Habits such as air baths helped ground Ben during his London days, and he needed all the grounding he could get. He was on a perilous mission, caught between two worlds: too American for the British and too British for the Americans. I can relate. Returning to the United States after a decade abroad, I felt rootless, a man without a country.
Life in this netherworld is disconcerting but has its advantages too. I never felt more American than in that carpet shop in Kabul. I knew I was representing my country. I had no choice. My Americanness defined me, whether I liked it or not. On visits home, I felt like an outsider too. I was clueless about the latest pop music (a deficiency that has persisted to this day) and paralyzed by the abundance of choice. I once spent forty-five minutes in the bread section of Whole Foods, unable to discern the relative merits of whole wheat versus whole grain versus ancient grain. I gave up and left empty-handed and hungry.
For many years, Franklin thought he could sustain his transatlantic balancing act: thoroughly American yet welcomed (mostly) by London’s intelligentsia. It worked. Until it didn’t.
It’s difficult to imagine Benjamin Franklin, the cuddliest of the founders, having enemies. But enemies he had, and none more antagonistic than the Penn brothers. It took months for Franklin to get a meeting with them. In the meantime, they launched a whisper campaign aimed at discrediting and belittling “the electrician,” as Thomas Penn called Franklin. They spread scurrilous rumors that Franklin was living luxuriously in London and had embezzled public funds. They were hoping Franklin, “a dangerous man,” would just go away. He did not, and the Penns finally granted him an audience in early 1758. It did not go well.
Calmly explaining why the Penns should pay their fair share of taxes, Franklin appealed to their sense of fairness and reason. When that didn’t work, he evoked their father’s memory. When that failed, he pointed to the common interest the men shared with the people of Pennsylvania. Thomas Penn dismissed Franklin’s pleas like swatting so many flies, declaring that as proprietors of Pennsylvania, they were free to do as they pleased with the colony. The charter said so. If the colonists felt deceived, “it was their own fault.” They should have read the fine print.
Usually Ben would let this sort of haughtiness wash over him like a cool air bath on a spring morning. Not this time. Ben’s anger toward the Penns, the arrogant Thomas in particular, was white-hot. He did not express his fury directly but instead resorted to one of his favorite tactics: a cool silence and a searing gaze.
Franklin nursed “a more cordial and thorough contempt [for Thomas Penn]… than I ever before felt for any man living.” He compared Penn to a “low jockey” who had cheated someone out of a good horse, then chuckled at the deception. When those words got back to the Penns, Franklin doubled down; the men deserved “to rot and stink in the nostrils of posterity.” After that, the Penns refused to deal directly with Franklin.
Franklin’s anger was uncharacteristic. He prided himself on maintaining his equanimity, even when provoked. He viewed his enemies with the benign indifference of a parent corralling unruly children. Friends admired his Buddha-like “gentle serenity.” This set him apart from other founders, like the firebrand Samuel Adams. Ben, ever the utilitarian, managed to render even his enemies useful. The talented learn from their friends. Geniuses learn from their enemies. Or, as Ben put it, “Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.”
But he could not love Thomas Penn. It was not the proprietor’s arrogance alone—Ben knew how to handle that type—but how Penn belittled him, meting out what Aristotle called a “down-ranking.” Penn considered Franklin, a self-made man, beneath him. The upstart electrician had neither the land nor the heritage to qualify as a “proper gentleman.” Franklin was a commoner and, worse, a feral colonist. The Penns’ contempt for Franklin was only the most egregious example of treatment he endured time and again at the hands of British officials, a coolness delivered in the form of an unspoken question: Who do you think you are? More than anything else, I think, it was this condescending attitude, a preference for pedigree over ability, that fueled the American Revolution.
