The dust is what I remember most. Chunks of reddish-brown earth adhered to my skin and my microphone and my silly correspondent’s vest and the few tufts of hair remaining on my prematurely bald head. Kabul was barren, a city of darkness and despair, and I, a young journalist in way over my head, was the greenest thing around.
It was 1996. The Afghan capital had just fallen to the Taliban: religious zealots who passed the time cruising Kabul’s muddy, cratered streets in Toyota pickups, with grenade launchers perched atop the flatbeds. Music was banned. Women, on those rare occasions they ventured onto the streets, were required to wear burqas, head-to-toe coverings with only a small mesh window for the eyes and, incongruously, a royal blue colorway that made them look like faceless apparitions. The soccer stadium had been converted into a site for public executions.
I faithfully produced stories for NPR, waving my microphone as if it were a wand and hoping misery conveyed was misery diminished.
One day, I decided to take a break from the grimness and dipped into a local carpet shop. Here was an art form still permitted under Taliban rule. I spotted the rug I wanted—a Bukhara beauty, featuring a tight maroon weave—and reluctantly haggled (I hate haggling) with the shopkeeper, a rotund man with a hearty laugh and wry smile. We settled on a price; then I retrieved a wad of US dollars, a mix of tens and twenties, from the money belt strapped to my belly.
“No,” he said, the smile fading from his face, his voice growing agitated. “Only Franklins! Only Franklins!”
Much of the world knows Ben Franklin this way: the face on the hundred-dollar bill. (Two-thirds of all hundred-dollar bills circulate outside the United States.) This is how I thought of Franklin too—if I thought of him at all. When I did, cartoonish images sprang to mind. Franklin manning his printing press. Franklin signing the US Constitution. Franklin flirting with the ladies of Paris. And, of course, Franklin flying his electrified kite.
A restless soul, I’ve always been drawn to the wisdom of strangers: Gandhi, Confucius, Nietzsche, and many others. I had always assumed true wisdom resided far away and spoke a foreign tongue. I inhaled the history of others even as I remained ignorant of my own. This disturbed me, but not enough to do anything about it. I had a war to cover, a world to see, so I stashed my remaining Franklins into my money belt and didn’t give him another thought.
Until I did.
Fast-forward three decades. I am no longer young. I am a man of a certain age, with all the uncertainty and apprehension that entails. I am approaching what Plato called the threshold of old age. I am not old, to be clear, but I am no longer young. I occupy an uncomfortable bardo state, somewhere between middle age and early-bird-special age. A birthday is approaching. A big one, where the number six features prominently. I’ve tried ignoring it. At first, this proved easy enough. The birthday was a tiny speck in the big sky, like an airliner at cruising altitude or a hot-air balloon floating high above the badlands of South Dakota.
Gradually, though, the unnamed birthday grew larger until it filled my field of vision. I began to take stock of my life, and I didn’t like the inventory. What did all my endless, mindless striving amount to? What good have I done?
That’s when Franklin reappeared in my life. He snuck in when I wasn’t looking. My editor suggested I write a book on aliens—one UFO encounter in particular that may or may not have happened over the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts in 1969. I didn’t want to write a book on aliens, but I did want to keep my editor happy, so I promised to look into it.
The Berkshire incident struck me as problematic, even more so than most UFO encounters. It involved bright lights, an abduction of an entire family, and insect-like creatures. I sighed. (I am a big sigher.) My antipathy for the whole UFO idea hardened. I told myself I’d do a tad more research, then call my editor and recuse myself. No UFO book for me. Then I stumbled across an article that changed everything.
It was titled “Our Founders, Alien Obsessed.” Intrigued, I began to read. Apparently several of America’s founders believed in the possibility of intelligent life in the universe. In 1639, John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, noted the appearance of strange objects in the sky over Boston—UFOs, in other words. Then there was Benjamin Franklin, who, as a young man, wrote, “I stretch my imagination thro’ and beyond our system of planets, beyond the visible fix’d stars themselves, into that space that is every way infinite, and conceive it fill’d with suns like ours, each with a chorus of worlds.”
A chorus of worlds! Now my interest was piqued—not about UFOs but about Benjamin Franklin.
He is not an obvious source of inspiration for someone like me, a fan of foreign lands and peoples, a man of art, not science, but if I’ve learned anything from my travels, it is to always question assumptions, to always ask: What if? What if I’ve been looking in all the wrong places? What if wisdom resides a lot closer than I think?
The more I learned about Ben Franklin, the more I suspected he just might be the mentor, the guide to ageing and to living, I’ve been seeking. The last third of his life was by far the most interesting, and the first two-thirds were downright fascinating. It was in his closing act, a time when he could have been doing the colonial equivalent of golfing in Florida, that he accomplished the most and changed the most. This was when Franklin the Loyalist became Franklin the Rebel and, later, when Franklin the Enslaver became Franklin the Abolitionist. This was when he charmed the French into supporting the American cause. It was also, paradoxically, when Franklin found the almost Buddha-like serenity that had long eluded him.
