A Man Nobody Really Knows
It’s been a number of months since I composed a new essay for this website – not since the November elections, in fact. Like many (if not all of you), I’ve been pretty bummed out about swiftly evolving events, with each day bringing a new indignity, yet another offense against decency, democracy, compassion, and common sense.
Nevertheless, I’m writing now to share a few tidbits from one of our Founding Fathers: Benjamin Franklin, the guy whose mug appears on our one-hundred dollar bill. Flanked by two other early patriots, a glum Franklin (carrying a cardboard box stacked with books and office supplies) also graces the March 3 cover of The New Yorker. For the cartoonist Barry Blitt, Franklin serves as a stand-in for the thousands of patriotic government workers who have been cavalierly dismissed during the ongoing Trump/Musk purge.
Old Ben was a complex figure, as described by historian Gordon Wood in The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. One of the richest men in the colonies (his slim book The Way to Wealth was a perennial best-seller and far more honest than Trump’s ghost written The Art of the Deal). Franklin also owned slaves (before embracing abolitionism), earned international acclaim as a scientist/inventor, and was an ardent defender of the British Crown for much of his adult life.
When he finally did take up the cause of the revolution, Franklin did so with a vengeance. His skillful courting of King Louis XVI produced French financial aid that proved indispensable to the War for Independence. But sadly, during and after that War he was often maligned for his French and British associations. It would be decades before he achieved honor as one of early America’s brightest luminaries.
Today, what interests me most about this precocious forebear are his spot-on observations about government and the governed. Franklin held important public offices and diplomatic positions and was a familiar presence in the halls of power. But he also prided himself on being a simple tradesman – a printer – with indissoluble ties to the common people.
Commenting on the British aristocracy, he lamented that they are “blinded by their…lust for dominion as an ambitious country, and thirst for a gainful monopoly as a commercial one.” Here Franklin could well have been describing the White House apparatchiks now in control of U.S. policy. Alternately, with respect to the general run of humanity he wrote that people have a “natural inclination to kingly government.” That seems still to be the case, and helps explain Donald Trump’s inexplicable claim on people’s hearts and minds.
Franklin further opined that there are “two passions which have a powerful influence in the affairs of men…Ambition and Avarice; the love of power and the love of money.” Separately, he allowed, each can be a forceful spur to action. But when united in the minds of some people, (read Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, et al) they can be quite injurious.
Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s work on moral development garnered a lot of attention when I was studying for the ministry a half-century ago. He proposed that during their lives human beings progress along a fixed moral continuum, ending at the high levels of “Social Contract” and, in rare cases, “Universal Ethical Principles.” But in fact, most Americans never move beyond stages one, two and three: “Obedience and Punishment,” “Self-interest,” and “Conformity and Interpersonal Accord.” With respect to their moral reasoning, Kohlberg concluded, most Americans remain stuck in the fourth grade.
Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have been surprised. During his long life he acquired both wealth and power, but he managed to transcend them both. In the end, he said he wished to be remembered as a “useful” man rather than a rich one.
