What Benjamin Franklin Actually Believed — And Why It Would Horrify His Fans Today

Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the most aggressively mythologized man in American history, which is an extraordinarily competitive category. He flies his kite, he founds his nation, he grins from your wallet, and he sits comfortably in the imagination of every conservative commentator who has ever used the phrase “the Founders intended” without troubling themselves too much with what the Founders actually said.

Franklin is their guy. Wise, godly, industrious, moral. A man of the people. A true American. He was also the man who wrote a scientific essay arguing that humanity’s most urgent intellectual priority should be making flatulence smell better. So.

The distance between the Benjamin Franklin of national mythology and the Benjamin Franklin of historical record is not a short walk. It is, in fact, a journey of such considerable length and scenic interest that it deserves its own guided tour. Because the real Franklin, brilliant, contradictory, deeply weird, occasionally monstrous, and almost always fascinating, would not survive a single news cycle in the current political climate. He would be canceled before the kite left the ground.

Buckle up, because the man on your hundred-dollar bill had bodies in his basement, doubted the divinity of Jesus, owned enslaved people, wrote a detailed letter advising a young man on the merits of sleeping with older women, and spent his mornings sitting naked in front of open windows in the name of personal wellness. And that is before we get to the racism. Which we will absolutely be getting to.