Hudson Who Lives 17Nov.pdf

"Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story? Alexander Hamilton after the End of History" The closing number in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical about first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” reflects on the great man’s historical l...

"Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story? Alexander Hamilton after the End of History" The closing number in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical about first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?” reflects on the great man’s historical legacy. It charges that the “ten-dollar founding father” remains a relatively neglected historical figure; unlike Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin, Hamilton had neither the opportunity to grow old nor to have his story told to the American people, despite the efforts of his devoted wife Eliza to keep his legacy alive.1 Eliza Hamilton’s love no doubt drove her desire to commemorate Alexander but the reasons for Miranda’s own attempt to revive Hamilton’s legacy are rather more complex and opaque. Hamilton’s story appeals to Miranda as much for autobiographical as for historical reasons, but his musical intervention had a tangible impact on the national commemoration of Hamilton, including keeping his face on the tendollar bill.2 Hamilton has also enjoyed massive critical and commercial success, garnering armfuls of industry awards and a truckload of ten-dollar bills for its creator. The show’s off-Broadway debut sold out, advance tickets for its Broadway opening totalled 30 million dollars and the show went on to play in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., London, Puerto Rico and on tour, with plans for productions in Hamburg and Sydney. In 2016 alone, Hamilton won 11 Tony awards, a Grammy, the Pulitzer prize for drama as well as breaking box office records. To coincide with 4th of July celebrations in 2020, the Disney+ channel launched a live stage film version with a 75 million-dollar distribution package. In its first ten days, 2.7 million households streamed the televised show. The name of Alexander Hamilton, it is safe to say, is no longer unknown. Alexander Hamilton’s name has, of course, always been familiar to historians of the revolutionary era and early republic.3 Born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies, Hamilton arrived in New York as a young man in 1772, just in time to join the revolutionary cause. His skill with both pen and sword soon brought him to the notice of General George Washington, who employed him as an aide-de-camp during the Lin Manuel-Miranda, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” Hamilton: An American Musical track 23, disc 2 (Original Broadway Cast Recording, 2015). 2 The 2015 decision to replace Hamilton with an unnamed American woman was reversed in 2016, due to the surging popularity of Hamilton the musical. See Scott L. Montgomery, “What Really Kept Alexander Hamilton on the $10 Bill” Fortune Magazine (24 April, 2016) https://fortune.com/2016/04/24/alexander-hamilton-harriet-tubman/ [accessed 30 December 2019] 3 For a historiographical survey of Hamilton’s historical reputation and a strong attempt to restore its positive features, see Stephen Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 1 1 revolutionary war and as his treasury secretary afterward. Alongside John Jay and James Madison, Hamilton co-authored The Federalist Papers, making the legal and political case that ultimately secured the adoption of the new US Constitution. At the treasury, his forensic legal brain and keen financial strategizing facilitated continued state-building. He put forward plans to assume state debts and fund national debt alongside the establishment of the first national Bank and aided the creation of the United States Coastguard and Post Office Department. Hamilton’s vision for a federalist future included the stimulation of manufacturing, which put him in direct opposition to his cabinet colleague at the State Department; Thomas Jefferson opposed debts, banks and the growth of industry in favour of a future republic of yeomen farmers, each “standing foursquare on his own plot of land, gun in hand and virtue in heart.”4 The clashing political visions of the two men coalesced into the first party system, with Hamilton defining the Federalist platform and Jefferson the Republican.5 Since being paired in the first US administration, the two men’s fortunes continued to be tied to one another historiographically across the generations.6 For most of the nineteenth century, Hamilton’s elitist plutocrat who sought close-to monarchical control at the centre of the American state, invariably lost out in the history books to Jefferson’s radical democrat who penned the Declaration of Independence and supported the French Revolution. As Michael O’Malley notes, “Until recently, Alexander Hamilton was a hero mostly to bankers.”7 Yet, as issues of race and slavery and their connection to the protections of states’ rights came to the fore in both history and history writing in the twentieth century, Hamilton’s star began to rise relative to that of slave-owning Jefferson. That star shines brightly in Miranda’s musical, with Hamilton transformed into a freedomfighting abolitionist and Jefferson into a privileged dandy who profits from unfree labour and “gets high with the French.”8 Hamilton’s legacy suits liberal corporatism while 4 Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virgina (New York: W.W. Nortonn & Co., 1975): 377. 5 The best account of the politics of the 1790s remains Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (Oxford University Press; New Ed edition, 1995). 6 A useful survey of the historiographical fortunes of the founding fathers is R.B. Bernstein, The Founding Fathers Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); see also Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1978); Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 7 Michael O’ Malley, “The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Hamilton, Money and Federal Power” in Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (eds.) Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018): 119. 8 Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Cabinet Battle #1,” Hamilton, track 2, disc 2 (2015). 