The Construction Career Charitable Fund was inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet by Michael Meyer

 

Benjamin Franklin publicized his core beliefs: loyalty and patriotism, racial and gender equality, education and public service. But before signing away the last of his fortune, Franklin drew up an imaginative scheme. 

 

At a time when the demise of the United States seemed more likely than its success – when the banking system was fledgling and the dollar so unstable that it had yet to be made the official currency – Franklin placed a final bet on the “rising generation” of young tradesmen. 

 

To his hometowns of Boston and Philadelphia, he gifted twin funds to jump-start what we now call blue-collar careers. The money was to be continually doled out in low-interest loans across two hundred years. ON the bicentennial of his death, the accounts – fattened by centuries of earning compound interest – could be cased out and spent on civic improvements.

 

Franklin believed that skilled workers formed the foundation of American democracy. They provided crucial services while interacting daily with people of all classes, creeds, and colors. Essentially, they kept the pulse of a community’s street-level public and economic life and laid the groundwork (literally) of a healthy society. “Good apprentices,” Franklin wrote in his will, “are most likely to make good citizens.” 

 

What happened to Franklin’s fortune and his hopeful wager on the working class? Surprisingly, given the swings in the nation’s fortunes between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, his bet paid off, although not in the manner, or with the results, that he had predicted. But like the lessons from his life, Franklin’s death has much to teach us still.

 

“The slightest events in the life of a famous man,” eulogized one of his Parisian friends, “become the most interesting, when they give birth to a new way of thinking that all of a sudden changes the direction of his will.”