cotton farmer got to vote on it. and the cotton farmers vote for it overwhelmingly, and it does work. what happens is after the supreme court declares it unconstitutional, they have to make it sound like conservation. you're not planting as much crops to get more money. you are doing it for conservation. whether it was called soil conservation. >> when was it ruled unconstitutional? prof. abrams: 1935. >> after? prof. abrams: yes. >> thank you. prof. abrams: anybody else? any questions? [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] you are watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span 3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. >> next, on american history tv, author and journalist walter isaacson discusses the life and

legacy of founding father benjamin franklin. isaacson argues that franklin's methods and passion for science epitomized what he calls, quote, "america's national character," end quote. the new york historical society hosted this program. it is a little over one hour. this is the 2016 benjamin franklin lecture in democracy. we are proud to partner with london's benjamin franklin house in bringing this lecture to our institution. benjamin franklin house is the only surviving former residence of benjamin franklin. today, a marvelous museum and educational center that inspires and motivates young londoners, as well as general visitors, through the example of our great american founder and innovator. the museum is a

georgian-terraced house at 26 craven street, very centrally located. so on your next visit to london, i know you will want to stop there. i am very glad, indeed to , recognize and congratulate the museum's founding director who , is with us this evening, representing benjamin franklin house. thank you. [applause] ms. mirrer: and i am also very glad to recognize and thank for all of her efforts, on behalf of this institution as well as for benjamin franklin house, benjamin franklin house trustee anita wien. thank you, anita. [applause] ms. mirrer: now some of you wondering about the consonants of names. this beautiful space. the robert h. smith auditorium, and this lecture, the robert h. smith lecture in american

history. robert h. smith, as you may know, was among much else a visionary developer of crystal city just outside of washington, d.c., which is today one of the district's most young and hip neighborhoods. but bob smith, was, above all else a grateful american. , he did an enormous amount of good for institutions, like hours and like the benjamin franklin house. it was he who first brought our two institutions together, and i know that he would have been really, really pleased to know that tonight's lecture is taking place here, in this auditorium, which he very much envisaged as being used precisely as we are using it this evening for a , lecture that will surely engage us in the enjoyment in learning about american history. and i can surely say "surely," because walter isaacson, the celebrated journalist and by all -- biographer, is here.

we are pleased to welcome him back. mr. isaacson is the president and ceo of the nonpartisan aspen institute. during his prolific career as a journalist, mr. isaacson served as chairman and ceo of cnn and as the editor of "time" magazine. he is the author of many books, including "benjamin franklin: a ine," and his most recent 4014, "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution." tonight's program lasts about an hour. it will include a question and answer session. there will be no formal book signing this evening, but mr. isaacson's books will be available in the museum kiosk, just outside the auditorium. before we begin, as always, i would like to ask that anything -- that you please make sure that anything that makes a noise like a cell phone is switched off. and now, please do join me in welcoming walter isaacson to the stage.

[applause] thank you very much. it is wonderful to be back, especially on behalf of the benjamin franklin house, and to talk about, of all of the biography subjects i have ever written, the one that is my most favorite, of course, dr. benjamin franklin. this all started -- and i like seeing marcia and michelle sitting together. started my involvement in researching benjamin franklin. and being over in london quite a bit, i realized the only house still standing in which benjamin franklin lived was the house on craven street, near parliament, near trafalgar square. and it was not renovated at all. it was pretty much an abandoned place, and there were people trying to make it into a museum for benjamin franklin. i happened to know robert h.

smith, who have helped with monticello, not vernon, -- mount vernon, all of the great founders, and i said to him, let's have breakfast, because he was maybe four blocks from the benjamin franklin house, and he agreed to be one of the major funders. michelle, his daughter, who happened to be on my board at the aspen institute, said, "never again will i allow you to have breakfast with my father," but we do believe, as anita, who is on the board at the benjamin franklin house, that it was a wise investment, and dr. franklin would thank you. i will talk tonight about franklin, his relevance now as well as as an innovator, but i will do it, if you do not mind, as storytelling. just to go through the stories about ben franklin and try to draw the lessons from them. i thought about making it "here's 12 things you need to know of benjamin franklin," but when i was growing up, i had a mentor who said you know, there

are two types of people that come out of louisiana -- preachers and storytellers," and he said, "by god, be a storyteller, the world has too many preachers," and it is a -- the best way to get lessons across anyway. as you may know, benjamin franklin was born in boston, the 10th sunday of a puritan immigrant. and as the son of a puritan immigrant he was going to be his , father's tithe to the lord. his father was going to send him to harvard to be a minister. that was a long time ago, when harvard knew how to train ministers and not hedge fund managers. but benjamin franklin was not exactly cut of the cloth. at one point, they were salting away the provisions for the winter at his father's house, and he said to his father, "how about if i say grace over them right now, and we can get it done with once and for all for the entire year?" [laughter] mr. isaacson: so his father realized it would be a waste of

