For much of his long life, Benjamin Franklin was known as “Dr. Franklin.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t entirely truthful. While Franklin did display an intense interest in and knowledge of medicine, he was not a medical doctor. And while he was widely read and conversant in several languages, he never earned a PhD, or any other degree for that matter, not even a high school diploma. The title was honorary, bestowed first by St. Andrews University in Scotland and later by Oxford University. Dr. Franklin was not a “real” doctor.
I am not a real doctor either. Yet hanging in my office is a diploma granting me the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. It’s set in elegant typeface and accompanied by the requisite medieval motifs and sprinkling of Latin. I look at the framed diploma often, probably too often.
My honorary doctorate is not from Oxford or any other university you might have heard of. It is from St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, the second-most prestigious university in all of Bulgaria. It took me a full week of continual practice to wrap my American lips around the Bulgarian syllables, but I mastered them, as well as fourteen other words: Izvinete, no Bŭlgarskiyat mi ne e mnogo dobŭr, taka che shte govorya na Angliĭski. “Excuse me, but my Bulgarian is not very good, so I shall speak in English.”
That is what I told an audience of several dozen faculty, students, and journalists gathered one spring day at the university. I will never forget that moment. Draped in a black and purple robe, clutching my diploma like a talisman, I experienced what I imagine Franklin did when he received one of his honorary doctorates: a complex admixture of pride and validation, laced with trace elements of embarrassment. Do I deserve this? Have I earned it?
Most of all, I experienced relief. The good people of Veliko Tarnovo removed a large and debilitating chip from my shoulder. Unlike my wife and several friends, I had not attended an Ivy League school. I was a lazy, disengaged student. No Rhodes Scholar, I was a road warrior. Flitting from one place to the next, I was a compulsive wanderer and unrepentant neurotic. Now I was a doctor too and had the documentation to prove it.
I have a recurring fantasy. I am on an airplane—in first class, naturally (this is a fantasy)—sipping a Bloody Mary and nibbling on warmed nuts when a flight attendant makes an announcement.
“Attention passengers. Is there a doctor on board? If so, please press your call button.”
I press my call button, and the flight attendant rushes to my seat.
“Sir, you are a doctor?”
“Why, yes, I am, though technically it’s an honorary doctorate from the second-most prestigious university in Bulgaria. How can I help?”
I have a theory. Everyone is famous somewhere. Benjamin Franklin and Jerry Lewis were more famous in France than in America. The Germans worship David Hasselhoff. Thanks to the luck of the draw, I got Bulgaria.
Bulgarians love me. They love me even more than they love Michael Bolton, which is a lot. When I visited Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, I turned a corner and saw an eight-story-high billboard of the fading pop icon. They have a saying in Bulgaria: “Rock stars rise in the West and set in the East.”
I’m not sure why Bulgarians love me when, truth be told, there are days I don’t love myself. Now that I think about it, maybe that explains it. Bulgarians are among the least happy people in the world, so perhaps they relate to my Eeyore-ish sensibility. Or perhaps it is my dark humor that resonates with them. In any event, I’m not complaining. Unsolicited affection is a gift and, like all gifts, is best not questioned. It’s a lesson Franklin learned early in life.
The education of “Dr.” Franklin is on my mind as I walk the streets of old Boston one cold and rainy January day. I have a destination in mind. It’s a short walk from my hotel, only five minutes, but along the way I bump into Ben twice. I pass Franklin Street (all fifty states have at least one) and then a sign featuring his portly visage, the same one that appears on the hundred-dollar bill. “Benjamin Meet Blockchain,” it reads. The ad’s implication: Franklin would approve of blockchain and crypto and other financial wizardry cooked up in a Wall Street skyscraper or Bahamian villa. I’m not so sure. Ben loved innovative technologies but only useful ones, and these “innovations,” in my mind, don’t make the grade.
I arrive at my destination: 17 Milk Street. It’s a six-story brick building, not unlike the dozens of others nearby, but this building—or, to be more precise, this location—is special. I look up and there is Ben, sandwiched between a dental office and a marijuana dispensary called Cannabist. (“How do you want to feel today?” asks the sign in the window.) He’s perched above the second-floor window, wondering how the hell he got up here and why the good people at Cannabist don’t treat him to the occasional free sample.