Ben Franklin had anger issues. Unlike most people with anger issues, he recognized this tendency and worked at it. Hints of Ben’s rebellious anger surfaced in his Silence Dogood essays. Silence described herself as “good humour’d (unless I am first provok’d).” Ben would be provoked time and again by people like the Penns and by fellow Americans such as John Adams. Controlling his anger, redirecting that energy toward useful means, was a lifelong struggle. Unlike his plan for moral perfection, he never articulated an anger strategy. There is no “Art of Anger Management” to be found among his voluminous writings. But if I’ve learned anything thus far, it’s that life lessons are sometimes written in invisible ink. They become legible only when exposed to the light.
A bright and good place to start is the Royal Society for the Arts. It’s a short walk from Ben’s old Craven Street house, a pleasant stroll along cobblestoned streets that Ben made many times. He was an early and enthusiastic member, attending meetings, chairing committees, exchanging ideas. (In his day it was known as the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. It didn’t get royaled until 1908.)
The society’s building looks like a cross between an English bank and a Greek temple. Like Ben’s Craven Street house, it has good bones, though no actual bones, at least as far as I know. I step inside and experience that familiar time-travel jolt of frisson. Ben Franklin walked here! On this floor! I say that to myself, but I could probably have said it aloud. I am among history buffs, fellow travelers.
One of them is Eve, a pleasant, gray-haired woman who is my guide to this corner of Franklin land. She leads me down a flight of marble stairs, past portraits of very dead, very White men, former presidents of the society. I make small talk, asking about Franklin’s involvement in the society. Was he an active member?
“Oh, yes,” she says, “he was very much involved in the society, at least until he went back to America and signed his bit of paper.”
Wait. Did she just describe the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States and a beacon of hope for oppressed people everywhere, as a “bit of paper”? I let it slide. The special relationship is more important than the problem.
Eve retrieves a giant folio from a shelf. It must weigh thirty pounds. Inside are original Franklin letters, yellowing but intact. She hands me one. I take it from her carefully as if handling the crown jewels or a Bob Dylan autograph. I am touching the very paper that Ben Franklin touched. It’s Ben’s handwriting all right. I recognize the outsized capital letters, the evenly spaced words. I recognize his signature with its curvaceous B, lissome F, and whimsical final N that curls and loops and pirouettes before sticking the dismount. It’s very Ben: methodical and playful at the same time.
Franklin left a long paper trail. He wrote or received more than 15,000 letters in his lifetime. I’ve read many of them. They range from the silly to the sublime. As a whole, though, they are more elegant and gracious and thoughtful than just about any email today. Franklin took great care with each letter, as the multiple drafts and revisions attest.
The person he wrote to more than any other was his sister Jane, the youngest daughter of the large Franklin family and Ben’s “peculiar favourite.” Over the course of sixty-three years, he confided in Jane more than anyone else. As other family members began to die, Ben and Jane grew closer. “As our number diminishes, let our affection to each other rather increase,” he told her.
Ben was a bona fide citizen of the Republic of Letters, an informal transatlantic network of scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This virtual republic constituted the Internet of the day. It linked like-minded people separated by accidents of geography. Like the Internet, the Republic of Letters was wondrous—and awful. They had no cat videos, but they did snipe at one another and spread vicious rumors. Franklin often advised friends not to put their ideas into print unless they wanted them to live forever. Like the Internet, the Republic of Letters was not uniformly highbrow. No one—not even a Franklin or a Voltaire—could produce consistently exalted prose.
So it is with the Franklin letters archived here. They address prosaic matters: supplies of potash and sturgeon, an improved compass for surveying land, import duties, receipts for goods shipped, an outstanding balance. The quotidian nature of these letters makes me feel closer, not farther, from Franklin. He wasn’t all about scientific breakthroughs and high-stakes diplomacy. He had bills to pay, too.
Ben’s correspondence rarely contained even a hint of anger. There were a few exceptions, though. Arthur Lee, a Virginian and fellow diplomat known for his paranoid ramblings and angry outbursts, once wrote to Franklin, complaining that Ben was ignoring him: “I trust too sir that you will not treat this letter as you have done many others with the indignity of not answering it.”
