Benjamin Franklin, American Life
by Walter Isaacson

          “Benjamin Franklin was, during his eighty four long life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical though not most profound, political thinkers.  He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it.  He devised bifocal Glasses and clean-burning stoves, he discovered the course  of the Gulf Stream, and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold.  He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser.  He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism.  In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance of power realism.. And in Politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government”

He was most comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy.  Throughout his life he would refer to himself as “B.Franklin, printer”.

It appeared that he believed that spiritual salvation and secular success need not be at odds, that industriousness is next to godliness, and that free thought and free enterprise are integrally related’.   Puritans believed and “indeed, it was a legal offence to wear clothing that was considered too elaborate.

In childhood he encountered a boy blowing a whistle. Enchanted by the device, he gave up all the coins in his pocket for it.  His siblings proceeded to ridicule him, saying he had paid four times what it was worth.  “I cried with vexation”, Franklin recalled, “ and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure”.  Frugality became for him not only a virtue but also a pleasure.  “Industry and frugality, he wrote in describing the theme of Poor Richard’s almanacs, are  “the means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue”. One of his quotes is “Fish and guests stink after three days”.

His father had 17 children, and came to America with three of them.  In those days.  One quarter of all Boston newborns at the time died within a week.  It was not unusual for men in colonial New England to outlive two or three wives.  Of the first eighteen women who came to Massachusetts in 1628, for example, fourteen died withing a year.  Having more children and remarriage after the death of wives were economic necessities. 

          Franklin excelled in writing but failed math, a scholastic deficit he never fully remedied and that, combined with his lack of academic training in the field, would eventually condemn him to be merely the most ingenious scientist of his era rather than transcending into the pantheon of truly profound theorists such as Newton.

What would have happened if Franklin had, in fact, received a formal academic education and gone to Harvard? Some historians such as Arthur Tourtellot argue that he would have been stripped of his spontaneity, intuitivie literary style, zest, freshness and unclutteredness of his mind.

          One aspect of Franklin’s genius was the variety of his interests, from science to government to diplomacy to journalism, all of them approached room a very practical rather than theoretical angle. 

          At the age of 10, with only two years of schooling, Franklin went to work full time in his father’s candle and soap shop. Thereafter young Benjamin ended up apprenticed in 1718 at the age of 12 to his brother James 21 who had recently returned from training in England to set up as a printer.

          He began his apprenticeship, in Boston in the only newspaper “The Boston Newsletter, launched in 1704.

              Print trade was a natural calling for Franklin. “From a child I was fond of reading and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books”.  Indeed books were the most important formative influence in his life, and he was lucky to grow up in Boston, where libraries had been carefully nurtured since the Araabella brought fifty volumes along with the town’s first settlers in 1630.  By the time Franaklin was born, Cotton Mather had built a private library of almost three thousand volumes rich in classical and scientific as well as theological works.  This appreciation of books was one of the traits shared by the Puritanism of Mather and the Englightenment of Locke, world’s that would combine in the character of Benjamin Franklin.

          Once he began working in his brother’s print shop, Franaklin was able to sneak books from the apprentices who worked for booksellers, as long as he returned the volumes clean. “Often, I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted’

          At the age of 12 he had such tastes in leisure pursuits as was Pluarch’s Lives, which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better.  History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.

          Franklin, as a young printer in Philadelphia, carted rolls of paper through the streets to give the appearance of being industrious.   As an old diplomat in France, he wore a fur cap to portray the role of backwoods sage.  In between, he created an image for himself as a simple yet striving tradesman, assiduously honing the virtues – diligence, frugality, honesty, of a good shopkeeper and beneficent member of his community.

          But the image he created was rooted in reality.  Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary arisitocracy.  Throughout his life he would refer to himself as ‘B. Franklin, printer’.

          Reading his biography gives you an insight into mind of a human being who achieved greatness simply because he was curious, earnest in his efforts, he was willing to give credit to others even when it was his, all characteristics that would propel any individual, if he tries, to a greater level and also lift a nation which has such individuals to a greater glory. He was great as he was human.
As usual with Walter Isaacson, he had written an wonderful, scholarly biography, well balanced and based on empirical evidence of the incidents described and opinion expressed, and as a reader I can only commend him to others.  I hope such as master biographer would emerge from Tamil Nadu who can tell the stories of Tamilnadu's leaders and others.