Some Problems Won't Be Solved

The Hamilton-Jefferson Binary, Organized Labor in the 18th Century, and the Emptiness at the Heart of Our Historical Discourse

The other day I posted a paying-subscriber piece—free preview here—in which I said that I’m not going to go on complaining about the catastrophic effects on our political discourse of what’s now been almost ten years of effort by professional historians to bring their expertise to combating Trumpism. Which is true. That story has got to come to an end.

And yet the critique I developed, during what turned out to be such a long and heavy trip, which has, in the end, also been a somewhat saddening one, means the end is going to have to be somewhat long and heavy too.

For one thing, I’m going to find a way to collect a selection of those pieces and shape them up as an idiosyncratic angle on the whole awful decade 2016-2026. For another thing, I need to look back and try to accept this stark fact:

Everything the historians got wrong has been and still remains utterly non-correctable.

Non-correctable by me, of course. But also non-correctable at all.

I think for a long time I believed that I, an outsider, might shake a few things up (speaking of hubris!—I guess I had to get my inspiration somewhere). The situation is in fact unshakeable. Inert. Preconceptions dominating the founding-history profession at its most successful—I mean at the level where some non-professionals have actually heard of the professionals—are so fundamentally wrongheaded, really so vacant, that the discourse carried out by literally the smartest and best-informed people in the field has become impervious to reality.

Which makes that discourse anything but a useful tool in combating Trumpism.

The underlying problem became overwhelmingly obvious—acutely painfully, at least to me—in this video:

It’s a recording of a public discussion held last year at the Miller Center, a nonprofit housed at the University of Virginia that encourages scholarly study and public engagement with the presidency (it has amazing online archives). The discussion was between probably the leading Hamilton scholar, Joanne Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale; and one of the leading Jefferson scholars, Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. It was moderated by Scott C. Miller, the director of the Center’s Project on Democracy and Capitalism and an economic historian at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The somewhat oddball topic matched Miller’s project: “Did Hamilton and Jefferson believe that democracy and capitalism could coexist in America?”

It’s oddball because that’s not the way either Hamilton or Jefferson would have framed anything, for a million reasons, as Miller and the two other historians point out. What people in the 18th Century meant by “democracy” was tricky, and neither of the two founders under discussion would have used the word “capitalism” (I think Hamilton did use the word “capitalist,” maybe once).

But the question is also a little on the nose—for me, that is. Dramatic conflicts between democracy and the pursuit of capital in the founding period are exactly what I’ve been writing books about, and while it’s impossible, as I think I’ve shown, to address that subject realistically in the context of the banal Hamilton-vs.-Jefferson binary, my showing it has had no impact on the mainstream discourse, so discussions like the one at the Miller Center will go on forever, and people will forever enjoy them. Asking what Hamilton and Jefferson thought about a relationship between capitalism and democracy collapses coherency, because it matters not what they thought but what they did, and when it comes to the founding, people prefer incoherence, prefer dissociating from irresolvable historical conflicts, prefer thought over action, and so they like the Hamilton-Jefferson binary and the focus on ideas. It’s calming.

Telling the story I tell, of conflicts between democracy and the pursuit of capital that were inherent to the U.S. founding, tends to disrupt the calming binary, and disruption is what starts to threaten, repeatedly, in the video. As things stray toward my area, the discussion gets confused. Hence my watching the video with such unhappy fascination. Two top historians in their great-man fields have no means of navigating the space the discussion keeps pushing them into. Reflexively retreating to what they perceive as solid ground, they handle the situation with characteristic humor, charm, and aplomb, but because I know what’s missing, I discern an underlying awkwardness.

The awkwardness seems to have origins in certain desires of the interlocutor, Scott Miller, which are unusual for an event like this. Miller teaches economic history, with a focus on markets, so he keeps wanting to talk about economic and social issues. While I suspect he’d see me as a wild-eyed communist, we’re on the same page in believing that these economic and market issues are precisely the salient places where big questions about democracy emerge in U.S. history. Miller’s problem is that he’s got these two—Freeman and Cogliano—to talk to, and these two—Hamilton and Jefferson—to talk about.

If you’ve never questioned the validity of the binary, you’d think you might easily connect economic issues to the politics of the period via a discussion of what Hamilton and Jefferson had to say—if the issues could be appropriately translated for them, anyway—but Miller keeps bumping into the fact that you can’t. The scholars are quite comfortable talking about 18th Century ideas. They more or less admit to being at sea on capitalism.

But the binary fails anyway, because there’s no parallel between the two famous founders on political economy. Hamilton was a nuts-and-bolts finance-policy operator and a highly informed student of the subject. Jefferson … wasn’t.

