Dan Snow's History Hit - Benjamin Franklin with Ken Burns
Episode Date: March 29, 2022Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a scientist, inventor, writer and diplomat. As one of the leading figures of early American history, Franklin helped to draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776,... worked to negotiate the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, and was a delegate to the convention that produced the U.S. Constitution in 1787.Ken Burns joins Dan to explore the revolutionary life of one of the 18th century's most consequential and compelling characters. They discuss how Franklin's life spanned an epoch of momentous change in science, technology, literature, politics, and government.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm very excited to have Ken Burns back on
the podcast. You all know Ken Burns. Ken Burns, the most legendary history documentary maker
on planet Earth. Many of us probably remember the US Civil War series that he made that
we all watched and fell in love with. But he's obviously made dozens of other documentaries,
Second World War, Vietnam, Ernest Hemingway. He's been on the podcast before. We talked
about Ernest Hemingway a year or two ago.
As you'll hear, it prompted me to go on a bit of an Ernest Hemingway reading binge,
which I'm very grateful for.
You know what, folks?
It has improved my life.
People are always casting about the things that improve their life.
I think changing your diet, an exercise regime does, your job, sure, your relationships.
Reading Hemingway improved my life.
There you go.
Thank you, Ken Burns, for that. And thank you,
Ken Burns, for his latest documentary series on Benjamin Franklin, the scientist, the inventor,
the writer, the diplomat, the signer of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
The man was a polymath. He was a legend. This conversation with Ken really reminded me that
before the revolution, he was the only American that the rest of the world ever heard of. He was
a brilliant scientist, described as the Isaac Newton of his time. And then he went on to become a
founding father. I mean, that's unbelievable. So much packed into one life. Absolutely
extraordinary. I think you'll agree when you listen to this podcast and watch his
two-part documentary premiering on PBS on April 4th and 5th this year, it'll be on,
for those of you listening in the UK, it'll be on a little bit later here in the UK as well. Ken is not only someone who has inspired me in my career,
it's been a huge honour to get to know him now through these podcasts, and I find him even more
electrifying and inspiring as I've got to know him better. So I have to pinch myself, I have to go
back to that slightly geeky kid who confused his friends in his early teens
by asking his mum and dad to watch. I've never watched box sets back then. I think it might
have been huge plastic containers of VHS tapes. I'm not sure. Anyway, I rented them from the
video rental store down the road. I hid them so that my friends wouldn't see. I took them home
and I binge watched all of them. I binge watched before it was fashionable, folks. I binge watched Ken Burns.
I should get a little t-shirt.
Binge watching Ken Burns since before binge watching was a thing.
Anyway, and so I think that young kid would be pretty excited
if he knew that his older self would be putting questions to Ken Burns
and chatting about history and how to make it accessible to people all over the world.
I love my job, folks. And thank you very much to you all for allowing me to do it.
If you wish to make it even easier to do my job, please head over to History Hit TV. It's our
digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but just for history notes. Available on smart TVs,
on phones, on computers, on everywhere where the internet is available. You just follow the link
in the information of this podcast. You click on that link, you get two weeks free, very, very small subscription, and you're in. That's it.
You're watching the world's best history show, one inspired by the brilliant Ken Burns.
So here's the man himself. Enjoy.
Ken, great to have you back on the show.
It's great to be with you, Dan.
Listen, after the last one, you made me go and read Liza Hemingway, and it changed my life.
I'm a massive Hemingway fan now because of you.
I have a rotating set of books at my foot of my bed, not at my nightstand.
And the only constant are the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.
Because if before you fall asleep, you've got 10 or 20 minutes to
just devote to a pure, almost perfect work of art, there's none better. Yeah, I agree. And I now
understand why everyone talks about this. He redefines the English language. I mean, I probably
should have done all this before I talked to you last time about Ernest Hemingway. But anyway,
it's extraordinarily important, I think, that you give that 19th century, that kind of verbiose 19th century novel writing
to his kind of modern style.
It's bonkers.
Well, you know, there's a famous thing that he said
that the shortest novel on record is six words,
and that is baby shoes for sale, never worn.
There's a whole story there.
Yeah.
