Party On, Dude!

Oh, I’ve seen this guy!

Yeah, I know it was him. He and his old lady were stumbling out of Condom Nation on South Street the other night, clutching tight onto a couple of bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He was getting really loud too, trying to hail a cab. He kept yelling out that he was late for a “kegger” at a buddy’s house at 3rd and Pine, and he had to make a stop there and then head north to Market Street before the Funk-O-Mart closed. I think he was looking for rims, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t think they had any. Oh well.

She was making a racket too. Wearing a pair of denim chinos and a leather jacket with a bandana that looked like the US Flag wrapped around her head. She looked familiar too. I think it was Betsy Ross.

…

OK, enough – “National Lampoon” has nothing to worry about from me.

To commemorate Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday, The Philadelphia Inquirer has published a whole bunch of related print and online content – I’m gradually making my way through it. Franklin, as we know, was truly a citizen of the world, being a true genius and also a world-class master of intrigue. However, his imprint on life in Philadelphia is absolutely indelible, as it should be.

I thought this article conveys a bit of Franklin’s importance, though I would have to make this post considerable longer to truly do him justice (and if he were alive today and writing a blog, I guarantee you that his site would have more hits than anyone else).

Entrepreneurial genius
By Stacey Burling
Inquirer Staff Writer

Ben Franklin may be best known for taming lightning and governments, but what made his storied contributions to mankind possible were his hard work and skill as a businessman.

He arrived in Philadelphia a nearly penniless teenager and retired at age 42, rich enough to lead a comfortable middle-class life while pursuing his real passions, science and politics. In an endearing gesture that seems almost inconceivable by today's avaricious standards, he gave away to society the ideas for inventions that could have made him even more money: the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and bifocals.

The hero of this quintessentially American rags-to-riches story combines the industriousness and frugality that his Poor Richard made famous with shrewdness, great timing, clever self-promotion, prodigious social skills and - here's the part that makes his act hardest to follow - a really great brain.

"This guy may have more neurons than any American who's ever lived," said Michael Zuckerman, a Franklin expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tied to Franklin's 300th birthday Jan. 17, the city is now heading into months of celebration and marketing of what those neurons wrought in business, science, civic life and literature.

Franklin seems so singular a personality that one wonders how he would fare in the modern corporate world. In fact, a slew of historians couldn't come up with a single modern American who embodies his remarkable range: the insatiable curiosity coupled with practicality, the business acumen, the political skill and scientific insight, the craftiness and charm, the desire to do public good.

Everyone falls short.

"Trying to find his analogue today is next to impossible," said Rosalind Remer, a historian who, as executive director of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, is in charge of the national birthday celebration.

The best we can do is an amalgam of many people with big, but not big enough, personalities. Oprah Winfrey? New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg? Jimmy Carter? Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page? Financier George Soros? Morals pundit Bill Bennett? The Daily Show's Jon Stewart?

Franklin was, of course, the product of a different time, one with far fewer people and institutions and much less information. This much blanker slate made it easier, though no less admirable, for the self-educated Franklin to found a hospital, a library, a university and a trade group while being one of the best writers and scientists of his time.

"To look for a Franklinian person today, you would have to go outside the United States," said James Green, librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia, which Franklin founded.

Printing was the field that Franklin's candlemaker father chose for his fifteenth child. Midway through training with his brother in Boston, the ambitious Franklin fled to Philadelphia, where he eventually started his own printing business.

Hard work played a part in it, but Franklin used networking and charm as well to gain backing from rich patrons. He also started a group, the Leather Apron Club, meant to elevate craftsmen like himself through networking. As a bonus, the group helped him. Throughout his businessman period, his many relationships and even his first forays into politics fed his business.

He was "interested in anything that will serve his interest and the public interest at the same time," said David Waldstreicher, a Temple University history professor who has written about Franklin and slavery.

Franklin quickly realized that printing alone was not the best strategy to obtain security and wealth. The most successful printers also controlled content and accepted financial risk, so he also became a publisher.

He bought and improved a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, that became the most popular in all the colonies, said J.A. Leo Lemay, a University of Delaware English professor and Franklin expert. Thanks to Franklin's gifts as a writer, the paper was livelier than others of its time, more local, and open to more points of view, historians say. Then he created the very popular Poor Richard's Almanack.

Franklin thought big. Though his methods weren't unheard of at the time, he was one of few entrepreneurs to attempt vertical integration, or franchising.

He helped set up friends and relatives in print shops that also sold his products throughout the colonies. He sold supplies for paper making and made his own ink.
On the political side, his connections as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly got him a government printing contract. As postmaster, he got free mail privileges and the opportunity to make mail routes, and hence distribution of his products, far more efficient.

"He was really good at surveying the landscape to see where the weaknesses were and exploiting the holes," Remer said. Franklin's scope as a businessman, she said, made him one of the first to think of the colonies as a whole.

Through it all, he cleverly promoted his products and honed his own image. Some find his manipulativeness unappealing, and he takes flak from Waldstreicher for owning slaves and accepting ads for runaway slaves and indentured servants.

Nonetheless, biographer Walter Isaacson calls Franklin the best American business strategist of his time and the country's "first great publicist."

He also credits Franklin with helping create the middle class through his support of craftspeople and shopkeepers.

For all his business success, money was not Franklin's prime goal. He quit with enough to live well, but not ostentatiously, in retirement.

"I don't think he was that interested in wealth," Waldstreicher said. "He was interested in control, in power, in power to do good things and to become a bigger person in the world."

In a famous letter to his mother, said Montana State University historian Billy Smith, Franklin wrote, "I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich."

While his electrical experiments began during his printer phase, most of the scientific and political work for which he is remembered took place during the more gentlemanly decades of his life.

"Making a lot of money by the time you're 42 is the easiest of all the things Franklin did," said Richard Shell, professor of legal studies and management at Penn's Wharton School.

If Franklin was working now, what would the corporate world do with him?

Even among the modern multitudes, he'd still stand out, his admirers say.

Although far fewer people were alive in his day, Franklin was nonetheless world-famous.

"He was not a big fish in a small pond," Yale historian Edmund Morgan said. "He was a big fish in a big pond."

All of the qualities that made him so successful in his time are just as useful today.

"It's hard to apply a 300-year-old intelligence to the world we have now," Shell said. "Of all the founding fathers, he seems to be the one, if you plopped him down today, would adapt."

Smart as he was, Franklin would have to specialize nowadays. You can't learn physics in a couple of years anymore. Few think he'd want to spend years mastering the minutiae of 21st-century genetics.

"The only thing that's clear is that he wants to be great," Zuckerman said. "He wants to be recognized for his greatness. What that would translate to now? Maybe a rock musician."

Shell sees him as an "extraordinary blogger."

Others agree he'd thrive in the information age. "He was entrepreneurial," Isaacson said. "He loved new technology. He loved science. He loved inventions, and he would be the master of the digital revolution today."

More pieces of Benjamin Franklin's resume will appear in coming editions. For the complete resume, go here.

Bill Bennett my ass...

Update: Here's some great stuff from Bill in Portland, Maine, courtesy of The Daily Kos.