Speaker 1: I think about Ben Franklin all the time. I remember
Speaker 1: being with Elon Musk right when he bought Twitter, and
Speaker 1: he was trying to decide do you print everything is
Speaker 1: a total free speech? Does it become raucous? Or is
Speaker 1: there any limits to what you put on it? And
Speaker 1: I went back to when Ben Franklin was in his
Speaker 1: early twenties and a printer in Philadelphia and he had
Speaker 1: a newspaper. He writes apology for printers, which is still
Speaker 1: one of the best defenses of free speech. He says
Speaker 1: all voices should be allowed, because if you let the
Speaker 1: printer decide what should be enter out, you'd only hear
Speaker 1: the opinion of printers.
Speaker 2: And Franklin said, if.
Speaker 1: Truth and false did he have fair play, then truth
Speaker 1: will win out. But Franklin realizes after a while that's
Speaker 1: not always the case. Sometimes, as Franklin says in Poor Richard,
Speaker 1: a lie can make it all the way around the
Speaker 1: world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
Speaker 1: And he does a test for himself. He had to
Speaker 1: figure out when do you refuse to print something you
Speaker 1: know as salacious or malicious or untrue. And at one
Speaker 1: point he was going to get paid to publish something scurreless,
Speaker 1: and it was so salacious, and he said, well, is
Speaker 1: it really worth the money? And to try to determine
Speaker 1: whether I'd publish it or not, I purchased this a
Speaker 1: small piece of bread. I went home and lay on
Speaker 1: the floor, slept on the floor, ate only bread and water.
Speaker 1: And I realized that I could live that way if
Speaker 1: I had to, and it was better to be proud
Speaker 1: of what I did.
Speaker 2: As a printer, a publisher, and a postmaster. Benjamin Franklin
Speaker 2: launched America's first great media empire. But that's not exactly
Speaker 2: how we picture him. For most of us, he's the
Speaker 2: funny writer or the old guy with a kite, not
Speaker 2: America's wealthiest self made businessman. But Franklin's ambitious. He devoured
Speaker 2: any book he could get his hands on, formed clubs
Speaker 2: to learn from his peers, jousted with his competitors, and
Speaker 2: constantly innovated seeking new efficiencies. And while it might be
Speaker 2: enough to appreciate Franklin for the business savant that he was,
Speaker 2: what he learned during those years, from the ethical questions
Speaker 2: he wrestled with to the observations he made while traveling
Speaker 2: for work, gave tremendous insight into the founding father he
Speaker 2: would become and the democracy he wanted to build. In
Speaker 2: this third episode of On Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson reveals
Speaker 2: how Franklin's identity as a printer and businessman let him
Speaker 2: on a path not just to become a revolutionary, but
Speaker 2: to understanding the shape America's democracy would need to take.
Speaker 2: Can you walk us through how Ben Franklin created his
Speaker 2: print operation in Philadelphia, starting from showing up in the
Speaker 2: city with a few coins in his pocket.
Speaker 1: When he straggles up Market Street. But draggled, he's able
Speaker 1: to get a job in one of the print shops
Speaker 1: there an apprentice, and he works very hard for a
Speaker 1: sort of ne'er do well printer named Samuel Kimo. And
Speaker 1: in the end Franklin becomes much more of the star
Speaker 1: of the town.
Speaker 2: Personally because he's good at doing his own pr right.
Speaker 1: But Franklin's ambitious. He's a young printer who knows how
Speaker 1: to ingratiate himself, and I think Keemar, his boss, becomes
Speaker 1: quite resentful. But Franklin eventually breaks away to start his
Speaker 1: own printing shop.
Speaker 2: And you write that it takes a while for him
Speaker 2: to get going. He's got his owne ups and downs.
Speaker 2: And there's one little anecdote that I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 2: which is not one of the biggest ones in the book,
Speaker 2: but it felt like it encapsulated some of that, which
Speaker 2: is he somehow connects with Governor Keith, governor of the
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania Colony, and he's going to be sent to London
Speaker 2: to buy printing equipment to set himself up as a printer.
