Bunch of Amateurs (7 page)

You know this guy. He’s the pilgrim who is resurrected as a series of construction-paper cutouts in schoolrooms across America every Thanksgiving Day. Right,
him
—decent to a fault, kind to the Indians, delighted to have discovered maize, and known almost exclusively by his outfit: the funny hat, buckle shoes, and white stockings. And this costume was how the French knew him as well.

Often Franklin would go to the formal salons in Paris dressed in this outfit, or he might go in the clothes of the other stereotype of
that period—the American pioneer farmer, wearing a coonskin cap and a rustic coat as if he had recently stepped out of the freshly cut forests of Pennsylvania. One of the widely read works in Paris at the time was a book by colonist James Dickinson entitled
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies
. You know this guy too. He’s Daniel Boone.

Franklin spent a lot of time cruising Paris in one of these two costumes. The French loved it. And so, while John Adams waits at the gates of Versaillies at last, the door of the carriage opens and out steps Ben Franklin. History doesn’t record which costume he wore, but I have always imagined him in the frontier outfit. There is a famous Parisian drawing of Franklin from this very period in a coonskin cap. Despite the passing of two centuries, he still looks ridiculous in it. And, according to one chronicler of this meeting, “Adams left the palace surroundings with the feeling that the situation could be compared to Indian leaders addressing the Congress.…” Why? Because there standing at the gates of Versailles was John Adams in his official wig, his rent-a-sword, his fresh breeches. Imagine his reaction at the sheer audacity of a known libertine like Franklin, a woman-letching, Paris-loving gourmand costumed in the humble garments of a colonial bumpkin.

Certainly, Adams was embarrassed by Franklin’s breach of etiquette and fretted that he had made them both look like fools. Or, as a second thought, Adams probably feared that Franklin’s prank
would
work and there Adams was, the dope who dressed properly. Suddenly, wearing the wig and lace would make him look the naïf, the fool, the loser with the
KICK ME
sign once again pinned to his breeches. (Time to write in the diary!)

What would be the comparable moment for us? Imagine being invited to the White House for a state dinner and someone shows up in bib overalls and a baseball cap that reads
SEX INSTRUCTOR—FIRST LESSON FREE
. Now imagine just
who
that person would have to be for
everyone in the Blue Room to turn, see it, and say, “Oh, that’s brilliant, let him in.”

It was a crucial moment in the development of the idea of America—all of France was looking and talking. It was the moment our image as a land of improvisationalists solidified in the minds of people abroad. They not only loved Franklin’s costume, they loved that he was
in
costume. They got the joke better than Adams did. This was who the French thought we were, and Franklin indulged it, camping it up.

When Franklin stepped from that carriage, and all the moments when he’d visited the various parties in Paris and the salons, he had been consciously participating in arguably
the
first modern media circus. But he invented it, right then and there, as the thing that would get him what he wanted. When he had stepped off the boat in Marseilles months earlier, he was old and bald, with that stringy long hair down his neck—just as most of us remember him. He had donned a coonskin cap and a plain brown coat just to keep warm. He quickly realized that people were reacting to his outfit and looking at him in a useful way. He decided to run with it. Forget the great scientist. He’d work the Daniel Boone angle. His coonskin cap became so popular that it was merchandized in Paris. People bought souvenirs depicting this image of Franklin the trailblazing woodsman of America. On other occasions, when the French saw Franklin with his bifocals, they thought his glasses were cracked and that he didn’t get new ones because of his frontier frugality. He never bothered to correct them. He knew what people wanted to see. So he made sure that they did.

But Franklin’s time in Paris was about more than his costume. He was literally received with cheers. People lined the streets. Portraits, mementos, and images were stamped out and sold. His face became familiar everywhere. Artists sketched him, and his portrait appeared on small figurines, snuffboxes, vases. An overnight fashion of the time, suddenly, was to have a portrait of Franklin over the mantel, in
much the same way that one finds portraits of Martin Luther King in various homes today.

The man who gave Franklin free quarters in Paris, the Comte de Chaumont, was also franchising Franklin ruthlessly—convincing the king’s portraitist to paint him and mass manufacturing medallions showing Franklin in high-minded profile with a Latin slogan that translates, “He snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants.”

Adams thought all this excess was scandalous. But the Parisians couldn’t get enough of Franklin-mania. Close friends to the king were unable to shut up about him. One of those aristocrats was Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Comtesse Diane de Polignac. King Louis XVI was so annoyed by the hype that he presented her with the ultimate piece of Franklin kitsch—a magnificent Sèvres porcelain chamber pot with a portrait of Franklin’s now notorious face positioned, you know, just so.

Enraged as always, Adams never quite understood what was happening around him. He saw it all as vulgarity (and who can argue?), but he also understood that Franklin was creating a different way of seeing the world. Of course, Franklin’s flimflammery got us the money, the arms, and the men. But later Adams fumed that such stunts would rob history of the truth of his own role and that in time people would say “that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington.” Which, if you read your average grade school textbook, is not that far off.

Meanwhile, Franklin continued to ignore Adams and actually whined about how time-consuming all this eighteenth-century hype was. He complained of having to spend so many hours sitting for so many portraits. And he noted that his profile was as recognizable as “the man in the moon.” All the world was watching and
Franklin
was what they saw. He was not just a pioneer (trying to improvise his way into the hearts and wallets of the French), but our meta-pioneer. He created this image of us as clean-living bumpkins but also as the
pioneering amateurs we often are, fiddling our way into becoming something new by pretending to be something we’re not.

