 Hello, from the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team. My name is Missy McNatt, and I'm an Education Specialist in Washington, D.C. And welcome to the National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners Program. You can find information about future programs on the National Archives website, archives.gov, under events, and on the National Archives Facebook page. This morning we will meet Benjamin Franklin, portrayed by Bill Roebling, historian and actor with the American Historical Theater. Benjamin Franklin served in many roles during his life. He was a printer, a publicist, a writer, an inventor, a statesman, and a diplomat. In the holdings of the National Archives are records associated with Benjamin Franklin, usually in connection with his role as a founding father. In this slide we see Benjamin Franklin serving on the Committee of Five, the committee that was tasked with drafting the Declaration of Independence. And in the other drawing we see Franklin charming the Parisians during the Revolutionary War in his role as a diplomat. In this next slide are three founding documents that Benjamin Franklin contributed to, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, the war between the United States and Great Britain, and our Constitution. In this next slide is the featured activity in Doc's Teach about Benjamin Franklin. That's docsteachdocsteach.org and we will share this slide again at the end of our program. At the end of the presentation by Benjamin Franklin we will have a question and answer session with him. So please write your questions in the YouTube chat box and we have a member of the National Archives staff who is monitoring that. And let us know where you're watching from today. This program is brought to you by the National Archives Public Programs and Education team, the National Archives and the National Archives Foundation. And now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Benjamin Franklin, a remarkable man who captured the hearts of the European nations and the confidence of his countrymen. Good morning. Good morning, young learners and hopefully parents as well. It's wonderful to be with you today. I say to be with you. I am at home in Philadelphia, but I wish I were with you and we were all gathered together. And so it's my pleasure to join you this way. As I say, I'm here in Philadelphia, which has been my home for many, many years, more years than I care to think about. But I didn't start out in Philadelphia. I started out in the city of Boston some miles north of here. And now that I'm speaking to young learners, I want to talk about a little bit of the time that I spent as a young learner and then some of the different ways that I learned things. I was born in Boston, as I said, my family had 17 children. I was the 15th. You learn a lot of things when you've got a lot of siblings. You learn when to stay out of the way and when not to and all sorts of things like that. But the first thing I'd like to talk about is the fact that we don't learn everything from books and such. We learn a lot of things from our mistakes if we're smart. And I'd like to talk about a few of the mistakes I made. I know that may be unusual to think about, but we have to sort of honor our mistakes and grow from them. When I was a young boy, oh, I must have been about nine or 10, I was with some friends and we were fishing. And when you're living in Boston, certainly in the 18th century surrounded by water, the things to do are limited when it comes to play. And so we would fish, we would swim. One day we were at the waterfront and swimming and we were gonna do some fishing. And we thought, well, we could get out a little closer to the water if we had a little pier to fish off of. And I happened to notice just next to where we were that there were some men building a house. And there were a lot of stones just sort of hanging around there. So after those men went home, I had what I thought was a bright idea to let's say borrow those stones to build our fishing pier. Well, we built a fine fishing pier. We were really into that task. And so when we built that pier, we had a wonderful day fishing and then we went home. Well, the next morning my father came to me and said, Benjamin, we need to speak about something. And he told me that some men had complained that they went to work on the house and many of the materials were missing. And so the word got back to my father that I and my friends must have been the ones to move those stones. They had seen us there that morning. My father told me that it was my job for today to go back there, take every one of those stones from that fishing pier and put them back where they belonged and to apologize to those workmen. And I did. Now, I learned a lot from that experience. First of all, I learned that taking things that don't belong to you is not borrowing. There's another word for that they call that stealing and that it was the wrong thing to do. And I learned very severely from that mistake. I also learned that my parents loved me, that I could make mistakes as long as I honored those mistakes and my parents would still love me. And I think that's an important lesson for a young person to learn. A little later on, I was involved in a project. I must have been a late teenager by then. And I decided that I could very easily, well, with a lot of hard work, I could become a perfect person. I thought, how hard could it be to be perfect? I just sort of had this very sort of mathematical