Speaker 2: And the governor's promised him this, and then he arrives
Speaker 2: in London and turns out it was a completely false promise,
Speaker 2: that there was no money to buy the equipment, and
Speaker 2: he's very sanguine about it, and you write, for Franklin
Speaker 2: it was an insight into human foibles rather than evil.
Speaker 2: He wished to please everybody, Franklin later said of Keith,
Speaker 2: and having little to give, he gave expectations.
Speaker 1: Franklin looked at a guy like Governor Keith, who had
Speaker 1: promised him a lunge and credit. But then he said, well,
Speaker 1: he was just trying to please me. And I think
Speaker 1: that a bill to say, hey, we shouldn't ascribe deep
Speaker 1: evil motives to people. We should be tolerant that becomes
Speaker 1: ingrained in Franklin. So let's talk about his print shop.
Speaker 1: He's still pretty young when he starts it, going into
Speaker 1: competition with all these established printers. How does he distinguish
Speaker 1: himself when he had a print shop? He realized, you
Speaker 1: want him to be successful just printing things like the Bible,
Speaker 1: because people bought a Bible once in their lifetime, maybe
Speaker 1: or twice. So he realizes an almanac is a way
Speaker 1: to go. People would have to buy it every year.
Speaker 2: Sensing what people wanted and how to create demand was
Speaker 2: just one of the ways Franklin distinguished himself as a businessman.
Speaker 2: Another was his humor. Turns out, Franklin's sense of humor
Speaker 2: wasn't just a natural part of his writing. It was
Speaker 2: good business too, giving him a real advantage in the marketplace.
Speaker 2: Could he have made it if he hadn't been the
Speaker 2: writer that he was.
Speaker 1: I think being a humorous writer was key to his
Speaker 1: success because his news paper becomes more lively than the
Speaker 1: rivals his almanac. He pokes fun at the other almanac makers.
Speaker 1: He has poor Richard in the almanac predicting that we're
Speaker 1: going to die, and he gets into these fake rivalries
Speaker 1: and battles, public battles where they're poking fun at each other.
Speaker 1: But if you're in a jousting battle with Benjamin Franklin
Speaker 1: poking fun, he's going to win.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: He's got the more pockish sense of humor. And so
Speaker 1: in the end, his almanacs were valued more, his newspaper
Speaker 1: was valued more. And he was smart about publishing. He
Speaker 1: published novels, Pamela, the first novel published in America. Franklin
Speaker 1: has a good sense for what the public wants.
Speaker 2: He's a good salesperson, but even with something like Poor Richard,
Speaker 2: he's always figuring out how to make another product. Like
Speaker 2: after printing year after year of almanacs, he figures out
Speaker 2: he can create a best of compilation.
Speaker 1: Right, definitely, and it's called The Weight of Wealth The
Speaker 1: Sayings of Poor Richard, and it was by far the
Speaker 1: biggest selling book in the colonies for years.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't just the content that made Franklin wealthy.
Speaker 2: He was savvy about other parts of the business too,
Speaker 2: striking deals to ensure his newspapers and books got premium
Speaker 2: placement and distribution. And even that wasn't enough for Franklin.
Speaker 2: He realized that if he could control the distribution, he
Speaker 2: could squash the competition, and so he laid the groundwork
Speaker 2: for a monopoly.
