Alexander Hamilton & the Persistence of Myth by Stephen F. Knott University Press of Kansas, 344 pp., $34.95 Writings by Alexander Hamilton edited by Joanne B. Freeman Library of America, 1,108 pp., $40 IN 1987, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy published a book called “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” in which he warned that the United States was on the verge of decline. The problem he said was “imperial overstretch.” America had taken on more overseas commitments than it could afford and was slowly sinking under the burden. It hasn’t worked out that way. But Kennedy is an honest scholar, and on February 2, 2002, he took another look at his subject in an essay in the Financial Times. He began with a long description of a United States aircraft-carrier battle group: the twenty-story carrier, with a crew of over five thousand, along with seventy state-of-the-art aircraft armed with the latest smart-bomb and missile technology. No other nation has a weapon this formidable. But it does not move alone. The carrier is accompanied by an Aegis cruiser and a small convoy of other ships–including a hunter-killer submarine or two to attack enemy subs. The United States will have thirteen carrier groups like this when the USS Ronald Reagan joins the fleet soon. “This array of force is staggering,” Kennedy wrote. “Were it ever assembled en masse the result would be the largest concentration of naval and aerial force the world would have seen.” But, Kennedy pointed out, it never is assembled en masse. Instead, the United States’ forces are spread around the globe, protecting American interests and projecting American power to every corner of the world. The United States now spends more on its military than the next nine largest national defense budgets combined, Kennedy noted. The United States is responsible for 40 percent of global defense spending, if not more. “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing,” Kennedy added. Looking back over the course of human history, he concluded that no other superpower has ever had such an advantage over its allies and rivals. But this time, Kennedy was not warning of imperial overstretch, because the economic might of America is easily capable of supporting its military outlays. The United States accounts for nearly 30 percent of world economic production, Kennedy estimated. In other words, the American economy now comprises roughly the same share of the total world economy as it did in the years after World War II, when Japan and much of Europe were in ruins. So the United States can support this massive military while spending only about 3 percent of its gross national product on defense. “Being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world’s single superpower on the cheap is astonishing,” Kennedy noted. There are other ways to suggest America’s dominance. Forty-five percent of all Internet traffic takes place in the United States. About three quarters of the Nobel laureates in the sciences, economics, and medicine in recent decades live and work in the United States. American financial markets account for well over half of the world’s stock-market capitalization. (The markets of Japan, the nation in second place, account for less than 10 percent.) In short we live in a unipolar moment the likes of which the world has never seen. This economic and military disparity between the United States and the rest of the world is the great fact of our public lives, and prompts the great questions that will roil them in the years ahead: How can the United States take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity? Does a nation founded in the name of liberty have anything to fear from its own concentrated power? How will other nations react to America’s prominence and might? What will be the effects of American economic and cultural dominance? Fortunately, these questions are not new to us. We have been debating them for over two hundred years–because, two centuries ago, Alexander Hamilton foresaw that the United States would become a great republican empire. He worked all his life to make it so. In many respects the United States that bestrides the world today is Hamiltonianism in action. And the arguments that Alexander Hamilton set off in his lifetime–particularly with Thomas Jefferson–are the same arguments that the United States now sets off today. As befits a hegemon, America not only exports its values; it exports its disagreements. The whole world is about to experience an updated and earth-shaking version of the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson. LIKE SO MANY leading Americans, Hamilton was future-minded–which is to say, he viewed the present from the vantage point of the future. While writing the Federalist Papers, he saw around him not thirteen struggling states but an empire, “in many respects the most interesting in the world,” which would be, before long, stronger than all the great empires of the day, “able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!” Hamilton sometimes feared that his grand visions would be taken as the “reveries of a projector rather than the sober views of a politician.” But his periods of self-doubt were