The small bust, so discreet no one but me seems to notice it, marks where Franklin was born on January 17, 1706, less than a century after the death of Shakespeare and only thirteen years after the infamous Salem witch trials. Baby Ben arrived just in time to witness the dawn of a new era, the Age of Enlightenment. Old superstitions were dying out, replaced by a more rational and hopeful worldview. Franklin was born in the right time though not quite the right place, an oversight young Ben would correct. But not now, not yet. Boston was not done with Ben Franklin, nor was he done with Boston.
The actual house where Franklin was born is long gone. It burned to the ground in 1810, but thankfully a neighbor had sketched the house shortly before the fire. I retrieve a copy of the drawing from my backpack. I see a simple, two-story cottage with clapboards in front and large, rough shingles on the sides. Inside, space was at a premium, with only one room on the main floor and not many more upstairs. Two windows fronted the street while others faced a small yard and garden in the rear.
I look up from the drawing and gaze across twenty-first-century Milk Street. I see a coffee shop. It is cooler than I am, the kind of place where no one would ever, ever, use the word cool unless they were talking about the weather. Coffee shops were also plentiful in Franklin’s time, though less artisanal. Next to the coffee shop is Sulgrave News, a small store that sells lottery tickets and high-octane energy drinks but no actual newspapers or magazines. Ben would no doubt mourn the slow-motion death of print. Printer’s ink was in his blood.
Next to the newsstand that is not a newsstand is a church that is not a church. It is a sturdy green-steepled brick building sided with rows of white-framed arch windows. The Puritans didn’t consider the physical building where people gathered to worship a church. The “church” was the congregation, the people. When they weren’t congregating at these buildings—called meeting halls—they lent the space to others, presumably for weddings and bar mitzvahs.
Founded in 1669, the Old South un-church was a plucky upstart, a breakaway from the more established North un-church, that particular Puritan congregation apparently too puritanical for the likes of Josiah Franklin, Ben’s father, and many other Bostonians. Old South was where Boston’s intellectuals congregated. It may be just a building, in the Puritan mind, but what a building! Here one of the judges overseeing the Salem witch trials publicly apologized, accepting “the blame and shame of it.” Here Phillis Wheatley, the first enslaved African American poet, worshipped. Here Samuel Adams and other members of the Sons of Liberty hatched the plot for the Boston Tea Party.
And here baby Ben Franklin was baptized. Reverend Samuel Willard performed the ceremony. He was a kind man, a friend of the Franklins. Sprinkling icy water on the newborn’s head, the reverend recited the Puritan blessing: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost… a sign and seal of the covenant of grace.” These words, among the first Franklin heard, were meant to consecrate the life of a devout Christian, a Puritan. Ben was Josiah Franklin’s tenth son, and he intended to steer him “to the service of the church.” Young Ben was to become a man of the cloth.
Today, the Old South Meeting Hall is a small museum. I step inside and take in the wooden rafters and neatly arranged pews. A display case contains a chart of the old seating assignments. I lean closer to read the tiny print. There it is: “Franklin.” The seats weren’t bad—not primo, but not nose-bleed territory either. Josiah Franklin was a simple tradesman, a maker of soap and candles. How could this “leather apron,” as such manual workers were known, manage to score such good seats?
“He might have provided the church with candles,” suggests Delaney, the friendly tour guide.
“A kind of barter?” I say.
“Exactly.”
That is certainly possible. Bostonians loved to barter; they put the quo in quid pro quo. But there is another, more noble explanation. Josiah Franklin may have been a poor man, but he was rich in character and reputation. Townspeople came to the elder Franklin for advice and to mediate disputes. In Boston, unlike England, a candlemaker was respected for such traits and could play a role in political life. “Private virtue assured a public role,” as one historian put it.
I walk a few blocks from the Old South Meeting Hall to the Granary Burying Ground. A light snow has begun to fall, coating the tombstones with a thin layer of white fluff. Cemeteries always look better in the snow. Many luminaries from the Revolutionary War era are buried here: Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams. Their graves are marked with simple headstones. The same cannot be said of the towering, phallic obelisk in the center of the cemetery. In large letters, it reads: “FRANKLIN.”
