 In a sense, what he had done is he had picked up on the idea of the self-made man, which was just bubbling up into the cultural froth at the time. And he created the most effective, the most powerful, right? I mean, we still read it today. I assign it to students. I know dozens of other people assign it to their students. Great story. Thomas Mellon, right? You guys know the Mellon Bank. Ultimately, the bank that's now, well, forget whether they've merged, but the Mellon family. Mellon actually was a Thomas Mellon in the 19th century. He was a poor boy who read Franklin's autobiography, decided to get up off the farm, go to Pittsburgh, and start his career, which he eventually built into a successful banking career. And ultimately, the Mellon Bank built itself into an international bank to compete even with the J.P. Morgan's of the world at the time. He was so wealthy that by the time FDR came into office, FDR thought that Mellon was engaged in all kinds of tax evasion and whatnot. He became public enemy number one. He was the, or not Thomas Mellon, but his heirs became public enemy number one. They were those dirty bankers that they had to go after, right? They were one of the most successful families. All because he read this model. He read this idea of what it means to make yourself. Now, there's lots of interesting passages, lots of, I mean, I really, I recommend, this is a great book to read, as well his shorter essays. There's one called The Way to Wealth, which collects a lot of the poor Richard's phrases. But there's one part of this that I wanted to highlight, that I want to focus on today. And this is the part, he's now talking about his career as a printer, and when he was in Philadelphia, starting his way to prominence. And he notes in this letter to his son, it was about this time in the late 1720, so he's in his mid-20s at this point. It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. And then he details, over the next few pages, the ways in which he attempted to do this. And the really striking thing about this is this idea, moral perfection. Who talks about this anymore, right? Aren't we all just flawed creatures who have all of these boils and nastiness about us? And what we need to do is we need to avoid looking at ourselves in the mirror, because after all, we're all just broken individuals. He says, no, I'm going to be morally perfect. I'm not just going to try to attain moral perfection. I'm not even going to try and attain it in the next life, which he rejects. He's a deist. He says, look, it's all about life on this earth, and I am going to try to attain moral perfection. How is he going to do this? He's going to do it through conscious, rational planning. He's going to set out a project of improving himself. And so he literally lists out 13 virtues that he's going to attempt to cultivate in himself. He lists out a program whereby how he's going to get up, what he's going to study, how he's going to go about his day, what he's going to do to make himself better into the man that he wants to be. And this process, this idea of moral perfection as a thisworldly, conscious, rational effort is what really distinguishes this literature. Now, Franklin's autobiography, after his death, was collected. These various letters and editor hit upon these and realized, wow, this is really great stuff. So they put it together. There's four different parts of this letter to his son and to others that they put together. And they published this as the autobiography in the early 19th century. And early 19th century America was an incredibly ripe period for this idea. It's a politically free nation unprecedented in human history. The amount of freedom that individuals had to engage in the kinds of things that would lead to economic success, to social mobility, etc., were unprecedented. And in addition to this, initially American culture had a very thisworldly pro-human happiness orientation. And so in the 1820s and 1830s, a literature starts to develop. These books are becoming models. People start to imitate Franklin. They start to write more and more self-help or self-promotion, self-cultivation type books. And in the 1830s, Henry Clay, actually the politician in a speech in Congress by no conscious attention, actually invented the word the self-made man. He was being criticized by other senators about some economic policy. And he said, no, no, no, in America, we don't have hereditary aristocrats. We don't have people who are born into a station from which they can never change, right, either on the low end or on the high end. What we have, he said, is a large number of self-made men, people who have picked themselves up basically through their own power, risen up the social hierarchy. Now in the 19th century, this notion also, however, gets corrupted. And that's in part what I want to focus on. Because this is the great tragedy, a culture in the United States in the 19th century that not only produced inventors, businessmen, popular entertainers, people that could create their own careers, right, that could create themselves, that could cultivate themselves in the image that they sought, was corrupted. And that's why today, when we have actual examples, because we still retain at least enough political freedom and economic freedom, although ever decreasing by the day, that people can still do this. And we still retain enough cultural and social freedom that we can still define ourselves. We're not a product only of our religious, racial, ethnic, economic, cultural background. We can break out of that. We can define ourselves. But there's this enormous criticism. And part of that criticism ultimately arises out of what I think are two false views that developed in the 19th century of what self-making is about. Now on the one hand, one of these false views comes out of the idea of the Christian tradition. America, as many people know, as many people will argue, is, to one degree or another, deeply, deeply influenced by the Christian tradition. And it became so deeply influenced during the 19th century. There's a great book by a historian called The Christianizing of American Culture, and it happened primarily in the 19th century. During the 18th century, the Enlightenment, the pro-reason, pro-life on this, or a philosophy that adhered at the time that many of Americans, if not the majority of Americans, believed in, was a very deistic, God sort of made the world and then went off on his own business. He's not intervening with our lives. He doesn't want us to follow any creed. He wants us to discover the laws of nature and go about our business. Changed from that into the 19th century to a very evangelical Christian-centered culture through conscious intention of the churches at the time. And their idea of self-making was very, very different. Their idea of self-making was premised on the sense that you could make yourself in this world. It was not wholly a spiritual sort of narrative, but that you could make yourself in this world only for one purpose and only because of one particular problem with the self. Now, let me take these in reverse order. The problem with the self the Christian church has said is that human beings, in God's creation, are low, base, selfish, materialistic creatures. If you want to make yourself, if you want to make something of yourself, they said you have to overcome that. You have to overcome your inherent flaws. You have to rise above the way that God created you. You have to somehow make it to prove to him, in a sense, that you're better than that. You have to deny yourself. You have to deny these things. The curious part, though, was that unlike the earlier Christian narratives about the saints and how they led lives of true faith and ultimately were awarded in the afterlife, is that in the 19th century, this culture of the Enlightenment had so imbued America with the idea of success in this world that the Christian thinkers actually said, being rich is okay.