always brief, and he sought to transform America into a megapower: a nation democratic and free but also ambitious, dynamic, and glorious. As Forrest McDonald describes it in his definitive “Alexander Hamilton: A Biography,” Hamilton felt his young country was burdened with a social system that bred inertia. Status was derived by birthright. At Harvard, students were listed by the prominence of their families, not in alphabetical order. Meanwhile, outside of a few bustling seaports, local economies were dominated by petty aristocracies and vested interests. There was no real national economy to create competition, heighten trade, and upset local oligarchs. So Hamilton sought to create a fluid marketplace, one that would allow thrusting meritocrats, such as himself, to rise and make full use of their talents. These concepts were novel in the late eighteenth century, but he realized that in the future technological innovation would be the key to economic growth, and economic growth would be the route to national honor and greatness. If America wanted to achieve her just fame, then the country had to be aroused, and infused with an arduous spirit. Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” makes for pretty stale reading today. But, as Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld points out in her recent book “The Spirit of Capitalism,” he was far ahead of his time. The prevailing contemporary view, she writes, was that “manufacturing, of all industries, was the least productive of wealth, in fact, unproductive, and that a country with abundant agricultural resources had no need of it.” Manufacturing, as Jefferson put it, would be ruinous to a nation’s character. It would breed the sort of traders who performed “tricks with paper,” and it would create a nation populated by “starved and rickety paupers and dwarfs.” If there had to be manufacturing in the world, Jefferson said, let the workshops remain in Europe. Hamilton countered that only a diverse economy could open up opportunities for a nation of fully developed human beings. “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the object of enterprise,” he wrote in the Report, “is not the least considerable of the experiments by which wealth of a nation may be promoted. . . . Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.” HAMILTON therefore nationalized the nation’s revolutionary war debt, which he hoped would not only forge the many local economies into a great national economy, it would lead to thriving credit markets, which could fund investments and innovations. He created the Bank of the United States. He supported tariffs for infant industries (and advocated the removal of tariffs once industries could stand on their own). He organized what we would now
call federal research and development programs. He pioneered new forms of socio-economic research. He believed that only a limited but energetic government could rip off the shackles that inhibited the energies of the nation. While some of his peers, particularly James Madison, feared human passions and sought to check them, Hamilton feared human passions and sought to channel them for the good of the nation. Hamilton was largely indifferent to his own finances. Like his admirer Theodore Roosevelt, he was motivated more by the desire for honor, and he saw national wealth as a means to secure American power and prestige. He also fervently believed that economic might should be accompanied by military independence. He supported a professional standing army against the Jeffersonians who believed the United States should rely on militias for defense. He tried to create a military academy and insisted that a global commercial power required a large and well-funded navy. He proposed a million-dollar fund for a United States intelligence agency. What he was seeking in this was to create a spirit of patriotism that would motivate Americans to look for opportunities beyond the comfort of their valleys and homes. He hoped effective government would stoke Americans’ confidence in their own abilities and rouse them to great things. Create, motivate, stoke, rouse–these are all Hamiltonian words. And in this way Hamilton did play some role in fomenting the enormous energy that is the main feature visitors cite when trying to summarize the American spirit. And this energy was not only to be devoted to glory and enrichment, it was also to be channeled in the name of a great cause: democratic government. “Hamilton spent most of his career trying to reconcile the necessity of empire with the moral authority of consent,” Karl-Friedrich Walling writes in his excellent 1999 book “Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government.” He hoped American liberty would prompt a global democratic revolution: “The world has its eyes on America. The noble struggle we have made in the cause of liberty, has occasioned a kind of revolution in human sentiment. The influence of our example has penetrated the gloomy regions of despotism, and has pointed the way to inquiries, which may shake it to its deepest foundations.” In sum, Hamilton dreamed that America would become a rich, powerful republican empire that would champion the idea of self-government