mind in the sense that if I did something this way and practiced it that I would achieve it. And so I wrote a series of 12, what I called virtues, things that would make a better person. And I decided that things like industry, that means working hard and things like cleanliness, keeping my body clean and my home clean, which was very hard in the 18th century, by the way. And a variety of other things. And so I began to work on these. I made a chart, I decided that every day I would work on one thing. And until I was perfect at that, I took little black marks when I made mistakes and didn't do it. And I thought after a while I was doing very well. Of course, I was the only one judging what I was doing. And I think I got a little bit full of myself. And I began to boast a bit that I was becoming such a perfect person. My friends would just sort of laugh. But there was an old Quaker man nearby who heard me one day and he came over and said, Franklin, may I suggest to thee one more virtue? And I said, surely, what is that? And he said, humility. Oh, that was a tough one to learn. Because sometimes you think you are just the most special person in the world. And you need other people to sometimes remind you that perhaps you need to think about that. Well, the mistake I made then was thinking that I could be perfect. No, none of us is perfect. We all make mistakes. And the thing that we do is we learn from those mistakes and we grow from those mistakes. Another mistake I made a few years later, a friend and I, I was working on my experiments in electricity. And I didn't invent this technology we're using right now, but I do think my experiments in electricity might have helped it a little bit. But anyway, we were working, my friend and I were working on our generating static electricity and we thought it was Christmas time. It was the day before Christmas. And we had gotten a turkey. Now we did not go to a grocery store and buy a turkey already for the oven. No, we had a turkey, a live turkey there that we were expected to dispatch to its expected end to kill that turkey and to cook that turkey. And I had the bright idea that perhaps we could kill this turkey using electricity. And then perhaps we could cook it with electricity. Well, again, I got a little bit full of myself thinking I had done everything absolutely right. Apparently I picked up a wire that I should not have picked up. And well, the next thing I knew, my friends were helping me off the floor. They told me that all of a sudden there'd been a flash of light, a loud crack and I was sent flying across the room and was out for a couple of minutes. I could have killed myself. And believe me, when I worked on that kite experiment with lightning, I was much more careful about that. But I also learned there that as a scientist, as someone who's working on scientific things, it's very important to understand every step of that process because absolutely obviously, when you're conducting an experiment, it's very important to be alive at the end of it to be able to talk about it. So anyway, that was another mistake I made. And you know, as life went on, the mistakes are not only made by the young and there's no age at which we don't try to learn from our mistakes. When we, for example, when we wrote our constitution, if you look at our original constitution, there were a lot of mistakes there. There were a lot of things that we didn't address that we should have addressed. There were a lot of things that did not serve everyone in this country as well as it should have. I, for one, thought that we needed to do more. We weren't able to, but I knew that down the road, people would see things a little differently. And so I think this country is learning from its mistakes and we are always learning from our mistakes. So another way I want to talk about that we learn is that we expose ourselves to other people. And this is where the wonderful activity called travel comes in. Now, in this time in this country and around the world, it's hard to remember the joys of travel because we haven't been able to travel nearly as much. But I always encourage travel. Now, when I was a member of the Continental Congress and also of the Pennsylvania legislature, I think I saw things differently than a lot of my colleagues because I had traveled. I traveled all over this young country even when we were a British colony and in establishing post offices and other things. Later, I was sent to London by the colony of Pennsylvania to act as a business agent there. And I met many beautifully bright people and learned many things. And then, of course, later on during our war, I was sent to France to try to improve relations with the French people and get them to support our overthrowing King George III and becoming an independent country. Learned many things there, too. I learned, for example, that people in other countries don't always do things the way that we do. And it's important to, if you want to get something done, it's important to understand how those people operate and how those people think, and to try to accommodate that and sometimes become more like them in order to get something done. So this was another way that I think I learned. And travel in general, and I say this to any parents who are listening, too, it is such an important way. Those people that we may know who never leave their hometown, maybe never even leave their neighborhood, never expose themselves to people other than people who are exactly like them with the same