‘Hamilton, The Musical’: good timing and an apropos message

The country seems agog over "Hamilton, The Musical." The New York performances of the rap and hip-hop portrayal of the founding father and his times are still sold out after two and a half years. It won 11 Tonys, a Grammy and a Pulitzer for drama. There are two national touring companies going strong.  People who don't live in a city where there's a performance make travel plans that include one. The phenomenon is making history. What's going on?

Alexander Hamilton emerges from the production an extraordinarily talented, motivated, determined and, above all, principled individual. Following Ron Chernow's 2004 biography, the play tells a rags-to-riches story, a very bright fellow orphaned early, adopted by a wealthy family, sent away for his education, rising to the pinnacle of society mostly through the strength of his writing and his singular ability to translate his brilliant analyses of politics and economics into effective policy. He dies a hero at the hands of his archrival, Aaron Burr, whose political career Hamilton ruined by swinging presidential votes in the Electoral College to Thomas Jefferson, whose democratic notions Hamilton thought would ruin the country. But Hamilton understood that Burr was an unprincipled opportunist lacking even a shred of integrity and thus a still greater threat to the nation. Hamilton's legacy lives on in the foundational structure of American government.

It was not always so. For over half a century, American students learned that Hamilton was at heart a monarchist who favored the rich and the well-born, was anti-democratic to the core, was feared by Jefferson and his faction for cause, and represented a clear danger to the health and future of the American republic. Where did that idea come from?  From something someone wrote, one of the most influential of American historians, Charles Beard. In 1913 Beard, a sometime professor at Columbia but a prolific writer, published a study of the American founders, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Noting Hamilton's leadership in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and particularly his authorship of 55 of the 77 Federalist Papers, the essays published in newspapers over a 10-month period urging ratification, Beard presented Hamilton as heading a class-driven counterrevolution, suppressing the democratic impulses of the American Revolution in creating a non-democratic constitution that transferred national power to a collusion between a strong central government and the country's wealthiest and most accomplished businessmen. They were not motivated by the people's interest, Beard argued, but by their own.

This economic analysis of the founding came under significant criticism during the Cold War, and by the end of the 1960s, when, because of the civil rights revolution's emphasis on equality and its critique of power one might have expected differently, Beard's thesis, and his reputation, were in shambles. Historians noted that in the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton, while he supported the non-democratic nature of the Electoral College, the federal judiciary, whose members serve for life, and the Senate, nonetheless, because he believed totally unchecked central power would become tyrannous, argued that at least one element in the central government must be elected by universal suffrage — i.e., by the people with no property or other qualification. And so it was. The House of Representatives is elected by the people from districts determined by population, its members serve for only two-year terms, and it has two special powers related to democracy: the power of impeachment (not the Senate), and all money bills must originate there (not the Senate), because it's the people's money. Then historians cited Hamilton's role in founding the New York manumission society, leading to the gradual abolition of slavery in that state.  And historian Forrest MacDonald, the foremost critic, observed that the kind of government force Hamilton championed is necessary to restrain the anti-democratic and abusive tendencies of concentrated power, the only force that can effectively do so, if used properly.

"Hamilton, The Musical" is quite prescient. It debuted in February 2015, more than a year before the election of Donald Trump. But its message is currently apropos. Hamilton opposed plutocracy; he favored a strong economy that created equal opportunity. And what he valued most in government leadership was unassailable integrity.