around the world. And of all the different Americas that could have been imagined more than two hundred years ago, this one has come to pass. As George Will once put it, “There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton. However, if you seek Hamilton’s monument, look around. You are living in it. We honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s country.” AND YET there is no Founding Father whose reputation has waxed and waned so dramatically, who has aroused so much hatred and contempt. In his invaluable new book, “Alexander Hamilton & the Persistence of Myth,” Stephen Knott, an assistant professor and research fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, traces the course of Hamilton’s reputation. At his death, Hamilton was lavishly mourned, but he had the misfortune to be survived, by many years, by his two great enemies: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Indeed, it was Adams who had called Hamilton the “bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” and continued to inveigh against him during the early years of the nineteenth century. Hamilton’s reputation fell during Andrew Jackson’s administration–but then began to recover with the rising fortunes of self-professed Hamiltonians such as Daniel Webster and de facto Hamiltonians such as Henry Clay (who was reluctant to cite Hamilton personally, for fear of giving ammunition to his own enemies). Hamilton’s prestige reached its zenith during the Civil War. A strong abolitionist, he had spent his life preaching the virtues of national union and warning about the calamities of disunion–which meant that in the north he was regarded as a demi-god, just below Washington among the Founders. (His prestige was so high even Jefferson Davis cited convenient passages from his writings.) Reverence for Hamilton survived into the Gilded Age, when he was adopted by Western industrialists as the patron saint of capitalism and industrial might. Businessmen set up “Hamilton Clubs” across the country, which sponsored addresses on patriotic and commercial themes. Theodore Roosevelt, a fervent Hamiltonian, gave his famous “Strenuous Life” speech at a Hamilton Club in Chicago. By the 1920s, however, Hamilton’s reputation was again the subject of fierce debate. Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge regarded him as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the Founding Fathers. One of Harding’s most popular stock speeches was called “Alexander Hamilton–Prophet of the American Destiny.” Coolidge declared, “When America ceases to remember his greatness, America will no longer be great.” But left-wing historians such as Charles A. Beard were beginning to chip away at his reputation. And in 1928 Hamilton actually became an issue in the presidential campaign. His virtues were touted at the Republican convention, while at the Democratic convention the keynote speaker branded him an enemy of democracy. WITH THE coming of the New Deal, Hamilton’s reputation hit its nadir. Franklin Roosevelt considered himself a Jeffersonian man of the people–that is to say, an aristocrat with the common touch. Henry Wallace attacked Hamilton as a ruthless plutocrat. I.F. Stone called him “the hero of the upper classes.” The New Deal historians, eager to show that all of American history was but a precursor to Roosevelt’s domestic program, buried Hamilton under a mountain of obloquy, and Ezra Pound, for what it is worth, called Hamilton “the prime snot in ALL American history” in the “Cantos.” Hamilton’s reputation ticked back upward during the 1950s, when Cold Warriors began citing him as a realistic proponent of American might. But in “The Conscience of a Conservative,” Barry Goldwater declared himself a Jeffersonian, foreshadowing a shift in Republican attitudes. In 1979, Forrest McDonald published his biography, reviving Hamilton’s reputation among historians and political theorists. (Ironically, McDonald was chairman of the Goldwater for President Committee in Rhode Island in 1964.) But Hamilton had few champions in the political world. The left–a 1987 PBS documentary was typical–continued to attack him as an apologist for the wealthy. The 1994 Republican revolutionaries–led by Dick Armey and Tom DeLay–considered themselves populist Jeffersonians. “Hamilton’s views are anachronistic to our views,” said Senator Phil Gramm. “We are Jeffersonians.” Congressman David McIntosh, a member of the class of 1994, declared, “We have to be the party of less government, Jeffersonian, not Hamiltonian.” The Republican vogue for term limits was a reform inspired by the Jeffersonian spirit. Stephen Knott does a marvelous job gathering all the different views of Hamilton that have surfaced over the past centuries and weaving them into a clear and interesting narrative. If there is one flaw in the book, it is that Knott doesn’t spend enough time analyzing why Hamilton has aroused such passionate responses or what psychological predilections bias an individual into being for Hamilton or against him. With one sentence, though, he does point to the core of the matter: “The manner in which thoughtful Americans react to Alexander Hamilton often reveals their sense of pride or guilt in America’s economic and military power as well as their attitude toward their own prosperity.” In other words, people who are comfortable with American might and wealth tend to admire Hamilton. Those who are nervous about the American colossus tend to suspect or revile him. Knott doesn’t theorize much further than that, but any reader will be able to detect a pattern. Hamilton struck two notes in particular that aroused passionate antipathies in his lifetime–and have ever since. First, he was an ambitious
