Joe Biden, Alexander Hamilton, and US Manufacturing

Is Biden-administration policy getting roped into the fading glory of the "Hamilton" craze?

It’s been refreshing to me how little the Biden administration has seemed to want to cover itself in the glory that flowed, not so long ago, from the volcanic cultural impact that was “Hamilton: An American Musical.” During the Trump presidency, Democratic Party leadership and the entire liberal intelligentsia, caught up in the Broadway vision of America’s founding and meaning, obsessively framed criticisms of Trump in Hamiltonian terms. That might have made some sense, if they’d been content to invoke the fantastical “Hamilton”-ianism of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s patriotic pageant, where people of color are identified, in an imagined historical re-do, with the country’s founding oligarchy.

But no. Inspired by Miranda’s musical fantasia, Democrats obsessively invoked Alexander Hamilton himself—the real guy—and made him the founding spirit not of American oligarchy but of American democracy, contra Trump, thereby drawing juice from the musical’s overwhelming popularity even while pointing to the supposed founding ideals of this country, supposedly packaged in the supposedly real career and thinking of the first U.S. treasury secretary.

This all happened about a minute ago. And yet I’m not so sure everybody clearly remembers how totally and constantly, from Adam Schiff to The New Yorker to social media to Jimmy Fallon to PBS to you name it, quotes from and references to—not the play—but Hamilton himself, inescapably everywhere, were presented as enduring meditations on the nature of democratic American institutions. Memory can get fuzzy fast—especially when you’re waking up with a hangover after a roaring party you shouldn’t even have been at, wondering what on earth you might have said and done, but I swear all of this really happened. I could go on and on about it. But that’s what I did, here, say, and here, while the party was going on and on!—me, the ghost at the feast, the Ancient Mariner on the wedding day.

Suffice it to say now that in order to make Hamilton a popular hero of democracy, you have to reverse everything he did and said. That reversal was carried out with wild abandon for a long time, in some cases by people who should have known better, and having spent more than twenty years with him, I’m pretty sure that Hamilton would have taken great offense.

The show itself, by the way, is only now taking off, and God bless. It’s true that The New York Times no longer strains, these days, to find any possible connection, however tenuous, between “Hamilton: An American Musical” and whatever it happens to be reporting on. It’s true that some who six years ago were deeply immersed in the show’s ethos are now in a state of backlash—somewhat unfairly, it seems to me—against Miranda and all his works. But that doesn’t mean the show is over. In the real world, it’s flourishing.

Still. Obsessive, misconceived invocations of the real Alexander Hamilton as a guide to and inspiration for liberal politics, which went on for way too long—that’s all settled down.

Or so it’s seemed. Now comes a double-barreled reinvigoration of Hamiltonianism as a precursor to Democratic Party policy, this time with reference to President Biden’s efforts to connect federal funding to the domestic development of semiconductors, solar energy, and electric vehicles. One barrel: “There Is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House,” an opinion piece by the USC professor Jacob Soll, in The New York Times. The other: an interview with the John Jay professor Christian Parenti, on the Bloomberg podcast “Odd Lots.” Though coming from different places, both professors connect current politics to the landmark efforts famously made by Hamilton, as founding treasury secretary, to encourage U.S. manufacturing via federal legislation.

The key point for both writers is that there’s nothing originally and fundamentally American about government’s taking a hands-off approach to the economy, as some on the right have it. The first U.S. presidential administration pursued a hands-on policy of imposing protectionist tariffs and giving subsidies and awards to selected early-stage industries and successful companies, actively seeking to build up and organize American manufacturing for the purpose of national independence, security, and prosperity. Comprehensive government involvement in the economy is thus at least as “original” to the country as anything laissez-faire.

That’s a fact. Both it and its larger point should be thuddingly obvious to any student of the period, really to anyone acquainted with the history of modern nation-building, but I know everybody isn’t. Soll, in his opinion piece, really seems to be offering Biden-supporting Times readers a liberal-originalist affirmation, a talking point contradicting right-originalism on economic policy and starring somebody we all think we know: Hamilton.

But to what end? Biden’s policy is worth defending on its merits; the history doesn’t help. It’s not like we're in some good-faith originalist water-cooler discussion, where armed with historical facts, somebody might persuade their wavering officemate to vote Blue.

And both the history and the politics get uncomfortably muddled if you think about them at all. On the current policy front, Soll is making a broad historical claim on a founding-era policy that might just as easily be associated with Trump’s calls for high tariffs (recently 100%, I believe, on auto imports?). Soll denies that association. “Mr. Biden’s economic plans look even more Hamiltonian,” he writes, “in contrast with Donald Trump’s suggested 10 percent tariffs on all imports and 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods.” That’s because Hamilton’s proposed tariffs were more strategically targeted on specific products (though he’d always favored a 5% tax on all imports across the board).

But Soll also wants to frame Hamilton’s industrial policy as the basis for all further American industrial policies, such as Henry Clay’s American System and its descendants, and they relied on tariffs that were sometimes very high and broad, and, like Hamilton’s (and Trump’s), heavily focused on a single competitor. History will always get muddled when applied to current policy and featuring a famous founder on the marquee. Like: Why are we even talking about Henry Clay? Because Soll has to glide all the way to the War of 1812, and then to the American System and beyond it, just to make Hamilton’s proposed 1791 industrial policy look as legislatively successful as he wants it to be, since he’s holding it up as a model for Biden’s.