Ben wrote a reply the next day: “I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation.… If you do not cure your self of this temper it will end in insanity.” Ben wrote an even angrier letter to William Strahan, his British friend and member of Parliament who had backed the war against the American rebels. “Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends: You are now my enemy, and I am, yours.”
These two letters have something in common: Franklin never mailed either. They were placebo letters, one of Ben’s preferred strategies for diffusing anger. As a rule, he’d wait twenty-four hours or so before mailing a heated letter. More often than not, he wouldn’t send it or would dispatch a revised, softer version once the thunderstorm of anger had passed. Ben discharged anger the way his lightning rod discharged electricity, through deflection. Patience was the key. He waited for the storm of fury to pass so he could see more clearly.
Franklin did feel anger, of course. He was human after all. But with few exceptions (see Thomas Penn), his enemies never felt his wrath. Ben’s approach surprises me. Like many others, I had long believed we must confront our tormentors if we hope to heal and move on. Over time, though, I’ve come around to Franklin’s way.
Controlling anger doesn’t mean remaining silent in the face of injustice. “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair,” Ben said. Wrongs must be called out and confronted. The question is how. Franklin responded to injustice not with anger but with justice. Not always, not perfectly, but that was his goal: stopping the cycle of retribution.
In Philadelphia, Ben was upset when a rival publisher, Andrew Bradford, who also happened to be the city’s postmaster, refused to carry Ben’s newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in the mail. When a few years later Franklin became postmaster himself, he “took care never to imitate” Bradford’s pettiness and carried his rival’s newspaper. He had arrested the cycle of injustice or, as the Roman emperor and Stoic Marcus Aurelius said, “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
Ben approached anger the way he did everything: with an open mind and an eye to the useful. Could anger help him improve himself and the world at large? Ben didn’t deny or ignore his anger. He worked hard to master it, lest it master him. That was a luxury he could not afford. Unlike George Washington, Franklin had no troops to command. Unlike Samuel Adams, he had no Sons of Liberty to rouse. His power lay in his ability to persuade, and raw anger never persuaded anyone of anything.
Franklin’s mastery of anger was useful. It widened his circle, enlarged his range of motion. Anger-proof, he could engage in heated debate without fear of fire breaking out. He could dine amicably with political rivals and maybe find common ground. Franklin knew what many of us have forgotten: our capacity to tolerate anger—to feel it without acting on it—broadens our world and makes possibilians of us all.
Consider an incident when Ben was a young apprentice printer during his first London sojourn. His fellow printers demanded a five-shilling fee for ale. Ben didn’t drink ale so he refused to pay. Soon, strange things began to happen. He found his metal type in the wrong boxes, pages of a manuscript jumbled, and other “mischief done me.” When confronted, the other printers feigned ignorance, blaming the mishaps on the printing house ghost.
Ben had a choice: escalate the conflict, perhaps seeking redress from a manager, or soldier on and hope the mischief petered out. There was a third option: pay the fee. He paid, “convinc’d of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually.” Sometimes that meant yielding on a relatively minor point of principle, as he did in the London printing house. Sometimes it meant forgiving those who had wronged him. The opposite of anger is not despair but forgiveness. Forgiveness dissolves anger. Forgiveness, not living well, is the best revenge.
Ben had a remarkable capacity for forgiveness. He forgave William Keith for sending him, only eighteen years old, on the ill-fated mission to London. He forgave his old boss Samuel Keimer for humiliating him in public. He forgave his brother James for his violent outbursts. He even forgave the British after the war.
Franklin worked hard to reduce friction in his relationships. A consummate negotiator and conciliator, he always sought consensus. He admonished friends and enemies alike to use “soft words, civility, and good manners.” He always tempered his opinions, eschewing blunt declarations for softer phrases, like “it so appears to me at present.” To me, this sort of squishy language sounds antiquated. We don’t speak like that. We don’t use soft words. We use hard words, the harder the better. Only strident and muscular language can break through the noise, or so we’re told. But what if Ben is right? What if softer is better?
