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-REVIEW: of Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth By Stephen F. Knott (Barry Shain, First Things)

Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth is a book from which one can learn a great deal, but neither about Alexander Hamilton nor the persistence of myth. It is concerned with American history-more specifically, the history of the American Founding. It focuses on two representative symbols, Jefferson and Hamilton, and the persistent bifurcation in Americans' self-perception as a nation committed, on the one hand, to democracy, equality, localism, populism, strict constitutionalism, and agrarian economics-and, on the other, to limitations on popular political expression, hierarchical organization, centralization, elitism, a loose construction of the Constitution, and commercial economics. Jefferson and Hamilton quickly became the symbolic expressions of these competing socioeconomic programs, and it is the history of this association and their changing character that Stephen F. Knott tells.

What makes Knott's story compelling is the polemical nature of the historiography surrounding the Founding, as well as the changing national characterizations of Jefferson and Hamilton as alternating waves of vilification and hagiographic praise swept across the historical landscape. As Knott shows, these patterns responded with predictable regularity to changes in the economic and social environment. In particular, Hamilton's standing rises and falls with the stock market. Yet, in spite of our overall prosperity, Knott perplexedly reports that Hamilton has regularly been on the losing side of this national battle, as indicated by the disparity in Washington real estate devoted to each man. But what makes this work stand out is the detailed manner in which Knott draws to the reader's attention the persistence of politicization surrounding early American historiography. The cumulative effect of this unfortunate story is likely to undermine confidence in past historical objectivity, or even our current ability to do better.

These depressing possibilities are not conclusions that Knott reaches. But anyone reading his book who is not a "believer" (and it does approach religious zealotry) in the truth or righteousness of either Jeffersonianism or Hamiltonianism is likely to reach similar conclusions concerning the difficulty, if not impossibility, of writing balanced early national American history. In his telling of this story, one should not expect much from politicians, but what is less expected is the consistent partisanship displayed by the most preeminent of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians. As Knott observes, FDR's promotion of Jeffersonianism was politically excusable, but "less justifiable was the lowering of scholarly standards by the nation's intellectuals, who promoted a simplistic common folk versus plutocratic view of American history . . . [and] offer[ed] a glaring example of historians in the service of a political movement." Across the historical landscape, Knott shows (sometimes inadvertently) that historians (and political scientists) have served as apologists for Jefferson or Hamilton as they advanced both their political and professional interests.

It is this story, then, that Knott, modeling his effort on Merrill Peterson's The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, tells so powerfully. Knott shows that Hamilton, from the days after his death to the early years of the twentieth century, was regularly lauded in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, and vilified in the South and West. [...]

But with the Great Crash, admiration for Hamilton fell along with the market, and this provided an opening for the progressive historians' attacks on him. Contempt for Hamilton was also common among a number of Northern poets, including Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, and John Dos Passos. Knott concludes that "with poets and novelists voicing the despair of depression-era America and Hamilton branded as the cause of that despair, the 1930s witnessed a hemorrhaging of his reputation the likes of which had not been seen since the age of Jackson." Yet things would get worse.

As partisan as these historians and poets were in their treatment of Hamilton, more unbalanced still was the fanatical devotion to Jefferson among the next generation of early American historians. This is where Knott's account has the greatest bite. Indeed, it is at the pinnacle of the historical community that one finds some of the most passionate political actors writing in the service of their politics and in devotion to its preferred symbol. The writings of Merrill Peterson, Julian Boyd, Dumas Malone, Adrienne Koch, and Henry Steele Commager, to say nothing of the more honest zealotry of Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynn, are filled with anti-Hamilton partisan rancor, and Knott is quite effective in exposing it.

Richard Brookhiser wrote a nice, short biography, Alexander Hamilton, American, but he could fairly be charged with trying to refurbish a conservative's reputation. A more flattering portrayal then may be that in A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (2003) by James MacDonald, which leaves one with little doubt that the financial footing that Hamilton put the young Republic on was as important to America's surprising success as anything any Founder did. And it's amusing to see how William Carlos Williams critiqued Hamilton in the poem Paterson:

[Y]ou wanted to organize the country so that we should all/
stick together and make a little money.

On the Left that's a bad thing, huh? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2003 9:08 PM