meritocrat, and second he believed in limited but concentrated power to rouse the populace and shape the future. A HARD-WORKING achiever himself, Hamilton felt honor should go to those who rose through achievement. Some of his rivals viewed him as a dangerous young man in a hurry, a low-born arriviste lacking spiritual refinement (hence Jefferson’s famous aside predicting that history would scarcely “stoop to notice him”). Those who have a high intolerance for obvious ambition tend to detest Hamilton and the sort of nation he tried to create. “I dislike Hamilton because I always feel the adventurer in him,” Henry Adams once remarked. Some of this visceral dislike is pure snobbery, of the sort the languid well-born always feel for obscure strivers. But among the more serious-minded, Hamilton stands for a set of commercial, materialist, and individualistic values that corrode happy community or social solidarity. Communitarians and socialists have never had much use for him. Eugene V. Debs attacked him as a “rank individualist.” Henry Wallace called him a “commercialist.” Being a meritocrat, Hamilton also believed that those with ability should be able to rise above the common ranks of their fellow citizens. For this, many of Hamilton’s critics, especially on the left, have labeled him an elitist. It’s interesting that sometimes the same people who call him an adventurer also charge him with being a royalist. These are the three prongs of the trident with which a meritocrat gets jabbed: He is attacked for the low station whence he came; he is attacked for the fervor with which he climbs; and then he is attacked for the heights to which he ascends. During the middle third of the twentieth century in particular, liberals tarred Hamilton as an enemy of democracy, while embracing Jefferson, the slave-holding aristocrat, as the emblem of all democratic virtues. Hamilton’s real flaw, for these people, was that he admired commerce and economic dynamism. Through a series of twisted and unexamined prejudices, the mid-century liberals assumed that anybody who admired commerce must necessarily admire the wealthy. Anybody who admired the wealthy must detest the common man in what was assumed to be the great class war of life. And anybody who detested the common man was not a true democrat. Adlai Stevenson argued that while Jefferson had faith in “all the people,” Hamilton “felt that only men of wealth and affairs were qualified to understand and conduct government.” Newsweek claimed that Hamilton “favored a ruling aristocracy of wealth.” James MacGregor Burns claimed that Hamilton “looked on the mass of people as grasping, ignorant, slavish, in short, incapable of self-government.” One of the best threads in Stephen Knott’s book concerns a quotation, often attributed to Hamilton, that the people are “a great beast.” This comment appears to have originated in an 1859 book entitled the “Memoir of Theophilus Parsons.” The author’s father had allegedly met someone who had met someone who had been at a dinner party where Hamilton had made this alleged remark. This is tenuous evidence, and an exhaustive study by the Library of Congress concluded that the quotation is “without basis.” Nonetheless, as Knott demonstrated, the canard surfaces again and again in the anti-Hamilton literature, in writings from people as diverse as William O. Douglas, I.F. Stone, and Henry Steele Commager. Knott acidly observes that prominent scholars lowered their scholarly standards in order to attack Hamilton. They did so because the phrase fit all their prejudices about capitalists–and thus about Hamilton. The second Hamiltonian theme that drives some people crazy is his faith in concentrated authority. This has aroused antipathy on the right as well as the left. Hamilton feared inertia. He had seen too much weakness as an aide to General Washington during the Revolution and as an observer of the United States government under the Articles of Confederation. The pattern of his political life was to mobilize power. He used national power to upset local oligarchies and to make the United States an independent power in the world. As Walling demonstrates in “Republican Empire,” Hamilton also had a sophisticated view of national morale, which he believed was as vital to the success of a nation as military morale is to the success of an army. If citizens have lost faith in their government, then weakness, cynicism, and despondency follow. Ineffective leadership produces, as Hamilton put it, a “loss of virtue.” But a strong and effective government raises morale just as a strong officer raises the self-confidence of his men. Energetic leadership revives the “hopes of the people” and thereby gives a “new direction to their