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. But it gives you some sense of his historical and cultural status that Franklin, not a president, is the face on the highest denomination of currency now in circulation. (And he's been a figure in at least two musicals, "Ben Franklin in Paris" and "1776," so he has Broadway cred as well.)
Of all the Founding Fathers, Franklin is by far the most colorful, interesting and broadly experienced and talented; that he had his faults along with his substantial gifts is something that Ken Burns' informative, well-framed and entertaining PBS documentary — titled "Benjamin Franklin," with customary Burnsian simplicity — does not shy from saying.
Indeed, its indictments of 18th century racism — Franklin owned slaves but ended up an abolitionist — and the way the American Revolution further dispossessed Indigenous populations should make it controversial in those quarters currently dedicated to whitewashing, as it were, American history. There are things about his domestic life that make him seem less than a picture of perfect rectitude as well. He was full of contradictions, but you can't exactly call him a hypocrite; he viewed himself as a work in progress, and progressed, methodically charting his failures to live up to his own ideals and prescriptions.