It’s an oddly ostentatious memorial for Ben’s parents, people who were, by all accounts, reserved and unassuming. Ben remembers his father as a wise and gentle man who exercised his authority judiciously. (He had considerably less to say about his mother, noting only that she was “a discreet and virtuous woman.”) When young Ben and his friends were caught stealing stones from a construction site, Josiah Franklin didn’t “correct” (read “whip”) young Ben like the other fathers did to their sons, but instead taught him the memorable lesson “that nothing was useful which was not honest.” Again that word: useful. Franklin’s passion for it, I realize, was born not in his adopted town of Philadelphia but here in his birthplace.
I climb the few stone steps that lead to the obelisk platform and notice that, as often happens at Franklin pilgrimage sites, people have left pennies, and a few quarters, though no hundred-dollar bills. It’s touching and understandable, I suppose, but misses the point of Ben Franklin’s life and that of his parents, whose headstone lies before me now, the words written by their son Benjamin.
Josiah Franklin
And Abiah his Wife
Lie here interred.
They lived lovingly together in Wedlock
Fifty-five Years.
Without an Estate or any gainful Employment,
By constant labour and Industry,
With God’s Blessing,
They maintained a large Family
Comfortably;
Ben then suggests his parents’ lives were not only long but also useful, a model for those of little means.
From this Instance, Reader,
Be encouraged to Diligence in thy Calling,
And distrust not Providence.
I get the diligence part. That was pure Franklin. It is through sustained and focused effort that we get ahead. But his admonition to “distrust not Providence” surprises me. He was not a man who bent to the whims of chance. “He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner,” he once said. Was this nod to providence a gesture of respect for his pious father—or something more? There’s no denying Ben’s lucky breaks, including one that happened years before he was born.
When Josiah Franklin arrived in Boston in 1683, he was just another religious dissenter looking to start anew in John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.” In England, Josiah was a successful dyer, but Boston had no textile industry and no need for Josiah’s skill, so he pivoted and learned a new trade: tallow chandler. He was something of an alchemist, transforming animal fat into useful products such as soap and candles. His youngest son would go on to perform his own kind of alchemy, converting theories, scientific and political, into useful inventions and practices.
Ben’s father was strong and athletic. Cultured, too. He could “draw prettily,” Franklin recalls, and had a “a clear pleasing voice.” He played the violin. A pious man, he often quoted scripture to his children, especially these words of Solomon’s: “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings.” Josiah likely never imagined his youngest son would one day stand before four kings and dine with a fifth.
Josiah Franklin was a model of probity and restraint, traits Ben would inherit. Like his father, he could be friendly, warm even, but there was always part of him that remained separate and aloof. Was it protective, I wonder? Was he afraid of getting too close to people and getting hurt? It’s a common defense mechanism, then and now. My own father had mastered it. If someone slighted him, or he imagined they had, he wrote them off promptly and in perpetuity. He did not have many friends. So determined was he to protect himself that he forfeited much intimacy, forgetting that even the most timid turtle pokes his head out of his shell now and then.
I have inherited my father’s aversion to confrontation and avoid it whenever possible. It doesn’t matter whether it is a large or small conflict; if anything, it is life’s smaller tussles that unnerve me the most. A confrontation, a perceived confrontation, with an airline agent or a barista can send me into a prolonged funk. I’m not sure why, and years of therapy and a library of self-help books have shed little light on my affliction. I know my conflict avoidance comes at a cost, one I willingly pay. After all, who wants to get ensnared in a kerfuffle or, worse, a brouhaha? I worry, though, that I might end up like my father: safe but friendless.
Franklin also dreaded direct confrontation, but that is where we part ways. I deploy the covert hostility of the passive-aggressive, quietly seething and hoping my adversary discerns the source of my silent anger. It’s a feckless tactic. Friction unacknowledged is friction unresolved. Franklin took a different approach.
