And what a story the work itself is: Lin-Manuel Miranda, 1st generation American, picks up Ron Chernow's doorstop biography of Hamilton by accident, sees immediately not just the dramatic possibilities but the connections to his own Caribbean-American background. Obama feels similar affinities and helps launch the project at a White House soirée. Soon the whole world is rapping about the "ten dollar founding father with no father/Got a lot farther by working a lot harder/By being a lot smarter/By being a self-starter," and the rest is, as they say, history. Miranda's work is even keeping Hamilton on that ten-dollar bill where he belongs.
Like most miraculous birth narratives, though, this one leaves out the more questionable truths in favor of the glorious ones. Yes, Miranda deserves his genius grant, and I can hear in one run-through why the show is winning all those emmys, grammies, or whatever. But the fact is, "Hamilton" is just the culmination of a 20-year neo-conservative campaign to reshape our national story around the unlikely figure of Alexander Hamilton, who was an under-appreciated Founding Father for a reason.
The re-invention of Hamilton actually starts, as far as I can tell, with reactionary icons William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard in the 1990s, and publishing a seminal op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 1997. Chernow's very accessible biography--called a 'hagiography' by professional scholars--comes along a few years later, just as the New York Historical Society relaunches itself with a blockbuster Hamilton exhibit in 2004. That exhibit, underwritten by the Society's ultra-wealthy supporters at the Gilder Lehrman Institute, attracts big crowds but also a fair bit of controversy from scholars, who resent the obvious right-wing bias of curator and Hamilton biographer Richard Brookhiser, in whose vision Hamilton becomes the patron saint of modern global capital, as well as the exemplary case of meritocratic individualism.
On this platform, Miranda's spirited work adds a captivating aura of romance to a figure who otherwise lingers in the shadow of his once-admired adversary, Thomas Jefferson--and in the shadow of his violent death at the hands of the ineffable Aaron Burr. Miranda's musical manages to humanize Burr while caricaturing Jefferson, a two-fer that clears the way for Hamilton to join Washington at the apex of our national pantheon.
Revision also means exclusion. We see Hamilton's undisputed heroism at Yorktown, but not his scorched-earth suppression of revolt in western Pennsylvania, the only Secretary of the Treasury who ever led an army into the field against tax evaders. We hear a lot about his immigrant status, but not so much about his anti-immigrant politics. And the breezy evocation of his epochal dispute with Jefferson--industry vs. agriculture, capital and trade vs. homesteading and slavery--disguises Hamilton's strong beliefs in inequality and his support for a financial elite. We hear the farewell address he wrote for Washington but not his famous 6-hour speech to the Constitutional Convention on behalf of monarchy.
In short the astonishing success of "Hamilton" is not just artistic but political. As I pursue my researches I hope to return to this compelling question: why? Why is Hamilton such a ready-made fit for this America, right now? The answers will I hope prove enlightening.
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