“Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us…”
When we think of Benjamin Franklin today, we picture a Santa Claus character with a touch of mania. We see him flying a kite in a thunderstorm, or perhaps we see him behind a desk penning some of Poor Richard’s famous one-liners like “a cat in gloves catches no mice”. Franklin was indeed often conducting unique experiments, and his witty sayings were legendary, but Isaacson wants to show us the Franklin that has been forgotten. He was the only founding father to have signed and helped create four of the major documents of the American Revolution. His ability to strike a balance between idealism and realism along with his aversion to extremism made him the exact character required to stitch together thirteen disparate colonies into a single country.
Franklin was almost endlessly adaptable; in his young years, he was the printer with a work ethic that impressed his Puritan neighbors, while later in life his wit and taste for the finer things won him the popularity of the French royalty, especially the ladies. At one moment, Franklin would be fully engaged in the intricacies of balancing French interests against the British; at the next, he would be drafting improvements for streetlamps. He was a man who made a family of friends wherever he went but was often cold and distant with his biological family. He walked lightly through life, managing to be curious about the how of things, but not at all about the why. He was too busy trying to make this life better to spend too much time considering what came next. Famously, near his death, when asked about the divinity of Jesus, his response was:
"…it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble."
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Benjamin Franklin