What Would Ben Franklin Do?

KIRK ELLIS HAS A SHELF FULL OF AWARDS from telling stories about historic figures from John Adams to Anne Frank to the Beach Boys. He’s built a Hollywood career exploring the mythology of the past — most recently in a miniseries about Benjamin Franklin.

On one of those disturbingly warm days in November, when I was meditating on what had just happened in the election, it seemed like a good idea to go back – back into history. We are particularly lucky to have Kirk here as a neighbor in Santa Fe, so I called and asked him to come over and give me some sorely needed insight and perspective.

He walked in wearing in a tee shirt from the film Bonnie and Clyde. Kirk seemed to hate being photographed, but he loved talking about what was happening at this moment. After all, it’s history.

If Benjamin Franklin showed up today, what would he make of our democracy?

Bill Maher asked Michael Douglas (who played Franklin) that question on Real Time.

Michael said that Franklin would probably have another glass of Madeira. I think that’s probably true. Franklin could be quite radical in his thinking. He had the idea that every generation, the form of government needed to change. He was skeptical of the American electorate’s ability to preserve a republic.

Franklin was the most worldly of the founders. He had lived in England. Obviously, he’d spent many, many years in France. He’d seen different forms of government. These guys all came from the enlightenment tradition. This idea that there was a better way to do things that was rational; you could create a system that would help align the people in the government.

Now, I spent a lot of years inside the head of John Adams and Adams was deeply, deeply distrustful of mankind in general. He believed that government was necessary to prevent men from succumbing to their worst interests.

We like to think of ourselves as this Jeffersonian electorate, this group of free men who are infinitely improvable, but we live not in a democracy but in a representative republic. We’re living in John Adams’ government. At least up until this most recent election.

One of the assumptions of that time was that you had a reasonably well-informed public.

And that they voted in the common interest.

The issue is one of communication, how messages are relayed. When the Declaration of Independence is promulgated in Philadelphia in July, on July 4th, 1776, it takes months for it to get across the colonies. They don’t even hear about it in Georgia until late in the summer.

News could only travel as fast as a man on a horse or a ship across the ocean — there wasn’t this instant relay of information. That’s become part of the problem, 24-hour news cycles that have to find ways to crank out data to keep you watching. But data, as David McCullough famously taught me, is not information, it’s not knowledge, it’s just data.

The founders did not foresee this. They believed in a free press. They believed that there should be multiple voices. And the press in the day of Franklin – well, he was a printer and publisher. They were fiercely partisan papers.

We forget how nasty they were. All the terrible things they would say about Jefferson, for example…

Say what you will about any of our recent elections, the election of 1800 that put Jefferson in the White House is still the dirtiest campaign in American political history. A lot of mud was slung. Adams was called a ‘horrible hermaphroditic creature, lacking neither the grace of a woman or the strength of a man’.

Listen, the fundamental failing of the Constitution is that its authors failed to recognize that party politics were going to take over the system. There was still that belief where this idea of faction doesn’t exist, that everyone was working towards what they thought was a common good.

We live in a world today where it’s all about personality. It’s all about me, me, me, my group. But the founders came from that enlightenment tradition that was based on the social compact, where there were individual freedoms that came with collective responsibility. At some point, I don’t know when, but certainly in my lifetime, the American electorate has just forgotten about that whole ‘collective good’ thing. It’s all about grievance, it’s all about what I want, what I need, what’s been taken away from me, not about what I can do for my country.

If that kind of individual mandate had been the norm during either the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention, none of those documents ever would have been written. They were testaments to the power of compromise and people willing to sacrifice so that the final work would benefit the most people.

It also helped that you had presidents who could, for example, talk about the Greek in the New Testament, actually trying to figure out what Jesus said. What has happened to that level of education, knowledge, intelligence, whatever you call it?

You’re talking about the late-life correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. An extraordinary exchange of letters. Remember though, in that exchange of letters, they’re bemoaning the rise of Jacksonian populism, using a lot of the same terms that we’re using today to describe what happened this past election day.

Listen, it’s easy to say that they all would be spinning in their graves or they wouldn’t recognize the country they created. But I think they’d see some of their era in our modern era. They’d see some of the same problems, and they’d be having the same debates. The system they set up, the question of where did the ultimate power lie, in the executive branch or in the legislative branch, was never answered.

They left how America would be governed an unanswered question. Over the course of the centuries, we’ve had different answers. The greatest debate was fought on the battlefield in the Civil War. And even that didn’t answer the question.

Tell us about Benjamin Franklin’s rock star status.

At the time, Franklin was the best known American in the world. He may have been the only American known outside of our little enclave on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. That was largely due to his reputation as a scientist and as a philosopher.

I think people don’t realize that Franklin spent most of his life outside America. He got rich, he runs away from home, from his abusive brother. He makes a fortune as a printer.

Franklin spent almost 20 years in England as a colonial representative. He was representing four colonies as well as serving as a kind of postmaster general to America at the time. So he was steeped in English government and he became a well-known figure, both as a colonial representative and then as a scientist, because he was still working on his scientific discoveries at the time and making a reputation in that world.

Nobody in America had travelled to the extent that Benjamin Franklin had.

