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do his fetal nation proud. And now, here comes his partner’s carriage. I like to imagine the horses halting, the wheels braking, and Adams’s moon face tilting slightly to catch a partial glimpse of the, even then, world famous hangdog eyes and sly smirk of Ben Franklin. The carriage door’s iron latches turn with a tiny crunching sound and the door opens wide.
    But I’m not going to bring Franklin, the notorious trumpeter, out of the carriage just yet, because, at this point, you won’t get the joke. (This is always the problem with history, so much huffing and puffing.) You can’t really appreciate the unbearable lightness of the moment until you have a sense of the petty soap opera playing out between these two crucial Americans and the broader quarrels that dominated French society at that time. Along with the mud, Franklin stepped from his carriage into all of that, too.
    More important, what happens here is one of those great moments in American history, specifically in the way our nation comes to be thought of as a bunch of amateurs. We often apply that word to garage inventors or athletes who can’t make the cut. Or we think of it as a broad word that implies poor quality or mediocre talent. I want to argue that the word took on several meanings when it crossed the pond and that together they form a kind of story, an American story. And this story often involves, at the beginning, an act of fraudulence, of assuming a new name or donning a disguise, of pretending that you are something that you are not. This story gets repeated over and over again and far more often than people might think. It constitutesa hidden history of America. And while there are many places in our past where one could say it began, I am going to locate it right here, with Franklin’s exit from the carriage, because it was an instant in history as daring as it was hilarious. With nothing but a bit of ad-libbing on Franklin’s part, a fresh figure is about to be born: the New World amateur and the soul of the American character.

II. Bowling Alone, Colonial Style
    During the Revolutionary War itself, few really understood just what Ben Franklin was up to. From our point of view, we see him as just another founding father. But the other revolutionaries didn’t see him that way at all.
    At this time in Paris, Franklin was seventy-two years old. John Adams was forty-three years old, Thomas Jefferson was thirty-five, and James Madison was twenty-seven years old. They had not yet earned their bones. Franklin already had one gouty foot in the history books. He was not just famous. He was world famous. The subject of his fame—the taming of lightning—had about it a kind of pre-Darwinian grandeur. He had demystified one of the last natural phenomena widely perceived to be God’s direct and immediate interferences in man’s events. Some felt he had overstepped the bounds of humility. Others thought that, having literally stolen God’s thunder, some of it had rubbed off on Franklin himself. In many quarters, he was considered not simply a scientist, but perhaps the greatest scientist since Isaac Newton. It’s a role every century or so assigns to one individual.
    Consider how the twentieth century elevated Albert Einstein as scientific genius who rose from patent clerk to fuzzy-haired icon with twinkling eyes and mischievous sense of humor. By the time I got into college, that ideal of intellect was yielding to the computer and so our new icon would become a great mind literally bound inside a machine. We see it every time Stephen Hawking’s crumpled body is wheeled out into a lecture hall to talk to us. Withered and slumped to one side, his face a human rhombus, Hawking flashes an elfin smile as his B-movie metallic voice explains his central idea, so monstrously big it is actually called the Grand Unified Theory of the universe.
    Ben Franklin was this character in his time. All the world saw him as both the most mysterious and the