habits, the same values and all. Those people don't see the world in a broader way. Those people limit their minds, their education, and so this is a very important thing, travel. And in light of travel, but to me, the key to learning overall, however we learn, the key is curiosity. You know, I don't think I've ever been necessarily the smartest person in a room, but I know that I have been the most curious person in the room. I always want to know how things work, why things work, and that's become a very important part of my life. So again, that part of learning, not only learning from our mistakes, but learning by exposing ourselves to other people. And of course, it is so important to learn in a more traditional way, to learn by reading books and of course, all the technologies that you have at your command today are ways to learn. And the important thing is, especially in a fast moving world as the world more and more becomes, and it was even that way at my day in the age of what people call the enlightenment. What you knew one day may not be what you need to know the next day. And so it's always important to never think that you've arrived at the knowledge that you need, but to always expose yourselves to that wider world, to that world of knowledge, that world of technology, or that world of human relations too, and of making peace and avoiding conflict. All of these things are things that need to be learned. We're taught many things by many people and many of them are right, but many of them are wrong. So it's always very important to keep our minds open and explore. This is what I think today. Is this perhaps the way that I need to think? I know I found in my life many times, the way I thought as a young man was a very limited view and I decided as I went on in my life that perhaps if I exposed myself to the thoughts of other people and always judging those thoughts in the light of what's right and wrong, but the more I exposed myself to other people, I found that possible to change my thoughts. Now I've spent a lot of time in politics and let me tell you, politicians don't like the idea of changing the way they think because people will think they just don't stand for anything. But I think it's extremely important that we examine ourselves and examine the way we think and learn from our mistakes, learn from our thoughts, listen to other people, that perhaps, you know, I'm talking now because that's what they asked me to do. But I don't learn so much from talking. I do learn from listening. Now you have the opportunity to send me some questions and comments and I certainly welcome receiving those because I want to learn still. I've never stopped and I don't want to stop. We don't stop learning until we die and that should be your thought for the day. I'm gonna stop talking and hope that you have a lot of good questions for me and thank you so much for allowing me to come to you this way. And I look forward to a time when I can speak with you in person. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Franklin. Such wonderful advice and great ideas for our listeners. So let me get to the questions that we have and thank you for everyone for watching. We have folks from New York and Maryland. Our first question is Dr. Franklin, you are maybe the most famous American but you spent so much time away from America. Why? Well, I guess the beginning reason of that was that because people wanted me to go. I don't mean because they didn't want me here necessarily although some of them might not have but certainly the first time that I went abroad, I was a young man of 18 and I had only been in Philadelphia for a year or so. And I was approached by a man who was the Lieutenant Governor of our province here in our British colony at that time and said, I love your work as a printer. You're a very eager learner, you do wonderful work but you know, this is a new country and there is no printer in Philadelphia or Boston or even New York who could teach you what you need to learn. And so he said, if you'll go to London, I will send you letters of credit. I will send you letters of introduction. You can get work there and you can learn from the best printers in the European world. And so I sold all my books to get a one-way ticket to Boston or to London and that turned out that that gentleman who told me that he would send me all these things, I forgot he was a politician and he never sent them but beware of political promises. But anyway, I did spend a year and a half there and met a great many people. Then I was sent by the colony of Pennsylvania many years later because of my work in electricity and the publishing of my findings, I was apparently the most famous American in Europe. I was the only one they knew sometimes. And so both then and later when I was sent to France as an ambassador, it was because the people knew me and they knew of me at least. And that's why I went. And I met, it was a wonderful learning experience for me even then meeting some of the smartest people I knew. And I kind of a related question when you went to Paris as a diplomat and you mentioned when you were talking earlier how you had learned that you have to pay attention to other people's culture. Did you speak French? And you- Well, I thought I did. John Adams told me I didn't because I went to the second grade, he went to Harvard but I learned everything from a book and I don't know if you've ever been to a country where you think you know the language and then when they start