NARRATOR: To most
Americans, Benjamin Franklin is remembered as a flyer
of kites and storms, a quaint, somewhat
eccentric gadgeteer and the author of
folksy witticisms. But in his time, he was perhaps
the most internationally renowned of America's founding
fathers, a man of science, a man of letters, a
politician and diplomat, the son of a Boston soap boiler
who, through intelligence, talent, and industry, rose
to become a man who many have called the first citizen
of the 18th century. An inventor, a poet,
pamphleteer, and philosopher, a distinguished member of three
national academies of science, the one-time postmaster
of Philadelphia and America's first
postmaster general, he established Philadelphia's
first police force, fire department,
lending library, and the academy
which would become the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the first
fire insurance company. He served as a delegate to
the Constitutional Convention, helped draft the
Declaration of Independence, and still stands as one of
America's most effective statesmen and ambassadors. He also had his detractors. There were those
who thought Franklin dangerous and untrustworthy,
willing to do or say just about anything to line his pockets,
win praise, or confound his enemies. The famous writer D.H.
Lawrence considered him a hypocrite and fraud, a man who
preached middle class morality while indulging
his private lusts. Historian Max Weber
considered him the embodiment of everything despicable in
both the American character and the capitalist system. But theirs is a minority view. Most see Franklin's life as
an astoundingly full one. His autobiography, one of the
finest in the English language, tells a rags to
riches tale truer to the American dream than
that of Horatio Alger he sought success and found it. Without consciously
seeking fame, he became perhaps the most
famous man of his age, a man so famous that medallions and
plates bearing his likeness were best sellers
on two continents. And yet he was a man equally
comfortable with tradesmen and kings, a man who preferred
his fur cap to an elegant wig, and who modestly chose as his
epitaph "Benjamin Franklin, printer." Benjamin Franklin was
born on January 17th, 1706 in Boston, the seventh child
of Abiah Folger Franklin, second wife of Josiah Franklin. His father was a dyer
and tallow chandler, who had arrived in Massachusetts
from the English Midlands 23 years before. Young Benjamin was
an avid reader, and Josiah Franklin
believed his son was headed for the ministry. However, the family had no money
to pay for a college education. Instead, at 12,
Benjamin was apprenticed to his father as a candlemaker,
then to his brother James as a printer. The world of the print shop
exposed him to new books, ideas, and writers. Two ballads composed
when he was 12 and hawked on the
streets of Boston were his first
adventures in literature. "Wretched stuff," he
would later call them. When his brother began
publishing the "New England Courant," Benjamin developed
a taste for journalism and soon began slipping
anonymous essays under the shop door at night, secretly
delighting in the praise they received from the paper's
more prestigious contributors. He wrote a version of the
Lord's Prayer, which he thought was superior in style
and in the theology to the one in the Bible. He rewrote the Book
of Common Prayer and published a limited
number of copies of it. He invented a parable on
persecution, which he used to fool his friends with by
telling them that it was one of the chapters of the Bible,
which of course they had never heard of. NARRATOR: The
precocious 16-year-old, who developed his
prose style by copying the essays of "The
Spectator," Britain's leading literary
magazine, published 14 of these anonymous pieces
under the satiric pen name Silence Dogood, a chatty,
moralizing widow woman. The secret of his authorship
wasn't revealed until 55 years later, in his autobiography. Trapped as an apprentice and
bristling under his brother's stern hand, Benjamin ran
away, telling a ship's captain that he needed to get
out of town discreetly, having just gotten
a girl in trouble. It was a lie, but
it did the trick. After a miserable
layover in New York, the 17-year-old Franklin
arrived in Philadelphia in October of 1723, hungry,
bedraggled, friendless, and almost broke. Deborah Reed, the girl who
would seven years later become his wife, laughed out
loud when she first saw him on the waterfront. Exhausted and looking
for a resting place, he stepped inside the
Quaker meeting house, and unfamiliar with the Quakers'
form of silent prayer, promptly fell asleep. He soon landed a job as
a printer's assistant. And through an amazing stroke