Parenti, in the “Odds Lot” interview, makes this long glide too. That's because Hamilton’s manufacturing effort never got nowhere. It was his first huge flop. His vision was comprehensive, and Congress, refusing to even debate his report seriously, passed a tariff as a one-off and let the whole project for subsidizing certain industries and rewarding certain businesses die. Taking a more honest look at the legislative history would have undermined the conceit: Hamilton as the original industrialization man.

In real life, when federal policies for building out the nation industrially did finally pass Congress, they were influenced just as much by the work of Jefferson’s treasury secretary Albert Gallatin, who also failed, in his day, to get what he wanted. And it was Hamilton’s mentor, Robert Morris, the “free trade” monopolist and war profiteer, financing and financed by the Revolution, who originated what became known as the tariff, as well as the general idea of an independent America built out as a competitive nation state. Then there were the British, of course, already well up on these concepts: by the time Hamilton presented his manufacturing report to Congress, if you were a Brit who knew anything about factory machines, you weren’t allowed to emigrate (Hamilton’s people snuck some of the experts out anyway, along with the machinery’s plans and specs).

Get real, that is, and the marquee gets crowded—and maybe more interesting. This attempt to revive the mood of six-to-nine years ago—“Hamilton, well-known to you as the greatest founder of all, would have endorsed Democratic Party policy!”—isn’t only intellectually insupportable but also boring.

Anyway, no liberal today looking realistically at Hamilton’s industrialization policy could possibly endorse its operations in practice—and no leftist, if leftism has something to do with using the power of government to promote the rights and claims of labor over those of capital. And Parenti, a critic of the left from within the left, doesn’t endorse those operations. In the “Odd Lots” interview, he doesn’t mention them at all.

He doesn’t mention labor at all.

And yet labor was of course the key to the whole endeavor. Hamilton planned to lower factory wages and keep them low, employing, also on the British model, women and children first—children as young as nine—working six fourteen-hour days a week at the unregulated will of owners. That force was to be enhanced by immigrant men and others too poor to work as tenant farmers, and then, over time, by men waking up to the fact that work like this might be better for them than hired-hand and tenant farm work; ultimately whole families were to be employed in factory towns, with no legislation, at any level of government, regarding their health, safety, wages, hours, job security, or retirement. Hamilton’s industrialization policy—however progressive from a mile-high view—was borne out in the 19th and 20th centuries in a proliferation of mass-scale ventures, from mining to fruit-picking to manufacturing and more, that drove the dynamic rise of the United States in the near total absence of labor law. Read the 1791 Report on Manufactures: see the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

So when his fans say Hamilton invented modern America, maybe they’re right—but American modernity also includes those famous battles between labor and capital at Homestead Steel, Rouge Ford, Blair Mountain Mine, and on and on. Only in the 1930’s did industrialization start to be federally regulated on behalf of workers. And “start” is the right word.

I’m not telling Parenti anything he doesn’t know, of course. (Noting just by the way that from a certain Marxist viewpoint—not necessarily his—the fact that industrialization consolidated a proletariat at war with capital, is all to the good, so all hail Hamilton, maybe.) Parenti is more focused on contrasting the broad technocratic idea of industrializing nationally, which, like Soll, he incorrectly credits Hamilton alone with inventing, with the broad philosophical idea of a decentralized, anti-statist agrarianism, casting the former as progressive, even radically so, and the latter as regressive, with the slaveholding Jefferson its marquee figure. If the left has tended to glorify the agrarian, Parenti is out to correct that, by reviving Hamilton.

But does the left really idealize agrarianism? I just don’t see it. In the left-influenced founding-era history I read—Gary Nash and Terry Bouton, to name just two—there’s none of that.

And the all-too-familiar Hamilton-vs.-Jefferson binary is undermined here in any event by a number of factors, including the Jefferson administration’s proposed manufacturing policy; Hamilton’s understanding that not only did no fundamental conflict prevail between agriculture and manufacturing but also, when encouraged by government at large scale, they complemented each other (see Washington, one of the biggest of the big-ag men, on the importance of the factory moment); and the fact that Hamilton’s working-class opponents of the day—Parenti doesn’t talk about them—were by no means stereotypically Jeffersonian in outlook.

The founding-era popular movement wanted growth too, even certain forms of industrialization; they weren’t lock-step against the consolidated state (nor was Jefferson even, at times anyway). They wanted government to actively enable their efforts at growth, on their own terms, with benefits accruing to them, not on Hamilton’s terms, with benefits accruing, as they saw it, only to big business, high finance, and, in Hamilton’s vision, the development of the United States as a commercial and military empire. Because that democratic movement on behalf of free labor gets routinely left out of Hamiltonian revivalism (until now!) the revival never gets you anything but these weirdly off-base discussions of founding U.S. history.

Hamilton is getting renewed traction now in large part because of a news hook—Biden’s manufacturing policies. But as far as I can tell, so far it’s only the discussers who are appealing to Hamiltonian originalism, not members of the administration. That’s good. Support for domestic manufacturing won’t gain a thing from having Hamilton’s supposed endorsement, and maybe Hamilton’s days of getting dragged kicking and screaming into endorsing current politics have come to an end.

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The real deal on Hamilton is but one dramatic element—though an important one—in my forthcoming book, The Hamilton Scheme, out on May 28, whose subtitle is meant to assure you that it’s anything but a professorial discourse (the argument that the tale sits on can, however, be gotten from the endnotes). The more you find out about this guy, the more fascinating he is, and Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography is now a generation old, making The Hamilton Scheme, among other things, the rock-em sock-em Hamilton book for our time, and in that sense—whether you end up liking the story or not—a major publishing event. At least for me! Pre-order any time, and I hope you’ll share this post and info about the book with anyone you think might be interested.