Speaker 1: When Franklin was a printer in Philadelphia, he had a
Speaker 1: competitor named Andrew Bradford. They competed against each other in
Speaker 1: many areas, but they also cooperated, just like you might
Speaker 1: find Apple and Microsoft competing and cooperating. They even published
Speaker 1: a PSALM book together and split the costs. But one
Speaker 1: thing that really heightened their competition was that Bradford was
Speaker 1: the postmaster, and that was a great advantage. He got
Speaker 1: to favor his own content, and Soanklin at first pushes
Speaker 1: against him and tries to get the Postmaster General to
Speaker 1: order Bradford to carry Franklin's papers as well. But eventually
Speaker 1: Franklin's able to rest away from Bradford the Philadelphia postmastership,
Speaker 1: and Franklin then says, I'm going to create an open system,
Speaker 1: and he does that, but then he gets mad at
Speaker 1: Bradford again, and for a while he's keeping Bradford from
Speaker 1: sending things through. But as usual, Franklin gets to the
Speaker 1: right place, and eventually we have a US postal system
Speaker 1: that's a platform for everybody, and it's an open system.
Speaker 2: The thing I love about this story is there's also
Speaker 2: if one of them doesn't want to carry the other's papers,
Speaker 2: there's this sort of backdoor way to make it happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah. What was great is when they would deny each
Speaker 1: other the right to use the postal system, you could
Speaker 1: just bribe the writers to do it.
Speaker 2: There's always a side door if you have cash to
Speaker 2: hold out.
Speaker 1: Nowadays we wrestled with should internet service providers be able
Speaker 1: to favor certain content or should all content be on
Speaker 1: a level playing field. It goes back to Franklin and
Speaker 1: Bradford in Philadelphia, finally, after a lot of struggle back
Speaker 1: and forth, saying an open system is better.
Speaker 2: Even as Franklin controlled so much of the printing industry,
Speaker 2: he remains committed to fair play. He believed competition at
Speaker 2: a marketplace of opinions created a healthier society, and any
Speaker 2: streaks of ruthlessness always seemed to be tamed by his
Speaker 2: greater sense of civic duty.
Speaker 1: Franklin did not believe that much in monetizing intellectual property.
Speaker 1: He never patented or copyrighted anything he did, and he
Speaker 1: could have done it with some of his writings. He
Speaker 1: could have said, I'm going to take a copyright out
Speaker 1: on the sayings of poor Richard. However, he knew that
Speaker 1: the sayings of Poor Richard were things that he had
Speaker 1: taken in from previous writers in the past two or
Speaker 1: three centuries who had said clever things, and Franklin might
Speaker 1: polish him up a bit. And so he was not
Speaker 1: a strong believer in the type of intellectual property that
Speaker 1: we would call copyrights or trademarks or patents.
Speaker 2: I feel like we should say he was really good
Speaker 2: at making money. I mean, he did very well for himself.
Speaker 1: He was very successful as a printer and a publisher,
Speaker 1: and he always looked after his interests, you know, making
Speaker 1: sure he got the contract to do the paper currency,
Speaker 1: and that is newspaper advocated for paper currency. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, he doesn't take out patents on his scientific inventions.
Speaker 1: He said, we all benefit from things that went before.
Speaker 1: We should put these into the commons, whether it's a
Speaker 1: Franklin stove or the lightning rod.
Speaker 2: It really is fascinating, Like, on the one hand, he's
Speaker 2: quickly on a path to being incredibly wealthy, and he's
Speaker 2: doing all the innovative and sometimes cutthroat business things like
Speaker 2: taking over the post office and trying to stamp out
Speaker 2: his competition. And then he's always so civic minded. He's
Speaker 2: always thinking about the middle class. It's almost at the
Speaker 2: core of his identity.
Speaker 1: Right when he gets to Philadelphia and he becomes a tradesman,
Speaker 1: he creates what's called the Leather Apron Club or the Junto,
Speaker 1: And it doesn't try to replicate the clubs for the
Speaker 1: very rich, aristocratic elite of Philadelphia. It's just supposed to
Speaker 1: be for the tradesman, the artist, and the shopkeepers what
Speaker 1: he called we the middling people. That's why it was
Speaker 1: called a leather apron club. They put on leather aprons
Speaker 1: in the morning and open up their shop. And he
Speaker 1: felt that the civic life of America would be driven
Speaker 1: by a middle class.