of luck, a letter written to his parents explaining where
he was and why he had left, happened to be read by
Pennsylvania's governor Sir William Keith. The governor was so impressed
with the letter's style, he made a personal call on the
boy at Samuel Keimer's shop and proposed setting him up
as an independent printer. Sir William, it turned out,
made many promises but kept few. Sent to London to buy new
type and make contacts, Franklin arrived on
Christmas Eve, only to find that the governor
had not provided the promised letters of credit
or introduction. Stuck, Franklin took work
at the only trade he knew. For two years, he lived
frugally, annoying beer-sodded co-workers
with his sobriety, impressing employers
with his diligence, and supplementing his income
as a swimming instructor. On the ship back
to Philadelphia, the 20-year-old wrote out
what amounted to a life plan. Its precepts featured
frugality, honesty, industry, and diplomacy. The 12th of his
virtues was chastity. He showed the list
to a Quaker friend in Philadelphia, who told him
that he had omitted one very important virtue,
namely humility. NARRATOR: Humility never
presented a problem for Benjamin Franklin. Within two years of
his return, Franklin and a fellow apprentice
founded their own press to publish Philadelphia's
first top notch newspaper, "The Pennsylvania Gazette." It was an immediate success. The press flourished, producing
among other things America's first medical treatise,
Samuel Richardson's "Pamela," the first novel to be
printed in America, And the province's
paper currency. Firmly established
as an entrepreneur, he renewed his courtship
of Deborah Reed. He had begun this courtship
just before his ill-fated trip to England, but Deborah
had rejected him. In his absence, she had married
another, who had then abandoned her. This time, however,
she accepted. On September 1st, 1730,
Benjamin and Deborah Franklin announced their
common law marriage. They moved into rooms above the
print shop on Market Street. They also adopted
Franklin's illegitimate son William, the product of what
Franklin would later describe as an ungovernable youthful
passion which led him to frequent intrigues
with low women. Two more children followed,
Sally, a lifelong joy, and Francis, dead at six,
a lifelong source of grief. As Franklin prospered,
so did Philadelphia. One can almost date the
beginning of Philadelphia's transformation into America's
premier city to Franklin's first unqualified financial
and literary success, "Poor Richard's Almanac." Poor Richard was like
all 18th century almanacs in the way it mixed together
calendar lists, lunar charts, schedules of holidays and
fairs, home recipes, weather forecasts, and assorted
bits of homespun wisdom. What distinguished it was
the filler of Ben Franklin. Year after year,
Franklin filled blanks in the page with proverbs,
illustrations, and parables of his own creation. "God heals. The doctor takes the fee." "No nation was ever
ruined by trade." "Necessity never
made a good bargain." With these pearls of wit and
simple, civic-minded wisdom, Poor Richard utterly
eclipsed all its competitors. It was an enormous best
seller in all 13 colonies. For many of his readers,
Franklin's yearly almanac was the only reading
material they would see, besides the Bible. For many, it was their primer. The sayings of Poor
Richard, with their message of hard work, honesty,
and healthy skepticism, helped define an American
ethos just beginning to emerge from its Puritan
and provincial past. They articulated an emerging
nation's shared values, and they drew an increasing
amount of attention to both their
author and his city. Franklin founded the Junto Club,
an association of young men with a shared interest
in books, ideas, and personal improvement. At its meetings, Junto
members addressed questions of philosophical and
scientific interest. It was here that Franklin
presented his earliest speculations on the
nature of electricity. Civic improvements
also found their way onto the Junto's agenda. Franklin floated ideas
for professionalizing the nightwatch, which led to
the creation of Philadelphia's first police force. And he urged the creation
of a local fire brigade. With the Junto, Franklin founded
the city's first hospital and the predecessor of the
University of Pennsylvania. In time after time,
instance after instance, Franklin perceived
a need and went out to meet it in such a way that
he engaged other people to work with him, and he
created institutions that didn't rely on
him for their longevity or their future existence. And so we're still living
with many of the institutions that he founded
with such foresight. NARRATOR: As Franklin's stature