money to send him to harvard to be a minister, and so, he did the next best thing, or perhaps something even better, which is he apprenticed benjamin to his older brother, james, and a publishing house at the newspaper. so benjamin franklin, without a formal education, and i hate to mention this, because sometimes i get asked to give graduation speeches, and it is very difficult, because whether it is steve jobs or albert einstein or benjamin franklin or bill gates, or mark zuckerberg -- anyone i write about -- they all run away or drop out before they graduate. so benjamin franklin is apprenticed to his brother, and he teaches himself by pulling down the books from the shelves of his brother's publishing house and bookstore in boston. and it is addison and steel, essays, and "the spectator," and

publications from the great essayists of london. and what he does is he chops them all up, cuts them up he said that he was never quite sure that he became a great writer, but, in fact, what he does is he becomes the best homespun humor writer i think in american history. his brother, who i mentioned was an older brother, and being an older brother would not let him and franklin write for the him and newspaper, so franklin ends up writing under a pseudonym. he put a pen name on it, and he slips the essays he does under the door of his brother's printshop, and his brother and friends running the printshop have no idea where it is coming from, but it is this woman, silence dogood, and franklin has put on the persona of a widowed, elderly woman living in the

countryside of massachusetts and writing these essays, the triumph of the imagination, a kid who was then 15 years old and who never left boston but writing in this voice, saying, it's a distinctly american voice. change induces herself by saying, let me introduce myself. i am a woman of strong national sentiment. i really reject the notion of privilege, and i have a protective feel about all of my rights. that is how you know i am an american, and it really is that sort of authentic front to your -- frontier voice of poking fun at the pretensions of the elite and the top establishment, poking fun at the mathers and

the families that were running. tim boston. -- running puritan boston. over and over again in the first set of essays, you see her kind of doing this type of humor, saying that she was thinking of sending her nephew to harvard, but it only turns out dunces and blockheads, who only know how to enter a room genteelly, and she says that is something they will learn less expensively at dancing school, so she's going to send her nephew to dancing school. eventually his brother who did go to harvard and was not a dunce or blockhead finally figures out it was his brother writing these things and was not particularly happy. and they cut the story a little bit. benjamin franklin actually runs away. he breaks his apprenticeship. he had signed to be an apprenticeship for his brother for seven years, and he runs away to philadelphia, and this is an important thing because boston was theocratic, with very

little separation from the puritan churches and government. philadelphia was a place where there was great diversity. there were more radians and -- anglicansd and presbyterians and the invisibles and jews and freed slaves, and they all worked together. this place called market street, that all came to shop, and with brotherly love, you saw a diversity of people, people who are immigrants, including the anglicans and a episcopalian, but all of them had come for a particular type of freedom, and they had to work together in what was the first ethnically diverse society, and ethnic and religious and background diversity truly leads to creativity, with that sort of bubbling mix that allows

philadelphia to become a place of great commerce but also a place of great middle-class entrepreneurship, startup, and innovation. benjamin franklin eventually decides after being an apprentice to start his own printshop, because over in england, with the foundries and stuff, but in philadelphia, i think they had 11 newspapers. he starts the 12. it was really great in the days. there were great competing voices and there were newspapers for anglicans and for for newspaperd people very loyal to the crown. and ben franklin starts the first really independent newspaper, not affiliated with any faction but really being willing to poke fun of all factions and to stand up to what he called we, the middling people, meaning the middle-class people of philadelphia. in whichtarts a club,

they meet on fridays, and it is for people, as he put it, who wear leather aprons. it was a gathering. it was for people who were the shopkeepers and the artisans who got up early, put on their aprons and knew how to create small businesses. his view is that these would be the backbone of a new economy, and, indeed, one of the things that his group did, his leather apron club, was they made a set of rules and maxims on how to be a good start up entrepreneur and innovator. if you have ever read his autobiography, you have seen the rules. he lists them -- honesty, frugality, diligence. and he is kind of a geek. he marks off how well he had done each week at

conquering or mastering each one of the virtues. he puts a little plot by his name in the commonplace book when he messes up on one of the virtues. he is often a racing it to start over. he finally transfers it to a piece of slate so he can have a clean slate, as it goes. you start over again, and finally after a while, he ends 12 of theng all virtues for a given week and he says it off probably to the members of the club, and one of them said, you know franklin, you are forgetting a virtue that you might want to try, and the friend says, humility. you might want to try that one for a change, and what i love about franklin is that he admit, i was never really good at the virtue of humility.

