Where, and how, to draw the line between "respectable
stockholders" and "gamblers" - between the
Force and its Dark Side (if indeed such a distinction is possible)
- has remained a central dilemma of American capitalism. If
the exhibit had truly been interested in exploring the background
of today's Economy, it might have touched on the long history
of efforts to regulate and rein in speculative excess (such
as those legislated during the New Deal), and right wing efforts
to dismantle such constraints. It might have observed that
while the 1792 meltdown proved short and shallow, subsequent
ones grew steadily more damaging, and that in recent years
the potential for national and global financial catastrophe
has swollen enormously (as have the attendant costs to taxpayers
of cleaning up messes made by assorted sharks and bingers
- as in the Savings & Loan, Long Term Capital Management,
and Asian Tiger crises). But for all the exhibition's pseudo
presentism, it's no more interested in a critical engagement
with today's Economy than it is with Hamilton's.
Things are similarly smiley-faced over at the "Free Press"
screen where a Hamilton quotation about newspapers being "expedient
messengers of intelligence" segues to a stack of New
York Posts coming off the assembly line. Given that Hamilton
was the rag's Founding Father, and given that the current
publisher kicked in toward underwriting exhibit expenses,
the product placement seems fair enough, though one wonders
if the Post would have been accorded such prominence had liberal
Dorothy Schiff still been at the helm, rather than right wing
Rupert Murdoch.
We'll forebear (as does the show) from contemplating the
possible deleterious consequences for a Free Press of the
monopolization of media outlets in the hands of such barons
as Sir Rupert. But on the historical front, we should note
(as the show does not) that while Hamilton's legal argument
in the Croswell case was indeed a milestone in the development
of a Free Press, he was also [as Chernow reports] a "full
throated" supporter of the Sedition Act, a milestone
in the suppression of a Free Press.
Hamilton vigorously supported prosecution of journalists
who criticized the - his party's - government. When one opposition
editor called Hamilton's projected military a "standing
army" he was sentenced to two months in the slammer.
Another got eighteen months behind bars "for daring [Chernow
says] to print the heresy that the government allowed the
wealthy to benefit at the expense of commoners." Five
of the six most influential Republican papers were ultimately
prosecuted by a Federalist dominated judiciary. In the case
of the Argus, New York's leading opposition sheet, the editor
was charged with sedition for contending that "the federal
government was corrupt and inimical to the preservation of
liberty," and Hamilton opened up a second front by instigating
his own libel suit. If [Chernow observes] his "aim had
been to crush the Argus, he succeeded," as it shut down
the following year. Hamilton's later ringing defense of Croswell
- a Federalist editor whose ox was being gored by a Republican
administration - should, at the least, be set in this larger
context.
Similarly, given the exhibit's attention to Hamilton's immigrant
status, and his attendant supposed cosmopolitanism, it might
have mentioned that, in the Alien Act era, Hamilton [as Chernow
reports] "ranted about the need to punish people, especially
the foreign born who libeled government officials"; that
he sought "to throttle the flow of immigration";
and that he would have liked to kick out most of those who'd
made it in: "My opinion is that the mass [of aliens]
ought to be obliged to leave the country." Even John
Ashcroft didn't go that far.
It's also worth noting here that while Jefferson and Madison
promoted religious tolerance and separation of church and
state, Hamilton sought to create a network of Christian Constitutional
Societies that would mobilize devout citizens against the
presumably godless Jeffersonians - "an execrable idea,"
Chernow believes, "that would have grossly breached the
separation of church and state and mixed political power and
organized religion".
The point of this extended video screen analysis is not that
the exhibition should have drawn a different set of past-to-present
lines, connecting unattractive Hamiltonian policies to unappealing
aspects of the present - though such an approach would have
been at least as plausible as what's on offer. Imagine each
giant screen re-titled (PREEMPTIVE IMPERIALISM / ELITE RULE
/ CRONY CAPITALISM / IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION), each displaying
appropriate Modern America film vignettes, and each pinning
the sorry status quo squarely on Hamilton with apposite quotations
as evidence - "Our real Disease... is DEMOCRACY"
[A. Hamilton, Letter to T. Sedgwick, 7/10/04]. The
point, rather, is that thinking the contemporary world can
be profitably understood as the lengthened shadow of one eighteenth
century gentleman is a deeply misguided and misleading way
of doing history.
There's nothing whatever wrong with setting the present
in historical context, but this is not the way to go about
it. Exploring how and why a particular aspect of the current
scene came into being is best done by working backwards from
now. To investigate why, say, we're at war in Iraq, one must
attend to the enormous number of actions and events, which
cumulatively constituted the matrix of constraints and possibilities
within which today's players have acted, and which have made
the actual outcome more likely (though not inevitable). Some
factors emerged in the recent past - the first Gulf War, the
fall of communism, the Iranian revolution; others go back
to the 1940s - our burgeoning dependence on mid-east oil,
our emerging alliance with Israel;others (the epoch of British
rule) are still more remote. But on this, or almost any issue,
the words and deeds of Alexander Hamilton are light years
from being the most salient considerations.
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