The protagonist of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s most famous musical helped build the world in which his modern-day heroes are struggling to live.
Despite his transformation into a progressive visionary, courtesy of the Broadway megahit bearing his name, Hamilton is more accurately associated with the interests of capital than those of ordinary Americans. While the show celebrates the first treasury secretary for ushering in the American financial system, it glosses over the fact that Hamilton’s vision privileged the monied classes from the get-go. As most soldiers during the Revolutionary War were paid in IOUs, merchants and other speculators had been buying them up on the cheap from men who couldn’t afford to wait until full repayment—sparking eventual fights among the Founding Fathers about whether to pay actual soldiers or those rich enough to exploit them. Not only did Hamilton side with the merchants, he went on to back a regressive whiskey tax instead of a progressive one that might hurt their bottom lines. When the move eventually sparked a rebellion in 1794, Hamilton wanted to send armed troops to Pennsylvania to squash it. If *Hamilton* isn’t meant to be understood as strictly historically accurate, it’s nevertheless difficult to dispute the idea that the musical explicitly embraces fundamental American ideas and Hamilton’s role in engineering them—even if those ideas did include slavery (the abolition thereof Hamilton never actually campaigned for) and the business interests that institution so brutally upheld. Centuries later, enslaved people’s descendants—both African Americans and Afro-Latinos—would find themselves still stripped of generational wealth through redlining, Jim Crow, and imperialism. These forces eventually drove them and others to neighborhoods like Washington Heights—offering the heirs of Hamilton’s favored class yet another business opportunity, and leaving the underclass that’s lionized by *In The Heights *once again at the mercy of those who stand to profit off them. https://newrepublic.com/article/162789/alexander-hamilton-villain-in-the-heights -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#9289): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9289 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83631755/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
