interesting essay at Vox: Hamilton and historiography

[heresluck]

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/27/9771784/hamilton-cabinet-battle-debt

Teaser:

The net impact of Miranda's rendition of the dispute is to render Hamilton as a more progressive-friendly figure and Jefferson as a more straightforwardly conservative one. Jefferson complains that Hamilton's text is too long, echoing Republican criticisms of Barack Obama's key legislative initiatives, and objects generically to taxes — again, sounding like a modern Republican — without raising the point that 18th-century taxes hit the poor more heavily than the rich.

This is part of a larger shift in the trajectory of how American history is understood. [...]

Miranda's Hamilton so perfectly matches the sensibilities of mainstream Obama-era Democrats that the Democratic National Committee turned an early November Hamilton performance into a fundraiser.

And it reflects an ongoing, albeit somewhat subtle, split among contemporary Democrats.

Comments

[heresluck]

Honestly, I think Chernow's biography is *more* flattering; part of Chernow's goal is clearly to counter some of AHam's legacy of bad press (he really hammers home, for example, the evidence that Hamilton was not motivated by money, sometimes to his own detriment, in contrast to Jeffersonian rumors & rhetoric).

LMM's goal, on the other hand is to make good drama (which AHam's life certainly supplied!), and so he's interested in a) conflict, both internal and external, and b) structure and narrative arc, which means, among other things, demonstrating why Burr would want to shoot him. I mean, obviously Hamilton is our protagonist, and he's so consistently equated with America itself ("young, scrappy, and hungry") that we have to root for him, and he's so clever and charismatic that we want to root for him, but in addition to being a nerd and a charmer he's also a drama queen, a workaholic, and an arrogant whiner with anger issues who cheats on his wife and exercises staggeringly bad judgment on a regular basis. I love him, but I completely get why Burr can't stand him!

All of which is a long-winded way of agreeing that, yeah, the musical is about understanding Hamilton, appreciating him, and forgiving him his faults and bad decisions -- but not about lionizing him in an uncomplicated way.

[isis]

I agree with your comment here! I really do like the complexity that both works don't shy away from - "in addition to being a nerd and a charmer he's also a drama queen, a workaholic, and an arrogant whiner with anger issues who cheats on his wife and exercises staggeringly bad judgment on a regular basis", hee, exactly!

I don't agree that the lines are clearly drawn as Hamilton=liberal and Jefferson=conservative in either Chernow's book (which I've just finished) or the musical. It's a lot more nuanced than that, even in the musical - yes, Jefferson's poking fun at "too many damn pages" echos modern politics, but so does everything in The Election of 1800 - I think LMM is not so much drawing lines as pointing out that the machinery of politics hasn't changed much in 200 years.

[jesse_the_k]

Just so. I can't name a single most thrilling part of the production, but the sense that the Founders were absolutely human, frangible, irrational is so welcome. The musical undies the transformation of our yeasty, strange, intermittent history into frozen wax figures.