by Jack Hitt
Suddenly, we understood where he was headed. We could imagine it. We could see it: No longer Godzilla, Tyrannosaurus rex scampered on two legs, his back parallel to the ground, flitting (like thunder) from corpse to corpse: an enormous buzzard.
“So, would T. rex eat a lawyer?” Horner concluded. “If the lawyer’s alive, I’m afraid he would not eat him. The question is, can you tell if a lawyer’s alive?”
The room burst into a different kind of laughter—one of revelation. The audience had had its mind changed. It doesn’t happen that often. And it usually isn’t the work of a college dropout who tosses off his new ideas as just “sort of obvious when you think about it.” Horner has made numerous great discoveries precisely because he happily questioned the oldest views about dinosaurs. He looked at the most notorious predator of all time and thought—wait, how precisely did he kill?—a question that unraveled generations of macho assumptions about what is now seen as a very large proto-bird.
III. Serious Comedians
When Ben Franklin began thinking about breaking with his apprenticeship in Boston and striking out for a personal (and, ultimately, revolutionary) freedom, he pretended to be a woman. It was a pose that he’d continue off and on for a lifetime. His earliest writings—posing as the querulous forty-year-old “Silence Dogood” (or, later as Martha Careful or Celia Shortface and Alice Addertongue)—involved women observing the inanities of the authoritative men around them. Franklin’s characters brought humor to the tedious journalism of his day. Then, the early colonial media were infected with a tiresome pomposity. The papers were filled with earnest declarations, often little more than reprints of the previous Sunday’s sermons. At that time, women were widely seen as grown-up children, silly versions of adult men who might say anything! So, Franklin’s female voices granted him a freedom to make sharp observations (many would now be considered radically feminist). This was a new voice on the American literary scene—colloquial, profane, funny, casual, and alluring. It was a tone that no one would have heard if Franklin had tried to create it in his actual voice—a sixteen-year-old boy apprentice working for his solemn older brother.
When Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart—both of whom pose as “serious newsmen”—first appeared on cable news, it was widely understood by the traditional media to be mere comedy. But fairly soon there appeared articles worried that these “fake anchors” were more than phony blowhards. People were actually getting their news from them. The comedy was working on several levels. The real anchors on television fretted about what this all “meant,” and the actual blowhards on cable, like Bill O’Reilly, got angry and called them all stoners and subversives. The line from the improvisations of Ben Franklin to the comedy of Stephen Colbert is as American as pie.
Colbert and Stewart happened at around the same time that the blogosphere rose up and challenged, mostly, calcified newspapers and magazines. But TV media had long before degraded into something worse. Prime-time news had become a haven for stiff “presenters” (even their hair) who recited little more than what the professional press spokesmen for powerful players in Washington said was the truth. If comedy typically emerges out of the space between what we say and what we suspect is actually true, then Colbert and Stewart had wandered into a gold mine. Terrified of being labeled either liberal or conservative, mainstream television anchors long ago retreated behind words like “balanced” and, as a result, had abandoned analysis or even truth-telling for the ratings sanctuary of simply repeating what the establishment had instructed them to say.
In a sense, the regular TV anchor and the “action reporter” had already become parodies of serious newsmen. It’s just that the wooden professionals didn’t get the joke until Stewart and Colbert showed up.
There is a certain playfulness that comes with pretending, and that, too, is the animating spirit of amateur pursuits. Every study confirms that getting a person into a spirit of play not only puts them in their most creative posture but also, they will say later, made them happier than they had ever been. When a book came out about summer camp a few years ago, I remember being struck by how many adults were quick to confess that summer camp was the happiest memory of their lives. They had moved on to professional pursuits, but their fondest memory was this halcyon time of pretend, of being in the woods with bows and arrows, of encountering strangers in the guise of a wholly invented persona, of wearing ridiculous costumes.
The lightness of being that comes with pretend, of being unmoored from everything you think you know and skimming effortlessly across the surface of something profound and deep—that sense, too, pervades this fundamental idea of the American character. We are the people who literally created playtime for adults. It’s not a coincidence that as America’s industrial might began to emerge in the early twentieth century and the world came to see us as the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic that we simultaneously created a new space for playfulness. America invented the “weekend” and all that flows from that word—leisure, vacation, time off, mental-health days, etc. In other words, playtime.
This concept was so radical at the time—and still is in many cultures where work is constant and uninterrupted—that they had no word for it. The French word for “weekend” is le weekend. In Europe, the educational system that developed long ago pegged your lifetime pursuit early on. Claude-Anne Lopez had been scheduled at age seventeen to become a schoolteacher. Europeans still take the “test” that determines their future. Meanwhile, the traditionalists there love to honk in editorials about America’s “extended adolescence” and how our immaturity and general ignorance and refusal to play by the rules are all signs that we are a nation of Peter Pans, an entire people who refuse to grow up.
Europe has always judged America’s intellectual and artistic productions as childish versions of much finer things. We invented the musical, a banal corruption of opera. We invented the op-ed piece, a secular withering of the noble sermon. We invented the short story, a novel for a nation afflicted with ADD.