2 Jefferson’s suggests individualism and states’ rights: George Will once noted that while Jefferson is memorialised in Washington, Hamilton's monument is all around, “We honour Jefferson, but live in Hamilton's country, a mighty industrial nation with a strong central government.”9 Miranda’s play celebrates not just Alexander as founding father but Hamilton’s America. The Life and Death of the Past This essay is not primarily interested in the story that Miranda’s musical tells about the founding or the creation of a newly minted image for one half-forgotten founding father. Rather, it explores what Hamilton shows us about the nature of history itself and the relationship between history, memory and art – or between truth and fiction – and how the musical has played a role in the re-forging of that relationship. It examines the expanding status of popular fictional portrayals of historical events in the context of steadily declining interest in academic history.10 It does not offer a guide on how to make academic history more popular, but it does try to understand how and why this unhappy disconnect arose. Tracing changes in the writing of history about the revolution, alongside accompanying transformations in public culture, illuminates the impact that blurring the lines between truth and fiction has had on both sides of the equation. Historical myths and storytelling about the past existed long before the historical profession emerged in the nineteenth century and they have continued to spill out from beneath the discipline of professional scrutiny and scholarly rigor into public cultural spaces since. Over the last few decades, however, the relationship between history and the public has been transformed. On the one hand, “history” has become increasingly popular and public: in historical novels and plays; in the proliferation of heritage sites; and in television series and Hollywood movies, not only is story-telling about the past ubiquitous 9 George Will quoted in Knott, Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, 6. In US universities, the study of history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, despite the number of registered students rising. See Benjamin Schmidt, “The History BA Since the Great Recession: 2018 AHA Majors Report” Perspectives on History (26 November, 2018): https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report [accessed 12 November 2019]. While university departments are holding steady in the UK, fewer school students are taking History at A Level. See The British Academy, “Worrying decline in study of History and English at A Level, warns British Academy” (17 Aug, 2017) https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/worrying-decline-study-history-and-english-levelwarns-british-academy/ [accessed 19 October 2020]; Reality Check Team, “A Levels: What Subjects are Students Dropping and Why?” BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45171371 [accessed 19 October 2020] 10 3 but its import and urgency is on the rise.11 Individuals, families, and communities look to locate their cultural identities and historical roots in a shared past. From the 1970s, the search for identity has played out in a massive expansion of genealogical interest in the form of TV shows, heritage tourism, websites such as Ancestry and dramatic fiction. The 1977 TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots garnered a mass audience, indicating the early stirrings of a new public interest in both identity and genealogy that transformed the uses of the past as it expanded its audience.12 To connect with this new audience, professional historians sought ways to apply their tools outside of academia; launching the first issue of The Public Historian in 1978, editor Wesley Johnson noted that the time was ripe for historians who had “retreated into the proverbial ivory tower” to break out of their isolation.13 Responding to the apparently contradictory trends of an expansion of public interest in the past and declining levels of historical knowledge among the public, historians sought to bridge the gap.14 Louis R. Harlan’s 1989 presidential address to the American Historical Association encouraged historians to take a more active role in keeping history alive in the public mind, noting the relative success of “museum exhibitors, park rangers, historical filmmakers, and popular historians like Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough” and the obvious failures of “out 11 From Wolf Hall to Twelve Years a Slave, historical fiction in novels and film has grown incredibly popular. The American founding shares in this uptick in fictional accounts not only with Hamilton but offerings such as the HBO miniseries John Addams and Jeff Shaara’s bestselling novels Rise to Rebellion (New York: Ballantine Books Inc., 2001) and The Glorious Cause (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002). 12 More than 99 million Americans tuned into the finale of Roots, which remains the second mostwatched TV episode in broadcasting history. "Finale Of M*A*S*H Draws Record Number of Viewers," The New York Times, 3 March 1983: C17. The highly successful genealogical TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” airs in UK and US versions and regularly has an audience of over 6 million. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575; British historian David Olusoga took a similarly genealogical approach to houses, replacing bloodlines with bricks and mortar in his “A House Through Time,” now in its fourth season. Indeed, Olusoga’s appointment as Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester challenges the division between public and academic history and reverses the usual direction of travel: from the entertainment industry into academic life rather than vice versa. See https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/david-olusoga-obe/ 13 Wesley G. Johnson, “Editor’s Preface.” The Public Historian 1. 1 (1978): 6; see also Robert Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature, and Prospects,” The Public Historian 1.1 (1978): 16-28. The growing interest in the role of history in public was also reflected in the Radical History Review’s publication Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) edited by Susan Porter Benson, Roy Rosenzweig and Stephen Brier. 14 Although jeremiads like Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature (New York, 1987) and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) had a conservative political agenda attached, they also carried clear empirical evidence of a decline in historical knowledge among young Americans. 4 of touch” academic historians in doing so.15 Harlan’s view was not universally held but it was broadly accepted and the new field of ‘public history’ quickly became institutionalised in journals, conferences, degree programmes and academic posts. The foremost criticisms of Harlan’s diagnosis came from those who misread growing public enthusiasm for the past as evidence of widespread knowledge or understanding of history.16 As Michael Kammen notes, “American attendance at historic sites and museums is exceedingly high, and yet American performance is pathetic on an array of exams given to adults and highschool students who have had several years of American history classes.”17 To be sure, Hamilton’s immense popularity cannot be seen as an indication that its audiences are wellversed in the events or meaning of American independence either before or after watching the show. The relationship between history and the public has been further transformed by the emergence of an increasingly belligerent battle over the meaning of history that forms part of a broader “culture wars” in the public square, reflecting, exaggerating and reifying a fetishized version of social and political division in American life.18 While public uses of that most nationalist of historical themes, the American Revolution, have traditionally worked to cohere and unite Americans around a common set of values, recent deployment of the nation’s founding moment has, ironically, proven incredibly divisive. The “history wars” over the founding are played out through public controversies over flags, statues, exhibitions and public monuments but have also become increasingly bitter among and between professional historians. In her unsympathetic account of the Tea Party movement, Jill Lepore draws up the battle lines, as well as unwittingly exposing the division between academic and popular history. Her book polemicises against conservative uses of the American founding that emphasise tradition, continuity and national unity and deploys them for political purposes in public. Gordon Wood’s negative 15 Louis R. Harlan, “The Future of the American Historical Association,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 1-8. 