ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Alexander Hamilton was top aide to George Washington, led a battalion in the Revolutionary War, wrote the Federalist Papers and created the Coast Guard.
As the first Treasury Secretary, he singlehandedly designed a financial system that enabled a collection of plantations and freehold farmers to grow into the greatest economic and industrial power in history.
Now, three centuries later, “Hamilton” swept the Tony Awards with a big fat hit on Broadway.
Hamilton the man was the most prolific of the Founders, possessing an unmatched skill with the quill.
It’s fitting that “Hamilton” the Broadway musical unleashes a torrent of words in rap, a genre that exalts wordplay.
If Hamilton were alive today, you can’t help thinking he’d be a rapper.
“Hamilton” is it at once patriotic and subversive.
“Hamilton” makes you proud of America. It inspires awe and respect for the men (and they were men) who founded our country.
It tells a story of America as the land of opportunity, the home of the brave, ambition and will incarnate. And Hamilton the man is the embodiment of those qualities.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator, writer and lead character, lays it out in the number “I’m not throwing My Shot away”: “I’m just like my country/ I’m Young Scrappy and Hungry.”
Alexander Hamilton is a microcosm of America and an exemplar of the American promise. Here was an orphan who had nothing when he left his place of birth in the West Indies and came to Colonial America (New Jersey to be exact). By dint of skill and will he rose to the top in a nation he helped create. “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” a far less admirable New York political grandee memorably put it a couple of centuries later.
“Hamilton” captures the conflicts and personal ambitions that have animated American politics since the birth of the nation and always will. There are no plaster saints on this stage.
That “Hamilton” is told in rap with an (almost) all-black cast is a stroke of genius.
On one level, the modern gangsta rapper embodies the up-from-streets, grab-your-opportunity-when-you-see-it ethos of Hamilton. And rappers’ penchants for bling and Krug mirror Hamilton’s own aristocratic taste in clothing and society, an affectation for which he was widely criticized. Hamilton’s deadly affinity with firearms is another parallel.
On another level, the contrast between the cast and the historical reality of all-white Founders underlines the central message of the show: America is all about promise, opportunity for those who take it, a promise available to an ever-widening circle throughout our history.
And it is by offering this answer to the question “What is America?” that “Hamilton” is deeply subversive - to the politically correct leftists who seek to de-legitimatize America.
The critics (political, not theater) would have us believe America is a racist, exploitative “artificially constructed former settler state,” as Gerald Horne, chair of black studies department at the University of Houston, put it. “We still haven’t come to terms with the racist and economic realities of the United States from its origin,” he says in his critique of “Hamilton” the show.
The left sees history through the lens of race and the play of external economic forces. It leaves no agency for individual will.
“Hamilton” is a bold refutation of that worldview.
Alexander Hamilton was a man who by force of will and skill with a quill overcame his poor origins and not only rose to power, but created a nation where others could come and do as he did.
Such a story is a threat to those who seek to promote victimhood and dependency.
The runaway success of Mr. Miranda’s “Hamilton” has kept Alexander Hamilton alive on the $10 bill.
May it keep the story of America alive for a new generation.
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