i never mastered it, but i was very good at the pretense of humility. i learned to fake it very well. but here's the great genius of franklin. and he says that i learned that the pretense of humility was just as useful as the reality of humility. it made you listen to the people next to you. it made you hear what they are saying. it made you try to find the common ground, and that was the essence of the middle-class democracy that we were trying to put together. that notion that appearances help shape reality, of course, comes from shakespeare a la the man who turns into henry the fifth. we become the mask we where. it is sort of important because notdays we are probably quite as concerned about looking right, making good appearances, trying to show that you are doing the right thing, but as

franklin said, that is what helps inculcate a civil society. he actually believes deeply in the notion of a civil society. he started as soon as he got his newspaper going in his leather apron club to use the club to create civic associations. almost every month, he invented, a volunteer fire department, a library, a library in philadelphia so that everyone could share their books. an academy for the education of youth in philadelphia, and a freshman at penn, becomes the university of pennsylvania, a militia, a street sweeping core, and a net watch core, and what he realizes hi is that people le

to work together. he also realizes that humility or the pretense of humility is really important in getting people to collaborate. whenever in his newspaper he had an idea for something he wanted to start, such as the library, or the fire department or whatever, he would never propose it as an idea. he would always have it either be a letter or somebody else proposes it, or he would say a friend of mine was talking, and he proposes this idea. what do you think? he was the in poor richard's first almanac to sort of put forth the notion that it is amazing what you can get done if you do not care about taking the credit for it, and so he creates all of these associations, all of these collaborations, and he has a particular motto that he uses and sometimes inscribes it on the wall, which is the good we can do together exceeds the good we can do separately. it is that notion of collaboration and specific civic engagement as a society,

which is one of the things along with tolerance and inclusivity of people of diverse backgrounds that sets america apart from every other society of that time. and so he tries to view this notion of forming associations voluntarily. de tocqueville, of course, writes about this, and a big fan of his. i think he probably wins the award of the person who is most quoted but least read, meaning everybody always quotes him and i will say, yeah, do you remember what he actually said later on about that? i think i am the only one because i had to read it in college, and i thought, wait a minute. i'm not quite sure he gets it. he was french wandering around , america, and he was baffled by the fact that americans form voluntary associations, like

they do things like the voluntary fire department or barnraising, because they are so individualistic, so frontier oriented, it seems in conflict with this notion of association forming. i think ben franklin would not have seen any conflict, and i think most true americans don't, which is you can be individualistic. you can be pioneering. you can be an innovator. you can be your startup. you can be an entrepreneur, but in a voluntary way to form the type of associations that help us collaborate in business, in society, and in our civic lives, and that is what he mainly was able to do. when i wrote about the great innovators of the digital age, it occurred to me, having looked especially at benjamin franklin, that collaboration, this ability to work together was the key of

true entrepreneurship and great innovation. that flies in the face of what we sometimes teach about onto entrepreneurship and innovation. we make it seem like it is the loan great inventor or whatever, and we biographers have that dirty little secret. we always make it seem like some guy or gal goes into a garage and they have that lightbulb moment and innovation happens. but that's not the way it works in real life. as you work in your own life, it comes from forming teams and team work. it is something our education system is getting better at. running global area, we talked about the program she has putting together games that are teaching kids how to work together on games, but what we are learning both in schools, colleges, whatever is the importance of people being able

to share thoughts who work together, to collaborate. we used to do that also when i was in high school and college, but they had a name for it. they called it cheating, and now i think we have to say, no, that is how we are training kids to succeed in the world. take any of the great innovations of the digital age. you know, the internet, the computer, all of the great inventions of the digital age, but if you ask anybody who invented them, with all due respect to al gore, there is no easy answer. why? because they were all done as collaboration. the first computer at the university of pennsylvania, eniac, and you might pick somebody out in iowa state who had created a logical circuit and had come up with a lot of the ideas of the computer.

some people say he was the great inventor of the computer and you can see people would say that he should be given most credit. the problem is he was not a collaborator. he did things on his own. he did not have a team around him. when he had a problem, used to get in the car and drive for hours, sometimes to the illinois border. i think partly to think, but also partly because you could buy alcohol by the drink, but once he got it all put together, he got called into the navy in the early 1940's, and the dismantledts sort of and never quite worked. he couldn't get things to work with the systems or the circuit to actually work and it was not .ntil john markley likent out to many places

the new york world's fair and dartmouth at harvard and m.i.t., looking at people trying to make computers. he drove all of the way to iowa and looked at the one that he was doing. it caused a 17 year intellectual property patent dispute, but was not really stealing the ideas. it was collaborating, and he goes back to penn, and he gets a great engineer and mechanic, the whose grandfather invented turkish taffy machine, and he gets all sorts of engineers, and he gets six really great women phd's in math. this is before we told women they didn't know how to do math, so more women got phd's in the 1930's than the generation later, and they do the programming for it, and there was a team who ended up creating the computer. the same with the internet. it is not done by one person doing it. it was trying to tie together all of these computers that were in research universities, like

