HAMILTON'S CURRENCY RISING:
The often overlooked Founding Father envisioned an urban,
industrial United States, led by a strong central government
and backed by a huge military. It is no wonder today's conservatives
are embracing him.
By IAN GARRICK Mason
October 30, 2004 - National Post
As part of his speech at the Republican National Convention
in New York in early September, President George W. Bush rattled
off a list of domestic proposals that was almost Clintonian
in its length -- increased funding for job training, community
colleges, and rural health centres, the creation of economic
"opportunity zones" in poorer states, tax exemptions for small
businesses buying health insurance -- and that struck many
commentators as being jarringly out of sync with the traditional
conservative distrust of activist government. But with a closely-fought
election campaign focusing on the war in Iraq, the domestic
policy divisions in the Republican Party have been papered
over for the sake of keeping the Democrats out of the White
House.
Once the paper is removed, however, the divisions that emerge
will reflect something deeper than tactical disagreements
over government programs. They will reflect, rather, a much
older conflict in American politics, one between the followers
of Thomas Jefferson, one of America's best known and most
admired presidents, and the followers of Alexander Hamilton,
who most Americans know only as the man on the $10 bill.
The New-York Historical Society is doing its best to increase
Hamilton's constituency with a well-publicized exhibition
about his remarkable life, which ended 200 years ago this
past July 12. Indeed, Hamilton's status as one of the least
remembered of the founding fathers seems odd when one considers
his accomplishments. Born in 1757 on the tiny Caribbean island
of Nevis, Hamilton began working at the age of nine to support
his family after his father abandoned them. Having risen to
manager of a counting house, he was sent by benefactors to
complete his schooling in America. At 17, Hamilton began writing
political articles, and when the Revolutionary War began he
organized an artillery company, fought bravely, and ended
up as General George Washington's aide-de-camp at the age
of only 20.
After the war, Hamilton participated in the convention that
created the new constitution, and then went on to write the
lion's share of the Federalist essays (James Madison and John
Jay wrote the remainder), which were aimed at convincing New
York state to ratify the document. By thirty-two he was appointed
the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, at which post
he re-organized the nation's parlous finances, created a central
bank -- and warred mightily with fellow cabinet member, Secretary
of State Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton was killed in 1804 in
a famous duel with Aaron Burr, a tragic end to a long-festering
political and personal feud.
Despite all his achievements, it was the conflict with Jefferson
that was to influence the public memory of Hamilton for ever
after. In the view of posterity, the two men represented irreconcilable
visions of the nation: Jefferson, an idealistic, small-government,
agrarian, democratic America; Hamilton, a realistic, strong-government,
industrial, aristocratic America. And throughout the first
half of the nineteenth century, Jefferson's legacy outshone
Hamilton's.
But the coming of the Civil War discredited Jefferson's emphasis
on states' rights, and in the aftermath, the proven power
of the Union's economy and military seemed to justify Hamilton's
modernist views on government and commerce. Indeed, by the
end of the nineteenth century respect for Hamilton had reached
an apex. America had transformed itself from a nation of farmers
and local merchants into an industrial-military state that
had embarked on the beginnings of empire. President Theodore
Roosevelt, the great apostle of "active" government, held
Hamilton in high esteem. "The most brilliant American statesman
who ever lived," Roosevelt said of him, "possessing the loftiest
and keenest intellect of his time."
The Roosevelt era, in fact, was a kind of cross-over opportunity
for Hamilton's legacy. Roosevelt was both a Republican and
a progressive reformer in the style of what would later become
known as big government liberalism: he supported income and
inheritance taxes, improved labour standards, federal regulation
of monopolies, and the creation of national parks. When Roosevelt
was stonewalled in his third presidential run by pro-business
party bosses at the Republican Convention of 1912, he stormed
out -- "feeling like a bull moose," he said -- and set up
the Progressive Party, with a bull moose as its symbol.
Roosevelt only managed to split the Republican vote, however,
and the small-government, free-market spirit of Jefferson
returned to the White House with Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Though the pro-business administrations of the 1920s paid
some homage to Hamilton -- Calvin Coolidge put Hamilton's
face on the ten-dollar bill in 1928 -- it was mainly his financier's
spirit which was being invoked.
This simplification left Hamilton's legacy vulnerable. When
the Great Depression arrived, Wall Street, seen as Hamilton's
creation, was widely blamed for the collapse. Though Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's New Deal government would ultimately swell
to unprecedented size, FDR chose small-government Jefferson
as his icon, dedicating the Jefferson Memorial in 1943. Hamilton's
ghost was relegated to the shadows.