grew, so did his business. He set up branches
of his print shop in nearly every city
on the Eastern seaboard and took a major profit
share from each franchise. With his sharp eye for
economic opportunity, Franklin cornered the
Pennsylvania market in printing paper and
set prices accordingly. He used his position
as postmaster general to improve the
circulation of his papers and their profitability. Franklin's principal source
of income throughout his life, of course, was his
own printing shop. He retired from
business in 1748, but had already set up
a number of partnerships with his former journeyman
in places like Charleston, Barbados, Newport,
Woodbridge, New Jersey. And he provided the capital
for each of these shops and received a portion
of the profits. In addition, he
augmented his income by selling those satellite
printers paper and ink. So he had from his own
and other print shops the income from
the printing job, but also income from the sale
of supplies that were needed in the outlying provinces. NARRATOR: While Franklin
could be very shrewd, he could also be
extremely generous. Having invented a new energy
efficient heating device, which we still call the
Franklin stove, he declined to
patent his design. He argued that inventions
should serve the public interest and that new ideas like his
stove should be shared freely. Franklin's
philanthropy was what I call of a collective nature. His sense of benevolence was
aiding his fellow human beings and doing good to society. In fact, in many senses,
Franklin's philanthropy, his sense of benevolence,
was in fact his religion. Doing good to mankind was,
in his understanding, divine. NARRATOR: Among his
numerous inventions, such as his electrostatic
machine and the beautiful glass harmonica, none proved more
significant than the lightning rod, a practical extension of
his scientific experiments. Franklin suggested the right
size conductor, the right type of grounding system, and the
right way of attaching it to structures. Lightning rods today are pretty
much as Franklin originally proposed. Before Franklin's groundbreaking
work in electrical theory during the 1740s,
the mysterious forces which could be built up
and stored in Leyden jars were used mainly for
elaborate parlor tricks. Franklin's experiments, however,
took a more sober approach. Electricity, when
he was a young man, was a kind of parlor game. People knew something
about Leyden jars, how to store electricity. They knew it gave them shocks. But exactly what it was, how
it operated, they did not know. What he did as an
experimenter in electricity was to establish the
laws by which electricity operates, how to store
electricity, how to use it. He gave us the words
that we still use, "positive and negative,"
"battery," and the like. And of course, this achievement
was the subject, object of one of the great
epigrams of history. "He snatched lightning
from the skies and scepters from the hands of tyrants." NARRATOR: It was Franklin who
first postulated the theory of electricity as a kind
of fluid, which moved along conductive materials,
from what he described as positive poles
to negative poles. But perhaps his
greatest intuitive leap was his belief that
lightning was simply a more powerful version of
the spark from a Leyden jar. To prove this, he conducted
his now famous experiment with a kite and key. Franklin had the genius
to reduce basic principles to very simple examples. He first drew up two lists
of the characteristics of electricity, the
characteristics of lightning, compared them. They seemed the same. And then he tried
the experiment. NARRATOR: Franklin had
assumed that the only way to prove his
lightning theory would be to raise a conductive rod
from the spire of a church. But even the highest
steeple proved insufficient. In mid-1752, under
a threatening sky, Franklin and his son William
built and flew a kite. Franklin soon noticed the
threads on the kite string were beginning to
separate and stand, a sure sign that a
charge was Building He slipped a brass
key onto the string. And then, when he brushed
a knuckle against the key, it sparked. Lightning was indeed just
a massive static charge. This much celebrated
experiment typically pictures Franklin as
a gray-haired old man with his son a mere child,
though in fact, Franklin was a hardy 46-year-old at
the height of his powers. And his son was then 21. When his theory
was independently confirmed in France, Franklin's
reputation as a scientist soared. Franklin owed his reputation,
and not a little of his success as a as a politician
and a diplomat, to his scientific achievement. This gave him a an
international reputation, and before he ever went
to London and Paris. NARRATOR: Some clergymen in
