"Modern America" has been shaped by the actions
of hundreds of millions of people over the past 200 plus years,
all of whose contributions get obliterated by this kind of
approach; it's all the Hero's doing. Besides, when
is Modern America, anyway? Is it just the 21st century? Or
did Hamilton "make" all the intervening eras as
well? Are we to hold the guy accountable for the Gilded Age?
The depression of 1929? And what is Modern America,
how unitary a phenomenon is it in the era of Red and Blue,
or was it in the era of Blue and Gray? Has it ever been? And
how exactly did Hamilton exert his supposed influence
over the centuries - are his Words so potent? Sure, it's possible
cinematically, by alternating antique texts and current images,
to suggest that "18th-century plans" have found
"21st-century fulfillment," but this is a specious
form of magical thinking. It's not the way the world works,
not the way history happens.
-4-
Emerging from the gloom of His Vision the visitor
adjusts gratefully to the brightly lit final gallery - His
Life - only to experience an immediate let-down. His
Life consists entirely of a corridor-long Time Line, a
one-dimensional wall mural that strings dates from Hamilton's
biography along the top, and those of events in the wider
world below, all against a backdrop of reproduced portraits
and paintings. Glossily designed but deeply boring - Time
Out's review counsels hurrying past the "dull"
display - it's a hodgepodge of names and dates of treaties,
publications, laws, battles, appointments, elections, and
assorted unexplained events - the sort of stuff school kids
were once-upon-a-time forced to memorize-then-regurgitate,
then promptly forgot, retaining only an aversion to History.
The urge to flight engendered by this hoary contrivance might
account for the fact that many people, approaching the corridor's
end, tend to miss (or ignore) the right turn required to reach
the dueling statues (situated quite some distance away - another
Museology 101 design snafu), and instead hustle straight ahead
through a beckoning open door to the Gift Shop and its alluring
display of Hamiltonian knick-knacks, after which the obvious
next move is out the Exit door.
The problem here, as throughout, is insufficient information.
If you're not already familiar with Hamilton's story, the
Time Line assumes too much (viz. "He disbands the Army");
and if you are, it adds nothing new to your data bank. In
either case, there's not much point in perusing it in the
hallway: as there are virtually no artifacts on view, and
the text is up on-line, such insights as it affords can be
gleaned more comfortably at home.
Besides offering too little, the Time Line arrives too late
in the overall exhibition; we should have grasped the essentials
of Hamilton's story far earlier. It feels as if the designers
had belatedly noticed that their presentist preoccupations
had short-shrifted not only Hamilton's era, but Hamilton's
life, and set out to fill in the blanks. Indeed the Time Line
is just one of a posse of deputies dispatched to fill in the
biographical lacunae, but in the end, all these Kings' Men
are unable to compensate for Humpty-Dumpty's deficiencies.5
Thus Rothstein's advice to would-be attendees that they bone
up with some bios before stopping by - "one has to come
to this exhibition already prepared" - a serious indictment
for a supposedly stand-alone show.
-5-
It's not only Hamilton's Life that's missing in action:
so's His City. One of the most prevalent worries of pre-exhibition
commentators involved Richard Gilder's public assertions that
he wanted N-YHS to move away from its focus on the Big Apple
toward addressing U.S. history in general. Some argued that
these need not be contradictory goals, that it was perfectly
possible to view larger issues through a local prism, and
that the forthcoming Hamilton show would provide a model for
such an approach. As Hamilton's story is indeed deeply intertwined
with that of his adopted home town, and as I've long been
in favor of setting New York City's history in a national,
indeed international context, I awaited the results with interest.
Alas, as it turns out, there's no here, here. The fifth video
screen - THE CITY - gestures half-heartedly at Modern American
urban life: people whiz to and fro in Grand Central, at Centre
and Canal; we see stock shots of the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan
skyline. But the designers haven't exhumed any quotations
from their Hero's voluminous canon that could plausibly allow
them to claim, even by their lax evidentiary standards, that
the 21st century city is somehow an outgrowth of one of Hamilton's
18th century Plans. The best they've come up with is a report
from his son that while being rowed to his doom in New Jersey,
he "pointed out the beauties of the scenery and spoke
of the future greatness of the city.'' Even this tidbit is
immediately offset by a Hamiltonian assertion that the name
of "American"should take pride of place over any
"local discrimination," which seems to row in a
different direction.
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