Tonight, you can read the snows of Kilimanjaro in bed when you can't sleep. So listen, Ken,
let's talk about Franklin. First of all, by the way, this machine that you oversee that pumps out
these unbelievable documentaries, I mean, I've been watching hours of Franklin in the last few
days. Each one of them is an epic task. And tell me, I guess, a bit more about the team that you
preside over.
Are you across all of these in minute detail? Yes, it's not a machine. It's sort of a family
business. It's kind of a cottage industry here in which we've got three, three and a half,
four teams. And I'm the head of each of the teams. And we're working staggered on at least one,
sometimes two projects, which seems like there's this huge
output. But there's an economy of scale to be doing it this way. Certainly, I'm working on a
big, massive series on the history of the American Revolution. So Franklin and that overlaps are
people talking heads that we used in Franklin that will repeat again or other bites from their
interviews in the American Revolution. But even a disparate project like
Muhammad Ali, the last film, or Ernest Hemingway serve the purposes of Franklin. They help us keep
going. And so in some cases like Franklin, my co-producer David Schmidt hasn't been doing this
for that long. So I did almost all the interviews. On something like Hemingway, I just did a handful
of interviews because my co-producers and co-directors,
Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, are really good interviewers.
So I never miss an important editing, screening.
I've had the final word, a script meeting, that sort of stuff.
But I don't have to be there and shoot every interview.
I don't have to shoot every archive, that sort of stuff.
And the older I get, I'm 68.
I'm just running out of time.
So I'm getting greedy, right?
The more projects you want to work on, because I could be given a thousand years to live, which I won't. And I
won't run out of topics in American history. Well, I'm very glad to hear that because I'm
obviously a keen customer for your American history output. So keep going is all I can say.
How do we come down on Franklin? Has he been a founding father that's always fascinated you?
I don't say always. I think like for most people, he's a founding father that eludes us.
You know, he's got this reputation that precedes his political activity, which is he is arguably
the Isaac Newton of the 18th century.
He's the tamer and the describer of lightning.
And it falls to us as school kids to learn it that the lightning strikes the kite.
It never happens.
That's not what's required.
It's a much more complicated thing. But all of the things that we use today, positive, negative,
battery, charge, conductor, these are all Franklin terms. So he was the most famous American on earth
before he had a political bone in his body, other than an almost lifelong commitment to civic engagement.
He's on our $100 bill.
We call it a Benjamin.
That's the sign of kind of making it, is lots of Benjamins.
And if you make serious Benjamins, that's making the classic American over-emphasis
on money and the acquisition of stuff, which de Tocqueville warned us about and we never
listened.
on money and the acquisition of stuff, which de Tocqueville warned us about and we never listened.
But the assumption is that Franklin's example is just as this upwardly striver guy who makes
it.
And he held all of his vengeance, including the lightning rod, a byproduct of his electricity,
without patent, his improvements on the stove, bifocals, catheters, all of these things that
he did, which were improved.
He held without patent.
He was successful.
He did retire. But he is two things. He's a guy who is interested in self-advancement,
pulling her up by the bootstrap. So he attracts a certain amount of people generation after
generation, but they forget that this is also tethered to a kind of civic responsibility that
he perceives from the very, very beginning of his life. And so he's poking fun at pretensions, but he's also joining together with people to have civil
discourse and to pay back to the community. So he's got the first non-sectarian college in the
United States, University of Pennsylvania. He starts a free lending library, the first
philosophical society. He's creating in Philadelphia volunteer fire departments and police forces, and he's
doing any number of civic improvements, and he's brought into a civic, a political existence.
A reporter asked me, what would he think of social media today? He'd be totally confused. I said,
what are you talking about? He invented social media. He was a printer. He was a publisher.
He was a postmaster. He controlled everything coming and going.
He's much older than the other, quote, founding fathers. His son is older than Thomas Jefferson.
His son is older than Patrick Henry. I think his son is older than John Adams. But he is the first to perceive decades before the revolution of what it might mean to be an American, to unite the
fortunes of the disparate 13 colonies from Georgia in the South to my state
where I am of New Hampshire in the North. And it's too radical for people then, but by the time the
revolution comes, they're borrowing his slogan from decades before, join or die with an image
of a segmented snake, meaning you can't do this alone. It isn't just I, it's got to be we or us,
the United States. So he's the guy who sees beyond the horizon. It's an amazing life. And I think
if you think about all the things he did from being a printer, the greatest American stylist
in terms of writing of the 18th century are first humorous of any serious note.
