BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S LAST BET

A portrait of the great revolutionary leader as a working-class populist.

Like the other Founding Fathers, writes historian Meyer, Benjamin Franklin was morally compromised: He pledged himself to the cause of liberty, yet he kept slaves throughout his life. That fact has been long known but little publicized. So, too, the subject of this book, namely a fund that Franklin established toward the end of his life that would endow the cities of Philadelphia, where Franklin made his fortune, and Boston, where he studied, with funds that would mature over the centuries, meanwhile providing small loans to working-class people to be repaid with interest over 10-year periods. “Although the term would not be coined for another two centuries,” writes Meyer, “Franklin’s ethical lending scheme can be seen as a forerunner of microfinance.” In addition, thanks to the miracle of compound interest, a portion of the funds—which amounted to a bit under $4,500 in the money of the time but which, properly managed, should have yielded billions today—were also to be distributed to the cities for public works improvements. Franklin made numerous assumptions that didn’t hold, among them that the funds would be competently administered by civic-minded volunteers and repaid on time. Neither happened thanks to various financial crises in the days before central banking. In 1828, Meyer writes, “Philadelphia’s auditor—making a soft approximation—penciled in a balance of $9,919.50, a calamitous 43 percent slide in only four years.” What should have been billions amounted to just a few million two centuries later, and the inequality that Franklin meant to combat by helping workers build businesses and trade education has mounted. Still, as Meyer notes, despite mismanagement and neglect, that there’s any money left at all should count as a plus, as well as the fact that Franklin’s “example of civic virtue has been carried forward, as he had hoped, for two hundred years.”

Meyer’s book sheds fascinating light on an icon who has been reduced to a symbol.