Ben Franklin’s long and useful life spanned nearly all of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the Enlightenment. The period of scientific and philosophical progress yielded a harvest so rich and varied we are still partaking of it today. Every time you visit a doctor or contribute money to Amnesty International or turn on the lights or drink a cup of coffee, you have Enlightenment thinkers like Franklin to thank.
Bountiful harvests don’t just happen, of course. They require diligent farmers and healthy seeds as well as plentiful sunlight and, perhaps most of all, good soil. The soil of the Enlightenment was the word, in written and spoken form.
The Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Conversation. These gabfests took place in the coffeehouses of London and the salons of Paris, in the learned company of the Royal Society, and in the rough-and-tumble dockyards of Glasgow, where Adam Smith developed many of his economic theories.
A good conversationalist doesn’t necessarily make a good public speaker. Awkward and faltering, Benjamin Franklin was not a gifted public speaker, and he knew it. In larger groups or among strangers, he hardly uttered a word.
But Franklin was a superb conversationalist. On this point, everyone agreed. Chatting with Ben “was always a feast to me,” recalled James Madison, who was young enough to be Franklin’s grandson. “I never passed half an hour in his company without some observation or anecdote worth remembering.” No frivolous anecdotes, either. Franklin’s stories and jokes were intended not only to entertain but to illuminate.
While still in his twenties, Franklin wrote a brief essay about the art of conversation. I’ve read it and reread it and every time I marvel at how relevant and contemporary it feels. Franklin was writing at a time before telegraphs and telephones, Facetime and Zoom, Slack and Snapchat. Yet his observations about the art of conversation are just as applicable as when he wrote them nearly three hundred years ago—a reminder that despite our many technological advances, conversation still amounts to one person talking to another, hoping to connect.
Most people believe they excel in conversation, he said, but they deceive themselves (just as today most people claim to be above-average drivers, a statistical impossibility). In conversation, people tend to go to extremes, either focusing exclusively (and annoyingly) on themselves or mercilessly probing their hapless conversant for some dirt. Some people wrangle and dispute incessantly; “thus every trifle becomes a serious business.” Some people dwell on one topic too long, while others “leap from one thing to another with so much rapidity… that what they say is a mere chaos of noise and nonsense.”
The biggest mistake people make, Franklin thought, was “talking overmuch, and robbing others of their share of the discourse.” I love that phrase, talking overmuch, and plan to use it the next time I find myself straining to get a word in with an overtalker. A good conversationalist is a good listener. “Observe, the precept is hear much, not speak much,” he declared, from behind his Poor Richard mask. The mask was no act, though. Franklin was genuinely interested in people, and that’s not something that can be faked, not even by the Old Conjurer. No matter how busy, he always had time to talk, recalled Pierre Cabanis, a medical student who knew Franklin during his stay in France. “Whenever one found him, he was available… he always had an hour to devote to you.”
Franklin knew Westerners had no monopoly on good conversation hygiene. He expressed admiration for the “profound silence” observed by Native Americans when someone else was speaking. Compare that, he said, to the raucous British House of Commons or the so-called polite company of Europe, “where if you do not deliver your sentence with great rapidity, you are cut off in the middle of it.”
A good conversationalist doesn’t simply master a bundle of clever techniques. He possesses a generosity of spirit, a genuine willingness to better, not best, the person at the other end of the table. This demands a “readiness to overlook or excuse their foibles,” Franklin said. Overlooking is different from not seeing. You see and hear your interlocutor’s flaws, but choose to move past them, for now, so the conversation is freed to elevate both of you.
Being a good conversationalist doesn’t mean swallowing your opinions and beliefs. Franklin had many but never used them as a cudgel. They arrived Bubble-Wrapped. If asked what he thought about a subject, Franklin typically replied by asking a question or raising a doubt, engaging his interlocutor rather than alienating him. You could surmise where he stood, but he never allowed opinions, even strong ones, to come between people. Preserving a friendship was more important than scoring points, a useful truth that argumentative people fail to grasp. “They get victory sometimes,” he said, “but they never get goodwill, which would be of more use to them.” For Ben, the relationship was always more important than the problem.
But where to find good conversation in Philadelphia, a colonial backwater without a decent newspaper or bookstore? Philadelphia did have a few social clubs, but none dedicated to meaningful conversation and certainly none accessible to a leather-apron man like Franklin. So Ben created it.
That sounds awfully Silicon Valley, I realize. You sense a need for something but this something doesn’t exist, so you invent it. Too often, though, the need is imagined and the invention silly. Franklin’s start-ups mattered. They made a real difference in people’s lives. He founded (or cofounded) a library, a fire department, an insurance company, a militia, a scientific organization, a hospital, and more. I don’t think he saw these as “start-ups” or himself as a “founder.” It was more reflexive than that. He was, in that wonderfully antiquated Britishism (still used in India), “doing the needful.” When he invented the lightning rod, he was doing the needful. When he invented a flexible catheter or a stove that burned cleaner and more efficiently, he wasn’t doing it for the money or the followers. He wasn’t getting all Elon Musky. He was doing the needful.
And so, one autumn day in 1727, Franklin, only twenty-one years old, unemployed and still recovering from that serious bout of pleurisy, sat down and did the needful. Perhaps it was along the banks of the Schuylkill, or maybe on a barstool at the Indian Head Tavern. Either way, I can see him with notebook and quill, devising a plan.
