I Hate Hamilton and So Did The Cast’s Ancestors

General Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, was the one of the Nazis’ top field commanders, responsible for overseeing the expansive German war in North Africa. For a large part of history Rommel has been remembered as somewhat divorced from the Nazi cause, apolitical in his intentions and skilled in his military profession. Rommel, described as a “gentleman warrior” by Germany’s leading paper, Der Spiegel, had enjoyed years of relatively good PR for a Nazi.1 The fog of myths generally goes something like Rommel knew nothing about the Holocaust, just wanted to do right by Germany, and when he found out about the Holocaust, took part in a secret conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler and save the Jewish people. These are lies, but even though Germany after World War II had gone through an intense de-Nazification process, Rommel’s good, non-racist (and inaccurate) reputation has survived well enough to see his name adorn German military bases, German naval destroyers, museums in his honor and roads in his hometown. Watching Hamilton in the year 2020, as a black American, I assume, is like being a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, watching a troupe of Jews passionately perform a two hour musical about Erwin Rommel.

The play opened up with a song where a group of black people on stage called Alexander Hamilton “brother” and immediately I had to take a second. “Brother”. Most of this play’s main characters are played by black actors, including several white contributors to the American genocide of black people. Generally, the characters played by white actors, like King George and General Charles Lee, are portrayed as bad guys or idiots; obstacles in the way of our main characters. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, clearly heroes, are played by darker skinned men, almost implicitly indicative of their good guy status. Washington, given a big ‘WOOOO’ at his first appearance as if he were fucking Kramer, personally owned over 100 black human beings. The political reasoning behind an all-black cast, as it has been explained to me, is some metaphorical conquering of America’s dark history by black people, some sort of kicking down the door of the obviously segregated celebration of the early United States. Through a musical acknowledgment, really a painting over of the fact that the people that founded this country owned our ancestors like cattle, we’ll be a step closer to the kumbaya colorblind society that this play’s writers envisioned.

I would have to imagine that somewhere in the back of the founders’ heads, they were acutely aware of the colossus of suffering that underpinned any economic success their country had at the time, and the vast economic success that they personally enjoyed. Despite whatever empty statements any of them made about the equity of black people or ‘all men’, which didn’t include us yet, they must have been sure that at some point, the time would come where black people, just as the colonists did, would take their only given option for their rights, arm themselves and break free from the system that oppressed them. In the recesses of powdered wig covered minds, even if just in a dream, each one of them had to have imagined a dark brown mass, unshackled, walking slowly but deliberately to their well furnished houses to kill them and take back what their labor had built. If the founders at all understood what they themselves wrote about the light subjugation they faced from the British, they had to have thought, if just for a second, ‘God, I sure hope those niggers never rise up against us’. I can guarantee you, beyond the slimmest shadow of a fucking doubt, that the fleet of rich elite politicians we call our ‘founding fathers’ could have hoped for no better PR, no more subdued and neutered a population, no more total an overlook of their oppression, than to see black people in the year 2020, dressed up in colonist regalia, literally singing and dancing about how great they were. If George Washington had known that black people would be cheering a black version of him onto a stage 200 years after he died, when he literally owned title and deed to their ancestors solely because of their race, he probably would have bought a few more.

This is where Alexander Hamilton ever so conveniently steps in for the liberal argument, see Alexander Hamilton didn’t own slaves, he was a trailblazing ‘abolitionist’, so I’ve heard. Hamilton wasn’t as directly involved in the subjugation of black people as the other founders, but hovered around it his entire life, like a moth to a flame that will burn it if it gets too close. Coming up through his path to America’s political elite, he was necessarily encircled by the slavery he reportedly disliked. His wife’s family, the Schuylers, were one of the most prominent and wealthy families in New York, and as such, owned several slaves. Hamilton, while he was married to Elizabeth Schuyler, handled her and some of his new family’s finances, and naturally their well-diversified portfolios included black human beings. According to his own papers, he helped purchase “a Negro woman and child” for his rich in-laws and there’s a good bit of historical debate on whether he bought any for himself.2 In Hamilton’s professional life, he had become, as the play positively portrays, George Washington’s second hand man, writing Washington’s speeches and delivering his statements on the way to their Revolutionary War victory. He was appointed the Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, setting up the country’s financial system, underpinned by free black labor. To be perfectly fair to Hamilton, he was a member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated the abolition of slavery in New York, although many of the club’s members were slaveholders. Hamilton wrote that black people’s “natural faculties are as good as ours”, although as an increasingly desperate and self-serving argument to enlist them as soldiers in their war.3 Much like my hypothetical 3-act Rommel show, Hamilton was plucked as one of the least racist vanguards of a racist genocide in order to defend, or at least paint over the genocide. I haven’t quite theorized how I’d distract focus from the Holocaust with Rommel, but Hamilton does it by focusing instead on the time honored American tradition of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.

To resume my coverage of the actual play from the first song, the actors go on to call Hamilton, “just another immigrant coming up from the bottom”. Another pause. It is true that Hamilton was born on a Carribbean island called Nevis, now joined with St. Kitts to form its own nation. It’s true that Hamilton was born out of wedlock and unlike most of the other founding fathers, was not dropped into the lap of luxury. One major difference though that the creators of this play don’t seem to quite fully grasp is that Alexander Hamilton WAS WHITE. He was WHITE. Most of the other “immigrant(s) coming up from the bottom” at the time stayed very firmly at the bottom because they were kept there by CHAINS. Immigrant would have been a funny word for most of the “immigrants” of that time; kidnapping victim, imported labor, subhuman, anything like that might have better applied. On the list of immigrants in American history, Alexander Hamilton might have had one of the better starts at his time simply because he was WHITE, at a time when most of the dark people were in CHAINS. There wasn’t a chance for Washington to be impressed by the oratory of one of his slaves, most directly because they were legally BANNED from learning to read. He fit right into our power structure almost like he wasn’t an immigrant at all.

