even though they had just won a war
against the most powerful country on the
planet in the 1780s - to the rest of the
world America was a young country and
sort of a joke
why had America only
produced one great man Benjamin Franklin
Franklin was huge in Europe
the most popular theory about America
came from a French nobleman named count
Julian Lew a little Buffon count be
based on the word of some less than
impressed French friends claimed that
the content had just been raised from
the sea it was covered in swamps and too
humid and soft compared to the hard dry
land of Europe Bufo had never been to
America this made life in America just a
degenerate copy of Europe's if he
brought animals or plants from Europe to
America
their offspring would be smaller and
inferior as well this even applied to
humans so you better not have any babies
in America have I mentioned that before
had never been to America but this
theory became really popular and started
to appear in textbooks and even poetry
this wasn't good news for a fresh
country that needed people to move there
and for Europe to buy its goods
center the new American ambassador to
France a young Thomas Jefferson this was
personal
TJ writes all his founder friends for
help improving this dangerous Frenchman
wrong James Madison sent Jefferson the
detailed measurements of Virginian
weasel
Ethan bound to the distance between its
two naughty parts Jefferson writes his
first and only book which included a
massive table of animal measurements
compared to Europe's such as the twelve
pound us otter compared to the nine
pound European otter he even sends
bufang on american cougar pail and
mastodon fossils none of this is good
enough for brew foam and over an awkward
dinner jefferson has an idea he starts a
flurry of letters to his fellow founders
with a task more precious than they
could imagine he needed a moose and fast
it's 20 miles from the nearest road it
would take twenty men two full weeks to
drag the dead moose through the snow to
the governor by the time it arrives in
his office the moose was starting to
decay had lost most of its fur and
somehow its antlers were missing not
wanting to disappoint the writer of the
Declaration of Independence the governor
packs up the mango boost with a bunch of
deer antlers as replacements and ships
it off to Paris when finally arrives in
Paris
one year later Thomas Jefferson had no
choice but to take the largest pair of
deer antlers nail them onto the stuffed
moose and send them to bouffant with a
note to well use his imagination for
what it used to look like so did this
mighty moose change bouffant mind
no one knows he died a few days after
the rock let's just pretend he died it
shocked over how wrong he was the theory
of American degeneracy wouldn't go away
from our 70 years well beyond the death
of Thomas Jefferson who would continue
to fight it into his presidency at his
funeral his friend giving his eulogy
would call this fight Jefferson's
personal second Revolutionary War
