So there's a press behind me that's older than I am, older than most people watching this. And the guy whose words this show is named after spent more of his life in front of a machine like the one behind me than he ever spent in a powdered wig. He sat tight by hand, he sold papers as a boy in Boston, and he ran away at 17 with almost nothing in his pockets, walked into a Philadelphia print shop, and looked for work. By 23, he had bought his own newspaper. By 26, he was publishing an almanac, under a fake name, of course, that became one of the best-selling books in colonial America. And on his own gravestone, he asked for one job title, printer, not founder, not statesman, not philosopher, all of which he could have easily claimed, but printer. So we're starting our first season here to celebrate America's 250th anniversary with reflection in front of a machine that he would have recognized in five seconds. Because what Benjamin Franklin understood about a press is the same thing he understood about a country. Both of them are tools. Neither runs by itself. You walk away from one for a generation, and you don't have a free society. You have whatever fills the silence. September of 1787, Philadelphia, Independence Hall. Franklin is 81. He has gout so bad that his joints have stopped cooperating. Kidney stones have wrecked his summer. He can't walk from his house on Market Street to the state house on Chestnut, even though it's only a few blocks away. So every morning four men carry him over in a sedan chair, the kind of contraption you'd expect to see a French aristocrat in, not the most famous American alive at the time. And inside that hall, for nearly four months, fifty-five men have been arguing in secret. The doors have been closed, sentries are posted, no public, no press, no notes leaving the room. Just a small group of guys in August heat trying to figure out on paper whether a free people can govern themselves over a continent without a king to hold it all together. And on the morning of September 17th, they sign. The next day, the eighteenth, the doors open and the delegates start walking out into the street, into the general public. Word is spreading throughout town, a crowd is gathering. People want to know what happened in there. A woman in that crowd steps forward. Her name is Elizabeth Powell. She's one of the most politically connected Americans of her generation. A woman who corresponded regularly with George Washington for 30 years and hosted him personally at her own dinner table, who ran one of the most important political salons in the country at the time, when the country was still being argued into existence. She asks Franklin a very direct question. We know about it because a Maryland delegate named James McHenry sat down that day and wrote it in his diary. That diary is now in the Library of Congress. So she asks him this question Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy? And Franklin answers her with five of the most famous words in American history. A republic if you can keep it. If you can keep it. That's the line. Not here's your free country, enjoy it. Not we've guaranteed your freedom forever. Not you're welcome, we did this for you. A republic. Five simple words, if you can keep it. The entire sentence is built around the if. Now I want to be candid with you about something as we're getting into this story. Some historians think McHenry may have sharpened that quote a little bit later when he was in his own political fights and wanted to remind people what was at stake. And maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But the line has survived 239 years for a reason. It survived because every generation that read it recognized something very true about the country that they just had inherited. The Republic is not a gift, it's a commission to preserve a great experiment. Welcome to If We Can Keep It, and I'm your host, Aaron Evans. This show is built for one specific audience. It's for people who actually run things in this country. Owners, executives, office holders, leaders, pastors. The Americans who begin on Mondays before the inbox does. The men and women who are going to make 10 decisions this week that no one outside of the room is ever going to see. And the country we hand our children is going to be the sum of those decisions. Over the next 12 episodes, we're walking back through moments where the Republic almost didn't survive, where it nearly broke, where ordinary Americans in conditions that should have crushed them put a shoulder under it and held it up. We're turning 250 this year. And a 250th birthday, it's not a parade. It's an inventory. It's something that we can celebrate, but it's also a point of reflection for us to look at the next 250 years. So let me show you what exactly happened in that hall uh in the summer of 1787. The summer almost broke the convention before it produced a single page. The delegates disagreed on nearly everything that mattered. Large states wanted representation by population. Small states wanted equal votes regardless of size. Southern states still depended on enslaved labor and wanted the institution protected in the founding document. Northern states were already moving away from it. On the question of the presidency, some delegates wanted a king in everything but name. Others wanted a committee. Alexander Hamilton wanted an executive who served for life. For nearly four months in a closed room in Philadelphia Heat, these guys brokered the deals. They compromised, they walked out and they came back, and they produced a document the world had never seen before. Not because it was perfect. It wasn't. It still protected slavery. It excluded women from the vote. It counted some human beings as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation while denying them every right that representation was meant to secure. Those were real failures written into the founding text, and Americans would spend the next two centuries paying for those in blood and law. But inside the same document was something that was very special, something the world hadn't tried at scale. It included a mechanism for self-correction. Amendment, independent courts, regular elections, a free press, which the First Amendment would protect within four years. A separation of powers built deliberately so that no general, no president, no faction, no mob could collect the whole thing in one set of hands. Self-corrective mechanisms that would later provide solutions for the very problems the first edition of the documents protected into existence. This is what made these documents so spectacular and so unique in world history. On the last day of the convention, September 17th, Franklin stood up with a speech he had written, but he was too weak to deliver himself. He handed this speech to his fellow Pennsylvania delegate, James Wilson, who read it out loud for him. It's one of the most honest things a public man has ever put on the record. He quoted, I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. And then Franklin said something more remarkable that many public officials could learn from today. He told them that if every man in the room walked out and went home and started complaining about the parts he didn't like, the whole project was going to fall apart. He asked them on the strength of his name and his age and his fifty years of public service to sign the document. Thirty-nine of them did right then and there. And the next morning, the 18th, Franklin came out into the street. A woman asked her question, and he gave his most famous answer. A republic, if you can keep it. I want to say something here I've been thinking about for a while. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, I am completely convinced he would be the first founder to record a podcast. This is the guy who ran the press. This is the guy who published the almanac under a fake name. This is the guy who wrote pamphlets and broadsides and letters to editors his entire life. Because he understood better than almost anyone in the founding generation that a free country runs on a free flow of ideas. Words mattered to him. Knowledge mattered to him. He believed a vibrant nation depended on regular people in regular conversations, working through hard ideas out loud. That's what he did with a printing press. It's what he'd do with a microphone today. And honestly, I'm sitting here in front of one because I think he would tell me there's no better way to celebrate our nation's 250th anniversary than pick up a microphone and record a podcast about what got us here. So I also want to provide further clarity on this. I'm not recording this podcast because I think I personally deserve to be the one that's heard. I'm not doing it because I'm anything special. I'm not. I'm one of you. I'm I'm just a normal person. I'm doing it because the ideas we are going to talk about on this show are special. And our freedom demands that we use our speech to protect it. We can only protect those things that we take time to know about and understand. That's what Franklin would have done if he were here to celebrate our 250th. So I'm picking up the press. That's the commission he left us. There's a line of Franklin's that doesn't get quoted as often as it should. I think it belongs right next to the famous one. In that signing speech, the one James Wilson read that we discussed earlier, he said this quote, every form of government can be a blessing to the people if it's well administered. And then he said the part that should make every person in a position of authority sit up today. He said that even a good government can only end in despotism when the people get so corrupted that they need to be ruled, because they're no longer capable of ruling themselves. That's the warning that Franklin attached to this amazing gift that we have been given in America. We can lose a republic two different ways, from the top by power-hungry elites who grab too much and won't give it back to the people, or from the bottom by a public that has gotten so soft and so distracted and so willing to be lied to that a strongman starts to feel like a relief. He thought both threats were real. He was right, and they both still are very real today. So what's the work of keeping it practically? For someone listening to this on a Tuesday morning in a truck or a kitchen or corner office, it's not mysterious. Franklin's own life provides the manual for this. He printed the truth, including when it cost him friends, money, and a comfortable retirement. He served when his body had every right to send him home. He stayed in the argument when easier men would have walked away. He signed his name to imperfect things and worked to make them less imperfect after he signed them. You can run a company that way. You can run a campaign that way, you can hold an office that way. The Republic doesn't need you to be heroic today. It just needs you to be honest today, to say the true thing out loud, in the room where it matters, that only you are in, that I'm not, or your neighbor's not, but you're there. So speak the truth where it matters, with your name attached, to take responsibility for what is yours, to show up to the meeting that you'd rather just skip, to defend in writing the institution under your own roof. Whether it's a board or a chamber or a court or a newsroom or a small business or a precinct or a district in Congress. The country has never been kept by people who needed a parade. It's been kept by people who did the regular work on an average morning. So here's a challenge. Ben Franklin would approve of for everyone of us listening this week. Find the conversation in your life that you've been avoiding, not the small one, the real one. The board that you've been managing instead of leading, the memo that you've been softening because the truth in it is too inconvenient, even though everyone needs to hear it. The personnel decision that you keep delaying and moving to next Friday. The press call that you've been ducking because you know that what you're going to say is going to be unpopular. The line you've been meaning to draw in the sand, but you haven't. The uncomfortable conversation that you need to have with someone that you've been unwilling to have. Just pick one. Have the conversation before the end of this week. Be honest and real. Put your name on it. Make the decision in writing. Don't delay until next week a problem that you can begin addressing today, because it never gets better with delay, only larger. And there were many imperfect conversations and ideas that were going back and forth during this period of time that these men were locked into a room together in Philadelphia. But they did the hard work. They had the difficult conversations. They had the disagreements. And they came out with something that has lasted for 250 years with the greatest experiment in the history of the world. You can be that one citizen keeping one peace of one republic on an average day in one place. And honestly, if you know, it it's almost exactly the move Franklin made walking down the steps that morning. When Miss Powell asked her question, he didn't give her the answer that flattered her. He didn't give her the answer that protected him. He gave her the true one. He gave her the truth. He told her that the country she had just inherited wasn't a gift, but a job. He passed it to her. She passed it to the people in the street, and it's been in getting passed down ever since. And it comes to us now, here on America's 250th anniversary. If this episode hit home, do me a quick favor, follow the show, subscribe wherever you're listening right now, whether it's Instagram, YouTube, and send it to someone who needs the reminder that the country isn't going to keep itself. An owner, an executive, an office holder, a friend who's raising kids who are just going to inherit whatever we hand down to them. Because next week, the Republic almost didn't survive its first winter. The men who held it together were cold, hungry, barefoot in the snow, and most of them hadn't even been paid in months. The guy in charge of the whole thing writes a letter from a stone farmhouse that gave Congress three options for what was about to happen to the Army. We're going to walk through all of that together next week here on A Republic if we can keep it.