Bunch of Amateurs

by Jack Hitt

  “As soon as I read Catherine Ray,” Lopez said, “I realized that she was the one going overboard and he was the one calming her down.” Lopez referred to an incident often cited about Ray, when Franklin watched her sail off for a long, long time. This anecdote is always presented as being evidence of him as a smitten man.

  “He was visiting his brother in Boston at Christmas,” Lopez said. “She was going back to Block Island and then he wrote he stood on the shore and watched her disappear through his glass. The French talk about amité amour, a loving friendship. It’s platonic, and for a woman it can be quite nice.” She looked away for a moment. “You don’t get pregnant.”

  As to the years in Paris and the famous story of Franklin playing chess with Madame Brillon in the tub, Lopez reminded me that women bathed beneath a board that covered everything except their heads. Socializing with a bathing person wasn’t so unusual then. And there was one other thing, Lopez said. “Franklin had gout. He had kidney problems. He had stones. Marie Antoinette loaned him her litter. He was in real pain! Adams wrote that Franklin lost his head with the women of the court.” But the truth is that “he didn’t frequent the court much; he wasn’t invited that often, only special occasions. It’s a completely false idea that Adams had.” She paused and looked at me as if we were gossiping about somebody we both knew personally. “John Adams—I hate his self-satisfaction, his arrogance—so many alcoholics in that family.”

  So, the reality of Ben Franklin in all probability is that he was not a sex maniac but a busy man with a functional marriage who flirted with younger women in a grandfatherly way. It’s a truth as difficult to hear as the claim that T. rex was a giant buzzard.

  “Anytime I take a cab in Philadelphia,” Lopez added, “that comes up—‘Oh, yes, Franklin was quite a woman chaser, wasn’t he?’—I don’t even try to dissuade them anymore.”

  Looking back on her career, Lopez’s only regret is that she wishes she had marketed her books better. Still: She spent her later career awash in academic approval, giving prominent lectures, publishing all over, and being regularly honored as the great Franklin expert—all achieved by a series of self-motivated actions that Franklin would have recognized as arguably his greatest invention—the pursuit of happiness.

  That troublesome phrase appears in Thomas Jefferson’s final draft of the Declaration of Independence, a document edited by two men—John Adams and Ben Franklin. Surely Adams had vetted it for the constitutional and legal arguments that were his expertise. He was the Harvard-trained lawyer after all. But it was probably Ben who brought his own lightness of style to the sentences.

  The main idea of personal happiness at that time was not some hedonistic notion of pleasure but the other, more philosophical, kind. The Greek philosophers believed that discovering one’s own talents and then taking the pleasure of exploiting them (finding out that you had a singing voice, could write well, start a company, or invent new things), that was the deeper pleasure the founders had in mind and the freedom they sought.

  We don’t know for certain who put that phrase in the Declaration, but it was probably Ben. He wrote a good deal about happiness. The common phrase that would have rung familiar two hundred years ago, particularly as it pertained to government, came from John Locke—that governments were instituted to protect “life, liberty, and property.” Locke’s term ends with such a solid and limiting ker-thunk. It’s hard not to suspect that the rascally Franklin, who broke with tradition himself, envisioned the future of American citizens as something far more open-ended than the mere accumulation of property and careted in that phrase. The pursuit of happiness. Even in the founding document, the sense of playfulness is there.

  The other image that Franklin loved to invoke in this vein was the kite. He wrote about how, as a child in Boston, he would lie on his back on the surface of the harbor and get pulled along by his kite. It’s almost certainly a fiction. But that image is so compelling, such a wonderful sense of a child at play, drifting about, pulled here and there by a kite. His other usage of that image is a good bit more famous, the most famous image from the founding era: Ben flying his kite to prove that electricity existed in clouds and was the source of lightning.

  Several Franklin mavens believe that that story—the kite and key on a string—is also a probable fabrication. (I am one.) The fact is that Franklin had given away his theory of electricity by publishing his ideas and letting others—Europeans!—prove his theory by setting up electrical rods. The experiment was to put one’s knuckle near the rod during an overcast, pre-thunderstorm afternoon, and if the clouds were as charged with electrical “plasma,” as Franklin believed, then you would feel a nice kick of intense static electricity. And that was proven in Europe. (Proven too well in St. Petersburg, where a Swedish scientist named Georg Wilhelm Richmann put his knuckle near the rod when a bolt of lightning struck and he was killed.)

  The famous kite story was one Franklin told many years later—not at the time he allegedly performed it. His only witness was his son William. Franklin’s account is unusually vague. My own suspicion is that Franklin feared that the discovery of electricity was his greatest achievement. So he tried to retrofit the story of his experiment so that the history books would give him proper credit. He laid claim to the achievement not by setting out the details of his experiment—like I said, the account is vague—no, rather he put in the minds of all of us an image more indelible than the scribblings of a thousand historians. He improvised his own rewriting of history, in other words, by conjuring the world’s first beta-test version of what we might now call a photo-op.

