Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt Read Free Book Online Page A

“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 himselfa 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 thatquarrel 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