Framing Benjamin Franklin

One can have the most general, school-drilled sense of Benjamin Franklin — as a writer, publisher, scientist, inventor, statesman and founder — and still be amazed at how much else there is to learn about him. That's what Dayton Duncan realized while writing the two-part, four-hour documentary Benjamin Franklin for his longtime collaborator, director Ken Burns. It debuts April 4 on PBS.

"All those things, combined into one person who had two years of schooling!" marvels Duncan, who won an Emmy for writing Burns's 2009 series The National Parks: America's Best Idea. He initially pitched Burns on Franklin as a subject back in the '90s. "[Franklin] is sui generis," he says. "His interests were so broad-ranging. My son, who helped me with research, called him an omnivore."

Franklin's scientific achievements alone — most notably in electricity — floored Duncan. "I have a battery in this cell phone, and he's the one who named it a battery. I knew electricity had positive and negative charges. I didn't know he gave them those names."

But he also saw, in Franklin's willingness to experiment, the foundation for how he approached improving life and arguing for a new nation. "Experiments fail, and you need to learn from that and adjust to it if you want to move forward," Duncan says. "He applied that as rigorously to his work on politics and society."

Though Franklin raised his son William to serve the British Empire's authority, the father's increasing belief in the colonies' independence changed him. William, however, who became royal governor of New Jersey, stayed an ardent  Loyalist, and it tore the family apart.

"That drama overwhelmed me," says Duncan, who turned it into the documentary's emotional heart. "Think about it: on the one hand is one of the premier creators of our democracy, and one of the most infamous Loyalists was his son. It encapsulates how much the Revolution wasn't a [regional] war. It was within individual towns and families."

Franklin's evolution regarding slavery was also fraught. The documentary points out that he owned slaves and ran notices on runaway slaves in his newspaper. "It would have been historical and narrative malpractice" not to address the topic, Duncan says. Once the Constitution was signed, however, the storied Philadelphian embraced the Abolitionist movement, accepting that the new nation's ideals would always need to be stress-tested and fought for.

"As he told a woman outside Independence Hall, 'It's a republic, if you can keep it,'" Duncan says. "It's an experiment in democracy, and it's no certainty it will survive."

This article orginally appeared in emmy magazine issue #2, 2022, under the title, "How to Frame a Framer"