As I write this, the film version of Hamilton is a few hours away from its premiere on Disney+. I have my Hamilton T shirt ready for viewing the show with my family, and I may watch it a second time tomorrow when at least two different Twitter viewing parties are set to happen. (As I post this, my family and I are a few minutes away from that first viewing.) I’ve been very fortunate to be able to see the show three times, including once with a group of Rush students as part of the Hamilton Education Program organized by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. I have the original cast recording. I have the Mixtape. I have the “Weird Al” Yankovic Hamilton Polka. I am a serious hardcore Hamilton fanboy, is what I am trying to establish here.
I’m also an educator who teaches kids about history and government, and I have always felt an obligation to help my students reach an accurate and honest understanding of our nation’s history and the enduring scourges of racism and violent oppression that are as bound up with our founding as ideals of liberty and self-government. In this moment of 2020, I feel that obligation more strongly than ever.
So I have to ask myself, at a moment where many Americans are finally taking extra steps to confront hard truths about our past: “Is there a place in this moment for a fictionalized celebration of the United States’ founding?” Can I still put on that T shirt and sing along to “My Shot?” Can I feel good about the fact that I brought 50 high school students to see this show? That I’ve shown clips of it, displayed its logo in my classroom, and referred to it in my discussions?
My answer is still Yes, but thinking through the question has helped me see what other lenses I need to bring to bear in my classroom.
Before I explain, let me take a moment to review some of the criticisms that historians and other people have made of the show.
- Indigenous people already lived in all of the lands where European settlers went about founding nations, and Hamilton pretty completely ignores their very existence.
- Chattel slavery of African captives was fundamental to the economic development of the entire United States of America, and the show does not emphasize this enough, nor does it do enough to demonstrate the ways that many of the show’s characters – including Hamilton – profited from the institution of slavery. (I’m not linking a specific reference to this, but it’s mentioned in the next two articles I link.)
- While most of the performers are deliberately people of color, none of the characters are, which means that the show is actually reinforcing a white European dominant perspective on history while claiming to be inclusive.
- Some of Hamilton the person’s rough spots have been smoothed over in the creation of Hamilton the character, such that (for example) a man who expressed some anti-immigrant sentiments winds up with a line like, “Immigrants – we get the job done.”
I have some quibbles with some of these criticisms. For example, based on the reading I have done, I think Alexander Hamilton was opposed to slavery – however, he did profit from his marriage into the Schuyler family, whose wealth was at least in part connected to slavery. I think that George Washington answering the line “Black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom” with “Not. Yet.” is an example of Lin-Manuel Miranda making the specter of slavery haunt our celebration of the founding, and I think that subtle approach is one that helps the audience get to the point of being able to hold positive and negative opinions of the framers at once. Maybe I shouldn’t hail that as major accomplishment in the second decade of the 21st Century, but I think that’s where we are.
But in a show where control of the narrative is a central theme, there is no denying that some people have been left out of the narrative. How can I be OK with that?
My answer is that no one story can tell everything that needs to be told. Every story, every explanation, is a series of choices about what to include and what to exclude, what to emphasize and what to downplay. And every story exists in a context and a relationship to other stories and other perspectives. If Hamilton were the only story told about the nation’s founding, or the only story told about Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton, then its fictionalizations and omissions would be crippling.
But Hamilton exists in a country that has centered and mythologized the framers for centuries. The juxtaposition of these familiar historical figures with contemporary musical styles, performed by a cast of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds, gives an audience enough of a sense of the familiar to feel comfortable and enough of a sense of the unexpected to encourage a re-evaluation of perspectives.
I first learned about Hamilton because I follow the journalist Chris Hayes on Twitter. Hayes is an old classmate and friend of Miranda’s who kept praising the show, and based on his tweets I could not figure out if it was a show about a rapper or a show about Alexander Hamilton. It took me a bit for the light bulb to go on that it was both. The act of the juxtaposition is an act of commentary itself. On one level, yes, Hamilton is a white-European-centric Great Man approach to history. But it also makes an audience that might be comfortable with that style of history think about who else has been part of that story all along.
But what about the mythmaking? The celebration of the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality (“I wrote my way out”) that Miranda sees in Hamilton, in himself, in his family’s story? Again, if that were the only story we tell about America, it’d be super dangerous. But while it is essential that we have stories that acknowledge the pain that European settlement caused, it is just as essential to recognize that many people of color, including Miranda, view the United States, or at least aspects of it, positively. And this country, for all its faults, is the collection of people who have made their lives here. We can regret and condemn the destructive actions that led to some of those people’s existences while also acknowledging and indeed celebrating that those people exist, and this country is theirs too, and that many are happy about the lives they have built in it (even though there is still lots of work to be done). Hamilton provides a window to do that, and at this moment of the 21st Century, I think that is one story – among many – that deserves to be told.