Adams was always there to claim that the “real and everlasting excellences” were “piety and virtue.” He knew that these fine qualities were always put at risk by the mob whose unwashed ambitions lusted for vulgar fame. Naturally, Franklin saw it precisely the other way around. Success and fame were not ends in themselves but the flattering sideshow that came of heroic action. Like two figures of Greek mythology, Adams and Franklin battle in the American heart.

They fought bitterly throughout the founding era of the country and tried to establish two very different kinds of America. They managed to produce both, through their contempt for each other’s view and life. By struggling to create a single coherent America, they instead discovered a force and a counterforce whose ebb and flow guide the tides of our history. The one believes he is erecting a noble fortress to tradition and virtue; the other appears to be tearing it down.

Between the two of them were twin impulses, one more improvisational and experimental, the other more tradition-bound and knowing. There is no fixed American meta-narrative, but there is this ebb and flow between Adamsian veneration of piety and Franklinian love of improvisation, between Calvinist certainty and Deist doubt, between head and heart, virtuocracy and meritocracy, good character and cunning action, between security and freedom, between professionalism and amateurism.

The reason these cycles have little to do with daily politics is that
these qualities very easily (however slowly) shift from one party to the other. A little more than a half century ago, it was Franklin Roosevelt who could wink at his aristocratic past, his John Adams virtue, while the Republican candidates who ran against him were often self-made outsiders who claimed the mantle of Main Street. By 1960, self-made Richard Nixon tried unsuccessfully to knock over the glamorous scion of a family already seen as Boston Brahmin (the truth being more complicated). Dynasties have no lock on any party. A century that opened on Tafts and Roosevelts closed with Kennedys and Bushes.

By our time, it was meritocrat Bill Clinton, son of a dog track regular with a fondness for men and a racing stripe in her hair. Clinton didn’t know who his father was, but he clawed his way to the White House. He was followed, like clockwork, by the very essence of noblesse oblige: George W. Bush, a man with no accomplishments other than his birth. He claimed to consult his gut and instinct because to allege that any of his decisions were made through his own reasoned contemplation was a pose not even his aides thought he could carry off. So Bush preferred to cast his decisions in the language of virtue, which in our time takes up words like “faith” and “morality.” Bush was fond of publicly pronouncing his loyalty to others’ virtues. He introduced members of his cabinet with language that would have thrilled John Adams. George Bush typically explained that a certain man was chosen for a task because he was “good” or “strong.” Judge John Roberts was elevated to the Supreme Court, Bush said, because he believed Roberts had “a good heart.” And General Mike Hayden was elevated to head of the CIA because he was a “strong leader.”

What decisions they made sort of didn’t matter. They were “good men,” so what they did, it followed, was good. This view of virtue—very John Adams—explains why Bush held on to abject failures like Michael Brown at FEMA and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon long after their own friends had kicked them to the curb.

For now, the virtucrats dwell mainly on the right of our political spectrum. It’s why a public scold like William Bennett could write
a tome called
The Book of Virtues
, in which he describes the essential qualities of all “good men and women.” John Adams could have written that book, because that book gets written every generation.
McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader
, a collection of patriotic piffle and accounts of civic virtue, was its name a century and a half ago.

When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book called
The Cycles of American History
, he tried to define this movement as some variation between American political liberalism and conservatism and happening every generation or so. His father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., had a similar theory but crunched different numbers, computing a turn of the wheel every sixteen and a half years. Others had different time frames. Karl Mannheim put it at fifteen years. Henry Adams conjectured a turn every twelve years. De Tocqueville played it safe: “Among democratic nations,” he wrote, “each generation is a new people.” All of them were making a Freudian argument—that the time more or less coincides with the period of time it takes for one generation to age enough that it gets its head handed to it by the next one coming up. None of these cycles work out, because history doesn’t play by the clock. But switch out the idea from one of
time
to one of
creativity
and it works a little better.

It’s knee-jerk to believe that American history is a linear progression. For a long time in the past, it was arguably true—our narrative rolled along with the folks from the east as they pushed west. In 1893, the historian Frederick Turner wondered in an essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” if the closing of the American frontier would change the nation. Americans have answered his question by proving themselves over and over again capable of finding all kinds of new frontiers to invade, settle, and abandon—disastrously sometimes (the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq), often beautifully (the North Pole, the moon, the ocean), even virtually (radio, Hollywood, cyberspace). From time to time, we go so far as to demand from our President that he find us a new frontier to swarm.

In American culture, the cycle of amateurs clawing at the walls of professionalism has no fixed origin or duration. One can find it playing out continuously. The two need each other, feed on each other, and in the mythic course of American time—given new costumes, new eras, new characters—find themselves squaring off over and over again. In 1987, Allen Ginsberg (radical poet, destroyer of tradition, and nude protester) confessed in an interview that he admired his lifelong nemesis: conventional writer, defender of tradition, and clothed intellectual Norman Podhoretz. Ginsberg said that he didn’t know what he would do without him. Ginsberg and Podhoretz had gone to school together, dreamed of becoming poets together, and set off with their ambitions together. Podhoretz, though, recoiled at the amateur improvisations of the beat poets and retreated to the fortress of tradition. From there, he hurled invective at Ginsberg for the rest of their lives. But Ginsberg confessed that he needed the unmovable whetstone of Podhoretz’s intransigent tradition to sharpen himself against. “If he weren’t there like a wall I can butt my head against,” he said, sounding very much like a certain bespectacled founding father, “I wouldn’t have anybody to hate.”