Bunch of Amateurs (5 page)

Adams had this vague sense that others had figured out how to get ahead
without
all the homework, and he felt clueless and even injured when he found himself in the shadow of such shrewdness. It was all so horrible, especially because no one was noticing Adams’s magnificent virtue and his strict adherence to the rules. In fact, people seemed to
prefer
the company of insufferable wretches who
swanned about town and grasped at popularity. And he despised it all as a cheap trick, as he explained to his wife, Abigail: “A man must be his own trumpeter—he must write or dictate paragraphs of praise in the newspapers; he must dress, have a retinue and equipage; he must ostentatiously publish to the world his own writings with his name … he must get his picture drawn, the statue made, and must hire all the artists in his turn to set about works to spread his name, make the mob stare and gape, and perpetuate his name.”

Here’s the problem, though: This trumpeter Adams grumbled about was Ben Franklin. And Franklin was the reason Adams was in Paris, ostensibly to work as his partner in the war effort to get French support for America’s struggling armies in 1778. Already the rumors of Franklin’s boozing and womanizing were legendary. How could he party all across Paris and attend to the business of salvaging the failing American Revolution? The Continental Congress had sent Adams there to watch over this old and famous man whom many of the founding fathers had come to see as America’s very own Falstaff, a mead-guzzling, woman-flirting raconteur, handy with the pithy one-liners but not very efficient at getting the hard work done. As a result, Adams simply mistrusted Franklin. Yet that was the man Adams was slated to meet at Versailles on that May morning to make proper introductions at the Court.

At the time, an appearance before the king was a highly ritualized affair. One had to dress the part of a formal gentleman, which meant a stylized version of a knight pledged to the chivalric code—i.e., clean breeches, fine boots, laced cuffs, a sword, and a powdered wig. There were actually shops nearby to Versailles that catered to this getup, just as teenagers attending the prom today can rent a tuxedo. Near the gates, one could even find a sword-monger to rent you a fine-looking cutlass with gold hilt, an essential piece of the entire costume. So, picture it. There is John Adams in formal French court clothing, standing around, expectant. He has his sword and powdered wig. His cuffs are perfectly set to reveal the stitched finery of rich lace. Slay
me, Percy, if he isn’t a dashing pimpernel. Don’t say John Adams doesn’t know the rules! His perfumes are an exquisite blend. His breeches are fresh and pressed, his over-jacket cut just so, all according to court protocol as pronounced by the effete chamberlains who literally looked you up and down and vetted the costume of each man approaching the king’s personage and/or his representatives.

So Adams is feeling quite good about himself. He is here to meet the King of France, win over more support, and do his fetal nation proud. And now, here comes his partner’s carriage. I like to imagine the horses halting, the wheels braking, and Adams’s moon face tilting slightly to catch a partial glimpse of the, even then, world famous hangdog eyes and sly smirk of Ben Franklin. The carriage door’s iron latches turn with a tiny crunching sound and the door opens wide.

But I’m not going to bring Franklin, the notorious trumpeter, out of the carriage just yet, because, at this point, you won’t get the joke. (This is always the problem with history, so much huffing and puffing.) You can’t really appreciate the unbearable lightness of the moment until you have a sense of the petty soap opera playing out between these two crucial Americans and the broader quarrels that dominated French society at that time. Along with the mud, Franklin stepped from his carriage into all of that, too.

More important, what happens here is one of those great moments in American history, specifically in the way our nation comes to be thought of as a bunch of amateurs. We often apply that word to garage inventors or athletes who can’t make the cut. Or we think of it as a broad word that implies poor quality or mediocre talent. I want to argue that the word took on several meanings when it crossed the pond and that together they form a kind of story, an American story. And this story often involves, at the beginning, an act of fraudulence, of assuming a new name or donning a disguise, of pretending that you are something that you are not. This story gets repeated over and over again and far more often than people might think. It constitutes
a hidden history of America. And while there are many places in our past where one could say it began, I am going to locate it right here, with Franklin’s exit from the carriage, because it was an instant in history as daring as it was hilarious. With nothing but a bit of ad-libbing on Franklin’s part, a fresh figure is about to be born: the New World amateur and the soul of the American character.

During the Revolutionary War itself, few really understood just what Ben Franklin was up to. From our point of view, we see him as just another founding father. But the other revolutionaries didn’t see him that way at all.

At this time in Paris, Franklin was seventy-two years old. John Adams was forty-three years old, Thomas Jefferson was thirty-five, and James Madison was twenty-seven years old. They had not yet earned their bones. Franklin already had one gouty foot in the history books. He was not just famous. He was world famous. The subject of his fame—the taming of lightning—had about it a kind of pre-Darwinian grandeur. He had demystified one of the last natural phenomena widely perceived to be God’s direct and immediate interferences in man’s events. Some felt he had overstepped the bounds of humility. Others thought that, having literally stolen God’s thunder, some of it had rubbed off on Franklin himself. In many quarters, he was considered not simply a scientist, but perhaps the greatest scientist since Isaac Newton. It’s a role every century or so assigns to one individual.

Consider how the twentieth century elevated Albert Einstein as scientific genius who rose from patent clerk to fuzzy-haired icon with twinkling eyes and mischievous sense of humor. By the time I got into college, that ideal of intellect was yielding to the computer and so our new icon would become a great mind literally bound inside a machine. We see it every time Stephen Hawking’s crumpled body is wheeled out into a lecture hall to talk to us. Withered and slumped to one side, his face a human rhombus, Hawking flashes an elfin smile as his B-movie metallic voice explains his central idea, so monstrously big it is actually called the Grand Unified Theory of the universe.