16 Approaches to the study of the past designated less elitist (and certainly more relativistic) tended to confuse public enthusiasm for the past with knowledge about it. See especially Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990). 17 Michael Kammen, “Carl Becker Redivivus: Or, Is Everyone Really a Historian?” History and Theory 39.2 (2000):233. 18 The culture wars line up religious and conservative forces against liberal secular and progressive ones. They were first demarcated by James Davison Hunter in his Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991) and are chronicled by Andrew Hartman in A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5 review of her book rebukes Lepore for, among other things, mocking the American public and reminds her that while critical history plays an important role in busting myths, it can (and does) exist alongside other imagined pasts and community memories that serve other, less scholarly, purposes. The Lepore-Wood spat caused quite a stir among historians of the Revolution with each camp accusing the other of escalating presentism.19 Historian’s concerns about the gap between their professional practice and public audiences is not new, yet the acceptance of greater levels of presentism is undoubtedly a consequence of the way historians have worked to bridge that gap since the 1970s.20 The demands of the present ring loudly in an era undergoing what Francois Hartog calls “a break in time,” when “the present became something immense, invasive, and omnipresent, blocking out any other viewpoint, fabricating on a daily basis the past and the future it needed.”21 Temporal strains felt since the 1970s finally gave way to the “end of history” in 1989, setting the stage for revivals of the past that have very little to do with history.22 The consequent politicization of history and historicization of politics that has become a feature of American public culture, and can be read specifically through Miranda’s musical story about the American founding, is a central theme of this essay. The surrender of the past to the demands of the present need not infect historians, but a growing disorientation among academic historians about their role and place vis-à-vis public presentations of the past makes this an important conversation to have. The discussion is ongoing; a half-century ago, J. H. Plumb’s 1969 book The Death of the Past tolled a bell for the past as a source of authority in the present. No longer did the past provide a steady supply of heroes, Plumb notes, and neither did it act as a legitimizing font of knowledge, wisdom, tradition and ideological coherence.23 Reporting at the end of a decade of dramatic change and far-reaching movements for liberation, Plumb reminds us that while loosening the hold of the past on the present might indeed be something to 19 Jill Lepore, The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010); Gordon Wood, “No Thanks for the Memories” The New York Review of Books (13 Jan, 2011); for a taste of the controversy surrounding the book and its review see David Sehat, “Wood on Lepore on presentism or, why Gordon Wood thinks Jill Lepore is an academic snob.” U.S. Intellectual History Blog, S-USIH (11 Jan. 2011) and the online responses. It is curious and not a little worrying that the majority of responses are critical of Wood and supportive of Lepore, despite most commenters admitting to not having read her book. 20 Ian Tyrell’s Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005) traces the many ways that U.S. historians sought to bridge the gap before the 1970s “crisis” emerged. 21 Francois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015): 185. 22 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest No. 16 (Summer 1989)” 3-18. 23 J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan & Co, 1969): 41, 53, 57. 6 celebrate, the past also previously operated as a signpost to the future. Without that signpost, the future, along with the past, is lost.24 Philosophically minded historians have often commented on the relationship forged between past, present and future in the writing of history. E. H. Carr noted in his classic What is History? that “Good historians, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones.”25 Similarly, Peter Novick’s vast survey of American historiography points to a connection between a commitment to historical truth and a shared belief in progress among professional historians. He dates the collapse in nationalistic versions of the American founding much earlier – to Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the American Constitution – but notes that the Progressive school to which Beard belonged retained a belief in progress despite the profound shockwaves the First World War sent reverberating through Western intellectual certainties. Nevertheless, Progressive historians dispensed with the conservative and nationalistic pieties of their profession and adopted a relativist and presentist interpretation of the Revolution. Historical thinking, Carl Becker asserted, “was useful in getting the world’s work more effectively done.”26 Beard and Becker both introduced social conflict into the story of the founding, noting that the question of ‘who should rule at home’ was as important to American independence as that of home rule.27 This early historiographical questioning of national unity at the founding foreshadowed more dramatic challenges to come. The West’s Judeo-Christian traditions and the Enlightenment’s embrace of progress all tended to move history forward toward an inevitable future. What that future looked like took a variety of forms, from liberal Whig history through Hegelian and Darwinian configurations to nationalist, socialist and Marxist versions, but “the past was still in the service of the future, and its guide.” Plumb, The Death of the Past, 98. 25 E. H. Carr, What is History 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1990): 108. 