Benjamin Franklin was, as the children say these days, built different.
The Pennsylvanian founding father studiously maintained a chart bearing seven columns, for each day of the week, and 13 rows, one for each of 13 central virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Each week, Franklin committed to focus on practicing one such virtue and colored each cell with a black mark every night before he went to bed when he failed sufficiently to live up to any of the other virtues.
Would that we modern mortals, struggling as we do to complete much more mundane daily task lists, valued and cultivated virtue as diligently and systematically as the founding generation! Given the exigencies of today’s economy, the pettiness of our politics, the polarization of our society, and the pernicious influence of social media, devoting ourselves to the characteristics highlighted by Franklin and his cohort, channeling classical philosophers, seems impossible.
Not so, writes Jeffrey Rosen (no relation), the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, in his illuminating and inspiring new book. Indeed, Rosen contends, not only is cultivating virtue critical to individual and communal comity, it is also the sine qua non of the pursuit of happiness — the title of his book and the third (and perhaps the most important and least understood) unalienable right articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
Without virtue, Franklin wrote, “Man can have no Happiness in this World.” Indeed, it is through the pursuit, not the achievement, of such happiness that we find meaning. “Tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavor, a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” Or, as Cicero put it millennia earlier, “The mere search for higher happiness, not merely its actual attainment, is a prize beyond all human wealth or honor or physical pleasure.”
But how did the founders practice virtue, and how can we? Rosen traverses the writings and readings of our Founding Fathers, including their ancient sources, to discern what we might today call their “best practices” in improving themselves. “Today we think of happiness as the pursuit of pleasure,” Rosen writes. “But classical and Enlightenment thinkers defined happiness as the pursuit of virtue — as being good, rather than feeling good.”
Rosen loosely assigns each of Franklin’s cardinal virtues (save chastity, perhaps because it’s outdated?) to a different figure in American history, at times to underscore how devotedly he or she practiced it, at others to demonstrate how they failed to do so. Franklin himself is associated with temperance, in part thanks to his famous coinage of “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” and in part due to his relinquishing of his household slaves.
John Adams takes up the virtue of humility, with which he struggled his entire life. “Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal Vice and cardinal Folly,” our second president confided to his diary. While Adams carefully studied the Stoic philosophers in the original Greek and Latin, he labored to tame his own self-regard, even at the expense of multiple high-profile fallings-out with erstwhile allies. But over the course of his political career and with the help of the tender but persistent blandishments of his beloved Abigail, Adams eventually reached rapprochements with once-bitter rivals, including Thomas Jefferson, who defeated his 1800 reelection bid.
For his part, Jefferson suffered from a lack of industry, a trait he nevertheless praised to high heavens. “Never trouble another with what you can do yourself,” he instructed his granddaughter, and yet he maintained hundreds of slaves to carry out all of his manual labor. Still, Jefferson adopted a modified version of Franklin’s list of virtues and expressly recognized, however hypocritically, their essentiality.
Jefferson also struggled to practice frugality, although not as much as James Wilson, whose writings on happiness found their way into the Declaration. A merchant and land speculator, as well as a scholar at what would become the University of Pennsylvania, the Scotsman Wilson lived far beyond his means and found himself thrown into debtors’ prison on several occasions.
For sincerity, none can top Phillis Wheatley, a liberated African slave whose remarkable late 18th-century poetry Rosen helps excavate for the general public. “Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years,” Wheatley wrote in 1766, “O leave me not to the false joys of time.” It would have been easy for Wheatley, who had arrived in Boston on a slave ship five years earlier, to succumb to despair, given the striking mismatch between the high-flown rhetoric of liberty and the gritty reality of slavery. “Let virtue reign,” she wrote, midwar, in 1777, “Be victory ours, and generous freedom theirs.” But she kept the faith and inspired others through her sincere faith in the human spirit.
George Washington, for whom Wheatley had written a poem and with whom she had corresponded, embodied resolution, persistence, and level-headedness in the face of extraordinary turmoil. Washington’s “temper was naturally irritable and high toned,” Jefferson wrote, “but reflection & resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendancy over it.” Indeed, our first president, during wartime, urged the troops under his command to evince “patient virtue,” and, in his celebrated Farewell Address, invoked “Charity, humility & pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion.”
While most of the virtues Rosen explores are well matched to his subjects, as with justice and Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, others seem disconnected, such as cleanliness and John Quincy Adams. Other of these virtues run together at times, and certain heroes are recycled, as when both moderation, represented by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, and tranquility, personified by the reconciled Jefferson and Adams, are described as the triumph of reason over passion. In the Federalist Papers, Madison cautioned, “In all very numerous assemblies, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason,” while Hamilton — who, as we know from the play, fell prey to his personal passions — lamented upon Washington’s death how “passion wrests the helm from reason.” Similarly, late-in-life Jefferson and Adams agreed that, of ancient philosophers like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Epicurus, “their precepts related chiefly to ourselves, and the government of those passions which, unrestrained, would disturb our tranquility of mind.”
In addition, Rosen himself occasionally succumbs to certain modern vices, or at least feels compelled to obey certain regnant pieties, such as when he ensures he name-checks black historical figures and the Bhagavad Gita in a way that feels crowbarred in or when he contorts his prose to avoid using the now-verboten words “slave” and “master.” He also elides the true origin of the Jewish Mussar movement: the 18th-century Italian scholar Moshe Chayim Luzzatto’s masterpiece Mesilat Yesharim, or The Path of the Upright, whose virtues closely track those identified and pursued by Franklin.
More problematically, he takes it as axiomatic that just as the founders looked to the ancients for inspiration in cultivating virtue, so too should we moderns emulate the founders. But this is far easier said than done. For his part, in writing his book, Rosen, as he has revealed on several podcasts (including his own superb show on constitutional jurisprudence), dedicated hours each day to careful reading, reflection, and composing sonnets, styled at the beginning of each chapter as “notes” on a variety of ancient compositions. But who in our attention-starved digital landscape has the patience, discipline, and sheer time required to dedicate to such self-perfection?
And yet maybe that’s exactly the point: We are meant to pursue happiness, to strive for virtue, even if we, like many of the founders themselves, never fully achieve it. Perhaps, at a moment when our energies are devoted more to the virtual than the virtuous, The Pursuit of Happiness arrives as a welcome reminder of what’s important in life — and how to seek it.
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Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