America, England, and France condemned Franklin,
insisting that lightning was God's way of punishing sinners,
and it was not man's place to interfere. But Franklin, man
of reason, scoffed. As his electrical theories
and the effectiveness of his lightning rods
gained more and more adherents, his
reputation as the man who tamed the thunderbolt spread. Soon, Benjamin Franklin was the
best known American in Europe. At 55, just as
Franklin was planning to retire to a life of
scientific research, the Pennsylvania Assembly
sent him off to London to resolve a long standing
dispute with the heirs of William Penn, who
refused to pay taxes on their vast landholdings. It was supposed to
have been a short trip. He would be gone
for seven years. London offered Franklin
everything he wanted. In his lodgings, a short
walk from the Royal Academy, he had one room set aside for
his electrical experiments. He was a popular
dinner guest, always in demand, and in no hurry
to return to Market Street. In letters home to his
wife, Franklin always apologized for the necessity of
staying on for another month, then a few more. There is one
exchange of letters that shows how carefully she
protected her "pappy," as she called Franklin, her
pappy's interests. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the
British commander-in-chief in America, had done something
or other that, in her view, infringed upon her
pappy's prerogatives as postmaster general. She wrote him a very, very
strong letter protesting. She gave him the very devil. Not every woman in
18th century America would have stood up to
the commander-in-chief of the British army in
America in such terms. NARRATOR: But having
exhausted his excuses and partially settling the Penn
affair, Franklin finally set sail for Philadelphia
with heartfelt promises to return as soon as possible. He arrived in Philadelphia
in time for the elections to the assembly. Franklin had been his
city's representative for 14 straight years, but this time
he lost by a mere 25 votes to the Penn faction, who had
a strong desire to destroy Franklin's political career. Franklin and others now
concluded that the best thing for Pennsylvania would be
to petition the King to turn Pennsylvania into
a royal colony, eliminating the Penn's
control once and for all. Though no longer an elected
official, within a month, Franklin was again on
his way to England, bearing the assembly's petition. This time, he would
be gone 10 years. Larger issues eclipsed
Pennsylvania's problems with the Penns. In 1765, by a nearly
unanimous vote, parliament placed a new colonial
tax on everything printed-- legal documents, books,
newspapers, and even playing cards. Because proof of payment
required a stamp, it became known
as the Stamp Act. England itself already
had a similar tax on its own merchants. Franklin himself had suggested
something very much like it only a few years before. But by 1765, the political
climate had changed. The Stamp Act provoked riots in
the streets and speeches so hot they bordered on treason. When first told of the
Stamp Act riots in Boston, Franklin wept openly. He did what he could
to effect a compromise, but the lords turned a deaf ear. From across the
Atlantic, the colonists cried foul, labeling
the act tyrannical. "No taxation without
representation" became a call to arms. Lines were drawn and
loyalties questioned. With his son William now the
royal governor of New Jersey, rumors spread that Franklin
was one of the evil geniuses behind the detested Stamp Act. Back in Philadelphia,
his wife Deborah felt so threatened
she barricaded herself in a room in their Market
Street house, armed with a gun. It took time for Franklin
to realize the danger which the Stamp Act posed to
Anglo-American relations. But when he did, he
launched a furious campaign for its repeal. On February 13th, 1766, Franklin
was summoned to the House of Commons, then
debating whether or not to repeal the Stamp Act. Standing alone in
front of the Commons, over the course of four
hours and 174 questions, Franklin argued the case
against the Stamp Act. Edmund Burke later
described his interrogation as that of a master
being quizzed by a panel of schoolboys. But as the session wore on,
the tone grew more ominous. The members wanted to know just
how far the Americans would go in their opposition. Would they oppose
in force with arms? Unprovoked, Franklin
responded they would not. But what was the Stamp
Act if not provocative? Like so many others
who within a decade would be crying out
for independence, Franklin was still an eloquent
apostle of the unshakable ties between England
and its colonies. Until the very eve
of the Revolution, Franklin would believe
