Ken Burns on Ben Franklin’s legacy: It’s complicated | Opinion

A week before the Constitutional Convention opened in May 1787, Benjamin Franklin, the oldest delegate in Philadelphia, took a moment to consider his place in history.

“I am grown so old,” the 81-year-old statesman wrote, “I seem to have intruded myself into the company of posterity … employed too in matters of the greatest significance; but whether I have been doing good or mischief is for time to discover.”

Since Independence, every generation of Americans has wrestled with the larger-than-life character of Benjamin Franklin, evaluating him in their time against the issues of their day. His popularity ebbs and flows. He was too secular for the evangelists of the Second Great Awakening, too quick to compromise for the transcendentalists, too much a capitalist in the Progressive Era. Yet industrialists idolized his innovation and diligence, Depression-Era Americans championed him as the personification of the American Dream, and he was revered at the Bicentennial for his outsized role in securing American Independence.

Benjamin Franklin was so many things that his true character can be elusive. He seems to have wanted it that way. “Let all men know thee,” his alter ego, Poor Richard, advised, “but no man know thee thoroughly.” Over the course of Franklin’s long life, he was an indentured laborer, an enslaver, and an abolitionist; a king’s man and a revolutionary; an everyman and an elitist. He was a newsman who published hoaxes and a world-renowned inventor who never filed a patent.

Making our documentary film about Benjamin Franklin, we understood that his conflicting truths had to have fair play. By allowing those contradictions to coexist as they did in reality, the film is a biography made jagged with the sharp edges of the truth. We believe that Franklin’s life still reverberates today — for his superhuman contributions and his very human failures.

» READ MORE: Five interesting facts from Ken Burns’ new documentary on Ben Franklin

Franklin’s connections to race, slavery, and the dispossession of American Indians are fraught. Though he was an outspoken advocate for abolition in the final chapter of his life, he owned and enslaved people in middle age, and his newspaper earned advertising revenue from the business of slavery. He publicly denounced white men who killed Native people indiscriminately while also championing the expansion of white settlements onto Indigenous lands.

The same drive that brought him so much success as a writer, printer, scientist, and statesman also divided him from his family. Franklin’s diplomatic missions to London made him an absent husband to his wife, Deborah, in Philadelphia, and the two of them lived apart for 15 of her last 17 years. Despite his continual promises to return to her, he missed her death and funeral. And Franklin’s politics severed his once-intimate relationship with his son William when they chose opposing sides in the American Revolution. They would not reconcile even after the war.

More than anything, what we have learned from our four-plus years with Franklin is that he was very human. On a wall in our edit room, we have a big light-up sign that simply reads “It’s Complicated” in neon cursive. History is complicated, and that truth only inspires us. It is our job to create the space where facts can govern the story and where our audience has the opportunity to encounter historical reality in its complicated context.

People living in the United States interact with Franklin’s legacy daily. There’s a Franklin Street or a Franklin Avenue in almost every American city, and exactly half the states have a county called Franklin. His “Join, or Die” cartoon and his likeness dribbling a basketball have become Philadelphia 76ers logos. He might as well be the patron saint of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Postal Service, and of Philadelphia itself with countless establishments — from museums to ice cream shops — named in his honor.

But Franklin’s impact is with us today in less conspicuous ways too. He named the electrical “battery,” charted the Gulf Stream, developed the colonial postal system , and printed some of our first paper currency. He wrote lasting essays, established enduring institutions in Philadelphia, introduced groundbreaking theories about the natural world, and invented lifesaving appliances. He negotiated the alliance that won the Revolutionary War and contributed as much as anyone to the foundation of the American Republic.

Yes, his face on the $100 bill has made his name a synonym for making money and getting mine, but in life he was also an advocate for the common good and commonwealth.

Whether from his printing press, with his quill, at his scientific instruments, or through his metaphorical chess matches in Congress and at Versailles, Franklin left his fingerprints everywhere he went.

History is humanity — positive, negative, engaged, indifferent, tragic, and triumphant. Recognizing failures does not require ignoring virtue, nor the opposite. Strive to do good, to be better. Encourage goodness. Condemn the bad. Honor the good. But remember it all.

We owe where we are today — good, bad, and otherwise — to what went before. We do best when we remember lives lived and lost, sacrificed and stolen, wasted and well-spent. Humanity is history. It’s not all good. It’s not all bad. But it all happened, and it happens still.

Ultimately, we believe in the best of Benjamin Franklin, and his most useful traits to emulate are his capacity for introspection and his obsession with self-improvement. As Poor Richard says, “The Wise and Brave dares own that he was wrong.”

It’s never too late for any of us to be better.

Ken Burns is an award-winning filmmaker. He directed the new, two-part documentary “Benjamin Franklin,” which he also produced with David Schmidt. It premieres April 4 and 5 at 8 p.m. on WHYY 12 and is available to stream on PBS.org and the PBS Video app.