Benjamin Franklin: Leader Extraordinaire
Please enjoy this video lecture on Benjamin Franklin by Gleaves Whitney, the Executive Director of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. […]
Reassessing Benjamin Franklin’s Life & Legacy
D.G. Hart perceptively notes that Benjamin Franklin was not a Deist, as popular memory claims, but rather a "cultural Protestant." As such, he "applied much of what Protestants taught about work and study in the secular world without accepting all that the churches taught about the world to come." Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant (270 pages, [...]
Blind Benjamin Franklin
Even today, many Americans take an intentionally anti-intellectual stance, agreeing with the rationalists that faith and reason are incompatible. Blind Benjamin Franklin is father to them all. Apart from his rejection of wigs and the incident with the kite, the key and the lightning bolt, I’m afraid I have never been impressed or attracted to [...]
Benjamin Franklin on “The Morals of Chess”
“The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions.” I have a bit of a confession to make. I have never played chess [...]
Three Mistakes the Founders Made
By any objective standard, it would be difficult to claim that the Constitution really matters at any practical level in the United States. At a symbolic level, it still means a great deal. But, what a disconnect: that it matters so much in our minds and language but that it means nothing in our day-to-day [...]
The Project of Moral Perfection
The American Founders considered the cultivation of virtue essential to the survival of the republic. The following is excerpted from Franklin’s Autobiography, on which he worked between 1771 and 1790, but which was not published in English in its complete form until 1868. Below, we have maintained faithfulness to the original text. It was about [...]
A Better Constitution
I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument. Below are Benjamin Franklin’s closing remarks to the Federal Convention [...]
Benjamin Franklin & George Washington: Symbols or Lawmakers?
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, uniquely, have been lionized as merely “lending their names” to the founding. But at least one of these two greatest Americans of the eighteenth century was indeed a lawmaker and not merely a symbol in the Constitutional Convention. The title of this essay gives away its complete content, without suggesting [...]