Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt

America’s largely agricultural economy proof of these ideas. These were the Physiocrats, who were opposed by the Mercantilists, who didn’t see anything wrong with importing stocks of gold and silver from the New World. Again, America was either a source of inspiration with its pastoral simplicity or a pit of degeneracy into which France threw all its good raw materials and got back, as one Physiocrat put it, nothing but “gold and syphilis.”
    What the French knew of the homeland of John Adams and Ben Franklin was, therefore, fairly twisted. If Americans saw the typical Frenchman as a fop in silk and lace, then the average Frenchman saw the typical American as a withered homunculus. If, as a Frenchman, you took the more benign view of the New World, then the picture you had in mind ran to one of two images: the virtuous farmer in the coonskin cap or the Good Quaker in an outsized hat and enormous buckle shoes. The latter image was introduced some forty years before Adams’s arrival, by Voltaire. In a 1743 letter, Voltaire presented the image of the Good Quaker, an earnest and simple man, who served as his argument against the institutional church. This Good Quaker had escaped the confines of the traditional clergy in Europe and developed into an anticlerical pacifist, a man devoted to the benevolence of the human spirit and a sense of liberty hewn in the rough woods of the American eastern seaboard.
    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 ofthat 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