But the improvisation that comes with that playfulness yields all kinds of new things. Sure, that superficial lightness of being means we are the nation of unending Top-40 hits, a place where novelty trumps gravitas-burdened tradition every time. The architectural essayist J. B. Jackson liked to praise the temporary buildings and structures of our culture—the malls, the suburban creations, the strips on the edge of town—as the true American architecture in part because it so lacked any sense of tradition and permanence. American architecture was transitory, improvisational, and amateurish precisely because we were always tearing it down and building it up all over again, our permanent frontier.
Despite whatever America is going through now, this American idea still remains, for many people, the lure—this sense that here one can escape a past and create something new. A 2011 poll, in the midst of global terrorism and worldwide financial cataclysm, found that people still think that America is “the coolest nation” on earth. That may change, and perhaps this spirit of the amateur pursuit will flee elsewhere as America assumes the dreadful role of “empire.” But probably not.
The essential contradiction of the American ideal survives here—the nation of dedicated hard workers who’ve never grown up. We are all Californians—babes in bathing suits and hunky boys in convertible jeeps who somehow managed to create the seventh most productive economy on the planet. The rest of the world is still enchanted with a country whose most authoritative and credible newsmen are comedians faking it.
The kind of creativity one finds here can drive outside observers insane. Consider religion. Abroad, religion is the ultimate repository of tradition. The Vatican is arguably the oldest continuous bureaucracy in the world. In America, religion is largely improvisational and inventive. We are not a Catholic nation or even a Christian nation. We are inventing religions almost as fast as hits on iTunes. America is the land of Mormons and Scientologists, storefront Pentecostal shacks and weird rural cults. The Church of England sta
nds as a mighty bulwark of tradition in a country that grows increasingly bored by religion. Here, religion is its own cycle, with Great Awakenings pulsing throughout the nation as rhythmically as amateurism.
So, we reinvent God every generation or so. No biggie. There really is nothing that can’t be reinvented here. Wine-tasting? Who could compete with the erudite palates of Europe? Wine-tasting was once the province of certain old-school, largely French, experts who could boast a lifetime of sipping Burgundies. Then along came this alleged “million-dollar nose,” Robert Parker, who created a cockamamie scoring system that awarded “Parker Points.” There’s something very American about creating a pseudoscience out of something almost by definition unquantifiable. But quantify we shall.
What is the actual difference between Robert Parker scoring a new Bordeaux as a 97 versus a 98? Who knows? The infuriated French vintners do: millions in sales.
Almost no realm of human pursuit, no matter how abstract, is immune from some improvisational entrepreneur coming up with a scorecard and, of course, a company that charges for the result. Love has been Robert Parkerized at eHarmony.com, which boasts 29 “compatibility” measures to ensure “accuracy.” Emotional intelligence can be scored. Even the oldest of these measurements—the IQ test—is privately regarded as bunk (like the bogus Nielsen ratings), but as with wine, hell, it’s helpful to have a number. In fact, any number. Just as long as we all agree to it.
Happiness is another one. We are currently living through a renaissance of happiness studies and metrics. You can choose among dozens of tests to find out how happy you are. The most popular course at Harvard University these days is Psychology 1504, also known as “How to Get Happy.”
The word “happiness” has a strong pull in America. Amateurs lay claim to it—it’s another word for Csíkszentmihályi’s flow or Meredith Patterson’s codespace. But it’s also the one odd word that stands out in our Declaration of Independence. The pursuit of happiness. This is supposed to be our national mission, the American Dream, yet we’ve always been a little uncertain of what it meant.
IV. Flying a Kite
In the early 1950s, President Truman proposed that the papers of the Founding Fathers be collated by scholars and made available to the public. Thus began a series of seemingly endless efforts to annotate all the papers of the heroes of the American Revolution. Princeton University was assigned Thomas Jefferson’s papers. UVA got Madison’s and Washington’s papers. Yale would work with Ben Franklin’s papers. Money was appropriated and the process began.
The original editor of this effort in New Haven was a solemn and stately historian named Leonard Larabee. In 1954, he assembled a half-dozen workers and took over Room 220 in the august edifice at Yale known as Sterling Library. Like medieval monks, the small crew of historians pored over the documents under Larabee’s watch, eyeing the papers as though with a jeweler’s loupe, providing notes of explanation and clarification, putting these thousands of pages in order and creating a lifetime narrative of the written record of Ben Franklin. As he looked at the decades of work ahead, Larabee realized that some of Franklin’s later papers were in French and he remembered hearing some faculty wife had “a funny accent and that it was probably French.”
So he hired this young housewife, Claude-Anne Lopez, to perform the grunt work of typing some of these later papers so that the real historians could, one day, get to them.