that what was good for the British Empire was good
for America and vice versa. He considered himself
a British Empire man. He was a true Briton. He loved the Empire,
thought well of it and believed that America had
a very firm and solid place in the imperial scheme. And I think his experiences in
London just further entrenched those ideas in his mind. NARRATOR: He wants proudly
proclaimed "not merely as I am a colonist but
as I am a Briton. I have long been of the
opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and
stability of the British Empire lie in America." But now, facing a
divided parliament, Franklin chastised them
for looking on Americans as foreigners, reminding them
that Americans saw themselves as Englishmen, ever willing to
support England as long as they did not feel abused. Within weeks, the
Stamp Act was repealed, and all across America
Franklin was hailed as a hero. But parliament had not given up
its right to tax its colonies. New taxes were ordered. To aid in their
enforcement, British troops would be quartered in private
homes at colonial expense. Tensions mounted. Franklin, fearing the worst,
waited for the event which would blow these
smoldering resentments into a conflagration between
the colonists and the British. An altercation between
some Bostonians and British soldiers, which began
as a snowball fight, ended with five dead. Soon, the enraged Bostonians
took their protest to the waterfront and dumped
600 pounds of British tea into the harbor. Independence for the
American colonies, unthinkable only a
few years before, was now being declared
as the only solution. Franklin hoped it would
never come to that. Massachusetts once again asks
the still loyalist Franklin to act as its London
representative. But Thomas Hutchinson,
the royal government, blocked the appointment. When Franklin asserted that
the sending of more troops to Boston only proved England's
ill will toward the colonies, he was told that those troops
had been sent at Hutchinson's request. Governor Hutchinson had
written a series of letters to British colonial officials,
criticizing Massachusetts and suggesting that what he
termed their English liberties perhaps ought to be curtailed. "Abridged," I think
is the word he used. And a few years later,
in 1772, Franklin was shown these letters. He came into possession of them
and sent them to some friends in Massachusetts. And he said that they should
not be published but rather just circulated discreetly
among colonial officials. And of course, that was a
highly unrealistic expectation and the letters were
indeed published in Boston and created quite a hue and cry. NARRATOR: The outraged
Bostonians instantly drew up a petition demanding that
Hutchinson be removed from office, and that
Franklin be the one to present their petition to the King. Franklin did. Hutchinson demanded a hearing
to defend his reputation. When word got back
to London of this, there was even a greater hue
and cry about what traitor had turned over these private
letters to the colonists. And there were several suspects
whose names cropped up, and Franklin, of course,
wanted to retain his anonymity. NARRATOR: But when one of his
friends was named as a suspect, Franklin felt honor-bound to
step forward and admit that he had released the letters. He immediately became anathema
to the British authorities. On January 11th, 1774, six
days before his 68th birthday, Franklin received an invitation
to appear before the Privy Council in London. The tone was polite. Franklin expected that
the council was finally going to consider Massachusetts'
petition to replace Thomas Hutchinson as governor. But three weeks later,
when Franklin stepped before the council, he realized
that he was being called on the carpet for his role
in the Hutchinson letters controversy. The room was packed with
peers and spectators. Lord Gower presided. Franklin stood for
an hour and a half while Solicitor General
Alexander Wedderburn, a notoriously abusive and
table-thumping Scotsman, harangued him. Wedderburn's attack was
vicious, cutting, and personal. Wedderburn, the
Solicitor General, took the occasion to excoriate
and vilify and humiliate Franklin. And he really became a
subject of this affair. And the berating of Franklin
went on for an hour, and Franklin stood there
silently and took it all. NARRATOR: Wedderburn warned
that with men like Franklin at liberty, no gentlemen's
papers would be safe unlocked in a writing desk. The audience laughed. When Wedderburn branded Franklin
a common thief, they applauded. When it was over, Franklin
calmly and gravely left the room without a word. Franklin's fellow colonists
had long suspected him of being too English. Now the English considered
