Bunch of Amateurs Page 4

  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.”

  Into this matrix of disinterested disregard came John Adams. What he saw when he observed Franklin’s behavior was a man sunk in immoral frivolity and Parisian decadence. This urbane love of Franklin was seen by Adams from the other end of the telescope, and he charged that Franklin had “a monopoly of reputation here, and an indecency in displaying it.” Or he was jealous of it: “When they spoke of him, they seem to think he was to restore the Golden Age.”

  To Adams, there was no strategy, but how would he know? Franklin mostly neglected him, too. Thus the letters of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, paint a portrait of a most despicable Ben Franklin. Adams is enraged when he realizes he’s traveled all this way to do nothing of any importance. He’s reduced to the role of clerk to Franklin, figuring out the accounts and balancing the books. Franklin barely talks to him. And it was the hypocrisy that galled him. Here he was neglected by Poor Richard himself, who had lectured Americans like some Puritan saint that “a little neglect may breed great mischief.”

  Sunk in despair and self-pity, Adams in another letter said that he was simply “hated.” He was a man “treading among burning plowshares, with horrid figures of jealousy, envy, hatred and revenge, vanity, ambition, avarice, treachery, tyranny, insolence, arranged on each side of his path and lashing him with scorpions all the way, and attempting at every step to trip up his heels.”

  Over the years, Franklin repeatedly observed Adams’s aimless rage (and possibly his baroque metaphors), and he later wrote: “I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

  The difference between the two boiled down to a moral split in approaches to the wider world—between “I say what I mean” (Adams) and “Actions speak louder than words” (Franklin). Adams’s entire worldview was a variation of the Protestant work ethic, the strict bearing of the Quaker, the virtue of the Puritan. Franklin possessed more of the pioneer’s make-do ethic, the down-to-earth philosophy of the dabbler fooling around in search of a working solution, the pragmatism of the Deist. This division between a Puritan’s view of the world, with its emphasis on revealed truth and expert ways of doing things, versus the Deist’s view of the world, with its emphasis on seeing what works and an improvisational way of doing things, is a fundamental tension between these two men. It is a tug between how you’re supposed to do things and how you might try to do things, between a kind of professionalism and amateurism.

  In Paris, Adams was up at 5 A.M. every morning and was distraught that the man who had penned the words “Early to bed, early to rise …” could rarely be found before lunch. The hypocrisy offended Adams’s P
uritan sensibility. Every day seemed another fresh outrage, such as when Adams finally got command of enough of the French language to realize that Franklin was, in fact, a terrible speaker. He was just winging it, faking, and getting by with gestures and wit. “Never was a country more imposed on by finesse,” Adams wrote.

  Soon enough, Adams and his sour attitude got left behind with Izard and the others. Franklin would not have much use for him, either. Adams was once again isolated, alone with his pen and his poisoned thoughts. “The longer I live and the more I see of public men, the more I wish to be a private one,” he concluded. When David McCullough, in his biography of Adams, wished to capture the seclusion and melancholy of this journey, he wrote this sentence about Adams: “ ‘Dined at home,’ became a frequent note in his diary.”

  As a man, Adams made the perfect foil to Franklin, in part because if Franklin was the undisputed master of his own talents, then Adams was the unforgiving amanuensis to his most hideous defects.

  When he did get invited to those parties with Franklin, Adams would come home disturbed that he lacked the “power of the face.” By “my physical constitution,” he wrote, “I am but an ordinary man.” Adams was a short, fat man with a doughy face, and he understood that this somehow hurt him. Think about what an insight this is in the pre-television era: “When I look in the Glass, my Eye, my Forehead, my Brow, my Cheeks, my Lips all betray this Relaxation.”

  There is a raw, honest quality to Adams in his own determined examination of his essential loserness. Again, here he is looking into the mirror: “I have insensibly fallen into a habit of affecting wit and humor, of shrugging my shoulders, and … distorting the muscles of my face. My motions are stiff and uneasy, ungraceful, and my attention is unsteady and irregular.” When he was a young man, even his friends ridiculed him. “I talk to Paine about Greek; that makes him laugh. I talk to Sam Quincy about Resolution, and being a great Man, and study and improving Time, which makes him laugh,” Adams wrote (strangely sounding like Robin Gibb when he sang that Bee Gees hit “I Started a Joke”). “I talk to Hannah and Esther about the folly of Love, about despizing it, about being above it, pretend to be insensible of tender Passions, which makes them laugh.” Unlike most kids with the KICK ME sign pinned to his backside, Adams knew it was there. Instead of taking it off, Adams spent a lifetime writing about it.

  When he considered, as a young man, that he might try to be cool and well regarded, he of course wrote about it: “Shall I look out for a Cause to Speak to, and exert all the Soul and all the Body I own, to cut a flash, strike amazement, to catch the Vulgar? In short shall I walk a lingering, heavy Pace or shall I take one bold determined Leap into the Midst of some Cash and Business? That is the question. A bold Push, a resolute attempt, a determined Enterprize, or a slow, silent imperceptible creeping. Shall I creep or fly?”

  Here’s why Adams is amazing: He decided to creep.

  Imagine his despair when a letter from the colonies flits over that February in 1779 appointing Franklin “minister plenipotentiary”—that is, the single and sole representative to the King of France. Arthur Lee was reassigned to Madrid. And what did the letter say about Adams?

