# Were the Founding Fathers Generalists? What a 5,000-Book Library Tells Us

Canonical: https://michaeljkram.com/blog/were-the-founding-fathers-generalists/

By Michael J. Kram · October 1, 2026 · 6 min read

> Franklin and Jefferson get called polymaths. I think the better word is generalists, and I think they were trained, not born.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are the two Founders most often called polymaths. A polymath is someone who learns deeply in many fields and puts them to work together. Franklin printed newspapers and ran the colonial post, and in his spare hours he flew the kite and invented bifocals. Jefferson designed Monticello and drafted the Declaration. He also played the violin and collected fossils. Neither had a specialist's training in most of it.

That's the short answer. The long answer is the argument of my book, and I'd rather you fight with it than nod along.

## Short answer: which Founders were polymaths

Start with the two everyone names. Franklin's own *Autobiography* says his father took him out of school at ten to cut wicks and boil soap. He was apprenticed to his brother James, a printer, at twelve. From that shop he worked his way into stove design, then electricity, then a chart of the Gulf Stream, and at the end into the diplomacy that brought France into the war.

Jefferson went to William & Mary, then read law under George Wythe. After that he taught himself architecture from books and drew the plans for his own house and, late in life, for the University of Virginia.

Then the ones who get left off the list. John Adams farmed and practiced law, then drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. James Madison spent the year before the 1787 Convention reading the history of every confederacy he could find and wrote it up as his notes on ancient and modern confederacies. George Washington held a county surveyor's commission at seventeen and later ran a working plantation with a distillery and a gristmill. Those are three careers in one man, in each case.

## What made them polymaths: reading, letters, trades

Three habits show up again and again.

Reading. Jefferson wrote to John Adams on June 10, 1815, "I cannot live without books." He meant it literally. More on that below.

Letters. These men argued on paper for decades. Adams and Jefferson stopped writing to each other for years, made up in 1812, and kept the letters going until both died on July 4, 1826. A letter forces you to explain a field to someone outside it. That's generalist practice whether you call it that or not.

Trades. Printer, surveyor, farmer, lawyer. A trade teaches you that a theory has to survive contact with wood and weather. Book learning without a trade makes a scholar. Book learning with one makes a man who can fix the thing.

## The libraries they built

My book says the first of the Founders' "only" resources was a 5,000-volume library. I wrote that number. The book doesn't say whose library, and I won't pretend it's a catalog entry. Take it as my shorthand for the books a working generation of Founders could put their hands on.

For a real yardstick, two libraries are documented down to the volume.

The Library of Congress records that Congress bought Jefferson's personal library in 1815 for $23,950 and received 6,487 volumes. Congress needed it because the British had destroyed its first collection in 1814. One Virginian's private shelves restocked the national library.

Franklin went at it from the other end. In 1731 he and the members of his Junto club founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, a subscription library where tradesmen pooled their money to buy books none of them could afford alone. Glaziers and surveyors read off the same shelf as a printer. That is how you build generalists on a working man's income.

And the common household, at least as the story goes: in the book I pass along that "It has been said that our Founders usually owned a Bible, and if they could afford a second book, it was usually Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law." Blackstone's *Commentaries* ran four volumes, published from 1765 to 1769. Two books, read hard, can take a man a long way.

## Did they train generalists on purpose?

I argue they did. The whole book hangs on one line from the Notice:

> Their "only" resources were a 5,000-volume library, their education and literacy, and a special skill I'll call generalism.

M. Kram, *Common Sense 2.0*, Notice

And a few lines down: "The Founders did not beat those odds by stumbling into a majority of generalists: they trained them." The odds I mean are my own estimate that generalists occur "roughly one per million births." Nobody has a census of that. It's my number, and I put it out so someone can test it.

Two documents point the same direction. In 1749 Franklin published *Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania*, which led to the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania. He wanted students taught what was useful across the professions, not one narrow track. In 1779 Jefferson put his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge before the Virginia legislature: free basic schooling for ordinary children, with the brightest sent further at public cost. Virginia never passed it as written. The intent is on paper anyway.

Purpose doesn't prove results. I know that. But a generation that writes education bills between wars was not leaving its thinkers to chance.

## What we lost, according to Common Sense 2.0

My thesis is blunt: "the Founders were saturated with generalists; today we have none." I argue that is the whole difference between 1776 and 2026, the two ends of 250 years.

We kept the specialists. We have more of them than any country in history, and they're good at their lanes. What we stopped producing is the person who stands between the lanes and asks which one the problem actually lives in. Every field reports to its own peers, and nobody reports to the country.


I put the 1776 and 2026 sides next to each other in the book in one plain sentence: "Here is where the Founders stood: truly exceptional. Here is where we stand: not so good." You can call that harsh. Then tell me who, today, plays Franklin's part: printer, scientist, postmaster, diplomat, all in one working life.

## Try it: one exercise from 1776-style self-education

Franklin describes this drill in his *Autobiography*. He'd take an essay from *The Spectator*, jot a short hint for each sentence, put the hints away for a few days, then rewrite the essay from the hints alone and compare it with the original. Where his version was weaker, he saw exactly why.

Do it this week with one page of the Federalist or the Declaration:

1. Write a one-line hint for each sentence.
2. Wait three days.
3. Rebuild the page from your hints.
4. Compare. Mark every word the original used that you didn't have.

Then add those words to a notebook. In Appendix 4 I tell readers to "do start a personal dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia of new and confusing words." That notebook is where the training starts. It costs a pencil.

If you want the full case that the Founders trained generalists and that we can do it again, it's in *Common Sense 2.0*: about 40 pages, roughly 40 minutes, with the three training games in Appendix 4. The EPUB is $3.99, and the file is yours the minute you pay. Read it, then prove me wrong.

## Questions

### Which Founding Fathers were polymaths?

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are the two named most often. John Adams and James Madison worked across law and history. George Washington was a surveyor and a farmer before he was a general.

### What is the difference between a polymath and a generalist?

A polymath knows a lot about many fields. A generalist, as I use the word, sees how those fields connect and uses that to solve a problem none of them solves alone.

### How big was Thomas Jefferson's library?

The Library of Congress records that Congress bought Jefferson's library in 1815 for $23,950, and that it received 6,487 volumes.

### Did the Founders train generalists on purpose?

I argue they did. Franklin's 1749 education proposal and Jefferson's 1779 bill for public schooling both aimed at broad learning for ordinary citizens, not narrow training.