He's also our greatest diplomat, our greatest scientist, the world's greatest scientist
for that century. He's a politician. He's an envoy. He's the greatest diplomat in American
history by far. He's one of the architects of the Declaration of Independence. He doesn't write it,
but he edits it. Thank God in good ways. And then he comes back and crafts, after the diplomatic coups of the French and the
Treaty of Paris settling the Revolutionary War, he comes back and helps forge the, albeit tragic,
compromises that create the United States. Tragic insofar as nobody's addressing slavery,
and he's been an enslaver of human beings too, and printing ads to that thing. But he forges the compromises that ensure the South remains there by counting their
black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, no other rights.
But then in the ever-evolving Franklin, he's his own best invention.
He's an abolitionist at the end, and he introduces the first resolution against slavery
in the new government of the United States the government
He's helped to create the Constitution. He's helped to create the war. He's won and
The Declaration he's helped edit in addition to being all those other things and then you just shake your head and go wow
And he's itemizing his flaws all his life. He's balancing things out. He's Socratic
He's toughest on himself and then he's toughizing his flaws all his life. He's balancing things out. He's Socratic. He's toughest on himself.
And then he's tough on the rest of us.
It's a hugely wonderful example, I think, particularly today when we're all so divided,
everything's so binary.
He knew that you could be for self, but you had to bind that back to a kind of civic responsibility.
That's his huge contribution.
And I think we miss it.
You know, it whizzes past us. That's his huge contribution. And I think we miss it. You know,
it whizzes past us. Kids get taught about him and then you have to really say, no, wait a second,
who is this person? Well, in the great tradition of wonderful storytellers and filmmakers and artists, like when you watch Hamilton, you come away convinced that Hamilton's the most important
person who's ever lived. I came away from your gigantic documentary series convinced that Franklin
was the most important human being in the history of the world. You obviously gave us a great praise there, but
can we break down some more of these examples, which I think will surprise people, of the things
that he did and achieved? First of all, ignoring his role in the American Revolution to start with,
he was described as the Newton of his era. He was the first North American to be given a
most prestigious award by the- the Copley Medal. And that followed a career in printing press. How would you describe his
newspaper? I mean, it's the first of its kind in North America, really.
Well, he's apprenticed to his brother in Boston. He's an indentured servant to his brother,
James, in Boston. They're an unusual independent newspaper in that they're not following the
dictates of the dominant
religious group that controls the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Mather family, particularly the
patriarch Cotton Mather. And so they're writing sort of stuff. His brother James is in prison for
a while, but under pseudonyms, Benjamin is submitting wonderful things that are poking
fun at pretensions and all of this sort of stuff. And he's discovered, or he has to admit that he's
done this and it causes some jealousy. He runs away, breaks his indentured servitude and goes at pretensions and all of this sort of stuff. And he's discovered or he has to admit that he's done
this and it causes some jealousy. He runs away, breaks his indentured servitude and goes to
Philadelphia and he apprentices and stuff. He goes to London. He comes back. He starts a business
with a partner. He ends up being alone. He makes a fortune. He is able to retire early and to
involve himself in not only the civic things that is important as he's an up
and coming businessman, but also to scientific interests that he has. And he does make Newtonian
level discoveries with regard to electricity and then a practical, utile, life-saving invention,
the lightning rod. Doesn't seem like much, but thousands of people are dying a year from lightning.
And he's saving lives.
He's improving on a German immigrant stove.
He does the bifocal.
All these different things he's doing and holding without patent, which is interesting
because as he's held up as an example of American striving, that implies get what you can.
