Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (8 page)

1. It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.
   
2. To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action—the most amiable excellence in a rational being.
   
3. To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of suddenly growing rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.
   
4. I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever.
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Rule 1 he had already mastered. Rule 3 he likewise had little trouble following. As for 2 and 4, he would henceforth preach them diligently and generally make a show of practicing them, though he would sometimes be better at the show than the practicing.

On his voyage home, the 20-year-old Franklin indulged what would be a lifelong scientific curiosity. He experimented on the small crabs he found on some seaweed, calculated his distance from London based on the timing of a lunar eclipse, and studied the habits of dolphins and flying fish.

His journal of the voyage also reveals his talent for observing human nature. When he heard the tale of a former governor of the Isle of Wight who had been considered saintly yet was known to be a knave by the keeper of his castle, Franklin concluded that it was impossible for a dishonest person, no matter how cunning, to completely conceal his character. “Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted.”

While gambling at checkers with some shipmates, he formulated an “infallible rule,” which was that “if two persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves money most shall lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.” The rule, he decided, applied to other battles; a person who is too fearful will end up performing defensively and thus fail to seize offensive advantages.

He also developed theories about the sociable yearnings of men, ones that applied particularly to himself. One of the passengers was caught cheating at cards, and the others sought to fine him. When the fellow resisted paying, they decided on an even tougher punishment: he would be ostracized and completely shunned until he relented. Finally the miscreant paid the fine in order to end his excommunication. Franklin concluded:

One of the fundamental sentiments of the Enlightenment was that there is a sociable affinity, based on the natural instinct of benevolence, among fellow humans, and Franklin was an exemplar of this outlook. The opening phrase of the passage—“Man is a sociable being”—would turn out to be a defining credo of his long life. Later in the voyage, they encountered another vessel. Franklin noted:

His greatest happiness, however, came when he finally glimpsed the American shore. “My eyes,” he wrote, “were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.” With his deepened appreciation of community, his scientific curiosity, and his rules for leading a practical life, Franklin was ready to settle down and pursue success in the city that, more than Boston or London, he now realized was his true home.
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Philadelphia, 1726–1732

Franklin was a natural shopkeeper: clever, charming, astute about human nature, and eager to succeed. He became, as he put it, “an expert at selling” when he and Denham opened a general store on Water Street shortly after their return to Philadelphia in late 1726. Denham served as both a mentor and a surrogate parent to the aspiring 20-year-old. “We lodged and boarded together; he counseled me as a father, having a sincere regard for me. I respected and loved him.”
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But Franklin’s dreams of becoming a prosperous merchant ended after a few months, when Denham took ill and later died. In his oral will, he forgave Franklin the £10 he still owed for his ocean passage, but he did not leave him the business they had built. With no money and few prospects, Franklin swallowed his pride and accepted an offer from the eccentric Keimer to come back to his print shop, this time as the manager.
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Because there was no foundry in America for casting type, Franklin contrived one of his own by using Keimer’s letters to make lead molds. He thus became the first person in America to manufacture type. One of the most popular contemporary typefaces, a sans-serif font known as
Franklin Gothic
that is often used in newspaper headlines, was named after him in 1902.

When Keimer began to assert his power, the aversion to arbitrary authority that was part of Franklin’s heritage and breeding flared. One day, there was a commotion outside of the shop, and Franklin poked his head out of the window to watch. Keimer, who was on the street below, shouted at him to mind his own business. The public nature of the rebuke was humiliating, and Franklin quit on the spot. But after a few days, Keimer came begging for him to return, and Franklin did. They each needed the other, at least for the time being.

Keimer had won the right to print a new issue of paper currency for the New Jersey assembly, and only Franklin had the skills to do the job properly. He contrived a copperplate press to make bills so ornate they could not easily be counterfeited, and together they traveled to Burlington. Once again, it was young Franklin, the willing and witty conversationalist, rather than his slovenly master, who befriended the dignitaries. “My mind, having been much more improved by reading than Keimer’s, I suppose it was for that reason my conversation seemed more valued. They had me to their houses, introduced me to their friends, and showed me much civility.”
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The relationship with Keimer was not destined to last. Franklin, ever striving and chafing, realized that he was being used. Keimer was paying him to train the four “cheap hands” who worked at the shop with the intention of laying him off once they were in shape. Franklin, in turn, was willing to use Keimer. He and one of those apprenticed hands, Hugh Meredith, made secret plans to open a competing print shop, funded by Meredith’s father, once Meredith’s servitude was completed. Though not an outright devious scheme, it did not fully comport with Franklin’s high-minded pledge to “aim at sincerity in every word and action.”

