I finished reading the Alexander Hamilton biography today, 800+ pages by Ron Chernow. I had loved listening to the soundtrack of the recent musical for some time, but this book was really well written and described how Hamilton really helped build what the United States was going to become. Hamilton was perhaps the most realistic in his assessment of what the new fledgling country needed to be, not just an agricultural collection of states looking only for their own self-interest, but a nation held together by laws and institutions.
What really stood out to me, however, was the context of political intrigue in which Hamilton did all these things in such a very short time. Hamilton was in his early 40s (younger than I am now) when he started to fade from American life; before that he was a boy wonder whose touch was golden in almost everything he did. All the while the Jeffersonian Republicans of his day fought him, spread whispers that he was a traitor, and did everything they could to undermine his policies, even though after they finally took power in 1801 basically left much of what he did undisturbed because it had been so well-done.
Reading this book with our current political situation, it would be easy to contrast his competence with the foolishness of the current administration. Indeed, Hamilton recognized that as a nation we must be held together by certain American institutions, or we will fall apart. I don't know that the current administration (which echoes American individualism expertly) understands this, so tied they are to the "Screw you guys, I'm going home..." mentality of Eric Cartman in which it is everyone for themselves. Hamilton, I suspect, would be both fascinated by the development of American governmental institutions and appalled how they have been allowed to flounder.
Yet it's a bit dangerous to read too much into the current situation. We all want to think that 'our guy' is the only one that is really good, while everybody else is either incompetent, short-sighted, or corrupted. If there was one flaw in this book, it's that the author held Hamilton in such high esteem that when Hamilton's flaws were exposed, it's almost as if he had to apologize for them. Anybody who got in his way (Adams, Jefferson, Madison for starters) was a lesser being in the author's eyes. But that's not real. Everybody is flawed, and while you can see that some are better than others, that nobody ever gets it totally right. That's why we need a Hamilton to go along with a Washington, and a Madison to go along with a Jefferson. Competence and character is not a one-person show; it's something that happens when we work together.
I really loved this book. Not sure that I'll ever read it again (it took two hard weeks of reading to finish), and likely I won't be writing any hip-hop musicals as companion pieces. But it may be one of the best insights to my country ever written.