Speaker 2: When we come back, we dive into the revolutionary impact
Speaker 2: of the Leather Apron Club and the surprising ways its
Speaker 2: legacy still lives on today. People might have a vision
Speaker 2: of a printer or a newspaperman today a publisher and
Speaker 2: who they are and where they came from. But this
Speaker 2: was a real blue collar job. Then did you explain
Speaker 2: that and what Franklin means when he describes himself as
Speaker 2: a leather apron man.
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin throughout his life would sign his name B. Franklin,
Speaker 1: Common Printer. And it was because he believed that being
Speaker 1: a leather apron, meaning somebody owned a shop opened up
Speaker 1: in the morning, served people that market street, middle class
Speaker 1: values was the heart of who we were going to
Speaker 1: be as a nation, rather than trying to create the
Speaker 1: class system in England and the pretensions of the elite
Speaker 1: and the aristocracy. And so that notion of a printer
Speaker 1: as a shopkeeper and publisher was something he always had
Speaker 1: a pride in. Now this was something rather new in England.
Speaker 1: You had had an aristocracy and a working class, and
Speaker 1: but that wasn't a prosperous, vibrant middle class. And Franklin
Speaker 1: knew that a strong America would come from having a
Speaker 1: thriving class of small business owners.
Speaker 2: So the Leather Apron Club banded together in this new
Speaker 2: model to do good in the community, partially out of
Speaker 2: a sense of moral righteousness, but also out of practicality.
Speaker 2: The members knew that their businesses all had a better
Speaker 2: shout of success if the city was thriving, if the
Speaker 2: streets were clean and if the people had money in
Speaker 2: their pockets to spend.
Speaker 1: One of the Poor Richard Almanac sayings is about doing
Speaker 1: well by doing good, And this describes Franklin, which is
Speaker 1: he wants to do civic good, but he also knows
Speaker 1: you can profit by it when you start with his
Speaker 1: heat put A little things like keeping the streets, he said,
Speaker 1: might seem like a minor thing that some dust may
Speaker 1: get in somebody's eye, But if you multiply that to
Speaker 1: the whole community, you see why we all have to
Speaker 1: work together. And so what is Jonto or Leather Apron
Speaker 1: Club does is at every meeting they talk about what
Speaker 1: is it that a fellow member of the club might
Speaker 1: need and might help them in business? What ways can
Speaker 1: we help the commerce of Philadelphia, What new ideas might
Speaker 1: we profit from? And so he was always mixing his
Speaker 1: civic virtue with doing well by himself, like making sure
Speaker 1: that the other members of the Leather Apron Club used
Speaker 1: him as a printer. So they form all sorts of
Speaker 1: ideas and associations, to have a volunteer street sweeping core,
Speaker 1: to have a volunteer fire department.
Speaker 2: And people now maybe have a hard time conceptualizing the
Speaker 2: era where some of the things that he came up
Speaker 2: with didn't already exist. For instance, you've mentioned the volunteer
Speaker 2: firefighting or even the militias that he'd helped set up
Speaker 2: prior to him coming up with them. What was happening
Speaker 2: around a fire before Franklin's set up one of these associations.
Speaker 1: Well, you had people who either paid for protection, or
Speaker 1: people would pay for constable watches and stuff. But what
Speaker 1: he realizes is, especially with fires, but even with crime,
Speaker 1: that you can't just have certain people protect their own homes.
Speaker 1: The whole community has to pull together to do it.
Speaker 1: Fire on one home in Milk Street hurts every home
Speaker 1: on Milk Street, and so there are things we have
Speaker 1: to join together to do. One of the essences of
Speaker 1: democracy is figuring out what should be done in the commons,
Speaker 1: what should be done by government, what should be left
Speaker 1: to the private sphere. And this notion that we gather
Speaker 1: together in civic associations, it's so perplexed Tokeville. When he
Speaker 1: writes about democracy in America, he says Americans are the
Speaker 1: most individualistic people, and yet somehow they keep forming associations
Speaker 1: and this is in conflict. But for Benjamin Franklin, it
Speaker 1: wasn't in conflict at all. As poor Richard said, he
Speaker 1: who drinks alone let him catch his horse alone, which
Speaker 1: means it's not easy to catch a runaway horse unless
Speaker 1: you have friends helping you do it. And so that
Speaker 1: notion of governing ourselves through civic associations and then eventually
Speaker 1: of public private partnerships with local government and then later
Speaker 1: on colonial and national government, that becomes a new concept
Speaker 1: of how we were going to create in America. That's
Speaker 1: elevated both self reliance as well as community and civic association.