talking, particularly when they start talking very fast and all you realize you don't learn. And then I had never paid much attention to things like tenses and genders and all that sort of thing. And so, but the people seem to feel that I was sincerely trying and so they liked me. So they worked with you. So that's- Yes. Another question with your education and how far did you go in school? You said you didn't go to Harvard, John Adams. I went to the second grade and I was by that time I was 10 years old. We started a little later then. And a couple of reasons. My father felt that it was time for me to go to work. As I said, I was one of a large household and everyone had to contribute at a certain point. And this was in that time if your parents didn't have a lot of money. You went to school long enough to learn to read and write and such and then it was time to apprentice to a trade. The other reason was I had paid so much attention to all my reading and such, I think that then in my second year of school, my second grade that I failed arithmetic and there's something which I remedied many years later. But so my father did not want to pay to send me to school anymore and I went to work for him in the shop. And but becoming a printer later on when I did apprentice to my brother a couple of years later was the best thing to ever happen to me because that exposed me to this world of books. I would call it the information highway of the 18th century. So printing, were you printing books, newspapers, both? All of those things, printing books, newspapers, magazines. We had certain magazines then it was. And so I was printing all sorts of things. And then I began as when I had my own printing shop, I was publishing books that other people wrote and such. And so I was, I had books around me all the time. And we were able to read them. So another question, were you? Oh, and by the way, Missy, I want to also point out that learning doesn't stop at three o'clock or whenever they let you out of school, you can keep learning even when you're not in class. Pardon me. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with you. As a former teacher, couldn't agree more and education at the National Archives. But another question, were you friends with people when the other signers of the declaration? Were they your friends or more colleagues or how did you get along with that? That's a question that I get a lot. And the simple answer is were we friends, usually not. And really not because I didn't like them or they didn't like me, but you have to understand that we were all, we've had first met, for example, for example, most of these people except for the Pennsylvania delegation, when we came together in the Continental Congress to sign the declaration, we were separated by geography. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were in Virginia and I and John Adams and Samuel Adams, those folks were in Boston and they didn't travel much except for these special things. And also we were separated by age. I was the oldest man in the room, both in the Continental Congress and later in the Constitutional Convention. When these fellows were still going to school and a couple of them just were still being born, I had made my name in the publishing and the scientific world already. And so we had occupied sort of different lives up to that time. And also we didn't ever, I never got to spend a long time with most of those people, just very important times. So you mentioned earlier a Quaker who had given you advice. Were you raised in the Quaker faith? No, I was raised as I suppose a Puritan in Boston, which was what you pretty much had to be there at that time. But my parents were not a very, they were not a harsh and strict family. My father was a rather creative thinker and not a dissenter of the religious faith, but certainly a voice who always approached it from with his own mind. And so I was taught from a very early age to sort of be aware of many different ideas. And were you influenced by the Quakers when you lived in Philadelphia? Oh, I certainly was. I was influenced by them and many of my friends were Quakers, my first mentor in Philadelphia was a man named James Logan who was a Quaker and it became one of the wealthiest men in the colonies and had the largest library in America, which and he sort of, he met me when I visited him with my young friend who was a glazier, someone who put in windows and such and when Mr. Logan was building his house and outside of Philadelphia and Germantown, he, I met him when I went there with Thomas and we began to converse and he quickly realized that I was very eager to learn and to acquire knowledge and he spoke four or five languages. He could read and write in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and a few other things and published a great many books. So, and had a very interesting worldview and I later worked with the Quaker party in the Pennsylvania assembly because they were the most progressive of the groups. So they were always influential to me. I was not a Quaker, but I certainly was influenced in many ways by them. Wow, and then you have so many accomplishments, so many wonderful things that you did. So what is the one thing though that you would most like to be remembered for? I don't think that I ever did anything more important than being a part of this group of people who established this country, first had the courage to declare our independence, but then designed, wrote the constitution, established a government