eniac, and the defense department wanted them to network together and created the notion of a packet switched network, then told universities they had to figure out how to connect, and the research professors do what research professors always do, is a they delegated the task to the graduate students. they had 30 graduate students who kind of hung out and met every now and then to your how do the original protocol for the packet-switched network, and since they did not want it to be top-down or handed down or anything like that, they wanted it to be purely collaborative, they did not know what to call these. they didn't want to call them rules or regulations or even protocols, so every time they came up with an idea of how you would address a packet or how you would put the address in or how you would recombine it, they called it requests for comment, and that made it seem

very collaborative. requests for comment. "rfc," and that is still have we how we are inventing the internet. i think it is up to number 7000 or whatever it is. it is still being done in a collaborative way. and that was the sort of notion of a benjamin franklin, which is bring people together in association, the good we can do together exceeds what we can do separately. the same with microchips. one of my favorite stories was about not wanting the credit was bob noyce and his team in what eventually comes intel and creates the microchip, done almost simultaneously at texas instruments by jack and his team. you need a team to be able to do it. you need people who know the surface state conducting, the quantum mechanics, and you also

need people who know how to amplify a phone signal. you need all sorts of people on a team to do a microchip. noyce dies before he gets the nobel prize, and the winner says ce was still alive, he would be sharing this with me. and when the presenter at the grand nobel prize ceremony, he says it is based on your inventions, sir, that the entire digital revolution has come about, and he gets up and says, that reminds me of what the beavers said to the rabbit in at the foot of the hoover dam. no, i did not build it, but it is based on my idea. [laughter] walter: his whole point was that we have got to share the credit. we have to be great at collaboration. another lesson of benjamin franklin that is so important for the digital age is that p

eriod after becoming a successful publisher he decides to become a scientist. he decides to really try to learn science. we think of him sometimes as some doddering old dude flying a kite in the rain, a penny saved is a penny earned, but, no, he actually was not that old, and the electricity experiments he was doing during that period in the 1940's were the most exciting experiments of that era, the most important since newton's theory of gravity. the notion that electricity was a single fluid, went from positive to negative to be captured in a battery, all of these words he invented, and the notion that you can then make a practical use of it, the lightning rod, because up until then, they had stored gunpowder sometimes in churches as they were so afraid of lightning, and lightning was such a horrible tragedy that was happening over and over again, with the

lightning, and they would consecrate the bells of the church so the lightning would not strike, and i think there were like 1200 lightning strikes on churches the year he was doing these experiments. and franklin writes to his friend, "you would think we would try some other theory," and he comes up with the lightning rod and it was so great because he loved both the theory and implementing it, like a great entrepreneur or innovator. in fact, the first year of his electricity experiments, on the banks of the river in philadelphia, they are doing all sorts of things. they are creating electric charges, studying static , doing all these tricks, and he figures out that it is not two different fluids, as we thought at the time, but it is a single fluid that goes from negative to positive, so when he gets it all figured out,

he says the theory is great, but we have yet to find practical use for it. he writes his friend in london, a person who becomes his friend at what we now call franklin house, peter collins, and he is lamenting that they come up with these great theories, but he said, "you know, what use is the theory if you cannot find practical utility for it?" he even said of newton, it is fine to know the theory of gravity, but i do not need to know the full theory to know that if i let go of my crockery it will fall to the ground and break. i need to know how to put to use such theory, so at the end of the very first summer, the only use they find of it is getting near to thanksgiving. actually, thanksgiving did not really exist back then, but the harvest feast, and they decided to kill the turkeys they were going to eat by shocking them with big jolts of electricity.

franklin writes to peter collins and says they were uncommonly tender, these turkeys. those of us who are southerners who list the inventions of benjamin franklin like to put somewhere on the list to sneak it in the inventor of the fried turkey. but eventually, he comes up with the notion that if you look at a spark of electricity, and you look at a lightning bolt, he puts it in his journal, all of the comparisons, that they snapped like that, that they make a sound like that, and he says, ok, they seem to be the same thing. a spark and a lightning bolt, and he writes at the bottom, let the experiment be made. i am writing about leonardo da vinci now, and leonardo is one of the first people in history where instead of trying to take the wisdom of the ancients says i'm going to have as my mistress

experience and experiment. over and over, he says, let the experiment be made. that is pretty obvious, up until recently, it used to be obvious that the scientific method was something you use, and you had a theory, and you test it, and then you look at the data, and you refine your theory. that is the scientific method we all got from galileo and the various, but it starts to some extent with people like leonardo and the renaissance. but for franklin, it ties into the whole concept of the enlightenment, which is you have to understand science to understand society, that there are social sciences as well as natural sciences, and he would if,hought you a philistine you know you knew all of the , humanities, and you knew greek and latin and whatever, but you did not try to keep up with science. nowadays, we kind of say stem

