Checking in.....................

 

.................................with Poor Richard:

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

The way to be safe, is never to be secure.

Success has ruin'd many a man.

Observe all men; thyself most.

Half the truth is often a great lie.

Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

 A mob's a monster; heads enough, but no brains.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of.\

If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.

Poor Richard knew a thing or two...............

 

The following bits of wisdom were culled from here:

There are three Things extreamly hard, Steel, a Diamond and to know one’s self.

He is a Governor that governs his Passions, and he a Servant that serves them.

A Cypher and Humility make the other Figures and Virtues of ten fold Value.

If it were not for the Belly, the Back might wear Gold.

Wouldst thou confound thine Enemy, be good thy self.

Pride is as loud a Beggar as Want, and a great deal more saucy.

Pay what you owe, and what you’re worth you’ll know.

Sorrow is good for nothing but Sin.

Many a Man thinks he is buying Pleasure, when he is really selling himself a Slave to it.

Tis hard (but glorious) to be poor and honest: An empty Sack can hardly stand upright; but if it does, ’tis a stout one!

He that can bear a Reproof, and mend by it, if he is not wise, is in a fair way of being so.

Sound, and sound Doctrine, may pass through a Ram’s Horn, and a Preacher, without straitening the one, or amending the other.

Clean your Finger, before you point at my Spots.

He that spills the Rum, loses that only; He that drinks it, often loses both that and himself.

Those that have much Business must have much Pardon.

Discontented Minds, and Fevers of the Body are not to be cured by changing Beds or Businesses.

Little Strokes, Fell great Oaks.

’Tis a Shame that your Family is an Honour to you! You ought to be an Honour to your Family.

Glass, China, and Reputation, are easily crack’d, and never well mended.

What signifies knowing the Names, if you know not the Natures of Things.

Tim was so learned, that he could name a Horse in nine Languages; So ignorant, that he bought a Cow to ride on.

The Golden Age never was the present Age.

You may be too cunning for One, but not for All.

Genius without Education is like Silver in the Mine.

Many would live by their Wits, but break for want of Stock.

bred...........................

 

      There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts.  But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin's evolution and, but extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.

      When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people.  As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit.  Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

     Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother's print shop in Boston.  He was not awed by establishment elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords.  He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner.  And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.

     For a long time he had cherished vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire.  But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subjugating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar.  Once it was clear that Britain remained intent of subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

one archetype......................

 

     Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy.  He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes.  He was equally distrustful of the elite and the rabble, of ceding power to the well-born establishment or to an unruly mob.  With his shopkeeper's values he cringed at class warfare.  Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Franklin at age 62.............................

The year is 1768.............. 

Above all, as he admitted in some letters, his views were in flux and he was still trying to make up his mind. . . .

     That was the crux of Franklin's dilemma.  He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, "in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman."  With his dreams for a harmonious and growing British Empire, he still hoped he could be both.  "Being born and bred in one of the countries and having lived long and made many agreeable connections in the other, I wish all prosperity to both," he proclaimed.  Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 

The more things change...............

 

     As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764. Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter.  It included paternal exhortations to be "dutiful and tender towards your good mama" and typical Franklin advice, such as "to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping."  But it also contained a more serious note.  "I have many enemies," he said.  "Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me.  It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that not advantage may be given to their malevolence."

-Walter Isaacson,  Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

the great conciliator................

 

"When one has so many different people with different opinions to deal with in a new affair," he explained to his friend Cadwallader Colden, "one is obliged sometimes to give up some smaller points in order to obtain greater."  It was a sentiment he would express in similar words when he became the great conciliator at the Constitutional Convention thirty-three years later.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

little advantages..........................

 

     As a result, Franklin was able to draw up a bill in the Assembly to pay for street paving, and he accompanied it with a proposal to install street lamps in front of each house.  With his love for science and detail, Franklin even worked on a design for the lamps.  The globes imported from London, he noticed, did not have vent on the bottom to allow air in, which meant the smoke collected and darkened the glass.  Franklin invented a new model with vents and a chimney, so that the lamp remained clean and bright.  He also designed the style of lamp, common today, that had four flat panes of glass rather than one globe, making it easier to repair if broken.  "Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding," Franklin said, but they should remember that "human felicity is produced . . . by little advantages that occur every day."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin:  An American Life

"Cautious".............................