At a young age, he realized that being “saucy and provoking,” as he put it, wasn’t getting him anywhere, so he softened his language and adopted a strategy of “modest diffidence.” He jettisoned definitive words, such as certainly and undoubtedly and instead deployed softer phrases, like “I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so.” This way, he made his point without alienating his interlocutor. Maybe this soft language could work for me too and help me overcome my conflict-aversion. It appears to me it just might, Ben.
Franklin’s Boston, population eight thousand, was more town than city, a colonial outpost perched on the edge of the British Empire. Distance, though, is a blessing as well as curse. Some of the era’s greatest advances in science and governance were made not in London but in faraway America. David Bushnell’s submarine, dubbed “the Turtle.” Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Advances made not despite the distance from the mothership but because of it. Distance is liberating, as any teenager taking their first parent-free trip will tell you.
Boston was a town of brightly painted houses packed into a narrow peninsula, exposed to wilderness and sea. Life was hard. Open sewers ran down the middle of the streets. During the long winters, firewood and fresh water were scarce. Epidemics, such as smallpox, surfaced with alarming regularity. One in four newborns died within a few days.
Assuming you survived infancy, the hazards didn’t stop there. Every few weeks, the local newspaper reported raids by Native Americans. There was rampant piracy, and frequent public hangings of captured pirates. Most Britons thought of Boston as a feral and dangerous place, if they thought of it at all. In the calculus of British imperialism, Boston was a rounding error.
Yet it was remarkably well educated. The literacy rate was 98 percent among men and 62 percent for women. And Boston, while small, was still larger than New York and Philadelphia. The archetype of the snooty “Boston Brahmin” was already taking shape, and that shape looked and sounded a lot like John Adams. Writing in his diary shortly after visiting Philadelphia for the first time, Adams lays on the Boston exceptionalism thick: “The morals of our people are much better, their manners are more polite, and agreeable… our language is better, our persons are handsomer, our spirit is greater, our laws are wiser, our religion is superior, our education is better. We exceed them in every thing.”
Adams was right about at least one thing: Boston was no ordinary town. Like the Blues Brothers, it was on a mission from God. Founded by the Puritans in 1630, it was a biblical commonwealth, where God and country were intertwined. On the streets, you’d hear, along with chitchat about the weather and town gossip, this common question: “Are you saved?” Bostonians observed the Sabbath with uncommon rigor. The only recognized church was Puritan New England Congregationalism. The Massachusetts authorities persecuted Quakers and other sects. Early eighteenth-century Boston was not quite a theocracy, but it came close.
Despite the religious zealotry, Boston society was fluid, at least when it came to your choice of profession. As long as you didn’t offend the governing clergy, you could do more or less as you pleased. Bostonians started businesses. They published books. And a surprising number chose to join the Native Americans, abandoning the town altogether for a more bucolic life.
The beauty of this time and place is you didn’t have to choose one profession. This was the age of the hyphenated career. Boston was populated by physician-farmers, lawyer-poets, preacher-scientists, and printer-journalists. Such hybrid lives were possible in a way they are not today.
One reason people could master more than one trade is that there was less to master. The eighteenth century was perhaps the last time in human history when it was possible for one person to know everything that had come before. Specialized knowledge has its benefits, of course, but it has drawbacks too, and I for one mourn the passing of the hyphenated career. I wouldn’t mind being a barber-physicist or maybe a deejay-doctor. I think that’s why I decided to become a journalist. The profession enabled me to try on different personas. By shadowing an airline pilot for a day, I was an airline pilot for a day, and similarly with firefighters and Wall Street traders.
Boston, a city of merchants and tradesmen, imported much from England, including dangerous ideas such as those of John Locke, the ideological godfather of the American Revolution. Franklin’s Boston wasn’t yet the defiant hotbed of Samuel Adams and his fellow Sons of Liberty, but the roots of rebellion were already visible. Bostonians regularly ignored Parliament’s Acts of Trade and Navigation, which naturally favored Great Britain.
Boston may have been a Puritan city, but that doesn’t mean it was joyless. People knew how to have fun (provided it wasn’t Sunday, of course). “[Bostonians] dressed as elegantly as their budgets allowed, in spite of their pastors’ objections,” write historians Claude-Anne Lopez and Eugenia Herbert, noting that people also “drank heartily: homemade cider for the poor, rum for the better off; imported wine for the wealthy.” Near the Franklin house was the city’s best-known tavern, the Green Dragon, and, around the corner, a house of prostitution run by a woman known as “the Little Prude of Pleasure,” which is, I think, the perfect name for a Puritan madam.