  He did it by invoking an image that is at once playful and profound, practically the logo of the amateur’s childish spirit, of liberty, of leisure—the emblem of the lightness of being, where creativity thrives. It can be American, not out of nationalist pride, but because this sense emerged at our founding and is the inheritance of anyone born or driven to come here. While we might list the great liberties—speech, assembly, due process, trial by jury—the one that goes unstated, almost presumed, is the revolutionary decision to abandon one’s past and one’s self, as well as one’s culture, tradition, and history. To walk away from everything that one is—whether it’s fleeing a repressive nation for this new place or simply out the back door for the garage—that is real freedom. It’s a story that everyone who lives here or comes here recognizes in their gut is true, that the amateur’s dream is the American Dream.

  Acknowledgments

  Every idea starts somewhere, and this one began over lunch with Eric Nelson, a book editor who first asked me if I had ever noticed how many of my stories seemed to involve some self-invented crank wandering off to the outskirts of an obsession. The way he spoke made it sound like he was talking about me, but soon enough the idea was getting kicked around to collect a number of pieces from magazines and radio and shape them into an anthology. But that didn’t happen in part because, at the time, I was beginning the research for an article for my editors at the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough and Gerry Marzorati. The original draft was about NASA’s awards program—a half dozen or so massive monetary prizes dangled in front of America’s backyard tinkerers to seduce them into inventing a new generation of cheaper and better space gear. They pushed me to do more reporting and expand the focus (maybe this is how one can tell a magazine idea is a possible book: the rare phenom of an editor telling you: write more). I wound up with a reported story called “The Amateur Future of Space Travel.” And that reporting, which didn’t make it into this book, managed to get me poking around the edges of this idea as something larger and more fundamental to what often goes on in our nation’s metaphorical garages. By this time, I found myself eating several lunches with David McCormick, who’s a good bit more than a literary agent when he gets around half an idea and some ragged paragraphs on paper. A few hundred e-mail exchanges later and I had a book proposal in my hand. So I want to thank them all for getting me started.

  On
ce committed to a book, though, there’s a long period of wondering just what it was that you said in that proposal, which all of a sudden reads as vaguely as a found spiral notebook filled with notes from a long lost high school English class. This inspires frantic reactions that typically involve hiring research assistants and giving them half-cocked requests to find out everything about, say, self-taught dinosaur experts, homemade gasoline distillers, open-source anything, local “historians,” the newest religions, DIY submariners, amateur chefs, and the latest version of creation science. But then you realize what you really need is information on, say, self-taught dark-matter theorists, ethnic innovators coining new races, the ongoing jet-pack dream, the last 500 patent applications, high school kids building nuclear reactors in the suburbs, the latest Howard Finster, the latest Steve Jobs, the latest Lana Del Rey, anything to which the prefix wiki- has been added, and space elevator designers. But, wait, that’s nowhere near enough, so you tell them you also need a research file on, say, this year’s MacArthur Genius Grant winners, amateur porn pioneers, pranksters, weekend warriors curdling into militias, storm chasers, uncredentialed archaeologists, the collected triumphalist blog posts of Jeff Jarvis (a lot of heavy lifting, that one), cutting-edge agronomists in the medical marijuana field, self-appointed terrorist hunters, that whole smart mob business, competitive eaters, amateur rocketeers, microbrewing dudes, top fan-fiction writers, horticultural pioneers, latter-day radio pirates, and the surprisingly hefty crowd of people describing themselves as time travelers, some of whom, curiously, have recently disappeared.

  The first person who got sent off on these quixotic missions was the indispensable and brilliant Kirsten Weld. And when she fled to South America for a real research job, I handed the reins to Will Sedlack, Aliza Shvarts, and David Huyssen, who rode off on many a quest and in at least one case—and I totally understand—never found the way back.

  After the writing starts, there is a whole set of people who might read something or just listen to you talk through some vague notion until it begins to sound like a newish idea. First and foremost is Lisa Sanders, who sits in the other chair in our living room, and who has figured out the sweetest ways to say things like, “I don’t understand this whole chapter, really” and “signposts, Jack, signposts” and “Is this chunk in English, or did you accidentally set the font to dingbats?” When the writing’s all over, there’s this moment when you really need a single reader who can sit down with the manuscript and tell you in fresh terms exactly what it was that you actually said. Thank you, Michael Pollan. Throughout all this, there were those who did their share of listening and I am told this can be a fun but at times trying experience: Ian Ayres, Jessica Bauman, Jennifer Brown, Kevin Baker, Kaveh Khoshnood, Sarah Koenig, David Mikell, Jon Mooallem, Stephen Sherrill, Vera Titunik, and the itinerant scholars at Lulu’s.

  Then there are the other ears I have counted on all my life: Joan Algar, Dianne Moore, Nancy Miller, and Bobby Hitt. Thanks for everything that happened at 38 Gibbes Street—somehow connected here, I think.

  Toward the end of any book, there is the guy who was there every step of the way. Sean Desmond, my editor, is someone who managed a Jobian patience when he should have lost it and a no-drama steadiness not seen outside of the White House. For letting me supply the counterpoint, Sean, I am grateful. And all those at Crown—Sarah Breivogel, Julie Cepler, Annie Chagnot, and Courtney Snyder—and that riot of fun e-mails and ideas, thank you.

  Finally, to Tarpley and Yancey, who in the course of all this somehow managed to follow the plot, going from scuffed-up little girls to brilliant young women. You’re why this book and I are here.