Benjamin Franklin

In his new documentary on PBS, Ken Burns reveals Benjamin Franklin as one of America's most complex and wisest founders.

From his formation of the self-improvement society the Junto and his Albany Plan of Union for the mutual benefit of the colonies to the Constitution, Franklin always considered the “general good” of society. Franklin still has such an appeal to all segments of society because, as biographer Walter Isaacson has declared, he’s “by far the most approachable of our founders.” His rags to riches story, as the “the youngest Son of the youngest Son for 5 Generations back” to an indentured servant to a runaway to a prosperous statesman was the literal inspiration of the American dream. People on both sides of the political aisle are quick to look to Franklin. Fox News commentator and author Brian Kilmeade has called Franklin a “genius.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senator Amy Klobuchar both claimed Franklin and his post-Constitutional Convention warning that we had “a republic if you can keep it.” Pelosi even altered the words and placed the burden on Americans today: “a republic, if we can keep it.” In the aftermath of the January 6th attack on the U. S. Capitol, Franklin’s words have been a constant reminder of the need for vigilant citizens and so often repeated that it might as well be a bumper sticker. Burns thinks it’s because Franklin was the “greatest scientific mind,” the “greatest diplomat in American history,” and the “greatest personality” of the eighteenth century. He even petitioned Congress to “devise means for removing the Inconsistency from the Character of the American People.” Franklin was the only major founder to take such a public and prominent role. Franklin was not Jefferson. He ultimately recognized the worth of African Americans, supported the Bray School for Black students, and served as the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the first such group in the world. Two years later, Franklin was labeled a “person of concern” by the Mayor of Washington, D. C., and a statue of him in his adopted city of Philadelphia was vandalized with red paint (symbolizing blood) on his hands over the sin of slavery. Burns realizes this and casts Franklin as just as “indispensable” to the Revolution as George Washington and as crucial to the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson. Above all, we see a Franklin devoted to the greater good of society and national unity. It’s a smart and effective way to manage the various interpretations and effectively blend more than two centuries of historical writing. It opened with a sponsor’s glowing message of praise “celebrating the wisdom and ingenuity of one of America’s most distinguished founding fathers.” Franklin and his achievements were celebrated. Burns felt “obligated to tell all the facets” of Franklin’s life—from the famous kite to attempts to capture runaway slaves. Most Americans know his name—even if it’s just from the one reference to him in Hamilton, that time Eric Cartman time-traveled, spending a stack of Benjamins, lines like “early to bed, early to rise,” or as the mislabeled inventor of the soon-to-be-banished daylight savings time.

The star-studded vocal cast includes Mandy Patinkin (as Franklin) and Paul Giamatti (reprising his Emmy-winning role of John Adams).

Tonight’s Part 1, “Join or Die,” can be yawn-inducing as it dryly maneuvers through Franklin’s rise as a skilled printer, voracious reader and brilliant writer, especially without the advantage of archival footage and witness interviews that enliven some of Burns’ more recent films. But Tuesday’s conclusion of Benjamin Franklin, “An American,” benefits from a far more specific focus on the commencement of the Revolution. How did such a staunch monarchist become a leader of the American Revolution? This question is the driving force in Ken Burns’ latest documentary on revered Founding Father and celebrated inventor Benjamin Franklin. The four-hour event is most engaging whenever it’s endeavoring to solve that puzzle.

Ken Burns has been a documentary filmmaker for 45 years and his latest series is a four-hour PBS special about Benjamin Franklin airing on PBS Stations ...

Mandy Patinkin voices Franklin in this 2-part, 4-hour docuseries.

His affairs, the way he mostly ignored Sally, the daughter he had with common law wife Deborah Read, his long forays to London that fed his intellect but made him neglect his family — all of that information isn’t new, and it’s not presented as new. During that time, he left his wife and daughter back in Philadelphia and recreated a domestic life in England. There’s the matter of his “illegitimate” son William, who grew up to become the Crown-appointed governor of New Jersey, and the fact that he was a womanizer on both sides of the Atlantic. In his writings, for example, he acknowledges his biases against Black people, a view which changed over the years but never went away completely. He was also the owner of enslaved people, and someone who initially fought slavery only as a way to have less non-whites (including “swarthy” Swedes, apparently) invade the colonies. But what’s great about the docuseries Benjamin Franklin is that it’s not shy about portraying the Founding Father’s flaws as well as his greatness. Even though he dropped out of school to go live in Philadelphia, he was credited with a number of inventions as well as his famous kite experiment, where he proved that the skies are charged with electricity.

Here's everything you need to know about tuning into the new documentary on PBS,...

In this two-part documentary, Burns aims to show the world the real Benjamin Franklin, for better or for worse. After all, you don’t get to go down as one of the most influential and consequential men in history just for cracking a few jokes here and there. If you have even cable TV in the first place.

Ken Burns sat down with Jacobin to discuss his new documentary, Benjamin Franklin , and how the founding father's spirit of humanitarianism and progress led ...