He's getting what he can and then he's sharing the wealth. It's just
improbable. And nobody's whispered the United States yet. Nobody said there's issues with
the mothership in England. And interestingly, just on the kind of literary and media side,
you make such a convincing case that he kind of invents that kind of homespun American wisdom
that we now associate with your great country
that gives us Mark Twain and in fact, Hemingway, I guess as well, but his aphorisms and all that,
that is Franklin. That's Franklin, but let's give credit where credit would do. He's stealing
freely, you know, from British papers, the Bickerstaff papers and things like that. The
almanac is a common thing. He's taking some of these humorous jokes and he's making them funnier,
or at least he's making them funnier, or at least he's
making them funnier for an American audience. And so he does develop what will become Mark Twain's
sense of humor. As somebody said, he spoke with the bark on about Twain and about Lincoln. They
spoke the way ordinary people could understand what you were talking about. So Franklin had this
wonderful thing a century before.
He's a great writer. And remember, there's a scholar, Joyce Chaplin, who reminds us that if you're in the printing business, you're setting type upside down and backwards,
which means you kind of develop a hyper literacy. And if you're this curious,
omnivorous kid, as he was, who only had two years of formal schooling young,
as the scholar H.W. Brand says in the film,
he doesn't know what he doesn't have to know. So he presumes he has to know everything. And he does.
And he's the first one to chart the Gulf Stream and explain to mariners why it is it takes longer to go this way than that way, why it's warm, all of these wonderful, practical things that help
other human beings. I just think you cannot say enough about that period.
And then the experiments in lightning, he invents this wonderful musical instrument called an
harmonica, which he just looks at a demonstration in Cambridge, England and says, wait a second,
why is the guy rubbing glasses to make this parlor sound? Let me make a thing. And composers in Europe, ones we've heard about,
wrote things to his harmonica.
And he's known for being on the $100 barrel.
Yeah, we'll get to that.
Listen to Dan Snow's history.
I've got Ken Burns on again.
Exciting.
More coming up.
Have you ever wondered if those pointy medieval shoes gave you bunions? Would you be friends
with someone who had leprosy in the Middle Ages? And what on earth does that Bluetooth
symbol on your phone have to do with the Vikings? I'm Dr Kat Jarman and on Gone Medieval, we
find those answers for you. Talking everything from saints to sacrifices,
runes to relics, sex to science.
Join me, Dr Kat Jarman, and my co-host, Matt Lewis,
for everything from berserkers to battles and runes to raids.
Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit
wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Matt Lewis.
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.
The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.
From the greatest millennium in human history.
We're talking Vikings.
Normans.
Kings and popes.
Who were rarely the best of friends. murder, rebellions and crusades.
Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's get to his retirement, which is disturbingly around about the age i am now he has time for his science which you mentioned but also his ideas around a confederation we
could call it so looking at the iroquois starting to imagine america's and then being able to do
something like that by becoming postmaster as well so So his hand is on the tiller here. His hand is on everything. And that's what's so great. So he does begin to perceive,
because of the postmaster job causes him to travel, what people in Northern New England
like and what people in the South like. And he's beginning to understand the differences,
but the things they hold in common. And so he's able to capture that. He owns newspapers.
He's communicating. He's the postmaster.
He's printing currency.
He's printing government stuff.
So he's very much aware of what's going on.
I mean, he's controlling social media.
That's a really important part of who he is. And he's beginning to perceive well before, decades before the revolution, that what we
want to do, ironically, he borrows it from the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois
Confederation's idea that we can adjudicate the differences between various tribes in this way
without going to war. And so he suggests that they ought to do that, the Albany plan of action. He
drew a picture of a segmented snake with the phrase, join or die. And everybody said, whoa,
this is way too radical. But by the time
the revolution happened, they adopted that image and that slogan, join or die. And it was
revolutionary for everybody else. And it was at least two decades old for him. And so you are
dealing with not just the classic polymath, you're dealing with somebody who is outsized. I mean, he's the only American
that anybody on earth knows. They don't even know where America is. They don't know where
Philadelphia or Pennsylvania is, but they've heard of Dr. Franklin, the modern Prometheus,
the tamer of lightning. I mean, before him, it was often easy to get a letter to and from London,
if you're on the Eastern seaboard there, if you're in the Georgias or the Carolinas, yeah.
Let's do the Georgia, New Hampshire example.
Dan, you know, so you're in Savannah, Georgia.
