Author: Stephan A. Schwartz
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Publication Date: 2001
Link: Dr. Franklin’s Plan
Stephan: I wrote this piece for Smithsonian Magazine in 2001. I ran across it looking for something else, read it, and thought Dr. Franklin had it right over two centuries ago, and we would do well to listen to him. I wish all my readers the best for a wonderful July 4th. Spend a little time today thinking about what you can do to keep America's democracy healthy. If you are brave enough, talk about it amongst family and friends. Maybe you could do something together. This may be the most important 4th of July in your lifetime.
Franklin, by the way, usually shown as an elderly man -- because those are the images available -- had you met him would have left you with a very different impression. To begin with, Franklin was physically powerful. He was 5' 9" compared to Jefferson's or Washington's 6' 2" and built like a wrestler with a powerful upper body, big chest. He was charming, friendly, funny, and incredibly knowledgeable. He made a point by telling a story.
The sudden illness of his wife Martha called his travelling companion Thomas Jefferson back to Monticello. So on a Saturday in late October 1776 Benjamin Franklin, almost 70, exhausted and afflicted by gout and boils went aboard without him, and sailed for France in the 16-gun sloop Reprisal.1 He did so in the certain knowledge that if Reprisal was taken by a British warship he would be hanged for High Treason. His name was on the inflammatory Declaration of Independence, a document he had just helped Jefferson to write.
Franklin had been home less than a year, after almost two decades spent in the belly of the most powerful empire in the world representing first Pennsylvania’s and, eventually, America’s case at the court of King George II then, when he died, his grandson George III. The experience had made him more familiar with the ways of Europe than anyone else in the new American government, and he was going to need all the expertise he could muster. If he could not convince the French to fund and support the […]
Your Franklin article was a beautiful way to start this particularly troubled 4th, adding to and reinforcing what I already knew about him from your ‘laws of change’ especially the cumulative effect of diligence over the course of his life.
What do you feel Franklin would say to this quote from John Adams:
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
For those in or near Philadelphia I highly recommend a trip to the Franklin Institute. It gives a sense of the breath of the man’s interests, and intelligence. It is still a delight to visit today. also, Franklin’s writing never gets old.