Mindbending (& squee harshing) assessment of Actual Hamilton Actual Politics

[jesse_the_k]

Matt Stoller writes in The Baffler, March 2017 on Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder

The Hamilton Hustle

Indeed, the shifting popular image of Hamilton is itself a gauge of the relative strength of democratic institutions at any given moment. In the roaring 1920s, when Wall Street lorded it over all facets of our public life, treasury secretary Andrew Mellon put Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill. Mellon was the third richest man in the country, famous for, among other things, having his brother and chairman of one of his coal mining subsidiaries extoll the virtues of using machine guns to enforce labor discipline. Mellon himself, who later presided over the Great Depression, was routinely lauded by big business interests as the “greatest secretary of the treasury since Alexander Hamilton.” Big business leaders in Pittsburgh, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, worshipped Hamilton (as well as Napoleon).

During the next decade, as populists put constraints on big money, Hamilton fell into disrepute. In 1925, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then just a lawyer, recognized Hamilton as an authoritarian, saying that he had in his mind after reading a popular new book on Hamilton and Jefferson “a picture of escape after escape which this nation passed through in those first ten years; a picture of what might have been if the Republic had been finally organized as Alexander Hamilton sought.” By 1947, a post-war congressional report titled “Fascism in Action” listed Hamilton as one intellectual inspiration for the Nazi regime. Hamilton’s name practically became an epithet among Democrats of the New Deal era, which makes it all the more surprising that he is the darling of the modern party.

Set in contrast to the actual life and career of its subject, the play Hamilton is a feat of political alchemy—as is the stunningly successful marketing campaign surrounding it. But our generation’s version of Hamilton adulation isn’t all that different from the version that took hold in the 1920s: it’s designed to subvert democracy by helping the professional class to associate the rise of finance with the greatness of America, instead of seeing in that financial infrastructure the seeds of a dangerous authoritarian tradition.

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Comments

[rosefox]

Thanks for sharing that—really interesting!

I've been deep in Hamilton fandom from very early on (I saw the show before the album came out) and I didn't generally get a sense that the fans saw it as lionizing Hamilton. It showcases his facility with words, his grim determination to pull himself out of poverty and succeed no matter the cost, his frustration at people who didn't recognize and appreciate his genius even as he failed to see his own flaws. He's a whole person. But it's true that it mostly focuses on his personal failings rather than his ideas, some of which were brilliant and some of which were pretty terrible.

[jesse_the_k]

Yes, I think one of the reasons LMM's version of HAMILTON is so compelling is the lead character's position somewhere between hero and anti-hero.

[kore]

I think there was also blurring between Hamilton the character and the very lovable LMM, who was so personally associated with the character, the show, the whole phenomenon. It'll be interesting to see how future audiences judge the character as other people play him (or what might happen if that filmed performance DVD ever comes out).

[selki]

I don't agree with all his ideas, but a lot of his ideas were very good. He was a force against all the other founders' assumptions and their landed longtime resident privilege. His NY time included its Dutch roots and culture of religious tolerance (for profit, yes, but any port in a storm!). https://www.city-journal.org/html/alexander-hamilton-modern-america%E2%80%99s-founding-father-13149.html