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

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 was 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