  They forgot about him. The founding fathers back in the colonies neglected to reassign Adams. They didn’t even mention his name, as if they no longer remembered he was even in Paris. (We know Yosemite Sam’s reaction: Both six-shooters now firing in all directions, a funny dance, and lots of frontier gibberish at the top of his lungs.) Well, rhetorically, Adams almost got there: “The Scaffold is cutt away, and I am left kicking and sprawling in the Mire,” he wrote. “It is hardly a state of Disgrace that I am in but rather of Total Neglect and Contempt.”

  He immediately left Paris to catch a boat back to the United States. He had come to France to save his country, and instead all that happened was more mockery of John Adams. He fancied himself a brave paladin in the chivalrous service of freedom itself. Instead the world saw him differently, but why? He would contemplate that one on the way home, a trip for which Adams selected a great work of literature to study for his usual self-improving drudgery on the long trip across the sea. What book did Lady Liberty’s knight errant choose?

  Don Quixote.

  III. Franklin Steps from the Carriage

  But I can’t let Adams leave Paris just yet. Before he quixotically stormed off, there was this moment, his appointment at the gates of Versailles, when Franklin exited his coach. And Adams didn’t seem to quite understand what Franklin did understand: how different this particular visit was from all the others. On every other voyage, Franklin had been a British citizen. Now Franklin and Adams were Americans. But it was Franklin who understood that he was being looked at for the first time—gazed upon and studied … as an American. We had separated from England and were now being referred to as Americans. The sense that we were somehow different occupied people’s thoughts. How would they see us? What would they make of us? Franklin knew that he, as the most famous American, was suddenly cast in a role that went far beyond just being a diplomat. The center of all European culture was here, and they were anxious to see what Americans looked like and how they behaved. They were looking, specifically, at the person and character of Ben Franklin.

  So when he stepped from the carriage, it’s crucial to understand what the French were hoping to see when they looked. A fight was going on in Paris then about the very nature of Man, and in that quarrel the New World played a crucial part. A common view then held that the geographical climate of a place affected one’s very physical development. Others believed that what really mattered was the nature of the government under which one lived. It was a nature versus nurture fight; we still have them today.

  In the time that Franklin and Adams arrived in Paris, much of France believed that the relatively “new” climate of the New World stunted your growth and your mind. No, literally. It just seemed obvious to the French that Americans were smaller and somewhat stupider. American animals were understood to be punier, and our food crops were practically bonsai.

  According to Europe’s top scientists, the cooler American climate produced animals “mongelized, undersized, cowardly and a thousand times less dangerous than those of Asia and Africa.” The American Indians found on the land were understood to be “a mere animal of the first rank” who “lacked vigor and endurance, were sexually frigid and perverted, unprolific, hairless, insensitive to pain, short-lived, and afflicted by a list of ills and perversions ranging from irregular menstruation to the eating of iguanas.” Once Europeans moved to America, the men actually started to shrink, the women ceased to be fertile, and the domesticated livestock shriveled and became lethargic.

  If things weren’t more flaccid and dull-witted, then they were just very, very strange. A widely known fact at the time was that American bears attacked cows and bit a hole in their side. Then the bear would blow into the wound until the cow exploded. American snakes, it was said, just lay back with their jaws unhinged and waited for our retarded squirrels to fall into their mouths.

  The New World was a place of climate-controlled degeneracy, which explained why, according to Durand Echeverria, the “universities of America had not produced a single man of reputation, not a single individual capable of writing even a bad book, not a single teacher, philosopher, doctor, physicist, or scholar whose name had ever reached Europe.”

  Such notions were regularly advanced by the top thinkers of the day. This was not just conventional wisdom but known fact. One of the most ferocious theorists in this school was a Dutch scholar named Cornelius de Pauw, and when Diderot was deciding just who among the world’s experts should write the nineteen-page article in his famous encyclopedia on America, he chose this guy. De Pauw considered the discovery of America the “most disastrous event in the history of mankind.” Another of these theorists was Abbé Raynal, who later would dine with Franklin. When this issue of the puny American came up, Franklin asked his fellow countrymen at the table to stand. Franklin w
as tall, as were the others. Everyone laughed, because, as Thomas Jefferson, who loved to tell this story, once wrote, Raynal was “a mere shrimp.”

  A second school of thought of the day held precisely the opposite view: America was, in fact, an arcadia of pastoral simplicity. Here man got back to the land, improved himself naturally, expanded his worth according to grounded agrarian economics, and matured into a natural philosopher. The basics of this notion dated all the way back to Rousseau and his concept of the noble savage, which is exactly what these thinkers believed the American Indian to be, and even the colonialists, whose virtue was hewn from the hard labor of civilizing the land.

  A popular novel of the time explained America this way: “Every day of your lives is serene, for the purity of your souls is communicated to the skies above you. You are free, you labor, and bring forth all about you, besides your abundant crops, a harvest of all the virtues. You are as nature would wish us to be.” Here’s a metaphor of freedom, from that time: “a life as innocent and as imperturbably happy as that of the inhabitants of Virginia.”

  Abbé Raynal was eventually converted, and when he crossed over to the pro-America camp, he opined that “the inhabitants of the Colonies lead that rustic life for which the human race was originally intended and which most favors health and fecundity.”

  This argument invaded every major discipline. Economics, for instance. One view held that only agriculture created new wealth and saw in America’s largely agricultural economy proof of these ideas. These were the Physiocrats, who were opposed by the Mercantilists, who didn’t see anything wrong with importing stocks of gold and silver from the New World. Again, America was either a source of inspiration with its pastoral simplicity or a pit of degeneracy into which France threw all its good raw materials and got back, as one Physiocrat put it, nothing but “gold and syphilis.”