him too American. Benjamin Franklin went
before the Privy Council on January 29th, 1774
a loyal Englishman, and left an American
revolutionary. While Franklin was
preparing to leave England, He had often urged her
to join him in London, but knew that she would refuse
to make the sea crossing. Her semi-literate
letters, so unlike his polished masterpieces,
had kept the marriage going through its long
years of separation. Now she was gone,
and he would return as a widower to a new house
which she had built for them and which he had never seen. Franklin arrived in
Philadelphia on May 5th, 1775 to find his city
preparing for war. Only 2 and 1/2 weeks before,
a contingent of British troops under General Gage had
encountered armed Minutemen on the Lexington
and Concord roads. After London issued an
order for his arrest, Franklin needed little
coaxing to hurl himself into the logistics of rebellion. Besides serving with the
Second Continental Congress, he served as a leading figure on
its most important committees. In the summer of 1776, Franklin
was appointed to the five man committee charged with drawing
up a document which would make a declaration of
American independence. Responding to Thomas
Jefferson's first draft, Franklin objected to
Jefferson's use of the word "sacred and undeniable" in
describing certain truths. Franklin suggested
the text be revised to read "we hold these
truths to be self-evident." When the finished document
was ready to be signed, John Hancock, who wrote his
name large enough so that King George could read it
without spectacles, warned that they all now
had to hang together. To which Franklin
added, "yes, indeed. We must all hang together or
we shall all hang separately." Desperately in need of arms,
the self-declared independent United States looked to France. And when they looked
around for who to send on this important
mission, they chose Franklin. Despite his age, he
accepted the task. Going to France would mean
another long separation from his daughter Sally
and his grandchildren. Rebellion was taking
its personal toll. Franklin and his son William,
still the fiercely loyalist governor of New
Jersey, were hopelessly divided over the issue. As British attacks
increased, he broke with many of his British friends. He concluded an angry letter to
his dear friend William Strahan with the words "you and
I were long friends. You are now my enemy,
and I am yours. Benjamin Franklin." 70-years-old, half debilitated
by gout and kidney stones, Franklin set sail
for France on the day Congress adopted the
Declaration of Independence. With him went a new
nation's hopes for success in its desperate war against the
world's leading military power. Unofficially, France
was eager to do anything to trouble its arch-enemry
England, short of declaring war. At a time when it
wasn't altogether clear that the American
cause would prevail, France did not want to
find itself drawn into war against Britain by
backing a loser, but neither could it afford to
lose a potentially important ally. In this ambiguous world, filled
with spies double agents, Franklin maneuvered carefully,
arranging for arms shipments and for the money or
credit to pay for them. Handling the delicate matter
of cargo ships seized as war prizes by American
privateers, trying to make friends for
his proudly anti-royal, anti-aristocratic countrymen
without alienating the very French royalty and nobility
who might help their revolution succeed, failure
loomed at every step. The closer he got to the court
of Louis XVI and his Queen Mary Antoinette, the more
careful he had to be. Franklin was still a
minister without portfolio, representing an
unrecognized state. But as an individual, he
had been a smashing success. He was toasted,
feted, and lavishly praised wherever he went. The acknowledged master
of electrical science had electrified
an entire nation. When John Adams
arrived in France to join the American delegation,
he discovered that everyone, from the loftiest
minister of state to the lowliest
chambermaid seemed to know of le bon docteur. He was, I would say
gifted for France. He had some very rare
gifts for the time. He loved to laugh. And I always think of colonial
times as pretty serious. He liked good food. He liked good wine. He liked good company. And he liked to flirt,
all that is very Gallic and doesn't go down-- or
didn't go down very well in New England in his day. So he really fell into his
own climate, so to say, when he got to France. NARRATOR: Franklin's portrait
was everywhere, hung up on mantles, embossed on lockets,
plates, medallions, rings, coats, hats, and snuff boxes. But far more shocking
to Adams' stiff Yankee sensibility was the way women
