No one in line at the suburban post office on Friday afternoon looked like anyone else, yet everyone had a lot in common. Their shoulders and hair were soaked, from making their way through a sudden downpour. They stood in absolute silence, as if making the slightest noise would jinx them. And every single person was grasping two envelopes: one large and one small.
If you knew nothing else about the scene except the ubiquity of the envelopes — and maybe the weird noiselessness — you’d recognize this as the cruelest month, a time when citizens unite in obedience to the Internal Revenue Service and spend thousands of man-hours preparing and then waiting in line to mail their tax returns (electronic filing not being for everyone).
The threat of a government shutdown prompted by huge political divisions over federal spending and debt added piquancy to the ordeal this year.
“Everyone’s trying to get them by tonight,” the postal clerk told me when I finally made it to the front of her line. “After tonight they may just be sitting on a shelf somewhere,” she chuckled, handing over my certified mail receipts, “but at least you can prove you sent ’em!”
“Drat that Alexander Hamilton,” I thought, as I turned away. For it was he, George Washington’s right-handman and our original secretary of the treasury, who first led the fledgling American government down the path of energetic taxation that all subsequent Congresses and White Houses have so gaily traversed.
A new film about Hamilton, which airs Monday night on PBS (and which I saw in a pre-broadcast screening), illustrates the surprising extent to which Hamilton’s thinking about taxes and debt informs our circumstances today.
“Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton,” produced by Michael Pack and narrated by Hamilton biographer Richard Brookhiser, takes a quirky look at the legacy of this less-than-universally-known Founding Father.
Popping back and forth in time, the film lays out Hamilton’s story by taking us into the company of all sorts of unusual characters. We meet female convicts in the Caribbean (where Hamilton was born and where his mother was imprisoned for adultery). We hear perspectives on Hamilton from journalists and historians and schoolchildren, from writer Gore Vidal, Justice Antonin Scalia and even porn purveyor Larry Flynt.
“You see the fingerprints, the DNA of Hamilton, littered everywhere,” historian Jay Winik says in the film.
You may not know — I didn’t — that Hamilton managed the nation’s first financial crisis in much the way his successor Henry Paulson did, a couple of years ago: He pumped liquidity into the financial system.
In a 2008 interview for the film, Paulson draws the parallel. “We’re not doing this to help the bankers, heavens no. It’s the credit provision and the stable markets they provide that is necessary for the small businesses, the large businesses, and the jobs, and that’s what Hamilton’s legacy has been.”
That, and the consolidation of ever-greater national debt, a thing Hamilton called a national blessing. Some blessing, buddy! The tax forms dispatched for another year, I ducked my head and ran back out into the pouring rain.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
