Hamiltonian America

By A.K. | LOS ANGELES

ALEXANDER HAMILTON was never president. Indeed, he probably could not have been, for he was the only founding father born outside of what became the United States. (I can't imagine that the Caribbean hell hole called Nevis where Hamilton, an illegitimate child, was born even issued birth certificates. Birthers?)

By contrast, three of the men who cast Hamilton's life into relief were presidents:

• George Washington, who was Hamilton's aegis for much of his career,
• James Madison, who began as Hamilton's intellectual ally in writing the Federalist Papers but later turned into Hamilton's enemy, and
• Thomas Jefferson, who, with Madison, became the ideological and personal antithesis to Hamilton in the early years of the nation.

Perhaps this is why many of us know less about Hamilton than about these others. For a strong case can be made that Hamilton was in many ways the most “soulful” of the founders and the one with the most nuanced and farsighted vision for America. Indeed, America today almost certainly—as futile as this thought experiment admittedly is—conforms to Hamilton's vision much more than to Jefferson's.

America is a cosmopolitan, commercial and industrial place (as Hamilton envisioned), not an agrarian land of yeoman farmers untouched by the corrupting influence of banks and brokers (as Jefferson wanted). It has long since banned slavery, as Hamilton always thought it should, but as Jefferson and Madison, among other southerners, dared not contemplate.

Indeed, a list of Hamilton's legacies—first Treasury secretary, founder of "Wall Street" and American central banking, founder of the Coast Guard, visionary of capitalism and governmental checks and balances—inevitably shortchanges his overall impact. In everything but title he really was America's first and most important prime minister.

So I was thrilled to watch a new documentary about Hamilton that finally gives the man his due. To be aired on PBS on April 11th, "Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton" by Michael Pack and Richard Brookhiser (who also did "Rediscovering George Washington") brings the man to life in some creatively contemporary ways.

Thus we see Hank Paulson, while he was Treasury secretary, attempt to argue that he was responding in a "Hamiltonian" way to the financial crisis. Rupert Murdoch and Larry Flynt appear to explain how the media culture of Hamilton's day was perhaps not so alien after all. Some toughs from the Baltimore hood explain why they would gladly fight and die for honour, as Hamilton did (and as his beloved son had done) when he agreed to his fateful duel.

The film, to be sure, is too long—about two hours. But there are nuggets for us modern-day Hamiltonians to savour. Thus a handwriting analyst (while sitting on a boat on the Hudson as Hamilton might have done) points at the Ts that are not crossed and the Is that are not dotted in Hamilton's longhand, because Hamilton was just too fast a thinker to slow down for such technicalities.

That detail, indeed, says an awful lot about the great man. Perhaps it also explains why I empathise with him so much: words came so easily to him that he could not shut himself up. Had he learned to keep mum more often, to give his enemies less of a target, who knows how much more Hamilton might have contributed.