The Hamilton Cult (Harper’s Magazine):
The Founding Fathers are on record as worrying about how their deeds and actions might be recounted by posterity. “The history of our revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other,” John Adams complained. “The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electric rod smote the earth and out sprang George Washington.” By the mid-1790s, Revolutionary War veterans already paraded in separate groups, unable to agree on the definition of “the glorious cause.”
The Founders were right to worry. Disagreements over not just the substance of American history but how to teach it have continued to the present day. One of the liveliest battles occurred in 1994, right at the dawn of the Hamilton revival, and began with a surprise attack by Lynne Cheney, who was eager to take down a forthcoming set of national history standards. Her Wall Street Journal op-ed, which appeared on October 20, was entitled “The End of History.”
Prior to publishing her denunciation, Cheney had been the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where she spearheaded a 1992 report on the decline of education in the United States — particularly the teaching of history. The fear of what conservatives called relativism was in the air. Liberals, in their view, were replacing facts with politically correct opinions. “We would wish for our children that their decisions be informed not by the wisdom of the moment,” declared Cheney in the report, “but by the wisdom of the ages.”
There was bipartisan agreement that American education needed help, a sentiment that had already moved President George H. W. Bush to call for reform. A national standards council was convened in 1991, cochaired by Charlotte Crabtree, the director of the National Center for History in the Schools (N.C.H.S.) at UCLA, and Gary Nash, a distinguished historian and professor at the same university. It included an impressive (and inclusive) group of educators and scholars, with Cheney’s office reportedly suggesting many of the twenty-eight members.
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The two sides eventually drew up their forces for an epochal clash on Dateline. Cheney repeated her claims about the corrupt N.C.H.S., which had, she said, enlisted the foot soldiers of political correctness — more specifically, “various political groups such as African-American organizations and Native American groups.” Senator Bob Dole was shown speaking to veterans about the standards. “This is wrong,” Dole said, “and it threatens us as surely as any foreign power ever has.”
The standards, it should be said, were voluntary. They offered ways of presenting material, analyzing it, rather than mandating any particular recipe for teaching history. As a Times editorial noted, for every suggested exercise that would put John D. Rockefeller on trial for his business practices (particularly irritating to Cheney), there was an exercise celebrating the increase of wealth and freedom. In all, there were 2,600 sample assignments, though if you tuned in to Dateline that evening in 1995, you might have thought that this huge expenditure of work was a kind of Ponzi scheme, as Jane Pauley quizzed Gary Nash:
PAULEY: How should children be taught about George Washington? What should they be taught?
NASH: They should understand how Washington emerged out of the planter aristocracy of Virginia, and they should understand that it was a slave-owning aristocracy.
PAULEY: Was he a great man?
NASH: He certainly was a great man.
PAULEY: You mentioned slave-owning first.
NASH: Well, he was a great man, no doubt of it.
PAULEY: But do we need to weave America’s sad and long history of racism and slavery throughout the entire timeline of American history?
NASH: Yes, we do. Because it happened.
For the next two years, Nash and Crabtree explained, debated, and refined the standards, making changes under a volley of criticism from Congress, most of it from the right. Some of these critics probably had only a hazy idea of American history. That couldn’t be said of Nash, the author of a dozen books, including landmark studies of race and the Revolutionary era. Yet his approach as a historian was unlikely to impress his opponents. In The Unknown American Revolution (2005), he argues that the War for Independence as we know it was the culmination of numerous smaller-scale insurrections throughout the 1760s and 1770s. There were resistance movements by tenant farmers, urban mechanics and artisans, seamen, slaves, women, and Native Americans — i.e., the lower classes, with which the elite eventually joined forces to throw off the British crown.
To put it another way: Nash’s book, a synthesis of much of his work, is the opposite of those Great Man tomes that rise like hot-air balloons up the bestseller list. It shows a sequence of revolutions — what the author calls “unknowing rehearsals for revolt and radical reform.” It features not just a handful of plantation-owning Virginians and well-heeled New Englanders but sailmakers in New York, oystermen in Boston, backcountry farmers in North Carolina, and even women: Magdalen Valleau, a Huguenot, led colonial land riots in New Jersey as early as the 1740s. Crucially, the book also maintains that the reluctance on the part of Southern plantation owners to break with England was overcome by their fear of slave uprisings. (Indeed, it was Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s royal governor, who offered to emancipate and arm the state’s slave population in November 1775; what he called his Ethiopian Regiment wore sashes with the inscription liberty to slaves.) And revolutions kept happening, even after the Treaty of Paris officially ended the armed conflict with England in 1783. This, ultimately, seems the point of standards like those proposed by the N.C.H.S.: to see history in flux, as opposed to static and mere biography.
