If we are reckoning by money, Benjamin Franklin — the man on the $100 bill — is 20...
If we are reckoning by money, Benjamin Franklin — the man on the $100 bill — is 20 times as important as Abraham Lincoln, 100 times as important as George Washington and 10 times as important as Alexander Hamilton, notwithstanding"Hamilton." This is bad math, of course, because there is no reckoning by which Andrew Jackson is four times as important than Lincoln, or 20 times as important than Washington.
Peter Coyote, the customary Voice of Burns, is our narrator, with a croaky Mandy Patinkin speaking Franklin's own words — of which he left many, including an unfinished autobiography and a wealth of aphorisms still in common use.
Born in Puritan Boston, formally schooled for only two years, Franklin raised himself on books. His first great act was a bid for freedom, breaking his indentures to his printer brother James and fetching up penniless in Philadelphia at 17, where his abilities and industry made him prosperous and influential enough to essentially retire at 42, devoting himself henceforth to scientific experiments, intellectual correspondence, civic works and what would become national politics.
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