education. we have to do stem education, but with all due respect to most of you in this room, and i see most of you are not high school students, we say our kids should learn stem, but we are not very good in math, or we do not know c++ or python or what javascript is or how to do coding, and i think benjamin franklin would find that somewhat appalling. if you think some it is a -- somebody is a philistine because they do not know the difference between " hamlet" and "macbeth," it should be that. we do not make enough of it. we don't make enough efforts to say science is a community. that is why franklin, both as an entrepreneur and as a social scientist and an enlightened thinker, he tried to make sure he understood everything about science, that he looked at botany, that he figured out the

progress of northeastern storms by watching through his various systems exactly when a storm hit as it moved up the coast. he goes to england his very, very first time to get that printing equipment i told you about, and the captains of the ships have told him it takes one day less to get to england than it does coming back, something not explained by the prevailing winds or the rotation of the earth, so he dropped buckets and barrels into the ocean to take the temperature of the water, because he has heard people say there is a stream in the ocean, and he becomes the first person to publish a map of the gulfstream but having done this. he understands how science is beautiful and relates to our lives, and, by the way, he went back about seven or eight times between europe and the united states. the last time, he was 80, which, back then, was rather old, but he's still on that final trip,

he was still on the deck, lowering the barrel, taking the temperature of the ocean, because he always had that curiosity. that is such a key to understanding the enlightenment in the founding of our country. for example, in his works, he talks about do we need better poor law, in other words, that more welfare. what happens when people are put out of work by automation, and should they be given welfare? and he decides not to be ideological about it, but to test out how the laws are working in england and goes through all of the midlands of england, and different countries have different welfare and poor laws, and he tries to do a correlation between making sure people can, you know, live a good life but also make sure they have an incentive to work. likewise on the state tax.

he was very much in favor of an estate tax. he figured out and tested that in places where there was a higher estate tax, more people were more motivated to work rather than live off inherited wealth. so it was not notion of let the experiments be made, that helped inform franklin and helped inform how we created our society. he also, when he gets to london and france, is great at balancing idealism and realism, something we are having trouble doing in our foreign policy today. because when he gets to paris, the beginning of the revolutionary war, he realizes that we have to explain why we are in the revolution. he had been one of the drafters of the declaration and when he

gets to paris, what does he do? he builds a printing press and he starts printing the wonderful documents coming out of america and all of the ideals america is fighting for. but he also knew there was a balance of power. so he works with the french foreign minister, knowing that if france comes to our side of the war, part of the struggle britain and france, that france, spain, and the netherlands, it will help tip the balance of power to them and get the navigation rights on the mississippi. the notion of finding the right balance, that too shows an appreciation for science, newtonian mechanics, but also the notion of let the experiments be made. let's find the right balance.

something we may say we are not fully getting right in our day and age. the main thing too, if you combine all of these traits, balance, respect for evidence, tolerance, respect for diversity, and inclusivity, you get a sense that we need to work together and collaborate and sometimes it demands compromise. and treating well the opinions of others. as i said, he was on the committee, right when he came back, after 17 years off and on, mainly on in england trying to hold the british empire together with america, he comes back to philadelphia wondering, will he come down on the side of independence or stay loyal to the crown? yes the first deal with his son

-- yes the first deal with his illegitimate son. they had a good relationship but now his son is the royal governor of new jersey. the have a split and franklin comes down on the side of independence. so they put him on that committee that the continental congress appoints. it's in order to create that document to address with a decent respect the opinions of mankind, the declaration. it may have been the last time that congress created a good committee. [laughter] it has been franklin on it, john adams on it, thomas jefferson on it. thomas jefferson writes the first draft for reasons that bug john adams, but you know franklin is thrilled that jefferson is doing it. and one of the things you can see, not just as an editor, but that notion of balance and

compromise, which is the greatest sentence as a written by men, which is the second sentence of the declaration -- you watch them writing collaboratively. in the first draft, in the library of congress, we hold these truths to be sacred. and you see benjamin franklin, you know, his heavy black printers pen, using the backslashes, and he writes -- something that comes from the other sellers of the enlightenment, newton the , self-evident truth. they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and john adams handwriting, endowed by the creator. so you can see just in the editing of one half of one sentence, this notion of of collaboration requiring balance and compromise. as they balance, the role of

divine providence and the role of rationality in getting to our rights and liberties. i was actually working at cnn when i was looking at the first declaration and writing this part of the book. i came in one morning after i was studying and it was 7:00 a.m. because we used to have meetings at an ungodly hour and somebody said, we have a crossfire show tonight. and it was -- there was a judge in alabama had put the 10 commandments on the steps of the courthouse. federal judge said he had to take them down. they want to send in the federal marshals. and who would they have arguing against the 10 commandments? .e have a great crossfire when i went back home that evening and i went back to working on the ben franklin piracy, i said -- biography, i