Franklin was the most corporeal of the founding fathers. Jefferson, Adams, and Washington all had good heads on their shoulders, but that’s the problem—they were all head. I have no idea what Jefferson’s gut looked like (did he have one?) or Washington’s buttocks. Ah, but Franklin. Now here was a founder in full! “Fleshly, worldly, fluid, and ungodly,” as one scholar put it.
Yes, I thought, reading those words, and thank goodness, for this most fleshly and fluid of founders was also the most human. He’s the founder we want to have a beer with. I can’t imagine calling Thomas Jefferson “Tommy” or James Madison “Jimbo,” but I feel comfortable calling Franklin Ben, or even Benny, as he was known in his youth.
Benjamin Franklin is the best-known president who wasn’t president. He achieved so much it’s hard to know where to begin. He was the most famous American of his time and the only founder who would have been famous even if there had never been a Revolutionary War. Franklin was a printer, publisher, satirist, scientist, philanthropist, humorist, diplomat, inventor, legislator, meteorologist, memoirist, postmaster, editor, traveler, debunker, and enthusiast. He was also an influencer, perhaps the first. He signed all four documents leading to the founding of the new republic, the only person to do so. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, a new kind of stove, the matching grant, a musical instrument called the glass armonica, and a chair that doubles as a step stool. And that list is only partial. In Philadelphia, he founded many of the civic organizations we now take for granted: public libraries, hospitals, volunteer fire departments, neighborhood watches. He was at once practical and visionary, a rare combination.
My résumé is considerably less impressive. I have invented nothing, founded nothing. I am not the most famous American of my time. I have won no wars, signed no declarations.
As I dig, though, I unearth a few ways we are alike, Ben and me. I too need to lose more than a few pounds. I too believe the best way to a person’s heart is through their funny bone. Franklin, like me, was a traveler. He journeyed farther and longer than any other American of his time. He crossed the Atlantic eight times, and during an age when reaching one’s destination was not guaranteed and in-flight service was even worse than today. He spent a third of his long life abroad, living in London and Paris and visiting Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, and, for three glorious days, the Portuguese island of Madeira. The region’s wine was one of those small pleasures that Franklin cherished; amass enough of them, he believed, and the result was outsized happiness.
Franklin is the most misunderstood of the founders. Despite his business success and his visage gracing the hundred-dollar bill, he was no money-grubbing capitalist. He was, I’ve discovered, more Buddhist than banker. He wrestled with the imponderables of life: morality, mortality, God, bliss, love. Despite his reputation for coldness, Franklin was no automaton.
Was he perfect? Absolutely not. Franklin disappoints me at times, infuriates me at others. He was, as one historian said, “the perfect model of sanity,” and I can think of nothing more annoying than that. He could be too literal and pedantic, and too cautious. He could be ethnocentric and bigoted. So, yes, he was flawed, but so am I.
Like me, Ben loved nothing more than telling a good tale. Just as we need oxygen to breathe and water to drink, we humans need stories to tell ourselves, especially about three essential questions. How did we get here? Where do we go when we die? What should we do in the meantime? On the first two questions, Franklin is not much help; he had no time for idle speculation. But on the third question, he has much to offer. He is a good guide, and I sure could use one.
At a time when everyone, including me, is struggling to create better versions of themselves, Franklin, America’s original self-help evangelist, reminds us it is easier than we think. At a time when the tapestry of our union is fraying, Franklin reminds us there is something uniquely uplifting and admirable about the American experiment. At a time when opinions have calcified, Franklin reminds us that changing your mind is not only a noble act; it is also an American one.
Unfortunately, Ben Franklin resides in the past, and that is not a locale we Americans care to visit. Sure, we like a good museum gift shop or Civil War reenactment, but as a young nation, we find the future, replete with both promise and dread, far more compelling than the past. Yet it is the past—the eighteenth century, in particular—where I’ve had my head firmly inserted for the past few years. It was not a bad place to have had a head, provided said head was not Black or Native American or female or any head, really, except a white male one that spoke with the right accent.
A while ago, the late social critic Neil Postman wrote Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. His thesis: the eighteenth century was a pivotal time when many of our modern ideas were born, and we’d be wise to revisit it. “To forget our mistakes is bad,” he wrote, “but to forget our successes may be worse.” We’re so worried about repeating the past that we overlook the hidden treasures it contains. I find that notion mighty appealing. If I am anything, it is a treasure hunter.
My curiosity about Franklin and his times slow-simmered at first but soon reached a rolling, roiling boil with an intensity and persistence that surprised me. The result of my Franklin fixation is the book you are holding in your hands. You will, alas, find no aliens in these pages, but will, I hope, see what I now see in Benjamin Franklin: a fleshly and fluid founder who has much to teach us about something as enticing as it is elusive—the secret to living a long and useful life.