In France, Benjamin Franklin created the image of America and Americans that persist to this day; this idea of the home-spun philosopher with the fur hat, a bit of a rube, not as sophisticated as all those people in the old world, but representing a lot of new energy and new blood. I mean, it’s all a creation. It’s all a fiction. But that’s the image of America that you still see reflected in European media today.

Michael Douglas as Ben Franklin?

Casting Michael seemed to people I’ve talked to who’ve seen the show as counterintuitive. But the moment he steps out of that carriage, ten minutes into the first episode, I don’t need to explain. You have a celebrity playing a celebrity. It’s built into the role.

There’s a key line in the first episode when Franklin is addressing a group of French nobility. He says, Diplomacy must never be a siege, it must always be a seduction. That was the key to the character, and that’s what Michael really, really delivers. You write a line like that and people go, that was pulled from something Franklin said. It wasn’t; it was completely original to the script, but it really encapsulated Franklin’s thoughts about diplomacy.

It’s unusual that you have so much control over your material. How did you manage to do that?

A lifetime of patient plodding through the industry, P-L-O-D-D-I-N-G, as opposed to P-L-O-T-T-I-N-G, and just building up a reputation. And you get typecast. I’ve written in pretty much every genre except science fiction and musicals. But because my early successes were in true life stories, people know me as the go-to guy for biographies or historical films, which are, by the way, always the hardest to sell.

Part of what I think is happening in America, is we’re not interested in history.

As Americans, our understanding of ourselves doesn’t come from our actual history. It comes from popular representations of our history filtered through dime novels, movies, and television shows.

Comic book mythologies.

That’s exactly right. I mean, I’ve just finished writing a book called, They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde: The Outlaw Cult and America’s Love Affair with Guns. It’s about how this whole outlaw culture has been a part of the American identity, really from the founding era. But none of it is real. It’s an image of who we are, who we want to be, as opposed to who we were in the past, who we are in the present, and who we’re likely to be in the future.

I’ve always tried to approach these projects with a great deal of responsibility. I’m not a documentarian. I don’t have Ken Burns’ responsibility, but I don’t want to stray from so far that I’m telling fiction. That’s irresponsible.

We live in a world that has been dubbed the world of alternative facts. There is no such thing as an alternative fact. There’s only a fact.

At the same time, I don’t think that either John Adams or Benjamin Franklin would be too surprised at people’s gullibility. Because both of them, to a certain degree, played on people’s gullibility in their official roles. But the population is a lot larger now. Madison said as population increases and westward expansion grows more rapid, tendencies toward one belief or another will be absorbed in the general populace. In other words, that America would just absorb all of the more extreme ideas, and we would live in this world of the kind of center. Well, that proved to be a horrible miscalculation.

Why?

It’s this idea of factionism. I mean, look, the Civil War is an example of that. Two fundamentally different ways of life that are regrettably still being perceived in the ways they were at the time. It was never about the whole state’s rights argument. The South knew that if slavery ended, their economy was going to crater. And it did.

We’ve always been fragile. America has always been fragile.

How did Santa Fe become your home?

My father worked for Sears as a store manager. From the time I was born until the time I was in high school, we lived in seven different places, six of those just in Texas. The longest we ever lived in one place was in El Paso. That’s where I developed a real love for the region, for the people. My elementary school, St. Pat’s, is still in downtown El Paso, and hasn’t changed. I think they paved the parking lot. That was it in the last 50 years.

I developed a real love for the Southwest and for this area. Then when I was in college, I met my wife who was from New York, but worked in Albuquerque. We would always take trips here. When the time came in our respective careers where we felt we had the financial independence to make a move and just say to hell with LA, we came here. That was 25 years ago, almost exactly to the day.

There are very few places in America where the history is tactile and palpable. This is one of them. That is a constant source of inspiration. At the same time, one thing I’ve learned over a lifetime of doing this work is that history is a blessing and a curse. Certain places can get trapped in their history. In the last couple of years, I fear that I’ve seen Santa Fe get trapped in its history.

You can only build one kind of thing, whether it’s in the historic district or not. Cities don’t work that way, but Santa Fe has fallen victim to the same cultural balkanization that has afflicted America now. We’re silent and people aren’t talking to each other.

There’s a simple way to distinguish between Santa Fe and Taos. In Santa Fe, we have this patina of tri-cultural understanding, but the city has never been tri-cultural. There have always been more than just three cultures here. In Taos, those cultures actively hate each other. I would say Taos is probably a bit more honest than we are, in the way it presents these cultural clashes. It’s becoming a real problem, I think.

Does your knowledge as a historian give you any more optimism than you might otherwise have?

My first reaction after the November election was I am really, really lucky to live in New Mexico. It’s a fully democratic state — and how about the fact that we elected the largest contingent of female legislators in American history? That’s something to be proud of and hopeful about. I am very optimistic that within our little postage stamp of the world, we’re going to see a new kind of government when the legislature comes in January.

But look, the founders never lost hope. Even in those late-life letters that Adams and Jefferson exchanged — they had fears, they had concerns, but they never lost their vision for America and their hope for the future. These were the smartest individuals our country ever produced, frankly. Who am I to contradict their sense of an ongoing future?