26 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 96-98; Ellen Fitzpatrick also notes the critical nature of Beard’s work yet its retention of idealism and faith in progress in her History's Memory: Writing America's Past, 1880-1980 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 54; Carl Becker, “Some Aspects of the Influence of Social Problems and Ideas Upon the Study and Writing of History” American Journal of Sociology 18 (1912-13): 663. 27 The central publications of the Progressives as they relate to the founding are Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1913); Charles Beard, The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy: How Hamilton’s Merchant Class Lost Out to the Agrarian South (New York: Macmillan, 1915); Carl L. Becker, Beginnings of the American People (Cambridge MA: Riverside Press, 1915); Carl L. Becker, The Eve of the Revolution; A Chronicle of the Breach with England (London: Oxford University Press, 1918); Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932). A important critical study of the Progressive school is Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians--Turner, Beard, Parrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 24 7 The questioning of the authority of the past that began in the interwar period continued and, as Novick carefully charts, ran alongside a decline in historian’s commitments to objective truth and to the concept of historical progress into the twenty-first century. Historians properly place historical truth, as much as myth, under critical scrutiny; yet alongside the problematisation and rejection of nationalistic founding myths, historians of the American Revolution have, in large part, surrendered their special claim to truthtelling about the past.28 Lin-Manuel Miranda’s bold musical show has exposed this hesitancy and filled a void, presenting a patriotic and heroic tale for public consumption to much acclaim. In exploring this shift, this essay first surveys the shifting meanings, historical, mythical and otherwise, associated with the American Revolution in the decades since the founding. It then situates Hamilton within the current crisis in historical thinking that increasingly places the past at the service of the present. And finally, it marches Major General Hamilton through the heart of the divisive culture wars of the twenty-first century. Miranda has pressed Hamilton into public service as a twenty-first century culture warrior and in doing so, has exposed the deep ironies contained in the disconnect between historians and the public. The American public is thirsting for historical stories about the founding at the same time that professional historians seek ways to widen the public appeal of their work; yet the two groups have largely failed to connect.29 National Myth-Making In Miranda’s musical, history is messy and heroes are flawed. The Mixtape version of the Hamilton soundtrack kicks off with a short rap poem about conflict and disunity at the founding that sums up the approach; it challenges the mythical vision of national order and unity presented by artist John Trumbull’s 1818 painting “Declaration of Independence” and suggests instead a greater recognition of division and discord among the founders and the need for more complexity in historical understanding. Ever seen a painting by John Trumbull? 28 Michael Frisch’s observation that historians must now share their authority with the public makes a virtue of a necessity as historians wrestle with the loss of their authority over the past. See Frisch, A Shared Authority; David Glassberg similarly presses historians to open themselves to the history the public presents to them, since “political and economic currents” will soon give them little choice in the matter. Jump first - surrender your professional authority before you are pushed, he seems to say. David Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory” The Public Historian, 18. 2 (Spring, 1996): 23. 29The public discussion about historians’ engagement in public has been fairly heated and contentious. See, for instance, Bagehot, “The Study of History is in Decline in Britain” The Economist (18 July, 2019) https://www.economist.com/britain/2019/07/18/the-study-of-history-is-indecline-in-britain [accessed 30 December, 2019] and responses to it; Eric Alterman, “The Decline in Historical Thinking” The New Yorker (4 February, 2019). 8 Founding Fathers in a line, looking all humble Patiently waiting to sign a declaration and start a nation No sign of disagreement, not one grumble The reality is messier and richer, kids The reality is not a pretty picture, kids Every cabinet meeting is like a full-on rumble What you’re about to witness is no John Trumbull.30 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence (1819) Miranda’s interpretation of the contested nature of politics in the revolutionary era and, especially, the new republic is directly influenced by mainstream historiography. Historian Ron Chernow, whose popular history book inspired the musical and who acted as a historical consultant on the show, pointed out that Miranda ‘want[ed] historians to take this seriously.’31 By questioning the reliability of Trumbull’s painting – a much-heralded cultural representation of harmony and accord among patriots at the outset of the revolution – Miranda demonstrated that he had done his homework. There’s no doubt that the newly established federal government of 1789, like any national government, required a degree of national unity to function effectively. Miranda is right, of course, that in the aftermath of Revolution, few Americans – even national leaders – cared much about that. Indeed, in the wake of arbitrary and oppressive British rule, American patriots generally preferred that any central government remain as ineffective as possible. Neither did the newly-independent patriots embrace a robust national identity as a necessary unifying goal. The United States remained a plural noun as differences of state The Roots, “No John Trumbull (Intro.),” track no. 1 The Hamilton Mixtape (2016) Curt Schleier, “The Jewish historian behind Broadway’s hip-hop hit ‘Hamilton’” The Times of Israel (14 Sept 2015) https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-jewish-historian-behind-broadways-hiphop-hit-hamilton/ [accessed 9 July 2019]. See also Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (London: Head of Zeus Ltd., 2016). 