 

     Franklin, however, was no Malthusian pessimist.  He believed that, at least in America, increased productivity would keep ahead of population growth, thus making everyone better off as the country grew.  In fact, he predicted (also correctly) that what would restrain American population growth in the future was likely to be wealth rather than poverty, because richer people tended to be more "cautious" about getting married and having children.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin, An American Life

being obliged...........................

 

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

-Ben Franklin, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, September 1787

Essence..................

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 her 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 his catch his horse alone."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

character..................

 

     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.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

mobility........................

 

Social mobility was not very common in the eighteenth century.  But Franklin proudly made it his mission—indeed, helped it become part of America's mission—that a tradesman could rise in the world and stand before kings.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

from first page to last...........

 

His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, "what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving."

     He was also far less inward looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans.  Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose.  As A. Owen Aldridge writes, "The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about uncertainty of their salvation.  Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin.  One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

beyond.......................

 

. . . he was a prophet of tolerance.  Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken.  Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful.  The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

the virtue of free expression........

 

     The opinions people have, Franklin wrote, are "almost as various as their faces."  The job a printers is to allow people to express these differing opinions.  "There would be very little printed," he noted, if publishers produced only things that offended nobody.  At stake was the virtue of free expression, and Franklin summed up the Enlightenment position in a sentence that is now framed on newsroom walls: "Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

uncompromising.............

 

     For these reasons, as much as any, his signature carried stentorian weight when at age eighty-four, wracked by gout, seized by pain, barely able to walk or sit and subsisting on laudanum, a dying Franklin now south to be uncompromising on one matter facing the young republic: slavery.  Here, as in so many other areas, Franklin seemed ahead of his time.  When a South Carolina delegate argued slaves were property, akin to sheep or dogs, Franklin shot back: "there is some difference. . . . Sheep will never make insurrections."

     So, on that grim winter day in 1790, could Franklin's endorsement of the petition once again move the country and make it whole?

     It was not to be.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

We could use more "detached observers"...

 

There are many types of newspaper editors.  Some are crusading ideologues . . . Some are the opposite: they like power and their proximity to it . . .

     And then there are those who are charmed and amused by the world and delight in charming and amusing others.  They tend to be skeptical of both orthodoxies and heresies, and they are earnest in their desire to seek truth and promote public betterment (as well as sell papers).  There fits Franklin.  He was graced—and afflicted—with the trait so common to journalists, especially ones who have read Swift and Addison once too often, of wanting to participate in the world while also remaining a detached observer.  As a journalist he could step out of scene, even one that passionately engaged him, and comment on it, or on himself, with a droll irony.  The depths of his beliefs were often concealed by his knack for engaging in a knowing wink.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Ben Franklin, a complicated guy.......

 

For all his simplicity he loved the good life: In Paris alone he had 1,041 bottles of wine in his cellar, nine indoor servants, and he spent freely, on food, on women, on luxuries.  While his circle of friends was among the most fascinating in history—his acquaintances included David Hume, Bishop Berkeley, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Voltaire, Noah Webster, Sir Isaac Newton, Jeremy Bentham, Diderot, and Immanuel Kant, as well as the Enlightenment princess Ekaterina Dashkova of Russia, an intimate of Catherine the Great herself—his colleagues often couldn't stand him.  John Adams thought him "lazy," "insignificant," and devious, not to mention too accommodating to the French.  Arthur Lee, a fellow commissioner to France, despised him, and was convinced that their secretary was a British spy, a charge that Franklin abruptly dismissed (Lee was right). 

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

Stoop.........................

 

As they were making their way out, they went through a narrow passage and Mather suddenly warned, "Stoop! Stoop!"  Franklin, not understanding the exhortation, bumped his head on a low beam.  As was his wont, Mather turned it into a homily" "Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high.  Stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through this world—and you will miss many hard thumps."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life