You want to write a letter to your friend in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
That goes through London, right, until Benjamin Franklin.
And so all of a sudden, if you've cut out the middleman in just a simple act of communication, then you can extrapolate
from that, right? Do we need the middleman who seems distant and far away? And while they
protected us during the French and Indian war that became a global war, the Seven Years War,
the British coffers were depleted. And so there was obviously one source that you could
help increase the revenues, and that was by taxing things for those colonists there.
And they're going, wait, wait, we don't have any representation. We don't have any say in this.
And then all of a sudden, you have rhetorical stuff rising on each level. And Franklin's there,
by the way, trying to make it all right. He's trying
to say, no, no, no, let me represent this. Well, let's calm the passions. He felt himself a Brit.
He lived in London for the better part of 20 years, leaving his wife who didn't want to travel
behind. And if she had come, we would probably not know much besides the scientific stuff.
He just loved England. He loved London. There was more in just
a couple of coffee houses, a few blocks than anything in the colonies. But his attempt to
reconcile the difference and a bad political error that he made got himself in so much trouble that
he was brought before the Privy Council in the cockpit at Whitehall and excoriated for an hour
by an ambitious prosecutor named Alexander Wedderburn,
who just yelled at him and crowd was jeering. And as one of the scholars in the film said,
he walked into Britain and left an American. And he got radicalized by, it was his blunder. He had
privately shared letters of a friend of his, a Massachusetts Bay Colony politician, thinking that if the Approbrium went to him,
it might cool passions in London and in the colonies, and it did neither.
And when it was found that this agent of Pennsylvania and several other colonies had been the person
he felt compelled to admit that he had leaked the letters, then he became, how could a postmaster
have done such a dastardly deed?
How could a writer, how could a diplomat?
And so he was excoriated, and all of a sudden, you have an old man whose game is not revolution
beginning to side. Meanwhile, he's groomed his son to be what he wanted to be. He's appointed
the royal governor of New Jersey, and that's it. His best friend, his son, William, becomes his
enemy. It is a tragic internal story, not just the leaving of the wife,
his loss of his son and the son's attempt to repair after the revolution and him refusing to
do this, taking his own illegitimate son, his grandson, and keeping him. And he, William,
was illegitimate himself. I mean, it's just, you cannot make this up. Hollywood, they would say, wait, in one person,
uh-uh. I agree. This comes to the war itself because right at the beginning of the show,
you claim that he pretty much did more than anybody else to bring about victory. And then
I was like, what is going on? Think of, of course, of Washington and we think of, and then actually
you completely persuade me. I mean, his fingerprints are all over. Even as an older man away from the battlefield, he is essential in that victory.
Let's just dissect that very, very simply.
You know, the hero for Americans to this day, Franklin, is not number two.
And it was clearly at the time Washington and Franklin, and some put Franklin higher
and some put Washington higher, but it was just the two of them and then everybody else. And George Washington had the hugely impossible task of leading an army against the greatest
military power on earth, right? And certainly the greatest Navy on earth, if not the greatest
military power on earth that has tens of thousands of troops in the colonies trying to put down this
rebellion. So Washington's task is really difficult.
He knows he cannot sort of win, but he can't lose.
So he's always doing tactful retreats, right?
There are some periodic victories,
one of which he had nothing to do with at Saratoga, which convinces the French
that the Americans might actually pull this out.
And Franklin over in Paris,
as the envoy trying to negotiate a treaty,
is artfully
manipulating even the bad news and the victories into huge, huge accomplishments. So he's wonderful
there. He's beloved in the French court because he's got a light touch. But the key moment is at
Yorktown. And there is George Washington. Cornwallis is embedded in the town of Yorktown with his
several thousand troops. Washington has several thousand
Continental Army men that are supplied and armed by the French. Thank you, Dr. Franklin. And there
are also several thousand French troops. Thank you, Dr. Franklin, there. And Cornwallis has one
option, which is to escape by sea, go back to New York and regroup. But there's a French fleet
outside of Yorktown. Thank you, Dr. Franklin. And he's going nowhere and he has only
one course, which is to surrender. So you can easily say, no Franklin, no us, meaning the US,
right? No US, no us. That's his diplomatic skills, which we didn't even know he particularly had
beforehand. And then in terms of the construction of a kind of literary framework for the US
Revolution, which we all come to associate with the birth of America, he's all over that as well.