Meredith, 30, was fond of reading but also of alcohol. His father, a Welsh-bred farmer, took a liking to Franklin, especially because he had persuaded his son to abstain (at least temporarily) from drinking. He agreed to provide the funding necessary (£200) for the two young men to set up a partnership, Franklin’s contribution being his own talent. They sent to London for equipment,
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which arrived early in 1728, shortly after the New Jersey job was completed and Meredith’s indenture had expired.

The two partners bid farewell to the hapless Keimer, leased a house on Market Street, set up shop, and promptly served their first customer, a farmer referred by a friend. “This country man’s five shillings, being our first fruits and coming so seasonably, gave me more pleasure than any crown I have since earned.”

Their business succeeded largely because of Franklin’s diligence. When they were hired by a group of Quakers to print 178 pages of their history, the rest to be printed by Keimer, Franklin did not leave the shop each night until he had completed a four-page folio, often working past eleven. One night, just as he was finishing that day’s sheet, the plate dropped and broke; Franklin stayed overnight to redo it. “This industry visible to our neighbors began to give us character and credit,” Franklin noted. One of the town’s prominent merchants told members of his club, “The industry of that Franklin is superior to anything I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I go home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.”

Franklin became an apostle of being—and, just as important, of appearing to be—industrious. Even after he became successful, he made a show of personally carting the rolls of paper he bought in a wheelbarrow down the street to his shop, rather than having a hired hand do it.
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Meredith, on the other hand, was far from industrious, having taken again to drink. In addition, his father had paid only half of the money he had committed for their equipment, which prompted threatening letters from the suppliers. Franklin found two friends who were willing to finance him, but only if he dumped Meredith. Fortunately, Meredith realized that he was better off returning to farming. All ended well: Meredith let Franklin buy him out of their partnership, headed off to the Carolinas, and later wrote letters describing the countryside there, which Franklin published.

And so Franklin finally had a print shop of his own. More to the point, he had a career. Printing and its related endeavors—publisher, writer, newspaperman, postmaster—began to seem not merely a job but an interesting calling, both noble and fun. In his long life he would have many other careers: scientist, politician, statesman, diplomat. But henceforth he always identified himself the way he would do sixty years later in the opening words of his last will and testament: “I, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, printer.”
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Franklin was the consummate networker. He liked to mix his civic life with his social one, and he merrily leveraged both to further his business life. This approach was displayed when he formed a club of young workingmen in the fall of 1727, shortly after his return to Philadelphia, that was commonly called the Leather Apron Club and officially dubbed the Junto.

Franklin’s small club was composed of enterprising tradesmen and artisans, rather than the social elite who had their own fancier gentlemen’s clubs. At first, the members went to a local tavern for their Friday evening meetings, but soon they were able to rent a house of their own. There they discussed issues of the day, debated philosophical topics, devised schemes for self-improvement, and formed a network for the furtherance of their own careers.

The enterprise was typical of Franklin, who seemed ever eager to organize clubs and associations for mutual benefit, and it was also typically American. As the nation developed a shopkeeping middle class, its people balanced their individualist streaks with a propensity to form clubs, lodges, associations, and fraternal orders. Franklin epitomized this Rotarian urge and has remained, after more than two centuries, a symbol of it.

Franklin’s Junto initially had twelve young members, among them his printing partner Hugh Meredith; George Webb, a witty but imprudent runaway Oxford student who was also apprenticed to Keimer; Thomas Godfrey, a glassworker and amateur mathematician; Joseph Breintnall, a scrivener and poetry lover; Robert Grace, a generous and pun-loving man with some family money; and William Coleman, a clear-headed and good-hearted clerk with exacting morals, who later became a distinguished merchant.

Besides being amiable club mates, the Junto members often proved helpful to one another personally and professionally. Godfrey boarded at Franklin’s shop and his wife cooked for them. Breintnall was the friend who procured the Quaker printing commission. And Grace and Coleman funded Franklin when he broke with Meredith.

