In Praise of the Highly Imperfect Alexander Hamilton
By: Scott Paul
Tags: Alexander Hamilton, Manufacturing, Founding Fathers, Hamilton, Hamilfilm

In Praise of the Highly Imperfect Alexander Hamilton

As the Hamilfilm launches on Disney+, it’s a good time to reflect on one of the Founding Father’s important, but largely overlooked, economic legacies. Scott Paul Jul 3, 2020·6 min read

The artistic and cultural phenomenon Hamilton is now on film. Even though it streams on a Disney subscription service, the film is still by far the easiest way to access the groundbreaking musical, since there are no live performances of it taking place anywhere in America right now. Even before the pandemic hit, tickets to Hamilton were notoriously hard to find and prohibitively expensive for most Americans.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the past five years about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 21st century interpretation of our very white, male, and predominately slave-owning Founding Fathers with an intentionally non-white cast. This conversation has taken on new meaning in recent weeks, with our nation’s sharpened focus on longstanding structural racism and violence against Black Americans.

Statues of confederate traitors are coming down through both legal and spontaneous means, and the importance of our national symbols and how we think about them is rising. So let’s ask the question: Should we keep Alexander Hamilton’s statues up and his face on our ten dollar bill?

I’d argue yes, despite his many (and ultimately fatal) flaws. Here’s why.

Alexander Hamilton was about as progressive a Founding Father you will find when it comes to matters of slavery, but let’s stipulate that we are working from a very low bar here. Thomas Jefferson raped his slaves. He wrote the words “All Men are Created Equal” even as he viewed slaves as property and not as men and women. George Washington owned hundreds of slaves before, during, and after his presidency. Although he was the only one of nine slave-owning presidents who freed them upon his death, Washington was unwilling to address the issue of slavery out of a fear that it would tear the new nation apart. James Madison was also a slave owner. John Adams was an abolitionist and never owned a slave, but he opposed abolition as President unless it was done in a gradual way with much caution.

Hamilton never owned slaves but willingly married into a slave-owning family. As a boy growing up in the Caribbean, he witnessed atrocities against slaves that would shape his worldview, yet processed transactions as a young clerk involving shiploads of slaves from Africa. Once in America, he became a renowned manumissionist, but there is little evidence he staked his future political ambitions on abolition, echoing the concerns of Washington and Adams.

A scholar at Columbia University sums it up this way:

Hamilton’s views on race and the freed slave’s place in American society were far more progressive than those of his contemporaries: not only did Hamilton reject methods like colonization and mindsets of racial superiority, but Hamilton also believed that African slaves had mental faculties equal to those of whites, and deserved a fair standing within the American republic. Hamilton believed that slavery was a retrograde institution when posed in juxtaposition with his revolutionary vision of a manufactory America, and his career serves to underscore the limits of anti-slavery sentiment during his time — slavery was not the central dialectical issue of Hamilton’s era, and thus the institution did not occupy a central space in Hamilton’s mind.

I’m certainly not going to settle Hamilton’s legacy on race and slavery in this essay, and many readers will rightfully view him as either visionary or completely inadequate on these questions.

Hamilton’s economic vision, however, was truly revolutionary and does hold lessons for our nation as we confront extraordinary challenges presented by a legacy of structural racism and economic collapse amidst an era of unsettling globalization and technological change, layered on top of a pandemic.

As an aside, there’s little-to-no mention in the musical of Hamilton’s economic legacy beyond his service as Treasury Secretary and various other high-profile accomplishments such as establishing the U.S. Coast Guard. I will argue that his largely unknown work on manufacturing policy has had perhaps the most profound impact on the contours of our national development. (For more, see this.)

In Hamilton’s era, the answer to our economic questions seemed easy to some: double down on atrocious slave and plantation-based agriculture. The combination of fertile and abundant soil, a more welcoming climate, and “free” labor through slavery gave the United States a clear comparative advantage in commodity crops and an incentive to continue that specialization.

But Hamilton disagreed. As I mentioned, he did oppose slavery as an abolitionist. He also opposed dependence upon France or Great Britain for manufacturing as a patriot and former military strategist. He rejected the invisible hand as a pragmatic economic thinker.

In Hamilton’s time, the United States had no comparative advantage in manufacturing. We lacked the workers, the know-how, and the ecosystem. But none of that mattered to him. During the Revolutionary War, both Hamilton and General George Washington bemoaned the challenges of the new nation’s limited capacity to make its own armaments. This sparked a strong desire in both of them to change the dynamic and bring mills and industrial know-how to America from Europe.

As Treasury Secretary, Hamilton was tasked with writing America’s first policy ideas to promote manufacturing, which he delivered to the Congress in December of 1791. Hamilton’s vision included massive investment in our infrastructure and right-sized tariffs to ensure our industries could grow and export, our government could attract revenue, and that our manufacturers could still have access to imported raw materials. He saw the benefits of capital investments in industry. He also believed that manufacturing could serve to attract immigrants to our new nation, an idea that has had a profoundly positive and lasting impact on America to this very day.

American manufacturing and economic policy have shaped our democracy, and have been shaped by it. The more industrial North had a decided economic advantage over the plantation-based South in the Civil War. Our desire to move goods and people spurred investments first in roads and canals, then in rail, and on into our interstates. The promise of work in urban factories impacted global and regional migration patterns. The “arsenal of democracy” helped turn the tide of the Second World War. The convergence of 20th century American industrial leadership and the rise of trade unions built humanity’s strongest and most resilient middle class, providing a foundation for economic and political stability in a rapidly changing world. As the world’s lone post-World War II liberal economic superpower, the U.S. shaped the terms of global economic integration that have helped define the past 70 years.

Unfortunately, the fruits of Hamilton’s work did not reach the Black community in America because of structural racism until it was far too late: Deindustrialization was already under way.

We have a chance to make this right. As the public demands an end to structural racism and as policymakers respond, we can also re-imagine a manufacturing policy for our times. The ingredients are essentially the same as they were when Hamilton proposed them in 1791:

Rebuilding America through massive infrastructure investment

A trade policy that allows new industries in America to develop and eventually compete globally (which means appropriate tariffs, trade measures, and subsidies)

Focusing capital on manufacturing even through the short-term gains may not be as lucrative as developing distracting digital apps or new financial products

A skills training program that reaches undeserved communities

A government that leads by example and practices “Buy American”

While Donald Trump likes to invoke Hamilton today, his association with the Founding Father is mostly limited to a significant misreading of his tariff policy and perhaps his affinity for another brash New Yorker. While Trump uses trade and immigration as divisive tropes on many occasions, Hamilton was a true economic nationalist: He wanted to do some real nation building.

As a war hero and critic of 18th century racist views of the Black community, I believe Hamilton would be appalled by Trump’s unwavering support for statues and military bases named for treasonous and defeated confederate military officers. Let’s hope our leaders can reflect the positive attributes of Hamiltonian thought, even as they acknowledge his shortcomings.

So, as you stream Hamilton, raise a glass to freedom, and to the imperfect Founding Father. We have the opportunity to expand and deepen his legacy, and to make our union more perfect for all.