First, he needed a name. Franklin knew you can indeed judge a book by its cover, which is why as a printer, he went to such great lengths to design beautiful ones. How about the “Leather Apron Club”? It made sense. He would draw the club’s membership from tradesmen, working-class slobs like himself. I suspect he found the name too limiting, though, so he searched for something else. How about “the Junto”? Derived from the Latin juncta, or “joining together,” the name underscored Franklin’s unshakable belief in the power of the group. Yes, the Junto it was.
Next, he needed members. There was no shortage of young men (the club was not open to women; Franklin’s inclusiveness went only so far) like himself in Philadelphia. He recruited three colleagues from his former print shop, as well as a smattering of others: a clerk, a surveyor, a shoemaker, a mechanic. They belonged to various political parties and Christian denominations but shared a love of reading and poetry and ideas. They were not the sort of people with trust funds or private libraries or access to the creamy layer of Philadelphia society. Franklin wanted to ensure the club remained small and intimate, so he capped membership at twelve.
Next, he needed a venue. The Indian Head Tavern seemed as good a place as any. The food would be a draw, and the ale would lubricate conversation. It was settled. The Junto would meet at the Indian Head every Friday evening.
Finally, saving the hardest part for last, Franklin turned to the club’s raison d’être. He knew it wasn’t simply a place for a bunch of young working-class men to fling off their leather aprons, down pints of ale, and gab about sports or town gossip. Franklin aimed higher. His Junto was part Rotary Club, part book club, part fitness club, part group therapy, part incubator, and part confessional. It was Franklin’s Harvard, “the best school of philosophy, morals, and politics that existed in the province,” he said. The Junto was also Franklin’s church, its members his congregation. There was an initiation ceremony. Each new member had to stand and affirm his love of truth, and for all people, regardless of religion or occupation.
The Junto didn’t coddle its members. It made demands of them. Each week, the young men had to supply questions “on any point of morals, politics, or natural philosophy,” to be discussed by the group, and every three months they presented an essay on a subject of their choosing.
Let’s pause and consider how demanding this must have been. Life in colonial Philadelphia was hard, especially for this group of working-class men, who put in six days’ work each week. They had precious little leisure time. Yet they chose to spend a good chunk of it conversing about weighty subjects, writing queries and essays. Homework. What does this say, I wonder, about them—and about us? Why do we fritter away our leisure time? Perhaps it’s because, ironically, we don’t take it seriously. “Leisure is time for doing something useful,” Franklin said. He wasn’t being a killjoy. For Franklin, usefulness was fun. I understand that intellectually, but to understand something only intellectually is not to understand it at all.
The Junto’s methods were secular, but the group’s animating question mirrored Reverend Cotton Mather’s: “What good may I do in the world?” Franklin first floated his many ideas for civic improvement at these meetings. The fire department, insurance company, Pennsylvania militia, and the Philadelphia Academy (later to become the University of Pennsylvania) were all first aired at the Junto. It was Franklin’s sandbox.
At the heart of each Junto meeting was a list of twenty-four standing queries drafted by Franklin. Members were to meditate on these each Friday morning ahead of their weekly meeting. These were big, weighty questions. One example: “Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?”
Note the order. The highest priority is helping humanity, then country, then friends and, finally, yourself. The phrase that drove these discussions, one that Franklin and many of his fellow founders used often, was “public felicity.” In the eighteenth century, happiness was not merely a personal aspiration. It was a communal imperative and thus demanded a group effort. Either everyone was happy or no one was.
Questions at the Junto meetings ranged from the scientific (How does dew form on a tankard containing cold water?) to the philosophical (“Is it justifiable to put private men to death for the sake of public safety or tranquility?”) to the political (“Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?”).
Lest you think the Junto was a joyless club, hold your ale. This was no sober debating society. There was plenty of levity. A standing query was, in essence, Have you heard any good jokes or stories lately? One member played the flute at meetings. These gatherings were infused with as much heart as head. Writing to a fellow Junto member years later, Franklin said, “We loved and still love one another, we are grown grey together and yet it is [too] early to part.”
The conversation was freewheeling but not a free-for-all. Franklin erected guardrails. Members were not permitted to interrupt one another or ridicule another member’s manner of speaking. They must converse in a collegial manner “without fondness for dispute, or desire of victory.” Members took these rules seriously. Those who violated them were fined.
The Junto was not entirely altruistic. Members looked out for one another. Consider one standing query: “Hath anybody attacked your reputation lately? And what can the Junto do towards securing it?” They clearly had each other’s backs—and wallets. The Junto was also a networking club. Early LinkedIn. Members steered business toward each other. Franklin, soon to start his own print shop, landed his first major account thanks to a fellow Junto member. Despite the Franklin myth, he didn’t pull his bootstraps alone. He enlisted the help of friends, patrons, benefactors, and other bootstrap pullers. Does this diminish his accomplishments? I don’t think so. Success is always a group effort, whether acknowledged or not.
At one point, Franklin suggested members pool their books so all could benefit. It was a good idea, but it flopped. These book lovers weren’t about to part with their precious tomes. Franklin, as usual, pivoted, drawing on a larger pool of participants and founding the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s first successful lending library.
For many decades the Junto went on swimmingly, to use a favorite Franklinism, even after Ben had decamped again to London. What made the Junto such an enduring success? Trust explains a lot. The people of the eighteenth century were inundated with new information, some of it credible, much of it not. (Sound familiar?) They needed a reliable means with which to filter this flood of information, help make sense of it. The Junto provided that means. It was useful.
As usual, Franklin didn’t hoard his success. He shared it. Though the word didn’t exist yet (and wouldn’t until 1924), “sustainability” was his goal. He encouraged Junto members to start their own clubs, mini-Juntos. He was planting seeds.