that was a very unique government, the first real republic in the world since the Roman Empire and a government that existed without a king, without a monarch, quite unheard of at that time. So having established one of the most important governments in the history of the world, certainly has to be the most shining thing I've ever done. So going back to the declaration for a minute there, you were on that committee of five. Yes. And the story is that Jefferson did most of the writing and yes, no, you didn't get it. Let us know if that's the case or not. And what were your contributions? What would you say were your contributions? As Mr. Jefferson did do most of the writing, now he did get many of the ideas from people like John Locke and some other folks, but he certainly made them his own in the sense that he changed them to suit the government we were trying to establish. My most significant role was as an editor. Being, I mentioned I was a newspaper man and you mentioned it as well. Mr. Jefferson wanted to say so many things in that declaration. And I thought it was very important that we keep it as brief as possible and address the most important issues. And so we sort of disagreed a little on in some of those things, but and then John Adams was very helpful in that sense too. Mr. Adams was one of the greatest minds for government of any of anyone I ever knew. So my primary role was keeping Mr. Jefferson thinking about what we really had to say and maybe leaving some other things for another time. Oh, okay, yes. And then the constitution, you mentioned that as, so what would you say your most important contribution or contributions to the constitution were? Oh, many times I thought my most important contribution was keeping other members from strangling each other, but we were a group of very different people from different regions of this country with many different ideas of what the constitution should be. One state, something was more important in one state than in the other. And many times things would get pretty argumentative. And by that time I was 81 years old, I didn't have quite the energy that I had at that ripe young age of 70 when I was in continental Congress. But many times I would just invite them over to my home for food and drink and socialization to remember that we were all here for a very important reason. So again, I guess that was the, by that time I was the elder statesman and that was my, I made a few suggestions about a few things and but I felt my most important role was just trying to keep us in talking about what we needed to be talking about and also keep people from going home. So many people felt that we could never agree and we could come back another time and do this. And I felt if we are going to be having traveled again, I knew this, if we are going to be an important part of the world stage, then we have to have a government, not 13 little states running around doing whatever they wanted, but one government. We had to be able to defend ourselves. We had to be able to present a face as the United States of America. So this was an important part of my role as well. Well, very, very important, absolutely. And I believe there's a quote that you said at the end about the chair that Washington was sitting in that it was, you can tell it by. Yes, Mr. General Washington was the president of the Constitutional Convention. He presided over it, kept things where they needed to be and but he sat in a chair that had a, on the back of the chair was the image of a son, a son on the horizon, half a son. And I said often I've sat here and looked at that chair and the image on that chair and wondered if it was a rising or a setting sun. And I finally said that at last I have the happiness to know that it is indeed a rising sun, which was my statement of optimism, even though we didn't know for sure what was going to happen, but I was, I had this feeling that things were going to work. Yeah, well, I think, you know, that is, we are, I believe we're an optimistic country and we still have things we need to change and work and improve, but the fact that we are the rising, the sun is rising and things are getting better. So it is an optimistic point of view. Well, we have time for one last question and you have given us so much advice, but if you had to choose one piece of advice to give to our young people today, what would that be? I think something that's often lacking in our country and probably in the world is a sense of history, a sense that we are in a very unique place, but it's not something that is as unique as we might think. People have had similar problems over the years and even when things don't look very promising, remember that things have happened, bad things have happened before. We're here, we got here and we will get there again. So sometimes you get a little bit downcast and disheartened because you're afraid. You're afraid of what's happening in the world. You're afraid of what's happening in this country and be a student of history and realize that we're not alone here. We've got a lot of people behind us that both in the past and in the present and in the future. Now, well, thank you. And that is a perfect note for the National Archives that holds the records of our federal government. So lots of documents, records that people can explore to help them understand the history in their past. So thank you so very much, Dr. Franklin. It's been a pleasure chatting with you today and happy 4th of July to you. Oh, and to you. Thanks.