said, this is really bad. you know, here we are watching the 10 commandments being used as a wedge issue, a divider, when the founders were just showing how to do that balance that used religion to bring us together, not tear us apart. franklin is also wonderful at creating the notion of balance when it comes to the constitutional convention. once again he has come back, from harrisainly where he has negotiated for -- paris where he has negotiated for peace but stopping in england to see his exiled son and not reconciling with him. but he gets back and he is part of the constitutional convention. they have to carry him people , carry him on a chair. 2.5 blocks from his house on market street, what is now called independence hall. and in that hot summer of 1787,

there were some of the greatest minds ever doing the constitution. and when you have great leadership, make no mistake this was the world's greatest startup, you need people who are passionate and visionary and have great ideas. people like a jefferson or a madison. you need people of great high rectitude that you can trust like george washington. you need people who are passionate like samuel adams. but you also need that special type of person who can make everybody collaborate and make them come together. so, after the connecticut compromise has gone down in flames and it looks like the convention may break up on the big state and little state issue, equal votes for states in congress, or according to population in congress, how it was going to balance in a

collection of states and a national center. franklin finally gets up and he proposes that there be a house and a senate, proportional representation for the house, he makes that motion. he is the one that makes that motion. and he gets up and he says, you know, i am the oldest person here. he was not only the oldest person, but his age was twice the age of the average age of everybody else. he said, the older i get, something really makes sense to strange happens to me, i realized i am fallible, i realize i have made mistakes. he says it is going to happen to you. you are going to get older and you will realize that you may have been wrong. so, they were at their roundtables, so, look at the person at your table.

look at them. think about what they are saying and realize that you may end up being wrong about some things and they may end up being right. he said, when we were young in philadelphia, we had a joint of wood that did not fit together and would take some for one side and shave some on the other side, and you have a joint that would hold together for centuries. we too must each part with some of our demands. the notion comes from tolerance andinclusivity collaboration and humility, or at least the pretense of humility. compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies. so they end up voting for it, and a lineup by state to do so. franklin looks at the back of washington's chair and says, i often wondered if that was a rising sun or the setting sun. now i know it is a rising sun.

as they walk out of the hall in philadelphia, mrs. powell comes up and famously says, what have you wrought in there? what have you given us? and he says, a republic, madam, if you can keep it. he knew it was up to us to pull together to keep it healthy. even in a year like we are having now. during his lifetime, benjamin franklin donated to the building fund of each and every church in philadelphia. he believed that much in inclusivity, that the strength of our nation was that we brought different types of people together. one of the greatest historians of america once said, all franklin ever gave us was the notion of a good-natured religious and ethnic policy.

-- tolerance. look around the world today and think, wow. that was a very important notion. not something to be dismissed. it is the key notion of which we were built. at one point, they were building a new hall in philadelphia for itinerant preachers who came for the great awakening. it is still to the left of independence hall, even called the new hall even though it was built way back, and he wrote the fundraising document for it. even if constantinople was here to teach us about the prophet mohammed, we should listen. we might learn something. and on his deathbed, one of the largest contributors to israel, , so once he does -- so when he dies instead of a minister accompanying him to the grave,

all ministers and priests of philadelphia linked arms with the rabbis and bring his casket to the grave. that is what they were fighting for back then. and that is still what we are fighting for around the world, and yes, even here at home, today. thank you very much. [applause] walter: why don't you all come to the microphones? thank you. i think people know the routine. i will answer questions. yes? >> you mentioned that when ben franklin arrived in france and england, he sort of disregarded his initial american enterprise. how did he use the collaborative nature of his being as a

diplomat? how did that work in france and england? walter: you know, in england he was part of that group of dr. johnson and others, the coffeehouse group. he realized that spreading the word through discussion, through being part of the group, even though it was not yet a democracy in england, that that was going to help. and his house on craven street, the thing that we are celebrating now with mrs. , stevenson as a landlord, there would be his carriage there. every day, somebody would be there. he always sort of tried to bring people together, including -- he said, the empire is like a noble vase, once it is broken, it would be hard to put back together. he had great politicians, but mainly he had thinkers, he realized there was an intellectual class.

people like dr. johnson and that were and others part of the salons that he created. when he went to france, he learned french very well. unlike john adams, who also was there. and he created his printing press. he disparaged john adams because he was too aloof and will not be part of the people in paris. he said john adams learned french by studying grammar books and that he, ben franklin, learned it by writing poems to his mistresses and lounging on the pillows while they corrected him. but also benjamin franklin, you know how he rolls the paper up and down the streets as a young printer, he wanted that impression in france of being

sort of the frontier philosopher type. he knew that the french had read rousseau once too often and they believed in the natural man and philosopher. when he comes to paris, up until jerry lewis, he is the most famous person from america in paris because his lightning rod experiments were proven correct in paris. he comes to paris and they bring him in and people are lining the streets to see benjamin franklin, because he realized part of making people work together is indeed with publicity at times. you cannot do it as a shy person. and he wears a backwoods coat and a coonskin cap. here's a man who had lives on market street and craven street, philadelphia and london. he had barely ever been to the