There were democratic aspects, but the Senate at that time, until the early twentieth century, was elected by the state legislators, not by the commonfolk, not until an amendment to the Constitution in the first decade of the twentieth century. It doesn’t say that in the Constitution, but that’s what they wanted. It’s from the point of view of a Muslim owner of white Christian slaves. So yeah, it’s a republic and has aspects of, essentially, not so much a governing class as people who aspire to be part of a governing class. Of course, we have the celebrated massacre of the Paxton Boys that we detail. Until I saw your documentary, I never ever heard about this last public act of Franklin’s, an attempt to liberate the enslaved. It was this idea of borrowing from the Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy, the five, six tribes that had decided to band together to figure out how to solve common things and disputes without warfare. But what’s so notable about it, besides Benjamin’s fleeing to Philadelphia and becoming a runaway, is that he’s also beginning a literary career — first with these anonymous letters that are tongue in cheek but also making people laugh, yet also have a distance from the kind of criticism he’s leveling. He becomes the most famous American in the world, and probably equally the most famous man in America, along with George Washington. Without Franklin, we don’t have any success in our revolution. Franklin had long admired this as a good way of governing, and was beginning to perceive, because of his travels as postmaster, that as disparate as they were from Georgia to New Hampshire, they did hold some things in common. Of course, he’s also someone very into the common good and civic improvement. Franklin seems to be someone embraced by right-wing libertarians today both for his advocacy of being self-made as well as his belief in individual liberty.

Ken Burns steps far back in history for his latest PBS documentary, on Benjamin Franklin, which posed some visual challenges.

“We don’t live in a melodramatic world, and we don’t have a melodramatic history,” he says. “He is a beautiful human being, and he gave us every ounce of his talent to will to life someone who has been dead for well over 200 years. “The Revolution has everything; it is pretty much the challenge of ‘Benjamin Franklin’ multiplied by three or four because of its length. “The challenge here was to make someone from the 18th century come alive in a way that has dimension, has flaws.” His story is so fundamentally American in lots of really good and really bad ways that it is, to me, irresistible.” His subjects may span centuries and cross cultural divides, but the filmmaker says each of his nearly 40 documentaries ponders the same deceptively simple question: “Who are we?

Ken Burns' PBS documentary 'Benjamin Franklin,' capture all the facets of a man described as 'the most famous American in the world' during his time.

Burns has always been adept, particularly in promotional appearances, at connecting history to the present, and despite some debate about its authenticity, that disclaimer attributed to Franklin has echoed loudly in recent times. That includes Franklin's pivotal efforts to secure France's support, as well as his somewhat overstated reputation for being a ladies man during that posting. There's something comforting about Ken Burns' PBS documentaries dealing with subjects that predate video, since the filmmaker, unlike most of the industry, eschews dramatic reenactments in favour of a low-tech approach.

Half an hour into Ken Burns's new documentary about Benjamin Franklin, we see a page of advertisements that the entrepreneurial polymath ran in his ...

It’s not hard, however, to understand why Franklin joined the cause, since his Privy Council humiliation broke his last ties to the Empire. Still, it was not humanly easy: Franklin’s failure to reconcile the familial ties between England and the colonies is mirrored by Franklin’s deteriorating relationship with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey and a Loyalist. Juxtaposing the political and the paternal in that way is a powerful narrative tool, bringing to life the difficult choices Franklin faced. This aspect of Burns’s documentary will help viewers have a deeper and more balanced appreciation for how, in an era dominated by human bondage, Franklin went from slaveholder to abolitionist. In the past, biographies of Franklin and relevant histories have tended to not given adequate attention to how Franklin profited from the system of slavery entrenched in all of the original thirteen colonies. Unfortunately, even with the inclusion of Stacy Schiff aptly describing Franklin’s time in France, the documentary only scratches the surface of how these intimate friendships helped Franklin succeed diplomatically. Burns showcases how the Quakers, with whom Franklin had long and complicated ties in Philidelphia, viewed the practice of slavery as moral corruption and sin. The years in France give Burns plenty of material to work with—more on this in a moment—and make for the most entertaining part of the documentary. The way in which the documentary addresses the significance of slavery in Franklin’s daily life exceeds expectations. In 1776, after Franklin helped edit the Declaration of Independence, he recrossed the Atlantic, heading to France to represent his newly independent country and to secretly seek an alliance. The petitions failed, and Franklin passed away a few weeks later, aged 84. Burns and his commentators show us how Franklin became internationally famous for his experiments with electricity and eventually traveled to England to represent Pennsylvania as a colonial agent. “It’s hard to understand why [Franklin] even joined the Revolution,” historian Gordon Wood says—after all, Franklin was already successful and an old man: “Many of the 62 other delegates [to the Continental Congress] had not even been born when he first entered political life forty years earlier,” the narrator tells us. Young Ben was indentured to his older brother James, meaning that Ben was contractually bound to work for him, in this case as a printer’s apprentice.

Filmmaker Ken Burns's lauded documentaries include <em>The Civil War</em> ... It seems absurd to ask, but who was Benjamin Franklin, really? The American ...

I mean, he cannot stop looking at the world and looking inward and looking at the affairs of human beings. And none of us have the bandwidth to ever do that kind of spontaneous, “Let’s do it,” but we woke up on a Sunday morning and I looked at her and I said, “Let’s do it.” We did this spectacular drive, and it was like thieves. We lose the awkwardness of the breech pants and the waistcoats and the powdered wigs. And, in fact, one of the things that they made on the show is the thing I got: this fish sandwich. And then it fell to [Benjamin], this big social media titan, to have to explain to the public why inoculations were good and how tragic it was and sort of bare his soul, to have to live out a tragedy in a life that was examined all up and down the United States. It’s the civic engagement and the civic responsibility. This is not to ignore the kind of romanticization of native populations [while] participating in a massive dispossession of land. He said: “Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, the Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. When my daughter, Olivia, was home from school a couple of months ago, we got in the car and drove two and a half hours—the most you can go east and west in our tiny state of New Hampshire—to pick up lunch at a particular place that we had seen. We can appreciate his own journey, the shedding of many of his own flaws and understanding what those flaws were. And so because inoculations were so hard on the system, it was very difficult to figure out how to do it. Call it the curse of the polymath.