of all ages literally flung themselves at the portly,
balding, gouty old septuagenarian and
battled for his attention. Women liked Franklin for a
very simple reason, you know, because he paid
attention to them. It was valid then. It's valid today. NARRATOR: Franklin seemed
capable of charming them all. Like the time a young woman
invited him to spend a summer's night with Her Franklin
asked if they could postpone their rendezvous till winter,
when the nights were longer. But of all the women,
two in particular utterly captivated him. Madame Brillon and
Madame Helvetius. Madame Brillon was
Franklin's neighbor at Passy, and for his first
six years in France, his nearly constant companion. When he met her, she was in
her early 30s, beautiful, glamorous, the wife
of a rich gentleman, mother of two, a talented
musician and composer. They flirted outrageously. She said herself that she's
the one who had initiated the relationship, because she
was so impressed with his glory and with his genius. So she managed to be
introduced to him, and the romance, the flirtation
between them lasted for years. Franklin, at a certain point,
became ardent in pursuit. Madame Brillon was coy. She felt very strongly that she
was married and had children, and she didn't want to go
beyond a certain limit. So she quite astutely managed
to change the relationship into a father-daughter one. And from then on, Franklin
called her "my dear child," and she would refer
to him as "papa." NARRATOR: If at Passy
Franklin sought a mistress and found a charming,
emotionally draining daughter, at Auteuil, he found a
woman closer to his age, a brilliant woman to whom he
would soon propose marriage, Madame Helvetius. He called her estates
l'Academie d'Auteuil, and called her Notre
Dame d'Auteuil. Madame Helvetius, a daughter
to one of the great houses of Lorraine, distantly related
to Marie Antoinette herself, was an author and
early bohemian. Madam Helvetius was
very different, of course, from Madame Brillon. She was 30 years older,
a widow in her 60s, and she ran a wonderful circle
in her house in Auteuil. Franklin was such a close
friend that his place was always set at table, whether
he came or not, which must have been a
wonderful feeling of belonging. NARRATOR: To her
salon she attracted the great philosophers
of the Enlightenment. For the rest of
Franklin's stay in France, he would remain an integral
part of Madame Helvetius' eclectic circle. His notes to her display a
mastery of the French art of the sexually provocative yet
artfully ambiguous love letter. Their banter, coupled
with Madame Helvetius' lofty disregard for formalities
of dress and behavior scandalized the easily
shocked John Adams. Yet despite the playful tone,
Franklin had fallen in love. He was so taken
with Madame Helvetius that at a certain moment,
in his own slightly ironic, ambiguous way, he
did propose to her. And she hesitated somewhat, and
then decided that she'd rather remain independent. But they remained
the best of friends. And as a matter of fact, the
last letter that Franklin ever wrote to France was
addressed to her, and he reminisces about
the wonderful times they had together and
all the in jokes they had and the meals they shared and
the conversations they enjoyed. It is one of his most
nostalgic and touching letters. NARRATOR: Franklin
was at Auteuil when he received word of the
American victory at Yorktown and Cornwallis'
surrender to Washington. His years of maneuvering
for French recognition of the United States, the
delicate yet dangerous business of arms dealing,
and the cultivation of a military
alliance consummated in 1778 between France and
America had finally paid off. Franklin was commissioned, along
with John Jay and John Adams, to the tricky task of
negotiating a peace treaty with England without
snubbing his French allies. At the formal signing of the
Treaty of Paris on November 30th, 1783, it was
reported that Franklin wore the same plain suit he
wore at the Privy Council nearly a decade before. Like the new nation
he now represented, Franklin had turned public
humiliation to public triumph. In the spring of 1785,
at the age of 79, the United States government
finally granted his request to return home. He said that as much
as he loved France, he wanted to die
in his own country. Benjamin Franklin had come
to France as a lobbyist Benjamin Franklin had come
to France as a lobbyist and left as the
honored representative of a sovereign state. They saw him as greater
than he was, in a way. They saw in him both a
man of the backwoods, a backwoods philosopher,
a kind of noble savage, which was a very common
image at the time, and they also saw a very