30 31 9 residence, religious affiliation, sectional loyalty (east-west as much as north-south), ethnic identity, financial solvency, and occupational status among other things, divided the new nation. The Revolution of the 1770s and 80s did not, then, instantly produce a nation, much less a unified people. It has, however, come to sit at the heart of American political traditions as the most vivid and meaningful symbol of national unity and collective history. Many American presidents have drawn on the authority of the founding to establish and cohere the nation around a set of shared values. This is as true in recent years as formerly. In his inaugural address in 2005, George W. Bush invoked the ringing of the Liberty Bell down the years since 1776 in an effort to deliver foundational authority to his War on Terror.32 At his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama conjured the country’s founding four separate times, calling on the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution and the US Constitution as beacons to light the way through the economic challenges and security threats that Americans faced at home and abroad.33 President Trump, despite his Tea Party connections, did not refer to the founding during his inauguration speech at all (although he did say ‘America’ thirty times – more than any other President).34 Yet, despite its absence in the 1780s and despite its manipulation and mythologizing by elites for their own political purposes, collective memories of the Revolution still resonate with the American people and serve as a touchstone for national identity.35 It is noteworthy that while Miranda accepts historians’ claims about the divided nature of the early republic, correcting earlier more mythical accounts that stressed unity, he pushes on to make a hero of Hamilton, the founder who fought hardest to unify the nation and centralize power. It is Miranda’s willingness to bridge the divide between historical truth and national myth that accounts for the wide appeal of his storytelling. Indeed, the era of the Revolution provides a store of memorable events and inspirational stories – of Paul Revere’s courageous Ride, the rebellious dumping of tea in Boston harbor, the boldly George W. Bush, “Second Inaugural Address of George W. Bush” The Avalon Project at Yale Law School (January 20, 2005). 33 Barack H. Obama, “President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address” (January 21, 2009) 34 Patrick Scott, “Donald Trump delivered the most “American” inauguration speech ever” The Telegraph (23 January, 2017) 35 For example, see Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Montesano, “Famous Americans: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes” Journal of American History 94.4 (March 2008); Michael A. McDonnell, “War and Nationhood: Founding Myths and Historical Realities” in McDonnell et al. (eds.) Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History and Nation Making from Independence to Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013): 19-40. 32 10 defiant signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the glory of American victory at Yorktown – that continue to rouse and unite American citizens. Miranda’s Hamilton taps into this stream of popular story-telling as well as into many of the best, most enlightened ideals established by the American Revolution, underlining their continuing relevance. The show feeds the current demand for heroic tales of the founding fathers and engages the intense contemporary interest in the history and heritage of revolutionary America. It is the most right-on expression of ‘founders chic.’36 It operates as an origins story but it also provides a classic Horatio Alger tale of rags-toriches success, drawing on the deep cultural veins of the American Dream. Hamilton, a poor orphan boy (just like his country, “young, scrappy and hungry,”) makes good through his hard work, determination and willingness to take risks for a cause he believes in. Presented as an immigrant outsider who fought his way into “the room where it happens,” Caribbean-born Hamilton “gets the job done.” Miranda’s Yorktown tribute secures heroic status for Hamilton, whose military ingenuity and great personal bravery helped turn the British Empire – and the colonial world – upside down.37 Historians are less comfortable with Miranda’s heroic myth-making than they are with his exposure of character flaws and historical incongruities. Initial responses to Hamilton have been mixed, but largely ungenerous, although it is not entirely clear whether it is the show’s enormous success or its fictional nature that fuels the criticisms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, historians’ strongest rebukes are directed at the mythical elements of Hamilton: its appeal to the building of a national consensus and its ‘great man’ version of history that makes a national hero out of Hamilton. Historian Ken Owen notes with regret that while “historians have lambasted the phenomenon of Founders Chic as a fundamental distortion of history,” Miranda’s version of the revolution is little more than hagiography, exaggerating “the importance of individuals, at the expense of understanding the contribution of less-celebrated Americans or the role of broader societal and historical H.W. Brands ’“Founders Chic” The Atlantic (Sept., 2003) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/09/founders-chic/302773/ [accessed 1 Jan, 2020] provides an overview of the concept and some of the publications it refers to. Since 2003, the category has only expanded, to include a TV adaptation of McCullough’s book on John Adams and Ron Chernow’s books on Hamilton and Washington, among others. 37 Lyrics quoted are from Lin-Manuel Miranda, “My Shot” track 3, disc 1; “The Room Where it Happens” track 5, disc 2 and “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” track 20, disc 1, Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) 2015. 36 11 processes.”38 Many contributors to the volume Historians on Hamilton share this view; one essay condemns Hamilton because the show “sets out to rescue and renew an embarrassingly patriotic, partisan and partial version of early American history. It makes its hero into a great white hope for the founding, spinning a neo-Federalist, anti-slavery past that is myth, not history.”39 Other essays critique the musical for its historical inaccuracies and misrepresentations and use of historical ‘facts’ to discipline and censor Miranda over questions of race, policy and personality. William Hogeland suggests that Miranda’s distortions might be countered at the source by academic historians, who, he charges, have a duty to upend the claims of popular history books like Chernow’s to prevent simplifications and inaccuracies seeping into mass entertainment.40 It is not clear, however, whether this dry, dusty Gradgrindian response provides a service to either historical writing or musical theatre. Other responses demonstrate greater sensitivity to the difference between ‘facts’ and truth in the broader sense. Joanne Freeman, prominent historian of the revolution and expert consultant to Miranda, notes that while Hamilton flattens many historical complexities – especially the political ideas of Hamilton and his main rival Thomas Jefferson – and “takes great liberties with the period’s history,” it nevertheless “gets the underlying spirit of the moment right.” That spirit – of contingency and experimentation – is represented emphatically in the show’s vibrant and dynamic hip-hop score. Freeman understands that different rules apply to Miranda’s Hamilton than to history books, since it is, above all else, “a work of historical fiction.”41 The discomfort that some historians express about the mythical elements of Hamilton suggests a need to look again at the nature of historical fiction and the cultural work it does. Cultural historian Warren Susman explores this problem by examining the ongoing tensions that exist between mythical representations of the past and critical historical Ken Owen, “Historians and Hamilton: Founders Chic and the Cult of Personality” The Junto (21 April, 2016) https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/04/21/historians-and-hamilton-founders-chicand-the-cult-of-personality/ [accessed 1 Jan, 2020] 39 David Waldstreicher and Jeffrey L. Paisley, “Hamilton as Founders Chic: A Neo-Federalist, AntiSlavery Usable Past?” in Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (eds.) Historians on Hamilton (2018):140. 