Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Page A

supporting James Franklin’s fight against the “oppressors and bigots” in Boston. Bradford had no job to offer, but he suggested that the young runaway continue on to Philadelphia and seek work with his son Andrew Bradford, who ran the family print shop and weekly newspaper there.
    Franklin arrived at Philadelphia’s Market Street wharf on a Sunday morning ten days after his departure from Boston. In his pocket he had nothing more than a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper, the latter of which he gave to the boatmen to pay for his passage. They tried to decline it, because Franklin had helped with the rowing, but he insisted. He also gave away two of the three puffy rolls he bought to a mother and child he had met on the journey. “A man [is] sometimes more generous when he has little money than when he has plenty,” he later wrote, “perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.” 3
    From his first moments in Philadelphia, Franklin cared about such appearances. American individualists sometimes boast of not worrying about what others think of them. Franklin, more typically, nurtured his reputation, as a matter of both pride and utility, and he became the country’s first unabashed public relations expert. “I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal,” he later wrote, “but to avoid all appearances of the contrary” (his emphasis). Especially in his early years as a young tradesman, he was, in the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “a self-created and self-willed man who moved through life at a calculated pace toward calculated ends.” 4
    With a population of two thousand, Philadelphia was then America’s second-largest village after Boston. Envisioned by William Penn as a “green country town,” it featured a well-planned grid of wide streets lined with brick houses. In addition to the original Quakers who had settled there fifty years earlier, the city named for brotherly love had attracted raucous and entrepreneurial German, Scotch, and Irish immigrants who turned it into a lively marketplace filled with shops and taverns. Though its economy was sputtering and most of its streets were dirty and unpaved, the tone set by both the Quakers and subsequent immigrants was appealing to Franklin. They tended to be diligent, unpretentious, friendly, and tolerant, especially compared to the Puritans of Boston.
    The morning after his arrival, rested and better dressed, Franklin called on Andrew Bradford’s shop. There he found not only the young printer but also his father, William, who had come from New York on horseback and made it there faster. Andrew had no immediate work for the runaway, so William brought him around to see the town’s other printer, Samuel Keimer—a testament both to Franklin’s charming ability to enlist patrons and to the peculiar admixture of cooperation and competition so often found among American tradesmen.
    Keimer was a disheveled and quirky man with a motley printing operation. He asked Franklin a few questions, gave him a composing stick to assess his skills, and then promised to employ him as soon as he had more work. Not knowing that William was the father of his competitor, Keimer volubly described his plans for luring away most of Andrew Bradford’s business. Franklin stood by silently, marveling at the elder Bradford’s craftiness. After Bradford left, Franklin recalled, Keimer “was greatly surprised when I told him who the old man was.”
    Even after this inauspicious introduction, Franklin was able to get work from Keimer while he lodged with the younger Bradford. When Keimer finally insisted that he find living quarters that were less of a professional conflict, he fortuitously was able to rent a room from John Read, the father of the young girl who had been so amused by his appearance the day he straggled off the boat. “My chest and clothes being come by this time, I made rather a more respectable appearance in the eyes of