Meanwhile, how did the actual history standards pan out? In 1995, a Times reporter visited several New York City high schools in an effort to answer that very question. “Where’s the black man?” a student at a high school in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant asked. (The student was looking for Crispus Attucks, the black man who died in the Boston Massacre, and this was in pre-gentrified Bed-Stuy.) At Stuyvesant High School, in Manhattan, students debated Alexander Hamilton’s vision of the nascent American republic. “Hamilton protected an infant democracy,” a girl named Christina argued. “He protected the rich,” a girl named Elaine shot back. At the end of the debate, the students arguing for Hamilton just barely lost.
When the American colonists had won the war — thanks to, among other things, French naval assistance and Mexican financing — their rough confederation was a fiscal mess. Most state budgets were deeply in the red; even some state boundaries were a contested blur. It was Hamilton who found a way to solder the republic together. He had mastered the art of finance, taking cues from the British Empire and in particular from the fiscal strategies of Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1721 to 1742 and a pioneer of the so-called sinking fund. In essence, the sinking fund that Hamilton designed paid off debt through bond issues, which in turn encouraged speculation. To put it another way, he built a government based on debt assumption — with, incredibly, the support of George Washington, the loan-hating president who insisted that “no pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt.”
This is the stuff — the arcane maneuverings of public finance and bond markets — that William Hogeland tackled in Founding Finance (2012). To some extent, he hoped to debunk the idea that he was out to vilify Hamilton. The man was a genius, he argued, a great financier. Bonds, not duels and mistresses, are what made him tick — although bonds are seemingly meager material for a musical. Even less heartening, at least for a contemporary Broadway audience, is that Hamilton had little interest in paying off these debts.
Instead, Hogeland argues, Hamilton, under the tutelage of Robert Morris, was trying to increase the debt. This was his strategy for growing an empire out of a clutch of bankrupt states: assuming a federal debt structure. “His genius, his brilliance, was not in paying off the debt but in funding it,” says Hogeland. “And yet the very people who know that he is famous for funding and assumption will tell you, ‘Oh, Hamilton knew he had to pay the debt.’ How come we keep saying these things when they are the opposite of what he was trying to do?”
The Whiskey Rebellion was a protest against this new federal structure, the first resistance against a new system that reminded people of the system that they had just been fighting. Farmers in western Pennsylvania, just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, shipped their grain by mule to the East, often converting it to the more transportable form of whiskey. Hamilton taxed the whiskey at the point of production, using the revenue to make interest payments to government bondholders who did not themselves pay taxes on what they earned. It was, plain and simple, a redistribution of wealth. Yet even Hamilton was unnerved by the resulting frenzy, if only for how it looked politically. In the Pittsburgh area, citizens put up liberty poles, using the very same iconography that had been so effective during the Revolution — and once again, it was meant to protest taxation by faraway powers, though now the powers were closer than England.
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By the end of October 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion had collapsed. The federal troops met no resistance, and contented themselves with arresting a couple dozen men, such as Herman Husband, and bringing them back to Philadelphia for trial. In a sense, though, the insurrection — which was a kind of class war — never ended. “A lot of people in the run-up to the Revolution thought that inequality should be a big issue,” Nash says. “That was pretty much an axiom of eighteenth-century reasoning.”
But the Revolution didn’t solve those issues. And if you talk to people along the route that Hamilton and the army took in 1794, you could almost believe that the Whiskey Rebellion, which had everything to do with geography and natural resources and social stratification and almost nothing to do with the Great Man theory of history, is still in progress. You learn about communities of Eastern Europeans who came to work in the mines and the steel and coke mills, before the owners began boarding them up. You hear about jobs that started leaving in the 1960s, and really haven’t returned, anywhere west of the Alleghenies, to a largely lower-income white population. Once these people swore allegiance to John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, and until Ronald Reagan’s ascent, they might have voted for the party of Jefferson — but now they are as likely to vote for Trump as for Clinton. “At some point, the county turned red,” says Christine Buckelew, the president of the Fayette County Historical Society. She comes from a long line of farmers, who, she recalls, thought Baltimore was far away.
As far as Hamilton goes, it seems important to note that George Washington loved the theater. In 1790, when the federal government was based briefly in New York City — this was when Congress met on Wall Street, and the executive mansion occupied a site at what is now the Manhattan pier of the Brooklyn Bridge — the theater district was near City Hall. Washington showed up at all the plays, once even laughing in public, a major event for this most reticent of politicians. (He was the Samuel Beckett of his day, very big on silent pauses.) He certainly believed in the theater as an instrument of edification. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” a line that we attribute to an about-to-be-hanged Nathan Hale, was likely borrowed from Cato (1713), a play by Joseph Addison that Washington had staged for the troops, endeavoring to tie the political moment to a classical past by aligning the war with what he saw as the greatness of Rome.