Speaker 2: And also the lending library was a big part of
Speaker 2: what role did that play.
Speaker 1: Among the things the Leather Apron Club does is it
Speaker 1: creates the first sort of public library where they all
Speaker 1: agreed in the club to put their books together so
Speaker 1: other people could borrow them. And soon they have a
Speaker 1: room that they rent and it becomes away. As Franklin
Speaker 1: puts it, that the average tradesperson in America, the average shopkeeper,
Speaker 1: could be just as well informed, is just as educated
Speaker 1: as some of the elite or aristocracy. One of the
Speaker 1: amusing things Franklin figured out when he is starting his
Speaker 1: library is that he asked one of the wealthier privileged
Speaker 1: people of Philadelphia who didn't particularly like the young striving
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin if he could borrow a particular book, and
Speaker 1: he borrows it and then returns it and is very
Speaker 1: grateful for it and talks about how influential the book is.
Speaker 1: And after that the person he borrowed the book from
Speaker 1: loves Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin says, what I learned is
Speaker 1: sometimes when you allow a person to do you a favor,
Speaker 1: they will like you more than if you're doing favors
Speaker 1: for them.
Speaker 2: I love that lesson. And you describe these things coming
Speaker 2: together beginning in these clubs. If we creates this library,
Speaker 2: people can teach themselves. They can educate themselves, which is
Speaker 2: exactly what someone would do after being denied the opportunity
Speaker 2: to go to Harvard.
Speaker 1: He extends that to the Academy for the Education of
Speaker 1: Youth that becomes University of Pennsylvania. Both Franklin and Jefferson
Speaker 1: or exemplars of the Enlightenment. But Jefferson, when he creates
Speaker 1: a university that becomes the University of Virginia, talks about
Speaker 1: taking the most elite thinkers and bringing them into a
Speaker 1: new quote natural aristocracy. Franklin, when he creates what becomes
Speaker 1: the University of Pennsylvania, believes the goal is to take
Speaker 1: all people, no matter how brilliant they are or just
Speaker 1: industrious they are, and say everybody will benefit from learning.
Speaker 1: That education should not just be for the well born
Speaker 1: and for the elite, but it should become something that
Speaker 1: every striving person in America had a right to go
Speaker 1: borrow a book from a library, or to be part
Speaker 1: of an academy for the education of youth.
Speaker 2: For someone who joked about struggling with humility and whose
Speaker 2: name ended up on so many things, from the Franklin
Speaker 2: Stove to the one hundred dollars Bill, Franklin loved to
Speaker 2: play with anonymity in his writing, and he did it
Speaker 2: too in his work with the Leather Apron Club.
Speaker 1: Whenever he proposed a civic association, he might write a
Speaker 1: letter to the newspaper, but he said he was always
Speaker 1: very careful to make it that sounded like it was
Speaker 1: his suggestion. In fact, sometimes he would write letters to
Speaker 1: his newspaper under a pseudonym and say, it's been posed
Speaker 1: that maybe we should have a volunteer fire department. He said,
Speaker 1: it's amazing how much you can get done if you
Speaker 1: aren't interested in taking the credit for it.
Speaker 2: He also didn't seem to see any contradiction between being
Speaker 2: this sort of pr man for himself, building up his
Speaker 2: image so that he could use his image, and also
Speaker 2: being the person who slid these ideas in underneath the
Speaker 2: door so that other people would think they were theirs.