Ben Franklin was this character in his time. All the world saw him as both the most mysterious and the perfect creation of the New World. He had not only bottled lightning, he had cranked out hundreds of inventions. With his stringy hair and Buddhist paunch and sly grin (the puckish sense of humor seems to be the common denominator of genius), he looked the part as it was conceived then.

Given the generational difference and his insurmountable greatness, no one quite knew what to make of Franklin’s conversion to the Revolution. Especially John Adams. So how perverse was it that destiny would throw these two opposites together at so many crucial moments—they both were chosen to edit Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, they parleyed with the French about wartime alliances, and later they went to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.

The two men had a history, long before they ever got to Paris on this trip, and they would have a history long afterward. Think of them as the twin poles of the American psyche. They show up at nearly every crucial event of our founding, two cartoon figures standing on Lady Liberty’s shoulders, whispering in her ear.

John Adams was a man who believed in civic virtue, that the core measure of a man was his essential goodness (or absence of it). Adams believed you said what you meant. He fervently believed that you got
smart decisions by promoting good people to make them. Franklin believed in civic action and that words could (and maybe should) be deceptive. As Franklin put it to Adams on this trip: success in Paris would “depend more on what we do than what we say.” Good people were never a suitable replacement for good deeds.

Or to put it another way, Franklin thought Adams was an officious prick. Adams thought Franklin was a decadent blowhard. Their relationship is key to the creation of the mythic American tinkerer of the Old World’s imagination.

Adams came to his disgust with Franklin slowly. When he and Franklin were sent to New York during the earliest days of the fighting, in the hopes of negotiating some resolution with Admiral Howe after the Battle of Long Island, the two of them had to bunk together at the various inns as they traveled. One night, in New Jersey, Franklin threw open the window to ventilate the room even though many people thought that illness came from “out there.” Adams explained to Franklin that he was “afraid of the evening air.” But Franklin had long ago noticed that “nobody ever got a cold by going into a cold church, or any other cold air.” Adams knew of Franklin’s theory because he’d read it, but he’d written that “the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox.”

“Come!” Franklin shouted to Adams. “Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you.” Then he added a line in which, despite the intervening centuries, one can hear the insufferable preamble of the pompous know-it-all. “I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

Of course, Franklin’s theory is right, but in Adams’s writings you can sense his—for now, friendly—weariness: “The Doctor then began a harangue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together.”

By the time Adams arrived in Paris, Franklin had long been
working the salons and parlors trying to win over the locals. His strategy was to go slow and grasp the lay of the land before deciding how best to make the approach. To do this, he spent a lot of time socializing and indulging in French life of that time. Literally, he just partied.

To a man like Adams, Franklin was sunk in debauchery and doing unspeakable things with the ladies. Franklin was known to have played chess with a notorious lady named Madame Anne-Louise d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy while she bathed in her tub. He had attended dinners where women just plopped into Franklin’s lap, showered him in kisses, and purred,
“mon cher papa.”
Women who might otherwise seem honorable would casually flop an arm around Franklin’s shoulder. It was outrageous, Adams complained, such “incessant dinners and dissipation.” Why couldn’t they just go to the king and ask for help and money?

Franklin had already figured out that was premature. France had lost a war to England, and other nations were rising up. Russia under Catherine the Great had just recognized Poland and for all intents and purposes had declared itself a new and major player in continental affairs. The foreign minister of France at this time was Comte de Vergennes, a cunning militarist who desperately wanted to re-arm France and challenge England via the American conflict. (The scholar Jonathan Dull told me he considered Vergennes the Oliver North of the eighteenth century.) Vergennes had let Franklin know that building support in the town, sitting quietly, and waiting for the propitious moment were crucial.

France was ruled by one of the most famous kings on the earth, Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis XVI. But he was only twenty-four years old at the time, and straight talk would probably spook him. Sure, the French hated the Brits, and on that level, no problem, but here come some American bumpkins who want his support in overthrowing another … king? Might that not come back to haunt him?

Franklin chose not to confide in Adams about his own strategy
because Franklin had long ago learned that secrecy in diplomacy is key. Before Adams, there had been a succession of co-diplomats who despised Franklin for the same, understandable reasons. When Franklin forgot to tell Arthur Lee that he’d changed messengers, Lee exploded that Franklin’s neglect was “one of the deepest injuries that can be offered to a gentleman, a direct and unjust judgment of his veracity.” Another, Ralph Izard, found Franklin equally despicable and told Adams when he got to town that “Dr. Franklin was one of the most unprincipled men upon earth: that he was a man of no veracity, no honor, no integrity, as great a villain as ever breathed.”

Franklin simply ignored his partners, and he expressed his true thoughts in a letter to Izard that he never sent: “It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation.”

He also realized that the Parisians’ interest in him as a Great Man drove his partners insane: “I am too much respected, complimented and caressed by the people in general,” he wrote, and so when it came to his diplomatic partners in Paris, he simply chose to dismiss “those unhappy gentlemen; unhappy indeed in their tempers, and in the dark uncomfortable passions of jealousy, anger, suspicion, envy, and malice.”