READING MAKES A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON

I'm still working on this idea

Do you remember the first time you went to a library and checked out a book? I have heard so many good stories from others about how a library became an important part of growing up. We owe the public library system to Benjamin Franklin and his friends who started a lending library available to anyone in their town.

Did you watch Ken Burns' film on PBS about Ben Franklin this week? You can still catch it and remind yourself how Franklin, a man of many talents and interests, foibles and transgressions, helped mold the idea of the United States.

Franklin was a self-taught scientist and inventor. His invention of the lightning rod grew out of his experiments with electricity. His discovery prevented many tall buildings from catching fire due to lightning strikes. He never took payments for any of his many inventions. He felt that they should be available to anyone to use. He was a supporter of the smallpox vaccine after his second son died from the disease.

Franklin was a printer, writer, and voracious reader. He is known for his newspaper and the yearly Poor Richard's Almanac, which provided information about weather, times to plant, and sayings, such as, "Never leave till tomorrow that which you can do today," that people incorporated into their daily lives. He helped to develop our national postal system, which brought the disparate colonies together and which helped him to understand the need for the colonies to be united into one entity.

I'm still working on this broadside about Franklin

Franklin was also a womanizer and left his family in Pennsylvania for years while he lived in London. He was deeply prejudiced. His ideas about equality did not include women, people of color, or indigenous people, and he was a slave owner. To better understand his earliest beliefs read his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries (1751). Later in life though, he changed his thinking about slavery and the abilities of black people after observing the children in schools run for black children. He eventually became President of the Abolitionist Society and petitioned Congress to provide the means for slavery to end.

In other words, Franklin was a complex man who managed to rise above his own early beliefs to help construct a country united around equality and freedom. Learning or re-learning about people like Franklin shows how important it is to know history. Without that perspective, we could easily slip into a different type of governance. We are still trying to live up to the ideals that our country was built upon.

We are lucky to be able to read about his life in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

This is National Library Week. Celebrate your library!

Other good reads, not about Benjamin Franklin:

More information about Benjamin Franklin here:

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/benjamin-franklin/

http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/slavery-abolition-society/