It was the fluid nature of colonial Boston that enabled young Ben to mold his identity into new and unusual shapes. From a young age, he refused to accept the choices offered him. He ordered off-menu. More than that, he created an entirely new menu, one for future generations to peruse. None of this would have been possible had his father not taken a huge risk and sailed for parts unknown.
I’m beginning to appreciate the compactness, the human scale of old Boston. Nothing is more than ten minutes away by foot, and it’s only a short walk from the Granary Burying Ground to School Street. Here I find another version of Ben Franklin, this time in bronze. He is cradling a hat in one arm, a walking stick in the other, and looking more regal than he actually was. Franklin’s gaze is directed slightly downward toward… something. Following his line of sight, I spot a colorful sidewalk mosaic. Installed in 1983, it’s worn by forty years of passing shoes but is still bright and legible.
Rendered in the style of a hopscotch game, it depicts children doing childlike activities: flying kites, jumping rope, playing marbles, turning cartwheels, swinging from trees, drawing. The mosaic marks the original location of the Boston Latin School. Founded in 1635, it is the oldest public school in America. Young Ben was a student here. For a while.
I’m looking at the school motto, in Latin naturally: Labor Omnia Vincit. Omnibus opportunitas. “Work Conquers All—Opportunity for All.” It’s a sentiment Franklin, even at age eight, shared. Hard work was his passport to a better life.
Franklin was a good student, rising to the top of his class and even moving up a grade. It was, by all accounts, a happy time for Ben. The schoolhouse was light and airy, and when the windows were opened on warm spring days, the students could hear the sounds of the nearby waterfront humming with activity. Boston Latin offered the best secondary education in the colonies.
The curriculum was ambitious, but Ben mastered it easily. Soon he was performing scholarly feats like translating Aesop’s fables into Latin. Most of the students, from backgrounds more privileged than Ben’s, were destined for Harvard and then, most likely, a career in the clergy.
But after only a year, Ben’s father withdrew his son from the prestigious Latin School and enrolled him in a markedly less prestigious school where the subjects taught included dancing, embroidery, violin, flute, and “English and French quilting.” A year later, Josiah Franklin pulled Ben out of that school too, thus marking the end of Benjamin Franklin’s formal education. He was ten years old.
That must have stung. In a way, getting a taste of school was worse than none at all. The prospect of a learned life had been dangled in front of Ben, then yanked away. Why did Josiah Franklin deny his youngest son an education?
The conventional explanation, one posited by Franklin himself, is that his father couldn’t afford it. That theory doesn’t hold up, though. There was no tuition at the Latin School, and other expenses (a few shillings for firewood) were minimal. His father could have afforded to keep Ben in school. It was not the money but the faith—specifically, Ben’s lack of it—that was the problem.
From a young age, Franklin was a skeptic. “I began to doubt of Revelation itself,” he recalled. He was also prone to poking some good-natured fun at religious traditions. One day, when his father was saying grace yet again over a meal, Ben offered a helpful suggestion: “I think, father, if you said grace over the whole cask—once for all—it would be a vast saving of time.” Josiah Franklin knew the ministry would never accept a smart-ass skeptic like Ben into their fold. Providing him an education, so tied to the clergy, seemed pointless.
Franklin’s aborted education—far scantier than that of most other founders—explains a lot. It explains the sizable chip on his shoulder, every bit as burdensome as mine. It explains why he decried the excessive use of Latin and ancient Greek, “the quackery of literature,” in school curricula. It explains his allergy to even a whiff of snobbery. Most of all, it explains his nimble and resourceful mind. Josiah Franklin’s decision to pull young Ben out of school was, in hindsight, the best thing that ever happened to him. Distrust not providence.
Life is best understood backward but must be lived forward, observed the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Maybe we would trust providence more if we could watch our lives in reverse, like a home movie played backward. Maybe providence is always working in our favor, but we’re too close to appreciate it. Only time provides the distance needed to admire its handiwork.