“I was hired as a transcriber,” Lopez told me. “It could not have been lowlier.” And the atmosphere in that Sterling sanctuary could not have been more solemn. The work was done in near silence and moved at a glacial pace. The Franklin Papers opened for business in 1954 and produced “Volume 1” in 1959. The effort continues to this very day. They are on Volume 40 and intend to finish the entire project sometime in the next fifteen years. The work began with the beginning of Franklin’s life and moved slowly forward—almost in real time. When I visited the project, I once asked one of the scholars when she was hired. “Oh,” she said in a soft voice, “it was around the time Franklin left for Paris.” The chronology of Franklin’s life so structured the place, it had become a kind of calendar.
“I was paid sixty-five cents an hour and in order to get a pension you had to work nineteen hours, and Larabee had me working eighteen hours a week,” Lopez said. “They had weekly meetings and I was never invited because my work was completely separate. There were three men and three women. Larabee was the head and Whitfield Bell was number two, and he was my friend.”
The other reason Lopez had no one to talk to was “because the French letters came later in Franklin’s life, and others were doing Boston”—in other words, Franklin’s earliest years. So she worked alone, apart from the scholars.
Being European, Lopez confessed, “I knew nothing about American history; all I knew was what I had read in Gone With the Wind.” One day, when she encountered an unfamiliar name, “I raised my voice and said, ‘Was there somebody named John Jay?’ And who came tiptoeing to my booth but Whitfield Bell, and he whispered to me, ‘I must show you the American Dictionary of Famous People. I will bring that to you!’ ”
Larabee was very restrictive when it came to Lopez’s work. She was not encouraged to think or have an opinion, simply to transcribe and be done with it. She told me that she just couldn’t help taking notice of little details that she knew something about. So, after a while, she would simply insert a little note in a document’s file folder for a future reader. Historians who have worked there over the years still delight in coming upon a Lopez note from three or four decades ago.
“In my own way, I was trying to edit, but Larabee wouldn’t hear of it,” Lopez said. One day, when she realized that an “unidentified” letter of Franklin’s was, due to a misspelling, actually a letter from the famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier—the man who discovered oxygen and hydrogen, co-invented the metric system, and helped standardize much of modern chemistry (and was also, incidentally, guillotined during the French Revolution for selling inferior tobacco)—she wondered what she was to do with this discovery.
Her husband’s reply was what he knew: “Publish or perish.”
So, she wrote a little article, and it was accepted for publication by a German magazine. And later, people talked about the article (although not Len Larabee, who never mentioned it to Lopez). She was asked to give a talk at Smith College about her paper. In the cozy outpost of Ben Franklin scholarship, there was a tiny bit of news. A new voice was in town. Claude-Anne Lopez.
As years passed, Lopez spent a lot of time with Franklin in that era when he was notoriously bedding all those women—a simple fact of history that was presumably indisputable. Lopez wrote a book called Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris. The book was widely reviewed and well received. “Larabee was still running the papers and he never said a word about it.” Lopez actually went on to write three notable books about Franklin and is now regarded as one of the great Franklin scholars of our time.
When a new editor, William Willcox, arrived to take over from Larabee in the 1970s, he was stunned to learn that Lopez was still considered a “transcriber” and was not even listed as a staff member of the Franklin Papers.
“What?” Willcox said incredulously to Lopez. “You are the only person here I’ve heard of.” And so Claude-Anne Lopez, the amateur academic, was officially recognized to exist eighteen years after she was hired. Her name appears for the first time in 1972 with the publication of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 15. Or, to put it in Papers’ time—just before Franklin printed his maps charting the Gulf Stream and the birth of his grandson, Benny.
Coming to Franklin as a self-made scholar, Lopez brought the kind of eye that a Leonard Larabee would never appreciate. She saw a completely different man from the one seen repeatedly by the professionals who had pored over his words. Probably the most controversial and unacceptable discovery Lopez made was realizing that Franklin was not really some colonial lothario. It took a compl
ete newcomer to his letters to see what’s actually right there.
“I paid a lot of attention to his letters to women—to Catherine Ray and the other girls,” she told me over a glass of wine, “and these letters are so delicate and so grandfatherly.” There are three great letter exchanges with three women in Franklin’s oeuvre, and Lopez believes they are widely and commonly misunderstood.
“I was always particularly interested in the wooing side of Franklin. It doesn’t necessarily mean sex. Americans are so peculiar about sex. When I arrived here, people still wrote ‘s-x.’ Many American men are virgins when they marry. It’s astonishing.” The question remained: was Ben Franklin our founding Casanova?
“I am sure he tried; he was a man after all,” Lopez said with a laugh. “With Polly [Stevenson, his London landlady’s daughter], he never tried. He thought of her as his daughter and he encouraged her to marry.”
Lopez acknowledges what is indisputable: Franklin had a wild time as a young single man. He wrote, almost humiliatingly, about it. “After his youth, he settled down,” Lopez told me. “People say it was a terrible marriage with Deborah, but it wasn’t a terrible marriage. They had fantastic cooperation. It was her doing. Deborah ran the shop and kept the accounts. When he was away, she was the postmistress.”
And it’s true that Deborah Franklin wasn’t as social as Ben and feared crossing the Atlantic. So he traveled alone and she became his trusted surrogate in Philadelphia for the rest of their lives. Ben loved the society of women, but Lopez observed a far less dashing reality.