On January 17, 2006, America celebrated the 300^th birthday of Founding Father Ben Franklin.  Much has been written about Ben Franklin and his many accomplishments.  Ben Franklin was a printer, writer, scientist, inventor, civic leader, revolutionary, and international diplomat.

But he was so much more.  A recently released book, The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, edited by Franklin's eighth-generation grandson, finishes the autobiography started by Ben Franklin by compiling his letters and writings for the 33 years missing from the original manuscript.  Some will argue that these were the most interesting years in Ben Franklin's life as he served as America's advocate in London, represented Pennsylvania in the Continental Congress, helped write the nation's Constitution, and was America's wartime ambassador to France. 

CFIF Senior Vice President & Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino recently spoke with Mark Skousen about his famous ancestor and the completed autobiography.  What follows is excerpts from the interview that aired on "Your Turn - Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense" on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida's Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  Well a great big happy birthday is in order today.  Did you know that Ben Franklin turns 300 today?

In honor of his birthday and this true American patriot, it is my pleasure to welcome to the program Dr. Mark Skousen, Ben Franklin's Eighth-Generation Grandson and the editor of the recently released book titled The Compleated Autobiography of Ben Franklin.

Dr. Skousen, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon.

SKOUSEN:  It is my pleasure.

GIACHINO:   In the beginning of the book you outline what drove you to finish Ben Franklin's memoirs.  Can you briefly explain to the listeners why you did it and why it needed to be done?

SKOUSEN:  Well, like many people I had read the autobiography earlier in my career and I was always frustrated that just when it was getting interesting, just when he was entering the national and international scene, he died and failed to finish his autobiography.  So it ends in 1757 just as he is going to England to be the colonial agent for Pennsylvania and that's it.  So the last 33 years of his life were left unrecorded.

So as I was reading the papers of Benjamin Franklin, which are his letters and journals and so forth, I discovered that basically he had already written his autobiography and it was just a matter of collecting what he had written and putting it together and publishing it.  I think he would be very pleased to see one of his descendants publishing a work that he always wanted to do - and that is the last 33 years of his life.

GIACHINO:  And really it is written in his own words.  It is not like you summarized the remaining 33 years that were missing from his autobiography.  You actually took letters that he wrote and some letters that others had written about him and you put as much of it as you possibly could in his own words - although I have to thank you for translating some of it to common day English so that we can understand it today.

SKOUSEN:  Yes, we did do a lot of editing and updating and making it seamless so that it reads like a great story.  But all of it is basically in his words with a few exceptions.  For example,  he was so busy that he did not write much about the Declaration of Independence and all that time period.  Well you cannot have an autobiography without him talking about that.  But if you look at Chapter 4 of The Compleated Autobiography, I drew upon a letter that Arthur Lee wrote to his brother.  Arthur Lee was one of the commissioners in France and he reports that he sat around with Ben Franklin for a couple of hours in the evening and they reminisced about how it was such a miracle that out of no where, with no laws and no military and no money, they were able to beat the British or at least give them a tough time.  And to build up a whole nation.  And it was a miracle in human affairs.  So I just use that letter, which is third person, and change it to first person and I think that was one of the few examples where I had to rely on a third party to tell the story.

GIACHINO:  Okay, I want to make sure that the listeners know where this book is available.  Obviously it is available in a lot of local bookstores but one of the things that they can do, which I think is wonderful, is humaneventsonline.com actually has a link to the book, and if you link to it you can actually get a free chapter of the book emailed to you.  I think that is wonderful - it gives people enough of a teaser to know that this is a book that they really need if they are interested in learning a lot more about America and about our Founding Fathers and American history.  I applaud you for making it so readily available to people.  Very often we don't have an opportunity to preview a book before we purchase it and this gives us an opportunity to read an entire chapter, right?

SKOUSEN:  Yes.  And it is a pretty unique book in that it is a first edition written by a man who died 215 years ago.  So it is a very unique book.  I discovered a number of new things about Franklin.  When you read it you will discover that Franklin has been vastly underestimated.  He played a really critical role in winning the war.  And frankly, without his fundraising abilities - he was an extraordinary fundraiser and he got the French to raise over a billion dollars in military and financial aid, and without that we could not have won this war against the British.