As you say, he's editing the Declaration of Independence. Really, it's Thomas Jefferson's
beautiful, beautiful document. I mean, most of it is a set of complaints about King George III.
But the opening and the closing are among the most sterling American prose that we have,
But the opening and the closing are among the most sterling American prose that we have,
you know, only bettered by a few speeches and sentences of Abraham Lincoln.
It's really quite beautiful.
And the second sentence is, to me as an American, the second most important sentence in the English language, the first being, I love you.
The second sentence begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. Jefferson had distilled a century of Enlightenment thinking, but he's part
of a committee, and Franklin's on that committee. And Jefferson had first proposed, we hold these
truths to be sacred. And Franklin goes, time out. We're in the enlightenment here.
You know, these aren't sacred. These are to be inevitable, like the sun rising. This is
based on science and reason and all of that. And his just slight changes are so felicitous as to
make the document even more powerful and the hypocrisies embedded in it. Jefferson owns
hundreds of human beings in
his lifetime. And he's saying, here's something that all men are created equal. But the poetic
vagueness of the language has pulled Americans through. Lincoln does the 2.0 with the Gettysburg
Address saying, we really do mean that all men are created equal. We're proving it right now
with the sword. But it's wonderful. And then he comes back after he's negotiated with the French and then negotiated the Treaty
of Paris, which creates the United States or allows the United States of America to
then be created.
He forges the sometimes tragic compromises that made up the Constitution of the United
States that permitted all of those disparate colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia to
join together.
But then he's an abolitionist. At the
end, all his life, he's wondered, even as a young man, debating on whether the presence of slavery
adds or subtracts from the morals of a people. He started a school for black children and is
stunned to find out that they're equally adept as white kids. And then he comes around to realizing
that his own ownership of a handful of household
slaves, and by saying the word handful, I'm not letting him off the hook.
If you've got three slaves or 300 slaves, it's bad, right?
You know, it's like murdering three people or 300 people.
It's bad, right?
And so he becomes a president of an abolitionist society and proposes the first resolution
offered to the United States government to end slavery.
I mean, this is a lifetime of the arc of the 18th century.
He's born in 1706 and he dies in 1790.
I mean, I was flabbergasted.
And we don't make films, Dan, to tell you what we already know.
We make films to discover.
So we're sharing with you the enthusiasm, the excitement of our process of discovery.
Well, mission accomplished. And in terms of that discovery,
there's a moment in one episode where he talks about his preference for fair-skinned people.
He thinks he's more attracted to white-skinned people. And he said, as everybody is, or maybe
that's just me. As a filmmaker, it seems to me there's plenty of him to work with here.
that's just me. Like as a filmmaker, it seems to me there's plenty of him to work with here.
Yeah, I think that this is it. He is a deeply prejudiced white man of his time. He actually is romanticizing. He says the lovely white and the red. He doesn't like the swarthy, believe it or
not, German immigrants are coming in there. He dismisses them with a non-Aryan kind of, you know,
Hitler is going to two centuries later sort of say, no, no, no, you want, we're the pure whites, but he sees them as swarthy and not English and not the
Native Americans who he romanticizes, but is perfectly happy to dispossess them of their
properties and work on land deals in England, hoping that the king or somebody will grant him
a charter to lands beyond Pennsylvania that he can make a fortune on,
as George Washington did, as many people did. But he's questioning it all the time. I love
the self-discovery. He makes up a set of virtues, 12 of them that he tries to abide by, sets up a
chart. And then some friend points out as he's proudly showing this thing, he says,
haven't you forgotten a 13th, which is humility? And Franklin goes, oh, God, you're right.
You know, you're absolutely right.
And if I did well with humility, I'd probably brag about it, which would be so prideful.
He's just irresistible to us.
And I presume he was irresistible to just about everybody back then.
I mean, when he came back from England, people were very suspicious.
The revolution had begun and they didn't know where he was.
He'd been working to forge compromises, and all of a sudden, now he says he's for us.
Maybe he's a spy.
