The Hamilton Hustle.

[alarimer]

This article is certainly food for thought. I've come to think of the play Hamilton as fiction. It really is not based on Hamilton as he actually was, but as someone we wished him to be. But then, one should never learn history from pop culture. Broadway and Hollywood are littered with examples of this.

To put it simply, Hamilton was not a democrat; he was an authoritarian at heart. He didn't believe in democracy. He saw it as an American "disease."

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilton-hustle-stoller

What’s strange about all of this praise is how it presumes that Alexander Hamilton was a figure for whom social justice and democracy were key animating traits. Given how Democrats, in particular, embraced the show and Hamilton himself as a paragon of social justice, you would think that he had fought to enlarge the democratic rights of all Americans. But Alexander Hamilton simply didn’t believe in democracy, which he labeled an American “disease.” He fought—with military force—any model of organizing the American political economy that might promote egalitarian politics. He was an authoritarian, and proud of it.

To assert Hamilton disliked democracy is not controversial. The great historian Henry Adams described an evening at a New York dinner, when Hamilton replied to democratic sentiment by banging the table and saying, “Your people, sir—your people is a great beast!” Hamilton’s recommendation to the Constitutional Convention, for instance, was to have a president for life, and to explicitly make that president not subject to law.

Professional historians generally avoid emphasizing Hamilton’s disdain for the people, at least when they write for the broad public. Better to steer safely clear of the freight train of publicity and money behind the modern Hamilton myth. One exception is amateur historian William Hogeland, who noted in a recent Boston Review essay that Hamilton had strong authoritarian tendencies. Hamilton, he wrote, consistently emphasized “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”

Indeed, most of Hamilton’s legacy is astonishingly counter-democratic. His central role in founding both the financial infrastructure of Wall Street and a nascent military establishment (which supplanted the colonial system of locally controlled democratic militias) was rooted in his self-appointed crusade to undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to govern themselves. We should be grateful not that Hamilton structured the essential institutions of America to fit his vision, but that he failed to do so. Had he succeeded, we would probably be living in a military dictatorship.

[dhol82]

1. This fallls under what I never learned in history class.

Always interesting to find out you were lied to by your teachers.

[alarimer]

2. Typically we put the founders on pedestals they do not deserve.

I never knew much about Hamilton and always assumed Aaron Burr was the real villain, when in fact he was the more progressive of the two, politically. But he actually killed Hamilton in the duel, which is where I suspect most of the adulation for Hamilton comes from. I just have never liked the breathless praise that the musical got. Some of that is my own contrariness, because it's so popular there MUST be something wrong with it. And I was hesitant to post this article because Breitbart also disdains it, though for different reasons (they hate the multicultural caste).

But anyway, I read an article in the NYTimes this weekend about the founding of Paterson, NJ, which has been attributed to Hamilton, though his initial efforts failed.

[yurbud]

3. just as religion is a cult plus time, founding fathers had their own flaws and self-interests

that seem to fade into the background over time.

[Blue_Tires]

4. I suppose the next big discovery will be finding out "Evita" was no saint, either...

[dhol82]

5. Mother Theresa has gotten some bad press also

From what I have read, it was deserved.
Boy, talk about clay feet!

[Demsrule86]

6. Burr was accused of trying separate land from the Louisiana Purchase and form a separate country...

If true Burr was a traitor...it also appears that Hamilton deliberately did not wound Burr, but Burr went for the kill...I see nothing to admire in this man.

[politicat]

7. In the 1780s, democracy had never been tried on a scale larger than a village.

Athens? Not democracy -- the vote was limited to citizens, and citizenship was limited to men with the power, genetics and wealth to have been born in a certain place, to a father who was a citizen, and had enough money to own and hold slaves. And that was 2000+ years in the past. Representative governments had been tried and some lasted than others, but they all failed in blood and fire. Just as modern left-anarchism has some philosophical logics that sound appealing but don't work in practice, democracy of the 18th and early 19th century looked fairly dangerous.

The closest thing to active democracy were the Puritan settlements of New England, and those were deeply repressive regimes for anyone who wasn't "one of them". Ask my Quaker ancestors, who were branded, had ears cut off, were whipped out of the community and into the wilderness.

The Terror had not yet happened, but the English Civil War and the Cromwell regime was within living memory for the Founder generation. It was as closer to them in time than the US Civil War is to us, today. Fights over succession were completely normal for their world. The masses were a truly terrifying prospect for everyone, including the masses themselves, because this was a world with a corrupt and ineffective legal system, no policing, and minimal redress of grievances. When the masses got pushed too far, blood and fire was the only recourse.

You do realize that the democrats of the time period were not democrats at all? They wanted to limit the vote -- and even citizenship -- to male, white people with wealth? The Jeffersonians were playing at democracy, whose base intent was to maintain their wealth and ownership of other people. They used the small holders, laborers and mechanics in their region, exactly the same way our 1%ers take 11 of the cookies, then point at the woman/brown person/religious minority and tell the white working class, "they're taking your cookie."

They were all authoritarians in one way or another. As someone who would absolutely be one of the oppressed, I'm fine with the federalist legal and economic system that allowed for the evolution towards equal rights rather the Jeffersonian system that would have left me the property of my father until he sold me to another man, and I'd have to hope I'd outlive him to live on my own terms. Under the Jeffersonian agrarian system, women and people of color would never have a chance at the capital required to even approach suffrage and citizenship.

[scarletlib]

8. Excellent reply!