As I dive deeper into Ben World, I begin to see signs of him and his ideas everywhere. One evening, I’m watching a TV show about a sad sack soccer team up against a formidable rival. Predictably, the sad sack team was down three points at halftime. They were depleted and resigned. Then they watch a video of the opposing team’s manager disrespecting them, and their anger is stoked. They walk onto the field furious. The footage slows to highlight the players’ scowled faces and tightened muscles. I was sure what was coming next: the sad sack team, fueled by anger, would rage their way to victory.
Only they didn’t. Fired up, they committed gratuitous fouls and lost players to red cards. They played aggressively but not skillfully, squandering opportunities, and they lost by an even greater margin. Righteous anger is mindless, and has no off switch.
There is no need to defeat those consumed by anger. They will defeat themselves. When Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, alerted him to a smear campaign being waged against him, Ben was unfazed: “All grieve those unhappy gentlemen; unhappy indeed in their tempers, and in the dark uncomfortable passions of jealousy, anger, suspicion, envy, and malice… I take no other revenge of such enemies, than to let them remain in the miserable situation in which their malignant natures have placed them.” Anger is the parasite that eventually kills its host.
Whenever Ben felt consumed by rage, he’d go for a swim or lift dumbbells or climb the stairs at Number Seven Craven Street. Or he’d sit in his study, and play the strange instrument he called the glass armonica. If you’ve ever played a tune on glasses filled with water, you understand the principle behind the glass armonica. The varying amounts of water in the glasses produce different pitches. It’s an old idea. The ancient Greeks tapped jars with their fingers or sticks to make distinct sounds. Centuries later, musicians in the Middle East and Asia played glass bowls. In 1638, Galileo observed that different tones could be produced by rubbing moist fingertips across the rims of water glasses.
Franklin’s interest in musical glasses began in 1758. He had traveled from London to Cambridge to see Edmund Delaval, a fellow electrician. Delaval, it turned out, also dabbled in musical glasses, which he demonstrated to Ben. Franklin was charmed by the performance but, as usual, was soon thinking of ways to improve glass-based music.
Back in London, he bought a hodgepodge of parts—spindles and glasses and bowls—and got to work. The result was an instrument like no other. It consisted of twenty-three specially blown glasses skewered by an iron spindle. The musician spins the glasses by using a foot pedal while rubbing the edges of the glasses with a moistened finger. Ben’s invention was dubbed the “glassy-chord,” but he preferred “glass armonica,” after the Italian word for harmony.
Ben provided detailed instructions for playing the instrument. First, thoroughly clean both the glasses and the musician’s hands with rainwater (“Spring water is generally too hard and produces a harsh tone”). Then close any windows or draw the curtains because sunshine and wind can dry out the glasses. Follow these instructions, he said, and the “tone comes forth finely with the slightest pressure of the fingers imaginable.” If only, Ben.
There’s a glass armonica at Number Seven Craven Street. It’s an odd-looking contraption of a dozen or so glasses or bowls mounted on a long spindle. It looks like a sewing machine with a drinking problem. My attempt at playing it ends in abject failure. I can’t coax a single sound from the instrument. I grasped the theory but couldn’t make the leap to practice.
Ben had no such trouble. He was delighted with his invention and its “incomparably sweet” tones. I’m not sure about “sweet.” To me, the instrument sounds haunting and mournful, like whales grieving. One listener said the music sounds as if it is “coming from nowhere, pervading everywhere,” like Franklin himself. There is something wonderfully mysterious and magical about the glass armonica. It’s impossible to listen to it without feeling something stir inside you.
I am not surprised Ben Franklin invented a musical instrument. He loved music, particularly simple folk tunes, and played the violin, guitar, harpsichord, and spinet. I am surprised Ben invented this instrument. It is wildly impractical. The dozens of glasses required are expensive and fragile. It is not easily transported. It is not a linear instrument like, say, the piano. There is nothing rational about it. It is all raw emotion and passion, an instrument of the heart. People who hear it for the first time are often moved to tears. Was this a fluke, I wonder, or did Ben know something we don’t? Was the armonica his relief valve for the roiling anger gathering inside, a way to vent without spewing?