40 William Hogeland, “From Ron Chernows’ Alexander Hamilton to Hamilton: An American Musical” in Romano, R. and Potter C. (eds.) Historians on Hamilton (2018): 17-41. 41 Joanne Freeman, “Can We Get Back to Politics? Please?” in Romano, R. and Potter C. (eds.) Historians on Hamilton (2018): 52, 44. 38 12 ones. Susman notes that while myth and history work in essentially contradictory ways, they often overlap and exist together, in creative tension.42 it is this very tension between the mythic beliefs of a people- their visions, their hopes, their dreams-and the on-going, dynamic demands of their social life recorded by the students of the real past and the actual present (with perhaps an often-implied future) which provides many artists with their theme, a theme reflecting a basic conflict within the culture itself.43 Art, unlike history, is able to embrace and express the tensions between popular myth and history that the popular culture contains. Hamilton, alongside other historical fictions, has come to play a role in the national consciousness that some versions of history once played; it allows its audience the space to work through the contradictions between their hopes, dreams and aspirations on the one hand, and their real experiences and knowledge of the lived past on the other. Academic history no longer seeks to comfort or affirm; rather, it usually involves, even demands, a high level of critical self-questioning. As historians have broken down consensus and decentered narratives, as they have elevated the marginal and the subaltern, becoming skeptical of ‘great men’ and national heroes – the need for inspiration, unity and national identity must be met elsewhere. As the high priestess of historical fiction Hilary Mantel put it, “first the gods go, and then the heroes, and then we are left with our grubby, compromised selves.”44 While Miranda’s Hamilton – like Mantel’s own Thomas Cromwell – is indeed a compromised hero in many ways, he remains a hero who is able to reconcile the values of the nation’s hopeful, enlightened founding with those of the fragmented, disillusioned twenty-first century, comforting and challenging the audience in turn. Nevertheless, it is not just historians’ misreading of what Miranda does (critiquing art as if it were history, either for spinning myths or for getting facts wrong) that poses a problem. Historians are too often disorientated about their own public role, especially in navigating the community’s relationship between the past, the present and the future. The ‘mythbusting’ role outlined by J. H. Plumb limits historians’ ability to connect with the national imaginary.45 Many historians accept that Americans have ‘imagined’ their national community and ‘invented’ national traditions through rituals of remembrance and Warren I. Susman, "History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past" American Quarterly, Vol. 16. 2 (Summer, 1964): 243-263. 43 Susman, "History and the American Intellectual”: 248. 44 Hilary Mantel, “The Day is for the Living” BBC Reith Lectures (17 June, 2017). 45 In his Death of the Past, Plumb notes the irony of critical history destroying the “synthesizing and comprehensive statement of human destiny” offered first by Christianity, then by “the concept of progress, the manifest destinies of competitive nationalism, social Darwinism, or dialectical materialism.” p136 42 13 commemoration, but often do not accept the legitimacy of these identifications. Benedict Anderson’s important work underlines how cultural symbols and rituals that represent national identity carry a great weight of emotional legitimacy for citizens. For Anderson, the imagined nature of the national community does not indicate its falsity so much as its constructed-ness; it is an imagined collectivity whose bonds are created and reinforced by every generation. If historians seek to bust these myths in public, they are unlikely to make a connection with those who find them meaningful. Moreover, Anderson chastises those who only see sinister delusion in the operation of the national imagination: “In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the other and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”46 Much academic history seeks to counter, challenge and demystify, rather than understand and explain, that love. Historicising the Revolution Unlike European nations, the new American republic was from the beginning undeniably modern, making no dubious claims, as European nationalists did, to communal connections deep into the pre-modern era. Arguably the first modern nation-state, the United States had no roots in the ancient forests, no primordial languages or bloodlines that could be traced far back by nobility or monarchy. Indeed, this has always been the basis of American assertions of exceptionalism. The American nation was formed through armed struggle and willed into being by political reasoning and rational planning. It was also made up of diverse groups; it was a nation of immigrants with little shared cultural heritage to forge unity from. Americans had to start from scratch; but traditions could not be invented, and communities could not be imagined out of thin air. If there was no past, how could there be any historical memory? The revolution was a dramatic break with the past and so the national idea came to rest on this instead. The nation defined itself not through the past, but in the present and with a future-orientation. For at least the first century of American history, it was feasible for Americans to relegate history to the past and to let the dead bury their dead. The idea of the nation as a ‘clean slate’ that dominated political thinking in the founding years of the republic reached mythical proportions on the nineteenth-century frontier. In the 1830s, See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Books, 2nd ed. 2016), quotation p. 141; Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 46 14 Alexis de Tocqueville noted that in the US, “there are no traditions, or common habits, to forge links between their minds.”47 Thus, the ‘new dawn’ of the Revolution came to sit at the heart of the American national self-image. Over the last half-century, however, historians have set out to destabilise the narrative coherence and relativise the reality of the Revolution by historicising national understandings of the founding moment.48 Michael Kammen’s A Season of Youth (1978) was a departure in the historiography; it traces the multiple ways in which