Speaker 1: One of his clever insights is if you don't take
Speaker 1: credit for something, if you give somebody else the credit
Speaker 1: for an idea, it'll later become known that you were
Speaker 1: really the person who came up with it, it'll give
Speaker 1: you a lot more benefit to your reputation.
Speaker 2: While the Leather Apron Club was all about banding together
Speaker 2: with other shopkeepers to help one another in the city
Speaker 2: of Philadelphia, for Franklin was also about helping himself in
Speaker 2: the bottom line, the whole doing well by doing good
Speaker 2: maxim But Franklin's affects in his way of encouraging conversation
Speaker 2: sometimes made people question his intentions. You sort of write
Speaker 2: that for a man of his fame, he didn't have
Speaker 2: as many disputes as you might expect. He was able
Speaker 2: to resolve a lot of them, but he does start
Speaker 2: having these conflicts with other printers and eventually with the
Speaker 2: Penn family. And how does he sort of navigate when
Speaker 2: he feels like someone has a raid against him.
Speaker 1: In his Leather Apron Club, they had a way of
Speaker 1: discussing things that he felt would stop it from being
Speaker 1: too disputatious, Like if you disagreed with somebody, instead of
Speaker 1: contradicting them, you'd ask questions. That made Franklin charming at times,
Speaker 1: But after a while this indirectness, slyly asking questions in
Speaker 1: order to get his point across, he ends up alienating
Speaker 1: people who think he's not a fourth right principled person.
Speaker 1: John Adams called him insinuating, And so even though he's
Speaker 1: extraordinarily popular, he's able to rub people the wrong way
Speaker 1: sometimes and make enemies of the people he went into
Speaker 1: business with.
Speaker 2: But for all his flaws, Franklin was still a uniter,
Speaker 2: someone who had an incredible ability to bring people of
Speaker 2: differing persuasions together. When we return from break, we learned
Speaker 2: how Franklin's business trips up and down the East Coast
Speaker 2: gave him a unique perspective on the colonies, and how
Speaker 2: a little cartoon he published quickly became a call to arms.
Speaker 2: I want to talk a little bit about why Benjamin
Speaker 2: Franklin is so fixated on becoming Postmaster General. Why is
Speaker 2: it that's so key to his business empire.
Speaker 1: Once Franklin has the most successful content and the printing house,
Speaker 1: he also pushes and becomes the postmaster. He realizes, just
Speaker 1: as the cable titans of today realize, that if you
Speaker 1: own the content, you own the distribution system, if you
Speaker 1: have franchises, if you are able to do the printing
Speaker 1: and the publishing, that becomes the path to make him
Speaker 1: the most successful self made business person in America. So
Speaker 1: it becomes the first great media empire.
Speaker 2: In seventeen forty eight, at the age of forty two,
Speaker 2: Franklin retires from daily life at the printing shop, but
Speaker 2: he definitely doesn't stop working. Instead, he hangs up his
Speaker 2: leather apron to concentrate on grander ambitions further afield from
Speaker 2: Market Street. Some of those include the scientific experiments we
Speaker 2: heard about earlier, but in seventeen fifty three he also
Speaker 2: gets to work building a small postal system as Postmaster General.
Speaker 1: Before he became a deputy colonial postmaster, if you wanted
Speaker 1: to send a letter from Philadelphia to Boston, it often
Speaker 1: had to travel all the way to London and back,
Speaker 1: but he created a postal wrote. He was able to
Speaker 1: franchise print shops up and down the coast with his
Speaker 1: former workers or his cousins, sets them up in the
Speaker 1: printing business, shares the Poor Richard's Almanac and the news
Speaker 1: with him, helps them become postmasters, and then ties them
Speaker 1: all together. And then he traveled up and down the coast,
Speaker 1: both looking in on the print shops that he had franchised,
Speaker 1: but also making sure that each postal stop connected and
Speaker 1: that the postmasters and colonial postal system worked. And it
Speaker 1: gave him a unique perspective.