sophisticated person in him, the greatest scientist
in the world, practically. It's as if they had a Einstein
in their midst all of a sudden. They liked his simplicity. They liked his good humor. They all thought he was a
Quaker, or as they said, a "kwa-kair." And he was very quick to
capitalize on what they thought about him, and then he gave
them what he knew they wanted. NARRATOR: During
the six week voyage, the 80-year-old ignored the
pain of his kidney stones and spent his days measuring and
recording water temperatures, still engaged in his 30-year
effort to map the Gulf Stream. Back in Market Street, he had
barely written to a friend that "I shall now
be free of politics for the rest of my life. Welcome again, my dear
philosophical amusements" when he was asked to
represent Pennsylvania at the Constitutional
Convention. Though his participation
in the debates which raged across the summer
of 1787 was minimal, he guided the near deadlocked
delegates toward compromise. After the final draft
of the new constitution was read to the
convention, Franklin rose to make a statement. Franklin, at the
end of the convention, just before the
members were to sign, had a friend read a speech
in which he said "I do not entirely approve of
some of the provisions of this Constitution, but I
do not know that I will never approve them. For having lived
long, I have held ideas which I once
thought to be true and I now know to be false." And so he called on
his fellow delegates to doubt a little of
their own infallibility, and to sign the
document as he did. NARRATOR: They did. From his sickbed, Franklin
wrote to a fellow scientist in France, "our new
constitution is now established and has an appearance
that promises permanency. But in this world,
nothing can be said to be certain
except death and taxes." Bedridden and clearly
dying, his daughter Sally hoped that her
father might still live a long time, to which
he replied, "I hope not." Late in the night
of April 17th, 1790, the 84-year-old good
doctor died, quietly. "Mon cher Franklin, you
should have stayed in France. There they loved you and
they appreciated you, they adored you. Your fellow Americans are
full of criticism about you. They had nothing but mean
things to say about you, and even your funeral was
celebrated with much more pomp in France. The Senate went into
mourning in France. It didn't do so in America. There were more tributes
paid to you in France. Your influence was greater. In America, I'm sorry
to say, your posterity is going to see you
as a woman-chaser much more than the genius
the French still see in you." Carl van Doren summed
Franklin up on one occasion, taking into account of
his many achievements, by calling him a
harmonious human multitude. And George Washington had these
words to say about the old man. "If to be venerated
for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if
to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be loved for philanthropy
can gratify the human mind, you, sir, must have the
pleasing consolation to know that you have
not lived in vain." NARRATOR: He was buried
beneath a stone burying the simple phrase, "Benjamin
and Deborah Franklin." But the epitaph he had written
for himself 62 years before, when he was only 22,
was still as fresh as the day it was written. "Here lies the body of
Ben Franklin, printer." Like the cover of an
old book, its contents torn out and stripped
of its lettering and gilding, lies
here food for worms. But the work shall not be Lost
for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a
new and more elegant edition, corrected and
improved by the author. Ben Franklin had a zest for
life, cheerful, inquisitive, engaged, filling his
days and looking forward to brighter tomorrows, solving
problems that might sink lesser men. From obscurity in a small
seaport town on the North American coast, he emerged
as one of the leading figures of his age. Anecdotes featuring
his probity and wit were passed along
like little treasures. Artists clamored
for the opportunity to paint his portrait
or sculpt his features. To a world which thought
of Americans as crude, he presented an example
of sophistication and wit. To those who saw Americans
as being as savage as their rough frontiers,
he brought an image of civility and science. His life reads like an
allegory of the self-made, self-educated,
self-motivated man. He did so much in so
many distinctive arenas, the different biographies
of the man as publisher, civic leader, scientist, as
politician and statesman, as author, as 18th century
wit can and have been written. Whatever his virtues
and whatever his flaws, Benjamin Franklin
redefined what it meant to be an American
to an entire world. [theme music]