the American Revolution has been remembered, forgotten, and contested over the more than two centuries since its founding. So, for example, in the context of demands for a more radical democracy among working men in the age of Jackson, members of the cultural elite felt discomforted by an emphasis on the radicalism of the revolution; and as abolitionism emerged in the 1830s, they discouraged comparisons between their own revolution and those in Haiti (1791-1804) and Latin America (1799-1820s). American artists and writers responded to democratic demands by emphasizing the caution and reluctance of the Founders’ rebellion and the overriding respect for law and order that prevailed among framers of the Constitution.49 It is worth noting that Trumbull’s painting ‘The Declaration of Independence’ – a study not only of national unity but also of orderly restraint and calm deliberation – was completed in this period and was hung in the US Capitol rotunda in 1826, where it remains.50 Every generation of Americans built upon the myth, creating its own Revolution and writing its own history of the founding. Among the founding generation itself, John Adams expressed concern about the writing of revolutionary history, hoping it should not be narrowed to the bloody war (1775-1783) since it rested instead on a radical shift in the hearts and minds of colonists and on the novel unity established among and between the colonies, “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together; a perfection of Mechanism which no Artist had ever before effected.”51 In the new Republic, both sides of the ratification debates drew on different aspects of the revolution to legitimize their vision in building Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Vol. 1 (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969): 473. For literature in the field that points in these directions see Michael A. McDonnell et al., Remembering the Revolution; and Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, eds., The American Revolution Reborn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) 49 Kammen, A Season of Youth, pp.46-47. 50 Trumbull’s painting also appeared on the $100 bank note issued in 1863, a symbol of unity in the midst of the greatest crisis faced by the Union. It currently appears on the two-dollar bill. 51 John Adams, Letter to Hezekiah Niles, 13 Feb 1818. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6854 [Accessed 11 April, 2020] 47 48 15 the nation. The divisive politics of the 1790s demonstrated that the founders did not share a vision of the national community and how it should function. It is worth noting that in Hamilton, Miranda pits Hamilton against Jefferson in two major ‘rap battles’ to underline these divisions, but also to highlight the political compromises they necessitated to ensure the future of the republic. Both Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans held with universalistic claims about human justice, so that the limited nature of any single political viewpoint could be corrected through rigorous contestation to reveal the general public good beneath. On taking the presidency in 1801, Jefferson noted that ‘every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans. We are all federalists.”52 Adams and Jefferson inadvertently consecrated the union further when they both died on the 4th July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. Once living memory could no longer recall the revolution, it persisted as both myth and history. Undoubtedly, the emerging nationalism of the nineteenth century coloured Americans’ historical imagination about their revolution. Supremely confident and arguably chauvinistic, George Bancroft’s History of the United States celebrated the birth of the Republic as the work of Providence and was hailed as “our great defense of the rise of American nationality, our most fervent apology for the war of independence in all its untutored Americanism.”53 Plumb’s verdict on Bancroft was that he, along with other romantic historians of the nineteenth century, was not really a historian at all but a "manufacturer of a new past for America." Bancroft’s name has since become an adjective of insult in evaluating historical work on the revolution.54 Yet, while present-day historians dismiss the romantic fictions of Bancroft’s exceptionalism and nationalism, his work also reflected the growing democratic sensibilities of the mid-nineteenth century.55 Thomas Jefferson “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/peaceful-transition.html [accessed 9 May 2020] 53 Watt Stewart, “George Bancroft Historian of the American Republic” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 19. 1 (June, 1932): 86; George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent (Boston: Little, Brown & co., 10 vols. 1854–1878). 54 Plumb, The Death of the Past: 89; Michael D. Hattem, "Where have you gone, Gordon Wood?", The Junto: A Group Blog on Early America (Jan 21, 2013). https://earlyamericanists.com/2013/01/21/where-have-you-gone-gordon-wood/ [Accessed 14 August, 2019]. 55 Eileen Ka-May Cheng, "Plagiarism in Pursuit of Historical Truth" in McDonnell, Michael et al., Remembering the Revolution: 144-161 makes an interesting case that Bancroft’s plagiarism of Loyalist historian George Chalmers puts to question the validity of JH Plumb's distinction between “critical” (true) history and that employed by the guardians of tradition to sanctify the established order and give meaning to the present – or what Gordon Wood notes is now the preserve of "memory." 52 16 Winthrop Jordan notes that the rise of a democratic consciousness among working men, blacks and women in the 1830s coincided with a "sense of permanent democratic nationhood." The "temporal conjunction" of abolition and women's rights with democratic nationhood, Jordan notes, was not accidental. Since a bedrock assumption of majoritarianism underpinned revolutionary ideals, any ambiguities and omissions in the phrase ‘we the people’ soon came to testify “less to the weakness of the revolutionary agenda than to its sweeping power in the face of social realities."56 Democratic nationalism did not eradicate the universalism of the revolutionary generation, as often assumed, but operated as a mechanism of fulfilment for it. Each generation came to terms with national founding ideals – of freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness – in its own way. Some moved closer to those ideals, others moved further away. In the decades leading to the Civil War, the abolitionist movement sought to expand the scope of promised freedoms. Some slaves and free blacks questioned whether the Fourth of July celebration applied to them and marked the national holiday on the Fifth of July instead, to indicate their continued exclusion. In a famous abolitionist address on 5 July 1852, Frederick Douglass asked: “What to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.57 Despite such strong denunciations of the limitations of founding values and the hypocrisy in their expression, most abolitionists did not discard them. Rather, they called on the moral power of the revolution to demand that freedom and equality be extended to all Americans. Similarly, the women’s rights’ movement issued a ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, modelled on the Declaration of Independence and using much of the same language to mark the start of a campaign for civil equality for women. Winthrop Jordan, "On the Bracketing of Blacks and Women in the Same Agenda" in Jack Greene (ed.) The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits (New York: New York University Press, 1987): 281. 