Theoretically, for the glorifying tone of this play to work, this core maxim of the United States, that “anyone” can “make it” if they “work hard” and “apply themselves” would have to be somewhat true, or have evolved into truth sometime before today, as most liberals seem to insist on. All of these words and phrases enclosed by quotes contain a wide enough range of definition to be essentially meaningless, but I’ll give it a shot. “Anyone”, as we’ve been over, didn’t include black people in shackles, which by the year 1790 was nearly 20% of the American population.4 ‘Making it’, interestingly enough for Hamilton, included one of the highest offices in our land at the time, Secretary of the Treasury, but it did not mean making it there with his moral fiber intact. Given that Alexander Hamilton had any true moral aversion to slavery, he shaved it all off the eloquent oratory and writing he did so it would fit just perfectly into the position of America’s first economic commander. Hamilton, from this perch and from the right hand of the president, surely could have put together a case for why “all men are created equal” should translate to ‘Our economic system is built on a massive injustice.’5 Hamilton, the genius he’s portrayed as in this play and throughout conventional American history, would have been perfectly capable of making this lay-up argument and had probably run it in the back of his head time and time again. He either didn’t care about it enough,complicity with a genocide, didn’t bring it to those in his government, political cowardice, or he wasn’t listened to, at which point if he had a serious moral hang-up, he would have resigned.

It’s usually here that, if this were a dialogue, I would get arguments about preserving the union and keeping the country together and this is precisely my point. At no point were black people’s rights (or any other oppressed group’s, for that matter) a priority of those in power in the United States. No matter the injustice, no matter its strain on the country, the priority of our government has been on enriching itself and protecting its power. Even during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s “paramount struggle (was) to save the Union, and (was) not to either save or to destroy slavery”.6 Lincoln makes this eternally principled stance on the morals of slavery clear, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”.7 It’s not the role of Hamilton’s bourgeois capitalist government, Lincoln’s bourgeois government or any other bourgeois capitalist government to secure the rights of the free, discounted or similarly oppressed labor they profit off of. It’s not the role of the “white moderate”, I’m guessing the majority of the play’s audience, to “paternalistically… set the timetable for another man’s freedom”, as Martin Luther King said.8 It’s very simply not in their best interest (until it incidentally is, when the South fucks up and secedes). It’s the role of the oppressed people to secure their own rights by any means necessary, much like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and their friends did in the American Revolution, as famously depicted in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. I digress.

“Working hard” and “applying yourself” are eternal values, and ones that shouldn’t be thrown away under any system, but very clearly “working hard” and “applying yourself” mean vastly different things to different people. Of course, when this country was founded and Hamilton and friends were at its helm, the reward for black people’s “working hard” and “applying yourself” was not getting whipped by your owner until the skin fell off your back. Prospects for white people’s “working hard” and “applying themselves” were far brighter, especially if they happened to be born into the lap of luxury like most of the founding fathers, or marry into it like Alexander Hamilton. The problem with bootstrap promise being the crux of Hamilton’s protagonism in the play is that this bullshit is still run out to black people today, both as a justification for continued belief in America and a wagging finger at our continued poverty. Largely because of the legacy of what Hamilton and his friends calmly sat over, black people in nearly every facet do not have the same opportunities as whites in our country. When black people have been political non-humans for 4/5 of this government’s history, it’s a strange prescription to tell a colonized people to pull up their sleeves and just keep working for the same system, and listen to that catchy tune about its founders while you’re at it. Even more directly, people born poor in this country most generally stay poor, while rich people stay rich,91011 and slaves, the backstop of the historical low wage worker spectrum, understood this well (an argument I don’t have the space to cover in full here, but come on). If our capitalist system did reward work at base, as our heroes so lovingly sang about, Jeff Bezos would be a 1,954,849 harder worker than you, for an example.

To be clear, I have no problem with writing a musical, movie or any other piece of media about less than savory historical figures. There are a lot of them and many of them have extremely interesting stories to tell. But to pull together an all-black cast as some symbol of progress and wrap them around the cheery recital of a genocide is dystopically misguided. To then, through the lies of the perpetrators, reinforce the false promises that are told to the victims, is at a point a slap in the face to your own family line. Lin-Manuel Miranda seems like a good-hearted guy and he and the rest of the cast and crew are extremely talented at putting on a play. It’s a shame that he wrote this play in this way, and its political warping and entrenchment in the popular media is an even bigger shame. If he or anyone else is taking suggestions, there’s a thousand different wildly interesting people in American history that didn’t participate in a genocide and would be great to learn about. I dunno, somebody write a musical about Fred Hampton and maybe I’ll get through reviewing the first song.

1https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/world-war-ii-new-research-taints-image-of-desert-fox-rommel-a-484510.html

2https://www.varsitytutors.com/earlyamerica/early-america-review/volume-15/hamilton-and-slavery

3https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/print_documents/v1ch15s24.html

4https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm

5https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

6http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm

7http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm

8https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

9https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-the-real-reason-many-americans-stay-poor-2018-02-13

10https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/114902

11https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/politics/gao-income-gap-rich-poor.html