passions.” Hamilton therefore favored a strong presidency, a strong military, a strong judiciary, and a national government that would be a catalyst, but not a nursemaid. It is this strain of Hamiltonian thinking that led many conservatives during the last half of the twentieth century to see Hamilton as an apostle of big government. When he was running for vice president in 1956, Richard Nixon was asked if he were a Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian. He replied that as a believer in states’ rights, he was a Jeffersonian. “When Jefferson first ran for president, he ran as a Republican,” Nixon said. The Goldwater-DeLay-Armey wing of the Republican party feared the federal government more than a drift of the nation toward vice, and they felt the government didn’t need to do anything to rouse the spirit of the nation except get out of the way. Similarly, liberals have also been suspicious of Hamilton’s use of concentrated power. He believed, after all, in a powerful intelligence community, and during the Cold War, Hamilton was given the reputation as a tough foreign policy realist, who saw international politics as a mere struggle for power, divorced from larger ideals. Liberals became suspicious of the imperial presidency, which they associated with Hamilton. As Knott notes, Hamilton was sometimes portrayed as a Curtis LeMay in waistcoat and breaches. What the Hamiltonian critics of both the right and the left were doing was articulating the two wings of the antiestablishment populism that swept the country in the 1960s. Whether they were hippies or libertarians, these Americans preached the virtues of small communities and the evils of large, national institutions. The lefties hated the national government because it was the home of the military-industrial complex. The righties hated the national government because it was the bastion of the liberal elites. But both sides were joined in their distrust of vibrant national institutions, which Hamilton held dear. THAT MOOD has petered out over the past few years, with the decline of both the New Left and the Gingrich revolution. And it is natural therefore that Hamilton should be enjoying another one of his revivals, with academic books such as Knott’s, Walling’s, and Greenfeld’s, as well as with more popular books, such as Richard Brookhiser’s 1999 “Alexander Hamilton, American” and the recent appearance of a volume of Hamilton’s writing in the Library of America series. And since September 11, Hamilton suddenly seems central to our concerns. It has become once again obvious that our private lives require public protection. Confidence in national institutions has soared. The presidency is once again the focus of attention. George Bush has emerged as a dynamic and energetic executive, involved in stoking national morale and giving direction to our patriotic passions. America, in short, now exemplifies both sides of the spirit of Hamilton: It is a vibrant commercial arena and an active political power. Hamiltonianism has had such a troubled reputation because it demands the persistence of a tension–a perpetual balancing of liberty and power, individual initiative and national unity. Conservatives have sometimes prized the individual initiative part but rejected the national unity. Liberals have occasionally had the reverse reaction. But it should be clear, especially at this moment when the world is threatened by tyrants, tha
t, as Hamilton wrote, “vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.” It is a time for individualistic nationalism. And so now the debate goes global. Some nations fear the churning meritocracy that Hamilton championed and the United States represents. They call it “globalization” and charge that it will descend into a Darwinian struggle of the powerful against the weak. Others dread American unilateralism, fearing that so much power concentrated in the president’s hand will lead to rash militarism and disorder. BUT HAMILTONIANS counter that the world has more to fear from drift and disorder than from overweening American might, which is committed in any case to the cause of democracy more than national self-aggrandizement. Moreover, the Hamiltonians say, the free and churning meritocracy is the arena in which people are most likely to realize their fullest capacities–the fitting antidote to the stifling oligarchic regimes that one finds in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, not to mention Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And Hamiltonians are right to remind that world of the fact that Hamilton himself was more than just an economic man, interested in chasing money. He believed that the love of honor is the most powerful human motivation and that individuals, as much as nations, call out the best in themselves when they strive for the approbation of posterity. The essence of Hamiltonian happiness is to rise from obscurity to eminence, and then use one’s power and position to make it easier for people in other places and future times to realize the full measure of their own life projects. That’s what Hamilton sought to do in his lifetime, and what America seeks to do now. David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
