Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt Read Free Book Online

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 Puritan 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 greatMan, 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”).