frontier. but he comes as sort of this frontier, natural philosophe, and he comes to the steps where he then hugs voltaire. in some ways, his collaboration is through an intellectual and public policy intellectual networking sort of aspen institute of his time. >> you mentioned the nexus between franklin scientific achievements and the enlightenment. how much of that comes from newton and then how much from the theology of the times? if you could address that. walter: i am not a true expert, newton, fore franklin at least, is the driving force. the good thing about newton's science is that it was very comprehensible and analogous to

things in life. every force has a reaction. it is sort of force and mass and acceleration. they are rules and it makes it seem like, i get it, and these rules might actually apply. you can do experiments. you can test acceleration. you can test how force and mass work together. so that system, to me, not to me, but to franklin that is a foundation of the enlightenment. and it is interesting because in that day and age, the reason that franklin and jefferson and most of the other greats really really love science is because it was something that the ordinary person could understand . i wrote about einstein and one of the downsides of einstein was that he made science seem like whoa, but the notion of

relativity is not like newtonian physics for you have to be a genius to maybe understand how he could, but the calculus that describes motion, but you can kind of grasp the concept of motion. i would think for people like franklin, the notion of newtonian mechanics was part of the science that underlines the enlightenment. >> one of the many things that engine franklin is known for is being an abolitionist. it's very complicated is that something in his last years he took an active role in. earlier, you were talking about advertisements for slaves in his newspapers and over the years he owned several slaves. can you talk about slavery? walter: thank you for talking about that. it is truly important, we are talking about if we need to take down statues of andrew jackson or whoever it may be. i will start with his brother. benjamin franklin kept a ledger

in his life of every error he made and how he tried to rectify it. and it starts with running away from his brother as an apprentice. and when his brother dies, he pays for the education of his brother's children. as he gets to the end of his life, there is one big error he made, a huge one, and he realizes it. as you said, he allowed the advertisement of slavery in the pennsylvania gazette. for some time, he had to two household slaves, although they kind of just wandered off. but he did own slaves. and he realizes that was a poo abhorrent. and worse yet, at the convention, the notion of the compromise that makes great heroes, he had signed on to the compromise that allows slavery. not be mentioned in the constitution, but it is implied.

so, how does he rectify that? errata.great ira he becomes around age 80, the president of the society of the abolition of slavery. he realizes he had just gotten it really badly wrong. e writes as is very first hoax as a 15-year-old, i'm a woman. his last hoaxes are like a speech talking about how in algiers he had a published newspaper, saying how important it was to enslave white people because they are the only ones that can make the north african -- whatever work. it was all the arguments that they were using for slavery just transposed for somebody from africa saying it about white people. and he does quite a few of these

written things and parodies to try to push abolitionism. i think it is all important that as we remember and look at history that these are real flesh and blood human beings, they make mistakes. they are flawed. and the important thing is not areay, ok, these guys perfect. it is to say that they are human and they recognize when they make mistakes and they can change, as opposed to clinging to, never apologize for what you do. i think that franklin on slavery is inspirational, even though it was something he had to get his mind in the right place. it took a while. >> these speak about franklin and the importance -- you speak about franklin and the importance of his humility and his great compromise and work with others. i am thinking about another book you wrote about steve jobs, these are not characteristics

that came across at all. walter: when i wrote about steve jobs, it made me think i wanted to do about about the innovators because it was about collaboration. steve was very much of a collaborator in some ways. he and steve wozniak created a great team to do the original apple. he was a strong and sometimes difficult personality. but the amazing thing about him was that even though everybody talked to me about, you know, he was so difficult to work with. they also said, i never would have given up the chance to work with him. he drove me crazy, he drove me to distraction, but he drove me to do things i did not know i could do. so if you look at apple and his top people there, even though he

was a tough leader, they stick with him from like 1998 or so, when he comes back, until the present. you still have johnny ives, these people of great genius who all want to stick around. i hope the book that i wrote conveys by the end that, do not try this, being tough on people at home unless you have the charisma and division to be like -- the vision to be like steve jobs and cause people to want to walk through a wall for you as they did. that is sort of the paradox of the book -- how can you be so tough, why were you always so mean, but yet why did you inspire a certain loyalty that is very nice bosses do not always inspire? you know, when i asked him in his last year, what was the project you are most proud of.