But then a series of actions that he takes so demonstrates his commitment as an old man
to this young man's game, revolution.
And let's remember, our civil war, of which I've done a big, massive 12-hour series on,
was not a civil war. It was a sectional war. But our revolution was a civil war, of which I've done a big, massive 12-hour series on, was not a civil war.
It was a sectional war.
But our revolution was a civil war.
In any given place, there were at least 20% to 25% of the people who were loyal to the British crown.
And the atrocities against the loyalists and by the loyalists were tremendous.
After William, his son, was deposed, the last royal governor standing, and eventually went to jail because he wouldn't stop his pro-crown activities, he was finally let out of jail and presumed that he would get on the next ship to London.
And he didn't.
He stayed and formed a terrorist organization that killed patriots.
Not that there weren't lots of patriot organizations that killed loyalists.
It's a pretty stunning thing. I'm working on a big series on the American Revolution right now, which I hope to sort of do deeper dives
on a lot of the things I've just been talking about. It's so fascinating to finally not have
a sense of this period in both the investigation of Franklin and in the American Revolution.
It sounds like my third grade history textbook. It's deeper,
and we're seeing it from different points of view. Loyalists will have a voice. Those in Britain will
have a voice. British soldiers will have a voice. Native Americans trying to figure out which side
to join will have a voice. Freed blacks and enslaved people trying to figure out which side
to be with. At one point, the British very shrewdly suggested that you come over to our side and you'll be freed afterwards. And
that's what enrages a lot of the Southern planters. It galvanizes their response to it. What? Our most
valuable thing that we own, you're going to take that away from us? Oh no, I'm now redoubling my
revolutionary spirit.
But there was a huge human cry born in the Enlightenment, born in the age of discovery and exploration of these universal human rights. They've been articulated first in Britain and in
the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume and Locke, life, liberty, and property. And people are thinking
about these things. And this is the first practical application in a governmental form of those ideas, however flawed they were, however many asterisks we attach to the experiment because we permitted the perpetuation of chattel slavery in a country that had just proclaimed to the world that all men were created equal.
Ken, I cannot wait to see the next one, your American Revolutionary one that is coming up in a few years' time. It sounds like you're going to go to town on that
one. I hope so. I hope that our friends on the other side of the pond will be equally curious
about that because we want to give voice. It isn't just these noble, sturdy townsmen on the
Lexington Green firing at the overwhelming forces of the British troops. It's a much more complicated and therefore, to me, much more interesting story.
Sure is.
And if you're nice about those Howe brothers, I'm going to come over there and change the
script myself.
Those guys, absolute disgrace.
I mean, how did they let Washington get out of Manhattan, let alone New Jersey?
Anyway, another podcast.
We're going to talk about another podcast.
Ken, how can people watch The Franklin Show?
Well, The Franklin Show will be on PBS in the United States on April 4th and 5th and then
available on all its streaming platforms. But then, of course, it's got a UK component and
usually my stuff ends up on the British accessible PBS station pretty quickly. I've even had in
times past, pre-COVID ended up on junkets the second the
broadcast is over in England to talk about the imminent broadcast of that. So I think it'll be
available on the DVDs and the Blu-rays and all of that. Believe it or not, they're still being
produced for my stuff. People want to hold them in their hands. Gertrude Stein said of her hometown
of Oakland, California, there's no there there. You're sitting with a whole bunch of books behind you.
I really love the idea that there's tangible things.
It's not just a file on a computer.
Those are real books that you can pick up and hold.
That's great.
Incredible.
Okay.
Thank you very much, sir.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.
All this tradition of ours, our school history,
our songs,
this part of the history
of our country,
all were gone and finished.
Thanks, folks.
You've made it to the end
of another episode.
Congratulations.
Well done, you.
I hope you're not fast asleep.
If you did fancy supporting
everything we do here
at History Hit,
we'd love it if you would go
and wherever you get these pods,
give a little rating,
five stars or its equivalent.
A review would be great.
Thank you very much indeed.
That really does make a huge difference.
It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account.
So please, however, don't do that.
It can seem like a small thing, but actually it's kind of a big deal for us.
So I really appreciate it.
See you next time. you