Was Benjamin Franklin a Conservative?

I t’s a bit mischievous to suggest that Benjamin Franklin had conservative leanings. Yes, I’ve heard he was a revolutionary. But Franklin was very late to join the cause, and spent so much time in London working to repair relations with Britain that he was on the Atlantic Ocean coming home when war finally broke out in 1775. You might call him a conservative revolutionary (as opposed to, say, Thomas Paine).

Trying to stamp today’s political labels on historical figures who were dealing with very different questions is a bit of a fool’s errand, but in watching Ken Burns’s two-part, four-hour documentary Benjamin Franklin (streaming on the PBS app and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel), I found it an intriguing exercise.

Liberalism today largely focuses on personal liberation — with one or two telling exceptions. Conservatism is now, and I would argue always has been, much more attached to personal boundaries and limits. As a person, Franklin defined himself via his famous 13 virtues, which he developed when he was 20. Mostly they are a list of proscriptions and calls for self-restraint. Temperance (in food and drink), moderation, silence, order, frugality, humility, and chastity all appear on the list. I wouldn’t call these goals foreign to today’s Left, but if you heard someone call these qualities vitally important, and learned additionally that the speaker was actually keeping a daily record that he would blot whenever he failed to live up to his own standards, you would assume you were dealing with a conservative.

Justice, an expansive and passionate conception of which today helps to define liberalism, also appears on the Franklin list. Would Franklin call today’s “social justice” a natural outgrowth of justice? Perhaps. He defined justice as meaning one should “Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.” The inclination to charity is powerful, but Franklin might have had difficulty comprehending why this Christian or moral duty should become a gargantuan state undertaking unattached to any expectation of virtue on the part of recipients.

By disposition, Benjamin Franklin sounds a bit like one of today’s oddball self-made billionaires, a school dropout and runaway (fleeing his abusive older brother in Boston, to whom he was an indentured servant, is how he wound up in Philadelphia as a teen) who later became a columnist, satirist, and scientific innovator. He had only two years of formal education yet became one of the first media moguls, making a fortune as a printer and bookseller in Philadelphia. When he retired young from day-to-day business, he could have become a tech mogul several times over if it hadn’t been for his policy of not copyrighting his inventions, such as the lightning rod, bifocals, and the glass armonica, a musical instrument so popular that Mozart and Beethoven composed for it.

One of the historians interviewed for the film, Stacy Schiff, concludes, “There’s something about him that so much becomes what we all quest for . . . American ingenuity, that American feeling that we can accomplish anything.” In the Fifties, that brand of forward-looking optimism might have been a broadly held view, but today the parties are starkly divided on whether America is even a particularly great place. Today there is also a partisan rift over the wisdom of the Constitution, which was the concrete manifestation of Franklin’s radical turn. Franklin was a fan: “If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours, I think, bids fair for producing that effect. But after all, much depends on the people who are to be governed.”

Benjamin Franklin, which is severely visually constrained by the lack of enduring objects from Franklin’s time and relies heavily on paintings and woodcuts, is not among Burns’s best documentaries. At times it has all the visual sizzle of an audiobook. But Burns must work with what is available, which means we are left with a sleepy series of talking-head historians, plus actors in voiceover reading contemporaneous accounts (Mandy Patinkin supplies the voice of Franklin) and, lording over all, the omniscient voice of Burns’s usual narrator, Peter Coyote, whose intense, punch-every-word style I’ve come to adore.

The doc reminds us that Franklin was in part defined by paradoxes. He was a champion of liberty who held as many as half a dozen slaves (though in his final years he became an outspoken abolitionist). His respect for chastity did not prevent him from siring an illegitimate son — William Franklin, who would become the governor of New Jersey and a loyalist enemy to the Patriot revolutionaries.

But Franklin’s commitment to free speech, which emerged when his brother James was jailed for three weeks for questioning the Cotton Mather family that exercised supreme influence in Boston, was not equivocal. This, too, frames him as a conservative in today’s thinking, when the censorial impulse is everywhere on the left. (No, choosing what appears in school libraries and reading lists is not anything like censorship.) “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech,” Franklin wrote at 16. Today, as ever, when we are told that certain words are violence so that thoughts can be proscribed, one of Franklin’s best-known sayings lingers over the horizon: “A republic, if you can keep it.” What Franklin helped build was robust, but it is not indestructible. “Our new constitution is now established,” he said in 1789. “Everything seems to promise that it will be durable. But in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes.”