684. Franklin: Revenge of the American Genius (Part 2)

Second in the show's four-part Founding Fathers series for the Declaration's 250th anniversary, this one opens with a parable Franklin published in a London paper in January 1770, two months before the Boston Massacre: an English mastiff bullies a lion cub aboard ship until the cub grows big enough to hit back. The twist the episode turns on is that Franklin wrote it not as a separatist but as a warning from a loyalist — a man who had attended George III's coronation, called him the best of kings, and spent a third of his life in Britain. The hosts trace the roots in Puritan Boston: father Josiah rendering tallow, eleven siblings in a cramped Milk Street house, a runaway apprenticeship that ends with Franklin arriving in Philadelphia with a single Dutch dollar, and the industry-and-frugality creed that made him the colonies' most successful printer and, in the hosts' telling, the prototype of the American self-made man — with Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and Thomas Kidd's book on Franklin's religion brought in to explain how the Puritanism got secularised into folksy maxims. Sandbrook needles the folksiness throughout; Holland leans on the Reagan comparison.

The middle stretch is the celebrity science: the June 1752 kite experiment (a Russian imitator was electrocuted a year later), unpatented lightning rods, weather forecasting worked out from east coast storms, bifocals, naming the Gulf Stream, swimming flippers invented as a boy, oil poured on a Clapham Common pond to show surface tension, and naked morning "air baths" at his Craven Street lodgings. The hosts argue the eccentricity was calculated branding — Franklin selling America to Europe as a laboratory of the Enlightenment rather than a dump for religious zealots — and they don't skip the dark side: he brought two slaves to London, and in 1770 wrote an anonymous defence of slavery Holland calls the lowest point of his career, the issue that divided him from Samuel Johnson.

The pivot comes in December 1772, when Franklin leaks Governor Thomas Hutchinson's letters to Boston radicals hoping to calm things down, and it backfires completely: the letters are published, and a month after the Boston Tea Party Franklin is summoned to the Cockpit in Whitehall and publicly savaged before the Privy Council. He concludes that Britain, not he, has changed. He sails home in March 1775, lands after Lexington, joins the Continental Congress, breaks permanently with his loyalist son William, circulates (but never sends) a ferocious letter to his old friend William Strahan, and makes one famous edit to Jefferson's draft — "sacred and undeniable" becomes self-evident.

The last act is France: nine years as America's first ambassador, playing Rousseau-approved frontiersman in a fur cap at Versailles, staged embraces with Voltaire, and salon flirtations the hosts insist were diplomacy as much as indulgence — it worked, France entered the war, and Franklin signed the Treaty of Alliance wearing the coat from the Cockpit as deliberate revenge. He negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris, blessed the Constitutional Convention at 81 as its oldest delegate, and spent his final months on an anti-slavery petition to Congress and a Swiftian satire, published under a Muslim pseudonym, turning pro-slavery arguments inside out — his last published work before dying in April 1790.