i thought he was going to say the ipod, or the iphone, or the first macintosh. he said, you are not listening to me. he was kind of tough me at times. he said, creating a great product can be hard, but what is really hard is to create a great team that will continue always to create great products. the best thing, the best product i ever made was the team at apple. he got the notion of collaboration. that is why the book is 600 pages. it is not all that simple of how he got from being a tough leader to being a collaborative leader . >> this will be our last question. walter: sorry, i am taking too long. >> our team just created a social media collaboration tool in which ben franklin is our chief aspiration officer. walter: as he was for america. >> i am a silly girl, so he is

my patron saint. as a distinguished publisher and innovator and a civil activist, statesmen, supreme collaborator, how do you think benjamin franklin would grapple with the really ugly destructive social media stuff going on out there today, in light of what is happening politically? walter: thank you. next question. [laughter] walter: did you have a question? i will do both. that is a good question. i want to formulate an answer. i don't want to be mean to you because you have something written down. >> i visited franklin's home in london. it was a few years ago so i may be cloudy on this. his landlord's daughter was married to a doctor that was dissecting bodies. they found these bones in the basement. and apparently he got infected

by a disease that killed him eventually. walter: the husband. not ben franklin. >> i know that he was very close to his landlord and his last trip home to america, she went back to america with him and was at his bedside when he died. was she like a daughter to him? walter: i'm going to have marcia stand up one more time. if you have questions about the house, you should ask her. it's a good question and you're right about it. i will do that and the social media. it was odd. he had a common-law marriage with deborah franklin in philadelphia, and a daughter who was wonderful, and a son, who he was estranged from at times. but it is odd because he goes to london and he almost replicates having a family. i do not know and i do not pretend to know what type of romantic relationship -- i think he actually just wanted people

and a family around him. he has that and polly is very close to him and comes over and is there with him when he dies. on social media and other things, benjamin franklin believed very strongly that the free flow of ideas and free opinion -- free spread of ideas would empower people and eventually, in a very raggedy way, lead to more democracy and more liberties. he believed that if there were papers, there was room for 12. 11 he believed nobody could control the free flow of information. he helped instill in america's dna by bringing thomas payne over, for example, and helping him print pamphlets and hand them out on the street corners. by the way, thomas payne -- ben franklin, they are like the first bloggers. these are pamphleteers and they

are spreading ideas. nowadays, if you look at china, cracking down on the free flow of ideas. if you look at with the free flow of ideas is doing around the world, it is sometimes slowly and in a messy way bending the arc of history toward individual empowerment and democracy. and franklin felt that the countries and societies that were most comfortable with the free flow of information, most comfortable, not censoring people. letting everybody stand on the street corner and put out there pamphlets. thomas payne's pamphlets were as bad as some things you would see i will not mention whatever cable news show i'm thinking of. he believed that that was at the core of what was going to make a democracy strong. so frankly he would have loved it, that there is a rocket flow of ideas. and he probably would not have

liked the days of journalism in what i call the golden age in which there were news magazines, two or three networks, the elite person got to say that is the way it is. and there was one source of information. he would like the spread of information. he would even like the notion of pseudonyms, which we sometimes use. the internet is more. anonymity. but what he would not like is the fact that there is a total loss of civility. i think that comes from pure anonymity. it is somewhat an open question when he writes poor richard. he uses that pseudonym for the almanac. all of the pseudonyms he uses -- he basically knows you are responsible for your own work. certainly people knew that poor richard was benjamin

franklin. he believed you should take responsibility for your work. i think he would be appalled at the crassness that sometimes flows from the anonymity of free press. he believed everybody had the right to free expression, he believed that it was great that there were not gatekeepers tried to say, this is the information you get and here's the information you don't get. he would've felt that that basic respect and ability to sit down with other people and trying to find the common ground -- that was the goal of argumentation, not to divide us but to bring us together. that required people to take responsibility for what they said. that is the change he would make in our society today. thank you all. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> before next week's republican national convention, this weekend, c-span cities tour along with charter communications cable partners will explore the history and literary life of cleveland, ohio. talk with, we will author john grabowski as he exports have transportation shaped the identity as he explains in his book, "cleveland: the history motion." we will explore the langston hughes collection, exploring the life of the playwright and social activist while he lived in cleveland. >> he developed his love of writing and he was introduced to the work of carl sandburg and walt whitman through his teacher, miss weimer. also composed a poem

that is kind of famous. tv, wemerican history visit the cleveland history center and take a tour of the power and politics exhibit with the chief curator, highlighting the items in the collections relating to ohio presidential history and cleveland's past political conventions,' . we will tour automotive museum and learn why cleveland was named the motor city before to tri detroi. >> we are on lake erie, one of the great shipping routes. we also have a railroad in the area. there were a lot of railroad shipping routes that could be taken. industry,ve the steel which is very important in the automobile industry to have the steel you need. the results a lot of lumber in this area, so it all kind of came together. >> watch c-span cities tour to

cleveland today at 2:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. the c-span cities tour working with cable affiliates and across the country. each week until the 2016 election, rude to the white house -- road to the white house rewind brings you coverage of past presidential races. accepts theon presidential nomination at the democratic national convention at atlantic city, new jersey. he refers to the legacy of fallen president john f. kennedy, assassinated just nine months before the convention. president johnson went on to defeat barry goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. this speech is just under 40 minutes. more