The tone Franklin set for Junto meetings was earnest. Initiates were required to stand, lay their hand on their breast, and answer properly four questions: Do you have disrespect for any current member? Do you love mankind in general regardless of religion or profession? Do you feel people should ever be punished because of their opinions or mode of worship? Do you love and pursue truth for its own sake?

Franklin was worried that his fondness for conversation and eagerness to impress made him prone to “prattling, punning and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company.” Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.” So in the Junto, he began to work on his use of silence and gentle dialogue.

One method, which he had developed during his mock debates with John Collins in Boston and then when discoursing with Keimer, was to pursue topics through soft, Socratic queries. That became the preferred style for Junto meetings. Discussions were to be conducted “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” Franklin taught his friends to push their ideas through suggestions and questions, and to use (or at least feign) naïve curiosity to avoid contradicting people in a manner that could give offense. “All expressions of positiveness in opinion or of direct contradiction,” he recalled, “were prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.” It was a style he would urge on the Constitutional Convention sixty years later.

In a witty newspaper piece called “On Conversation,” which he wrote shortly after forming the Junto, Franklin stressed the importance of deferring, or at least giving the appearance of deferring, to others. Otherwise, even the smartest comments would “occasion envy and disgust.” His secret for how to win friends and influence people read like an early Dale Carnegie course: “Would you win the hearts of others, you must not seem to vie with them, but to admire them. Give them every opportunity of displaying their own qualifications, and when you have indulged their vanity, they will praise you in turn and prefer you above others…Such is the vanity of mankind that minding what others say is a much surer way of pleasing them than talking well ourselves.”
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Franklin went on to catalog the most common conversational sins “which cause dislike,” the greatest being “talking overmuch…which never fails to excite resentment.” The only thing amusing about such people, he joked, was watching two of them meet: “The vexation they both feel is visible in their looks and gestures; you shall see them gape and stare and interrupt one another at every turn, and watch with utmost impatience for a cough or pause, when they may crowd a word in edgeways.”

The other sins on his list were, in order: seeming uninterested, speaking too much about your own life, prying for personal secrets (“an unpardonable rudeness”), telling long and pointless stories (“old folks are most subject to this error, which is one chief reason their company is so often shunned”), contradicting or disputing someone directly, ridiculing or railing against things except in small witty doses (“it’s like salt, a little of which in some cases gives relish, but if thrown on by handfuls spoils all”), and spreading scandal (though he would later write lighthearted defenses of gossip).

The older he got, the more Franklin learned (with a few notable lapses) to follow his own advice. He used silence wisely, employed an indirect style of persuasion, and feigned modesty and naïveté in disputes. “When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.” Instead, he would agree in parts and suggest his differences only indirectly. “For these fifty years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression escape me,” he recalled when writing his autobiography. This velvet-tongued and sweetly passive style of circumspect argument would make him seem sage to some, insinuating and manipulative to others, but inflammatory to almost nobody. The method would also become, often with a nod to Franklin, a staple in modern management guides and self-improvement books.

Though the youngest member of the Junto, Franklin was, by dint of his intellectual charisma and conversational charm, not only its founder but its driving force. The topics discussed ranged from the social to the scientific and metaphysical. Most of them were earnest, some were quirky, and all were intriguing. Did importing indentured servants make America more prosperous? What made a piece of writing good? Why did condensation form on a cold mug? What accounted for happiness? What is wisdom? Is there a difference between knowledge and prudence? If a sovereign power deprives a citizen of his rights, is it justifiable for him to resist?

In addition to such topics of debate, Franklin laid out a guide for the type of conversational contributions each member could usefully make. There were twenty-four in all, and because their practicality is so revealing of Franklin’s purposeful approach, they are worth excerpting at length:

• 1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read remarkable or suited to be communicated to the Junto?…
  
• 2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
  
• 3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
  
• 4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?
  
• 5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?
  
• 6. Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
  
• 7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? Of imprudence? Of passion? Or of any other vice or folly?…
  
• 12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting that you heard of? And what have you heard of his character or merits? And whether you think it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him or encourage him as he deserves?…
  
• 14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country of which it would be proper to move the legislature for an amendment?
  
• 15. Have you lately observed any encroachments on the just liberties of the people?
  
• 16. Has anybody attacked your reputation lately, and what can the Junto do toward securing it?
  
• 17. Is there any man whose friendship you want and which the Junto or any of them can procure for you?…
  
• 20. In what manner can the Junto or any of them assist you in any of your honorable designs?
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