Speaker 2: His love of travel and his desire to sort of
Speaker 2: get out into the world and escape the provincialism of
Speaker 2: wherever he was. How did that sort of shape his
Speaker 2: early views of how America could form.
Speaker 1: Franklin becomes the most traveled person in colonial America. He
Speaker 1: would take tours up and down the colonies as postmaster.
Speaker 1: Partly it helped his business, but most important, it allowed
Speaker 1: him to see the colonies as potentially one unified country.
Speaker 1: So he's at the forefront of this notion of union.
Speaker 1: Up until then, the Virginians had very little in common
Speaker 1: with people from Massachusetts or even Pennsylvania. But he was
Speaker 1: very sociable, so he would go into each town from
Speaker 1: Charleston up to Boston and he would make friends, and
Speaker 1: it helped him form what he eventually created as an
Speaker 1: American Philosophical Society, which is people up and down the
Speaker 1: coast to exchange correspondence about scientific ideas. But it also
Speaker 1: helped him establish a notion of a unified country with
Speaker 1: common enter.
Speaker 2: Even after he gave up his daily work as a printer,
Speaker 2: Ben Franklin kept a hand in the press, so if
Speaker 2: he ever felt a need, it was easy to get
Speaker 2: something into print. In seventeen fifty four, early into his
Speaker 2: stint as Deputy Postmaster General, and in the early months
Speaker 2: of the French and Indian War, he used that perch
Speaker 2: to make a bold statement, one that would change the
Speaker 2: course of American history. Could you describe the join together
Speaker 2: or Die cartoon?
Speaker 1: The different colonies were not working together on things like
Speaker 1: a common defense in the French and Indian War, and
Speaker 1: so he drew a picture of a snake that was
Speaker 1: cut into thirteen segments for each of the colonies, and
Speaker 1: he just said under it, join or die without being
Speaker 1: put together, without holding together, it will die and he's
Speaker 1: saying the colonies should.
Speaker 2: Form a union. I just loved the idea of a
Speaker 2: political cartoon of a single image being so influential.
Speaker 1: Was the first editorial cartoon ever published in America. Is
Speaker 1: supposed to advocate for a position. Ben Franklin wants the
Speaker 1: colonies to join together in some loose union to be
Speaker 1: able to assert their own rights as colonies and also
Speaker 1: fight off the threats from the French and Indian wars,
Speaker 1: and this notion of a colonial unity becomes important to him.
Speaker 2: In the next episode, we watch Franklin's evolution from someone
Speaker 2: merely suggesting the colonies should unite to a full fledged
Speaker 2: revolutionary and we witness how this decision tears this family apart.
Speaker 1: Everybody's wondering what side is he going to be on?
Speaker 1: Is he going to remain a loyalist to the crown
Speaker 1: or be on the side of revolution And before he
Speaker 1: can announce it, he has to have a meeting with
Speaker 1: his son William.
Speaker 2: That's next time on Benjamin Franklin. This show is based
Speaker 2: on the writing and research of Walter Isaacson. So stood
Speaker 2: by me. Evan Ratliffe produced mixed and sound designed by
Speaker 2: Anna Rubinova. Adam Bozarth is our consulting producer, Lizzy Jacobs,
Speaker 2: who's our editor. Social Media by Dara Potts. This show
Speaker 2: was engineered at CDM Sound Studios from iHeart Podcast. The
Speaker 2: executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kalletoscope,
Speaker 2: it was executive produced by Mangeshttigador, with an assist from
Speaker 2: Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Amanda Urban,
Speaker 2: Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Kerry Lieberman,
Speaker 2: Nathan Otowski and Ali Gammit. And if you like podcasts
Speaker 2: about inventions what they mean for humanity, check out my
Speaker 2: other show, shell Game, about how it created an AI
Speaker 2: clone and set it loose on the world. It's a
Speaker 2: shell Game dot co. And for more shows from Kaleleidoscope,
Speaker 2: be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC. Thanks so much
Speaker 2: for listening in