Ben could have invented the armonica and kept it to himself as his private instrument. Instead, he flung it into the world, curious to see how far it would fly. He shared the design with glassblowers, metalworkers, and other skilled tradesmen. They began making armonicas, and soon Ben’s invention caught on. Concerts were held throughout Europe and in the American colonies. George Washington attended one in Williamsburg, Virginia. Marie Antoinette, the future queen of France, took armonica lessons while in Vienna. Mozart and Beethoven composed pieces for the instrument. The German physician and debunked hypnotist Franz Mesmer used the armonica in his practice.
When Ben returned briefly to Philadelphia in 1762, he brought an armonica with him. One night, while Deborah was sleeping, he began to play. She woke up, thinking it was the “music of angels.” Ben taught his daughter, Sarah (everyone called her Sally), how to play. They performed duets, she on the armonica, he on the harpsichord. He brought an armonica with him to France in 1776 and entertained friends. Of all his inventions, he said, the armonica was his favorite.
Franklin constructed his various inventions with his hands, but the motivation stemmed from his enormous heart. Each one satisfied a need. They were useful. His brother James was suffering from kidney stones, so Ben invented a flexible catheter. The archaic language of the Book of Common Prayer confused people, so he drafted a simplified version. His sister Jane was struggling with spelling, so he invented a phonetic alphabet. Sometimes the need was his own. When he was aged and could no longer reach books on high shelves, he invented the “long arm,” which did the trick. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but what kind of necessity, and whose? Harsh as it may sound, not all mothers are equally deserving.
Who was the glass armonica’s mother? Not pragmatism. The instrument did not alleviate physical pain or speed deliveries or diffuse dangers like lightning. All it did was make music, and a strange kind of music at that. The armonica was invented by and for Sensitive Ben—the Ben who cried when reading poetry or when spotting the American shoreline after a long absence or when hearing an otherworldly sound that surely came from the gods.
The gods are fickle, though, and so is beauty. By the end of the eighteenth century, the armonica had lost its sheen. It was fragile and expensive and ill-suited for the larger concert halls coming into vogue. Rumors circulated that armonica performers went mad or died young, possibly due to excessive stimulation of the nerves in the fingers.
The armonica teetered on the verge of extinction. Then it resurfaced in the early twentieth century and survives to this day. Watch the Harry Potter movies or the Oscar-winning film Gravity and you will hear Franklin’s glass armonica. A handful of musicians today are proficient in the instrument. I arrange to meet one, a fireplug of a Scot named Alasdair Malloy, Hollywood’s go-to armonica player.
I walk a few blocks from my hotel in Waterloo to the Royal Festival Hall on the Thames and spot Alasdair waiting at a table. He has a ruddy complexion and a shock of white hair. He reminds me of Franklin. This has been happening a lot lately. I’m beginning to worry I am losing my grip—the man with a hammer who sees Bens everywhere.
I like Alasdair. I like how he excuses my lack of musical knowledge. I like how he talks about the armonica as if it were a person, one he is intimate with. (“I caress the instrument,” he says.) His job, he explains, is not to make music but to “get the bowls speaking.” I like how he doesn’t so much play the armonica as commune with it.
“I feel all the vibrations coming up through my fingers,” he says. “It’s an experience completely different from any other instrument I’ve played, and it’s a very personal one.” He suspects that was a big part of the instrument’s appeal for Franklin. The armonica enabled him to escape his frenzied, high-stakes London life and do something just for himself. Even the most useful person needs me-time.
I tell Alasdair about my failed attempt at playing the armonica. The bowls weren’t talking to me. Is there a trick?
“Give the bowls a really good clean,” he says. Then I should put a finger (the first joint, not the fingertip) on the far side of a bowl and draw it toward me, first quickly then slowly until I feel a real connection and a sound emerges. A sensitive touch is essential. “It is a very intimate instrument,” he tells me, and I picture Ben playing the glass armonica stark naked. He probably did.