Where it remained for the next fifty years. Though government
continued to expand in support of national priorities like
the Cold War and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Jefferson
remained ascendant for both egalitarian liberals and small-government
conservatives. Indeed, led by low-taxes crusader and Republican
Party stalwart Grover Norquist, activists at the Ronald Reagan
Legacy Project have been mounting a campaign over the past
several years to replace Hamilton's face on the ten dollar
bill with Reagan's. Apparently, it's nothing personal. "Hamilton
has less of a built-in constituency of people who would be
opposed to him being removed," Project director Chris Butler
told the New York Times this year.
Recently, however, Hamilton has once again been gaining defenders.
Ron Chernow's full-scale biography of him earlier in the summer
attracted a great deal of favourable media attention, and
the New-York Historical Society exhibition has been organized
by another of Hamilton's biographers, Richard Brookhiser,
who wrote Alexander Hamilton, American in 1999.
Brookhiser is senior editor at the conservative American
magazine National Review, and it is from conservatives
that Hamilton's memory has been getting its strongest support.
For Brookhiser, Hamilton's appeal is as a moral exemplar.
His life story, after all, could be a brochure for the American
Dream: immigrant arrives with nothing and bootstraps himself
to a top cabinet position, then builds a legal and economic
infrastructure that in turn helps others to realize their
potential. "Hamilton," writes Brookhiser, "who had already
come from the Caribbean to the pulpit at St. Paul's [where
he gave the eulogy for the deceased General Nathanael Greene],
and would go on to more glittering prizes yet, wanted to generalize
his experience. That is why he is a great man, and a great
American."
Meanwhile, to conservatives who admire strong executive power,
Hamilton has become a stern post-9/11 icon. Pondering the
ashes from the World Trade Center that covered Hamilton's
nearby resting place, Stephen F. Knott, author of Alexander
Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth, writes in an essay for
the Claremont Institute that "One can almost hear him calling
from his despoiled grave, exhorting the nation not to bow
to those still warring with the Enlightenment, those who are
fearful of modernity and change, and envious of our wealth
and power... [H]e would also suggest, no doubt to the concern
of some contemporary observers, that there are occasions when
the government's obligation to protect our right to life necessarily
precedes some civil rights."
There is even an attempt to use Hamilton's legacy to rejuvenate
the Republican Party itself. In 1997, David Brooks and William
Kristol of the Weekly Standard wrote an article in the Wall
Street Journal advocating "national-greatness conservatism".
Criticizing the anti-government rhetoric of many of their
conservative colleagues, they asked, "How can Americans love
their nation if they hate its government?" They then proceeded
to outline a manifesto of park- and monument-building programs,
of "national strength and moral assertiveness abroad", and
of limited but "energetic" government.
Now a columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks recently
updated this call in a feature piece in the paper's weekly
magazine ("How to reinvent the G.O.P."). "Strong-government
conservatism" or "progressive conservatism" is what he calls
it now, but once again he links it tightly to the legacy of
Hamilton, as well as to the legacies of Abraham Lincoln and
Teddy Roosevelt. His manifesto has grown a little more ambitious:
he's for aggressively prosecuting "the war on Islamic extremism"
and implementing an 18-month national service program for
young people -- "for the sake of character development and
national union," he argues. He's for reducing the size of
government "where it is useless or worse" and for eliminating
corporate subsidies "in a great sweep that overwhelms the
parochial lobbying campaigns that groups will mount on behalf
of each one" -- a classic Jeffersonian small-government goal
dressed up in Hamiltonian language.
It was with the same sort of activist spirit that President
Bush's convention speech was imbued. Hamilton's ghost became
more tangible that evening.
Yet while the temptation to glorify the wisdom of Hamilton
is a strong one, like other fallible human beings he wasn't
always wise. Though he deserves much credit for having built
the foundations of the modern American state, as much good
came from delegates ignoring his recommendations as following
them. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton advocated
the election of a president-for-life (subject to recall for
bad behaviour) -- an idea which would have made America a
kind of "elective monarchy", as James Madison described it
in his notes. Luckily, the other delegates took little notice;
Hamilton was later told that his speech had been "praised
by everybody", but "supported by none".
In the end, much of what Hamilton advocated did come true
-- America is run by a powerful federal government with a
permanent and huge military; as a country, it is urban, industrial,
commercial, and capitalist. "[Hamilton] was the messenger
from the future we now inhabit," writes Chernow. To many of
his modern supporters, this is enough to justify elevating
him in the public mind to a place equal to or higher than
Jefferson. But most Americans have never really been comfortable
with Hamilton -- perhaps because they continue to believe
that there is something unique about the American experiment,
and that it is Jefferson's legacy, not Hamilton's, that embodies
that uniqueness. Praise Hamilton, and you may praise the iron
sinews of the American nation-state. But praise Jefferson,
and you praise its heart.
URL: http://www3.sympatico.ca/ian.g.mason/Alexander_Hamilton.htm