57 Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” Rochester, New York (July 5, 1852): http://masshumanities.org/files/programs/douglass/speech_complete.pdf [accessed 12 July, 2019] 56 17 Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s text declared that “all men and women are created equal” and went on to demand equal civil, political and social rights for women.58 On his musical stage, Miranda acknowledges this aspiration when he has Angelica Schuyler request that Jefferson “include women in the sequel” to the Declaration.59 Meanwhile, both Southern Confederates and Union politicians sought justification for their own cause in the revolutionary principles. Initially competing for ownership of the spirit of ’76, Unionists were begrudgingly obliged to rally behind Abraham Lincoln’s more conservative defense of the Constitution and cede the radical freedoms of 1776 to the Southern rebels. After the war was won, for a time, black Southerners monopolized community celebrations of the 4th of July.60 In the early twentieth century, historians shifted toward a more empirical methodology for writing the revolution; at once looking out from the colonies to relations within the Empire and examining the social and economic conflicts within. As the modern United States acquired its own colonies after 1898, it became more sensitive (if not sympathetic) to the actions the British Empire had taken in the eighteenth century. In his 1925 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Charles Andrews contrasted the ‘stale’ and ‘rigid’ psychology underpinning British rule with the dynamic, expansive outlook in the American colonies. Progress, he cautioned, could be stemmed temporarily but “cannot be permanently stopped by force.”61 Thus, the Revolution provided lessons both to Britain in the eighteenth century and to the United States in the twentieth: that imperial management required ongoing reform and enlightened government, at home and abroad. In Miranda’s twenty first-century version, the coercive power and violence of the British Empire is a distant enough memory to allow safe ridicule; reference to Britain is played out through the comical and pathetic figure of King George III, who warns the colonists that he will “kill your friends and family . . . to remind you of my love.”62 Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al. “The Declaration of Sentiments” Seneca Falls (July, 1848) https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm [accessed 12 July 2019] 59 The full lyric runs “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’m a compel him to include women in the sequel.” “The Schuyler Sisters” Hamilton track 5, disc 1 (Original Broadway Cast Recording) 2015. 60 Kammen, A Season of Youth: 58. 61 Charles M. Andrews, “The American Revolution: An Interpretation” Presidential address delivered before the American Historical Association at Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 29, 1925. American Historical Review 31, no. 2 (January 1926): 219–32. https://www.historians.org/aboutaha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/charles-m-andrews(1925) [accessed 17 April, 2020] 62 Jonathan Groff, “You’ll Be Back” track 7, disc 1, Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) 2015. 58 18 Miranda’s Hamilton adopts a progressive view of 1776 as a radical, populist uprising against both colonial and British elites. Since the Second World War, neo-Whig and neo-Progressive interpretations have constantly sparred in revolution historiography. Edmund Morgan’s work challenged interwar determinism, signaling that historians might properly take the ideas of the founders seriously rather than decoding some underlying economic or psychological motivation. Morgan paved the way for the ‘republican synthesis’ of J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn and others, who note the ironies of a revolution that drew on established British political traditions of rights and freedoms in order to overthrow the status quo. It points to the virtuous character of a (singular) people whose industry, frugality and simplicity enabled them to resist the corruption and luxury of the bloated British Empire. While the revolution was essentially a conservative movement for Bailyn, independence brought sweeping radical consequences in a veritable “contagion of liberty.”63 Gordon Wood concurs, indicating that the revolution took Americans “out of an essentially classical and mediaeval world . . . into one that was recognizably modern.”64 Historians writing from within the republican synthesis tended to emphasize a common political culture and unity of action among patriots. While neo-Whigs focused on political culture, neo-Progressive historians unearthed the lived experiences of marginal groups and the role they played in bringing on the revolution. Expanding the cast of actors from elite, white men to slaves, women, native Americans, workers, Loyalists and others; these histories integrated minorities into the larger political narrative of the Revolution.65 Miranda manages to merge elements of both versions of history into his musical: telling the story of one elite, white man through the bodies and voices of minorities, immigrants and women. He celebrates Hamilton’s story as See especially Edmund S. Morgan and Helen S. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953) and Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 64Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969): viii. 65 There are too many examples to include an exhaustive list, but three significant and indicative works are: Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 25. 3 (1968):371-407; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1980). 63 19 the universal American story – “a story about America then, told by America now,”” – and allows black bodies and voices to tell it.66 During the 1960s and 70s, as marginal and minority groups made their voices heard in public, historians folded their diverse stories into the national origins story. And, just as in the mid-nineteenth century, women and African Americans who sought greater political inclusion and social equality found a way to bolster their claim by appealing to the nation’s founding ideals. In particular, the civil rights movement invoked the revolutionary era in a range of ways. Most famously, Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech referred to the revolution and the national founding in hopeful terms: When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory no