Essential liberty
Franklin’s warning is the source of the title of Zadek’s 2020 book and of his Substack publication, and he reads it on air in the episode with Lenore Skenazy on childhood independence: “And I just want to read quickly an appropriate, wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin, his warning to us: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ From Benjamin Franklin” Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023). See bobisms for the phrase’s later career as the show’s standing test.
The 1750 complaint about the Germans
Franklin is also the show’s exhibit for the age of anti-immigrant argument. In the episode with Alex Nowrasteh on immigrant entrepreneurship, Zadek read a passage he had found for the broadcast: “He said, quote, 1750, Pennsylvania. … ‘Few of their children in the country learn English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages. Unless the stream of their importation could be turned, they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantage we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.’ Benjamin Franklin, 1750. It could have been written yesterday” Immigrants – The Ultimate Entrepreneurs (2013). Nowrasteh, in the same episode and again in Let Them All In (2013), placed Franklin at the head of a sequence running through the Irish, the Jews, the Chinese and the Italians, each said in turn to be incapable of assimilating.
Not in it for the money
In the episode on Dr. Benjamin Rush, Zadek grouped three founding-era men by a shared indifference to payment: Rush, who treated the poor for free; Paine, who gave his writing’s proceeds to the war effort; and Franklin, who “had lots of inventions, but his inventions like the stove and other inventions, he refused to patent them and he gave them to the public domain” Founding Healer (2019). The same episode records Franklin’s patronage of Rush in London, where Franklin served as agent for several provinces and housed the young physician after his Edinburgh studies.
Franklin and Adam Smith
Skipper Young’s argument in The Wisdom of ‘76 is that The Wealth of Nations and the Declaration are two halves of one year, and that Franklin is the link: “Ben Franklin, the co-star of my book, many people believe he helped edit it, and he certainly had input into it and he greatly affected Adam and his thinking” Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76: Young America’s Way to Wealth (2016). Zadek’s own framing was narrower: “Adam Smith, of course, never came to the US. His only contact with the Founders, I think, was Benjamin Franklin.” Young also credits Franklin’s encouragement with bringing Thomas Paine to America.
Two smaller appearances
Carol Berkin used Franklin to show how little the founders expected of their own creation: they assumed all republics end in a dictator or an oligarchy, “everybody assumed, by the way, even Benjamin Franklin … eventually the American republic would degenerate into tyranny. The Constitution was designed to just sort of slow that down” Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016). And in the episode on crowds and social media, Zadek offered a defense of brevity: “I think the first one to use a form of tweets was Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack; he had hundreds of what would be perfect tweets if they were around today. … He might have been America’s first tweeter” On Crowds and Tribalism (2019).