We say Washington was the first in war and first in peace and Franklin, I think, needs to be right up there with Washington.

GIACHINO:  Wouldn't you agree that Ben Franklin actually is the epitome of the American dream?  Here is a young boy whose father was a candle maker and he came somewhat from rags to riches and took advantage of the opportunities that America presented.  Is that right?

SKOUSEN:  Yes he is.  And I would call him the founder of a number of things.  He is the founder of self-help books and self-improvement; he is the founder of American capitalism and industry - thrift, frugality and economy, hard work, prudence.  One of the things that you find out in The Compleated Autobiography was the number of times that he had financial setbacks and personal setbacks during the war, but it never destroyed his innate optimism about America.  He thought America would become a mighty nation and that it would win the war.  He never doubted that the Americans would win the war.  You know the war lasted ten years and there was a lot of frustration with it.  But if you read The Compleated Autobiography he is never in doubt and it is just a wonderful upbeat description - occasionally he gets discouraged, but he quickly gets over that.

GIACHINO:  As an ancestor I think that you are somewhat uniquely qualified to opine on this.  We all know Ben Franklin was a printer and publisher, an inventor, a revolutionary, a diplomat.  If he were alive today, what could you see Franklin doing?

SKOUSEN:  Franklin would love to be alive today.  In fact he hoped and he often dreamed of being alive today - 200 or 300 years later because he knew of the technological advances that were just beginning with the scientific revolution that was occurring in his day.  There was small pox vaccinations and air balloons and all of these kinds of things were just beginning to happen.  He would love to be here now.  He would be fully active in all of the advanced technology.  But at the same time, he would be very much a civil servant and be involved in public affairs, probably not involved in party politics, which he despised.  He would be much more interested in helping with practical ways to improve the roads, to improve transportation - practical inventions are the thing that he specialized in.

And he also would like to see cheap government.  You know he said "we believe in good laws and cheap government."  And he said "a virtuous and industrious people may be cheaply governed."  So he would not like the welfare state mentality that is going on in today's government.

GIACHINO:  You make a lot of good points.  And he makes them himself, in fact, in this book which is why I think that if you are interested in learning more about this famous man, certainly the 300^th anniversary of his birth is a great time to do it and in order to do it - that is to truly understand Ben Franklin, you have to understand him as he understood himself, which means reading The Compleated Autobiography.

Mark, I have a caller on the line.  Is it okay if we take a call?

SKOUSEN:  Sure.

GIACHINO:  Go ahead caller, it's your turn.

CALLER:  Good afternoon.  I had heard some people say that Ben Franklin was a deist.  I wondered what you would say on that.

SKOUSEN:  Yes, in the early part of his career he was a deist and he was not a churchgoer.  He was a doubter regarding the divinity of Jesus.  So he was very much a student of the Enlightenment in that respect.  However, the war totally or at least partially changed his views on religion and he became a theist - a believer that God was active.  He said that "God governs in the affairs of man.  Have we not seen numerous occasions when God has intervened on our behalf or for the American cause?"  And this cause made him much more of a believer.  But his religion was still very practical - more in doing good works and charity rather than sermonizing and faith and church-going.

CALLER:  I knew that he asked for prayer in the Constitutional Convention and I thought that a deist would not ask for prayer so I wondered how that was.  So later he changed from being a deist?

SKOUSEN:  Yes, it is interesting that here was a non-churchgoer who was encouraging them saying "why have you not had prayers here?"  And he did it at a time when there was a big debate on the Constitution and they were not sure whether they would have a Constitution or not, and Franklin advocated prayers everyday.  You know he was the father of lights and provide enlightenment for them.  And they turned him down.  He said only three or four people were in support of that.  So Franklin was definitely more religious than they were.

GIACHINO:  If you have a chance to read the book - The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin, which is edited by Mark Skousen, his eighth-generation grandson, it does talk about that.  Isn't it true that he was forced to flee Boston when he was 17, in part because of his religious beliefs?