In our current moment, we are watching politicians align themselves with the greatness of a really great Broadway musical — the first woman to be nominated for a major party’s presidential bid quoted from the play in her acceptance speech, after buying out the entire theater for a fund-raiser a few weeks before. Just as interesting is the crusade to get high-school students to Hamilton. It has been reported that at the very first performance of the play, at New York City’s Public Theater, Lesley S. Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, turned to the person next to her — who was Ron Chernow — and said, “We have to get this in the hands of kids.”
Get it into the hands of kids they did, as I have already noted. Without a doubt, the play has interested young people in the Revolutionary era, a great thing, and scholars have pointed out that Hamilton is packed with historical detail, also pretty great. There are, to be sure, some factual pratfalls. Ironically, given its multicultural casting, there is still what Lyra D. Monteiro, a historian at Rutgers, has called a “truly damning omission.” “Despite the proliferation of black and brown bodies onstage,” she writes, “not a single enslaved or free person of color exists as a character in this play.” Hamilton depicts an era in which, for example, 14 percent of all New Yorkers were black, the majority of them slaves — and yet, Monteiro notes, “one could easily assume that slavery does not exist” in its universe. But if you say these things, you feel like a churl, defiantly going up against Lynne Cheney’s precepts: emphasize the positives in American history, stick with the Great Men, and so forth.
I recently met a teacher who took his students to Hamilton. They were excited, of course. Who wouldn’t be? The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored their visit specifically because they were from low-income neighborhoods — places where they could ill afford tickets to a Broadway show, let alone the price tag for Hillary Clinton’s fund-raising performance in July. (For $100,000, donors got two premium seats and attended a wrap party with the candidate afterward.) They boned up on their Hamiltonian history, told their friends and family, got dressed up. They each paid the sum of ten dollars — a Hamilton — since their benefactors called for this rudimentary investment. When they arrived at the theater, they stood in line and received their tickets. Then the scalpers descended, offering the students hundreds of dollars apiece.
“I could see them looking at the scalpers and looking at me,” the teacher recalls. “What was I supposed to say? I just said that if you’re going to sell your ticket, then you’re not going to be able to discuss the show.” None of the students sold their tickets. Touched by their idealism and disturbed by this curbside reminder of the relationship between speculation and economic inequality, the teacher led the group into the theater. “The play’s about how anybody can make it,” he says. “But it’s not true.”
The show, he stresses, was great: an amazing spectacle. On this point, Hogeland is in complete agreement. His objections, after all, have more to do with historical emphasis.
“I think the musical is theatrically brilliant,” he says. “But it’s just the icing on the cake of this industry that’s existed for decades now, trying to promote Hamilton as something other than what he actually was.” The duel with Burr, his relationship with his wife and his mistress — these are rich material for a narrative biography, Hogeland concedes, but in terms of Hamilton’s impact on the formation and the very nature of the United States, they are little more than footnotes. “Accidents,” he calls them. They lead us to overlook what Hamilton thought was his own purpose in life. “The liberals and people on the left who are lauding Hamilton because he was an active-government guy — they just aren’t getting what was important about him. It was the intertwining of military force and wealth concentration as almost the definition of nationhood. I think if you asked him, he would say, ‘Yeah, that’s it, that’s the key, that’s what I know how to do, and no one else knew how to do it.’ That’s his genuine legacy. We just have to sort out how we feel about it.”
Art is transformative. It can make people feel great — about themselves, about another person, about a character in a Broadway musical or some aspect of the thing we refer to as America. Hamilton, as we have seen, has made history come alive, to use the overused phrase. But wait — who said history was dead? Sure, people try to kill it all the time, intentionally or unintentionally, by obscuring it or by rendering it unconscious, bludgeoning it with dates and names and (sometimes the bluntest instrument of all) facts. By now, however, the parade of Great Men reminds me of nothing so much as the boldface names in an old gossip column, a dying form, by the way, that tends to service players who already know their names but like to hear them again. History is alive only when it is in dialogue with the present. I would argue — and I am certainly not alone — that history is less like something you learn than something you do, that you take your part in, a terrifying notion if you are inclined toward the status quo.
The American Revolution, the armed military conflict with England, is long over. But in our contemporary environment of extreme economic inequality, the unsung Stamp Act protesters or Tea Party rowdies sound less singular, less distant; they are like actors, not in a play but in a pageant whose outcome was and is beyond their imagining, constantly rewriting itself. And yet their concerns are ours, down to the last indignant detail. “Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one,” lamented a New York newspaper in 1765, “especially when it is considered that men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?” Neither Hamilton nor Hamilton will answer that question to our satisfaction. If this current election tells us anything, it is that the Whiskey Rebellion never truly ended, and while the soundtrack is always changing, the curtain may never come down.
& much more over at the full article