Source: CNN
An 81-year-old politician faces a combination of admiration and ridicule as he embarks on his pivotal, decisive chapter. He moves more slowly, speaks more softly, but his mind remains sharp and his moxie intact.
The politician is not President Joe Biden, but Benjamin Franklin. As an octogenarian, he was by far the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention. Many doubted whether Franklin was up to the task and snickered behind his back, but he proved them wrong. He contributed mightily, helping to set a tone of compromise and crafting a breakthrough that saved the day, and the young republic.
There is no better model for the elderly politician than Franklin. The last third of his long life (he lived until 84) was by far the most interesting, and the first two-thirds were downright fascinating.
It was in his closing act, a time when he could have been doing the colonial-era equivalent of golfing in Florida, that he accomplished the most and changed the most. This was when Franklin the Loyalist became Franklin the Rebel and, later, when Franklin the Enslaver became Franklin the Abolitionist. This was when he charmed the French into supporting the American cause, ensuring the revolution was a success.
Lost in the debate about how old is too old to occupy the White House is the fact that chronological age tells us little about a person. It is not how old someone is but the kind of old that matters. Are they grumpy old or sanguine old? Resigned old or bold old? Franklin was in a category unto himself. He was never president, of course, but he proved that age need not be an impediment to sage and inspired leadership.
At age 70, Franklin helped edit the Declaration of Independence. His most important revision appears early. Jefferson’s original draft reads, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal.” An assertive pen stroke — most likely Franklin’s — struck through “sacred & undeniable,” replacing it with “self-evident.” We hold these truths to be self-evident.
It might seem like a minor revision, a more concise wording of the same idea, but it is much more than that. Jefferson’s original wording appeals to religious authority. By revising the passage to read “self-evident,” Franklin invoked a different and, he believed, higher authority: human reason. Franklin saw what Jefferson, less than half his age, did not.
Franklin stayed busy, always faithful to his tenet that when it came to public positions, one should “never ask, never refuse, nor ever resign.” He needed to remain relevant and useful. He needed to be needed. As for death, he rarely thought about it. “It has always been my maxim to live on as if I was to live always,” he once said. “It is with such feeling only that we can be stimulated to the exertions necessary to effect any useful purpose.”
Recent research bears out Franklin’s approach. Many people grow happier as they age, even in the face of adversity, a 2014 study published in the journal Psychology and Ageing found, provided they possess one trait: a flexible sense of self. When it comes to matters of the head and heart, Franklin was remarkably nimble, that rare person who grew more, not less, agile with each passing year. At age 69, while serving in London, he flipped from British Loyalist to American rebel. Well into his 80s he continued to change his mind about vital issues, such as slavery.
Consider, again, the role he played at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. At 81, Franklin was old enough to be the father of all the others and the grandfather of most. When Franklin had first argued for colonial unity in 1754 (his so-called Albany Plan) at age 48, James Madison was three years old.
Franklin suffered from many physical ailments, including gout and kidney stones, and some days he had to be carried to the convention hall on a sedan chair, but the founding grandfather’s mind was as sharp as ever, honed perhaps by regular exercise, especially swimming, and playing magic squares, a kind of early sudoku he invented. Fellow convention delegate William Pierce said Franklin possessed “an activity of mind equal to a youth of 25 years.” One visitor to the elderly Franklin’s home, Manasseh Cutler, was struck by how “his manners are perfectly easy, and everything about him seems to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happiness.”
It was not all clear sailing though. Franklin’s age made him the object of both veneration and ridicule. The younger delegates admired Franklin’s past accomplishments but not necessarily his present contribution. Some dismissed his ideas out of hand. Others snickered behind his back. Ageism is not a 21st century invention.
Not for the first or last time, people underestimated Franklin. While he did not play the decisive role in shaping the Constitution — that task fell to younger delegates such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton — Franklin managed to cool heated tempers and nudge competing factions toward compromise. “The Old Conjurer,” as John Adams dubbed him, often accomplished this by sleight-of-hand. At one point, he proposed that each session open with a prayer. The unlikely motion went nowhere but it did supply the breathing space, the pause, so desperately needed.
During that sweltering Philadelphia summer of 1787, Franklin worked tirelessly, albeit quietly and behind the scenes, embodying the 17th-century jurist John Selden’s dictum: “They that govern most make (the) least noise.” Contrast that with our noisier-is-better assumption.
With the convention deadlocked, Franklin helped craft the Great Compromise (also known as the Connecticut Compromise). One legislative body, the House of Representatives, would be determined by population, while another, the Senate, by state — with each state having the same number of seats in the Senate. The plan, backed by Franklin, saved the day, and the infant nation.
At the close of the convention, with its outcome still in doubt, Franklin delivered an impassioned plea for something rarely celebrated today: doubt. Franklin doubted whether the Constitution drafted over the preceding few months was the best version possible, but he was going to sign it anyway: “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being oblig’d, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.” The older he grew, Franklin continued, the more likely he was to question his own judgment and to “pay more Respect to the Judgment of others.”
Franklin’s message is as vital today as it was in 1787. More vital. Doubting the views of others is easy. The hard part is second-guessing your own. Doubt everything, including your own doubt, Franklin advised, and don’t grow too attached to your intellectual castles. They might be built of sand. What he once said of scientific theories holds true for political ones as well. “(H)ow many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves oblig’d to destroy!”
The mark of a mature democracy, he observed, is not only the institutions and policies it constructs but its readiness to modify those institutions and policies to fit new circumstances. That is why Franklin referred to the new US Constitution not as a document or blueprint but as an “instrument.” Precisely as good and useful as the character of those who wield it. That is an important observation — one that could only occur to someone who had lived a few years.