SKOUSEN:  Well he was basically forced to leave because of his older brother.  He was basically working for his older brother in an apprenticeship - which is basically a form of slavery.  And his older brother James was beating him whenever he disagreed with him.  And finally Franklin had had enough and he just ran away and went to Philadelphia and became rather rich, and went back a couple of years later and was really well-dressed and had a bunch of gold coins in his pocket and needless to say his brother was not very pleased.

GIACHINO:  Didn't he publish in his brother's paper under another name?

SKOUSEN:  Yes, his pseudonym was Silence Dogood.  But when his older brother James discovered that Ben Franklin was the author, Silence Dogood, he said he could not do any more writing for them.  So basically his relationship was hurt.  Franklin was a natural, he was creative and he was an entrepreneurial type of person.  He got stifled working in Boston and so he went off to Philadelphia and that was a smart move.  He became a rich man.

GIACHINO:  I understand that Franklin has some 4,000 descendents, with about 900 scattered throughout the U.S. - you being one of them.  I understand that there is going to be a family reunion of sorts in April in Philadelphia.  When I think of Ben Franklin, I don't really think of him as a family man.  Am I being unfair?

SKOUSEN:  Yes, I think you are because he did talk about an errata in his life which was the siring of an illegitimate son, William.  But he was a doting father, very devoted to his wife Deborah when they were together.  He had a daughter Sarah and a young son Frankie, who died unfortunately of smallpox when he was four or five, and he took care of his grandkids when William took off.  I think he was very much a family man even though you hear many stories of him being an old lecher and so forth.  But you have to remember that when he was over in England his wife refused to cross the ocean - she had an extreme aversion to going over the ocean, just as people today do not like to fly.  So Franklin did everything he could to coax her to come, and she just adamantly refused. So they just gradually grew apart and they wrote letters and stuff like that.  But family meant a lot to Franklin and so I don't think it is fair to characterize him as just a promiscuous womanizer.

GIACHINO:  Okay, I stand corrected. 

We have another call.  Go ahead caller, it's your turn.

CALLER:  I think that some of the books that have recently been written - McCullough's books and so forth, they shed a lot of light on Franklin and I think that it is quite definite that the reason why he left Boston was because he rebelled against Calvinism and he went to a city that he thought he would have a lot more freedom in.  Even though he developed a relationship with the great evangelist George Whitfield and published a number of his books in German, he definitely turned against evangelical Christianity later in life and he got very involved with Free Masonry and with Voltaire.  And of course William was illegitimate.  And over in France he had a real reputation as being a womanizer.  I think the record bears testimony to all of this.

SKOUSEN:  Well, I would certainly agree with you that Franklin disliked the dogmatism of the evangelicals.  There is no doubt about that.  He felt the same way about the Quakers and others who had an extreme point of view.  He was very much a pragmatist and a practical believer, if you will, not a churchgoer.  He was into good works.  He certainly gave money to all kinds of religious organizations so he is not anti-religion in that respect.  In France, if you read his accounts, he was enamored by the French people and the French people were enamored by him.  But there was no indication that he was just going around and having relations with every woman coming along or anything like that.  He was very respectful in that sense.

So I think there is a balance there.  It is true that his son William also sired an illegitimate son named Temple.  Franklin raised Temple and then Temple was Franklin's secretary over in France and Temple also had an illegitimate son.  So you can make the case on both sides.

McCullough, you have to remember, wrote a book on John Adams, not on Ben Franklin and he seems to take Adams' side, which I think is rather irresponsible.  I think that Adams rather hurt the American cause in France but this is a debatable point and I think you can make the case in both directions.  But Franklin really was a tremendous patriot and I give him high marks for doing a lot for this country.

GIACHINO:  Dr. Skousen, I know you have other commitments with it being the 300^th anniversary of the birth of Ben Franklin.  I want to thank you for taking the time to come on this program to discuss your new book - The Compleated Autobiography by Ben Franklin.  Thank you so much for joining us.

SKOUSEN:  My pleasure.