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NY Times Op-Ed, June 11 2016
What ‘Hamilton’ Forgets About Alexander Hamilton
By JASON FRANK and ISAAC KRAMNICK
ALEXANDER HAMILTON is all the rage. Sold out for months in advance, the
musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s remarkable hip-hop
dramatization of this founder’s life, is arguably the most celebrated
American cultural phenomenon of our time. Reported on from every
conceivable angle, the show has helped keep Hamilton on the $10 bill and
prompted a new nickname for this weekend’s Broadway awards ceremony: the
“Hamiltonys.”
Central to the musical’s power is the way it and its extraordinarily
talented multiracial cast use Hamilton’s immigrant hustle to explain the
most important political episodes of his life. “I am not throwing away
my shot,” Mr. Miranda’s Hamilton sings early on, and it is this motif
that animates everything that follows.
In Hamilton’s tumultuous life, Mr. Miranda saw the drive and promise of
the immigrant story of America. Already in 1782 the French immigrant
Crèvecoeur had defined “the American, this new man” as one who moved to
a land in which the “idle may be employed, the useless become useful,
and the poor become rich.” Hamilton announces this entrepreneurial
ambition early in the show: “Hey, yo, I’m just like my country/I’m
young, scrappy and hungry.” The night’s biggest applause line,
“Immigrants: We get the job done!,” proclaims that, contra Donald J.
Trump, immigrants are the source of America’s greatness and renewal, not
its decline.
Mr. Miranda’s depiction of Hamilton as resourceful immigrant and
talented self-made man captures an important aspect of his character.
But the musical avoids an equally pronounced feature of Hamilton’s
beliefs: his deeply ingrained elitism, his disdain for the lower classes
and his fear of democratic politics. The musical’s misleading portrayal
of Hamilton as a “scrappy and hungry” man of the people obscures his
loathing of the egalitarian tendencies of the revolutionary era in which
he lived.
Hamilton mistrusted the political capacities of the common people and
insisted on deference to elites. In a speech delivered at the
Constitutional Convention, Hamilton praised the hierarchical principles
of the British political system. He argued, for example, that the new
American president and senators should serve for life. Many of the
Convention participants feared the “excess of democracy,” but Hamilton
went much further. He wanted to bring an elective monarchy and restore
non-titled aristocracy to America. “The people are turbulent and
changing,” he declared. “They seldom judge or determine right.” They
must be ruled by “landholders, merchants and men of the learned
professions,” whose experience and wisdom “travel beyond the circle” of
their neighbors. For America to become an enduring republic, Hamilton
argued, it had to insulate rulers and the economy as much as possible
from the jealous multitude.
One of the musical’s most memorable scenes portrays Hamilton’s debate
with Thomas Jefferson over the establishment of a national bank. What it
doesn’t convey is Jefferson’s populist resistance to an economic plan
that, in his view, supported the rule of commercial oligarchs who
manipulated credit and currency at the expense of debtors and yeoman
farmers. Instead, Mr. Miranda stages a confrontation between a
hypocritical republican slave owner and an abolitionist visionary (“A
civics lesson from a slaver,” a scoffing Hamilton says in response to
Jefferson. “Hey, neighbor, your debts are paid ’cause you don’t pay for
labor”) that conceals as much as it reveals.
Hamilton’s opposition to slavery — reflected, for example, in his being
a founder of New York’s Manumission Society — was not central to his
political vision. The musical’s suggestion that had he not been killed
in the duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton would have gone on to play an
important role in the abolitionist struggle is fantasy. Even the
lionization of Hamilton as the exemplar of America’s immigrant ideal
neglects his ultimate endorsement of the Alien and Sedition Acts of
1798, which made it harder for immigrants to become citizens while
allowing their deportation if they were suspected of disloyalty (he
urged exceptions, though, for some foreign merchants and those “whose
demeanor among us has been unexceptionable”). Jefferson led the
opposition to this policy, and his victory in the presidential election
of 1800 brought most of its provisions to an end.
Our point is not that Mr. Miranda should have offered a more balanced
portrayal of Hamilton. But the aspect of Hamilton’s life he celebrates —
the self-making entrepreneurialism of the American dream — cannot be
fully understood without including, indeed without highlighting,
Hamilton’s insistent and emphatic inegalitarianism. Hamilton and his
contemporaries understood these seemingly contradictory positions as two
sides of the same coin. Ignoring one side, as Mr. Miranda has done,
obscures their connection both then and now.
Just as Jefferson’s republican championing of the people’s liberties
depended upon his acceptance of a permanent underclass of slave
laborers, so does Hamilton’s commitment to the success of the
entrepreneurial self-made man depend upon his assumption that there
would be a deferential political underclass to do the heavy work. Mr.
Miranda’s emphasis on the contradiction inherent in Jefferson’s stance
deflects attention away from the contradiction in Hamilton’s.
Hamilton, with his contemptuous attitude toward the lower classes, was
perfectly comfortable with the inegalitarian and antidemocratic
implications of his economic vision. One has to wonder if the audiences
in the Richard Rodgers Theater would be as enthusiastic about a musical
openly affirming such convictions. No founder of this country more
clearly envisioned the greatness of a future empire enabled by drastic
inequalities of wealth and power. In this sense, too, “Hamilton” is very
much a musical for our times.
Jason Frank and Isaac Kramnick teach political theory in the department
of government at Cornell.
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