I thank Alasdair and head to Number Seven Craven Street. I climb the rickety stairs, then walk across the listing floor like a seasick sailor until I reach the glass armonica. I wipe down the bowls with a sponge, as Alasdair suggested, then turn the instrument on. This one is electric, a modification Ben surely would approve of. I wet a finger then gently touch the far side of a spinning bowl. Slowly I draw my finger toward me. Nothing. I try again, this time alternating the speed I move my finger. Fast, then slow, then fast again. Again nothing. Maybe I am not cut out for this. I am no Mozart. My one attempt at playing an instrument, the trombone, ended quickly and to the great relief of neighbors and their dogs.
I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful. We tend to use the two terms interchangeably, but they are different. The optimist believes that somehow—through their actions or luck or perhaps divine intervention—their future will be bright. The hopeful person makes no claims about the future but does believe it is their actions that make any goodness possible. Optimists believe the odds are in their favor. Hopeful people know the odds are against them but persist anyway. Hope is optimism pumping iron. Ben Franklin was not optimistic. He was hopeful.
I try once more to play the armonica, this time alternating the pressure, light then strong, then light again. And it happens—a sound! It is not a sound you’d want to hear, trust me, but it is a sound, and sound is a half step from music. I have communed with the glass armonica. Did you hear that, Ben? We may not be so different, you and me.
I suspect Ben turned to his glass armonica a lot in 1774, the worst year of his long and useful life. In January, he confronted the greatest test yet of his anger management skills. The brouhaha began when letters were leaked, incendiary letters. In private correspondence, Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of Massachusetts, portrayed the colonists as unruly children who needed to be disciplined, lest they veer into “perpetual anarchy and disobedience.” What was needed, Hutchinson said, was “an abridgement of what are called English liberties.”
Outrage erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, though for different reasons. For Americans, the letters confirmed their worst fears about British intentions. British officials, meanwhile, hunted for the leaker. Eventually Franklin confessed. He was the one who leaked the letters.
On January 29, British officials hauled Franklin before the Privy Council, the king’s cabinet. His timing wasn’t good. News of the Boston Tea Party had reached London only days earlier. He knew something was amiss as soon as he walked into the small but elegant room called the Cockpit, so named because cockfights were once held there.
On this day, the room was packed with many of London’s elite, their patrician eyes trained on the American wearing a simple russet suit of Manchester velvet. The mood was charged, as if those gathered had been “invited as to a bull-baiting.” The bull was Franklin. He had walked into an ambush.
What followed was a ritual humiliation of Franklin by Alexander Wedderburn, the king’s silk-tongued solicitor-general. He likened Franklin to a common thief who “has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men.”
Then Wedderburn, pounding the table, threw Franklin’s fame as an electrical scientist back in his face, calling him the “inventor and first planner” of all the troubles between Britain and its colonies. Franklin, he said, sought to “irritate and incense the minds of the King’s subjects” in America. Wedderburn then attacked Franklin’s most precious possession: his reputation. Doctor Franklin, he said, “moves in a very inferior orbit.”
And so it went for nearly an hour. The audience of British lords and other dignitaries ate it up, laughing and applauding, while Franklin remained silent, standing “conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body.” If he was angry, no one could tell. His expression gave nothing away. The inquisition complete, Franklin walked across the room and, according to one account, whispered to Wedderburn, “I will make your master a LITTLE KING for this.”
Did Franklin really say that? I doubt it, but it makes for a good story, and Ben loved a good story. Even if good stories are inaccurate, they often contain great truths. In this case, it reveals Franklin’s approach to anger. On that cold January day in London, he holstered his fury, resolving to convert it into something more powerful and useful.
Ben Franklin became an American the way Ernest Hemingway’s character in The Sun Also Rises went bankrupt: gradually and then suddenly. Franklin had walked into the Cockpit a loyal, if disillusioned, British subject. He walked out an American rebel.