There’s a revealing moment, at 38:53, where Miller brings up the concept of class in the 18th Century, “not,” he says with a chuckle, “in a kind of traditional Marxian sense or anything like that.” In what sense, then? I think he means “not in the sense of class struggle.”

For me, class struggle is both a central fact of the founding and the big thing that was erased from mainstream founding history after WWII: before the war, scholars knew about its centrality, which is one reason I do. (If you want to know how the erasure went down, you can read this. It’s quite the drama.) So while Freeman and Cogliano are not exactly wrong on the topic, the absence of the struggle makes them weak. As a Hamilton scholar, Freeman sticks with her subject’s and his milieu’s stated and implied ideas and tends to avoid his actions on behalf of his adoptive class and against the lower classes, which were quite intense and revealing. Cogliano too sticks with ideas—and when it came to class, Jefferson, unlike Hamilton, really only had ideas, not cogent policies, and those were pretty self-contradictory, as the scholars note. Yet again, the famous binary has failed the question.

But the moment where my jaw really dropped occurs at 1:06:09, with a question from the audience, read aloud by Miller: “Could Jefferson or Hamilton imagine a labor union?”

What stunned me is Miller’s framing the question as a fascinating counterfactual, requiring pure speculation—and the other two acquiescing in that framing. There’s even a kind of pause as, game to speculate, but unsure at first what to say, they size up this supposedly wild leap of a concept. It seems not to occur to any of them that even if the term “labor union” were taken to mean nothing but the organizing that emerged from mass industrialization, their historical framing would be way, way off. Organizing for higher wages began in Britain in the early 18th Century and was well underway in America during Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s lifetimes. The two founders didn’t have to imagine it—they knew it—and two of today’s best-known historians of the founding don’t seem to.

But this absence of labor unions in mainstream thought about the period runs even deeper than that. Since I think everything important that Hamilton, for one, ever did was in reaction to organized labor, and that a constant, highly organized struggle between capital and labor defined the whole founding period and made our country what it was, imagine my dismay at seeing three major scholars—one of them an economic-history professor—blithely expose that great void in public discourse created so long ago, when the centrality of free labor’s struggle with the American governing elite was erased from the founding narrative. That’s a void, by extension, in the intellectual underpinnings of our liberal politics. If you can’t see the Shays Rebellion—an uprising by ordinary people against regressive economic policies and a trigger for the Constitutional Convention—as a labor action, you’ll just never know your country’s history, never know what Americans were warring over, at the country’s birth. The Whiskey Rebellion was a labor action. The American Manufactory in Philadelphia was a labor action. The North Carolina Regulation was a labor action. The Diggers, in 17th Century England, were a labor action.

The demands made by the Levellers at Putney in 1647 were made on behalf of labor, and while those demands weren't met, in 1776 Pennsylvania, it was labor, in the form of militia privates organized across all counties, that took over the province, threw out the existing charter, and realized the Levellers’ aspirations for the first time anywhere. If they hadn’t done that, then we wouldn’t have declared independence in early July of that year—just so you know what I mean by central. (I wrote a ripsnorting page-turning book about about it.)

But if all that’s not specifically labor union-y enough, try this. In 1768, tailors in New York City went out on strike. In 1779, mariners at Philadelphia’s port struck (it was wartime, so the strike was broken by federal troops). In 1786, Philadelphia’s printers struck. Those events were fairly spontaneous, but in 1791, Philadelphia’s cordwainers (bootmakers) started a strike fund and carried out three well-planned strikes before 1800. Hamilton and Jefferson, if not today’s leading scholars of Hamilton and Jefferson, would of course have been well aware of such matters. In 1806, the cordwainers were tried for striking, and the position of the Jeffersonians, then a political majority, was that they had a right to associate—high Federalists like Washington had thought such a right was fictional—but that the state also had a compelling interest in regulating them. The striking union members were fined.

Why do I know those facts, when seemingly not knowing them got three highly credentialed scholars speculating about what they took to be a fascinating counterfactual? I looked them up. It’s very easy to do these days and took about a minute. If you’re interested, I refer you to “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835,” a paper by the historian Leonard Bernstein, published in 1950 in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

This big blank space in the minds of our leading historians is so staggering because it’s based on a decision, made by the academy and government during the Cold War, to erase from history the whole mass of free people living in the country during the founding period, in order to erase their conflict with the power of capital in the formation of the country. That decision, with ramifications still going on, has bankrupted liberal discourse about our national origins. The scholars at the Miller Center event aren’t the decision’s perpetrators; they’re among its victims, and so is the general public, and so is any attempt by our impoverished liberal culture to know anything useful about Trumpism. And yet the leaders of that culture keep telling us that they do know, better than anyone.

Like most things in this world, I can’t do anything about that. Unlike most things, I now see that I once had the idea, about this one, that I might be able to.