institutions that still exist today, such as the University of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and Pennsylvania Hospital. And, of course, as everyone knows he invented the lightning rod and bifocals. For all of his fame and myriad achievements in science, literature, and industry, Isaacson is quick to point out that Franklin’s ability was of a unique, yet almost quotidian variety. For instance, “Franklin would never develop into a rigorous, first-rank philosopher…he was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations.” Nor was he exactly a first-rate scientist. “Ingenious as he was,” Isaacson writes, “[Franklin] was no Galileo or Newton. He was a practical experimenter more than a systematic theorist.” Indeed, Isaacson concludes, “In science [Franklin] was more an Edison than a Newton, in literature more a Twain than a Shakespeare, in philosophy more a Dr. Johnson than a Bishop Berkeley, and in politics more a Burke than a Locke.”
Third, Franklin believed that one can best serve God by serving your fellow man. Thus, while he promoted “hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance” on the one hand, he also pushed for “civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes,” on the other. Such “good works” were at the foundation of his spiritual life and self-identity. Raised in Puritan Boston and established in Quaker Philadelphia, Franklin nevertheless firmly believed “A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
Finally, Franklin’s unique blend of intelligence, wit, compromise, and bonhomie made him, in Isaacson’s estimation, “the greatest American diplomat of all time.” He was “America’s first great image maker and public relations master.” No other American in the 1780s was more famous than Franklin and arguably no one understood all thirteen colonies better. Owing to his time in Boston and Philadelphia and his responsibilities as postmaster, Franklin was “one of the few to view America as a whole,” Isaacson writes. He was “the most traveled and least parochial of colonial leaders.” Likewise, he pursued a unique American foreign policy mixed realism and idealism, what Isaacson calls “the warp and woof of a resilient foreign policy.”
In closing, Franklin was – and in many ways still is – the personification of America: “Its cracker-barrel humor and wisdom; its technological ingenuity; its pluralistic tolerance; its ability to weave together individualism and community cooperation; its philosophical pragmatism; its celebration of meritocratic mobility; the idealistic streak ingrained in its foreign policy; and the Main Street virtues that serve as the foundation for its civic values.” Or as the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner put it in 1887: “[Franklin’s] life is the story of American common sense in its highest form applied to business, to politics, to science, to diplomacy, to religion, to philanthropy.”
It has been argued that Americans are either natural born haters or lovers of Franklin. I suspect that both Isaacson and I are the latter, and this is a biography for those in that happy camp.
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