It was via a mix of ubiquity and persistence that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton put itself at the edge of my awareness in late 2015 and stayed there through much of the next year. I’d never been an enthusiast of musical theatre, or even much interested in it. But Hamilton’s gathering presence as a pop-culture reference carried associations that were souring my passive indifference into something active and unfriendly.
The Hamilton buzz came with distasteful notes of official propriety, the same dead respectability carried by such names as “Barack Obama” and “The New York Times” and “NPR”. Indeed, in my own California neighbourhood, a continent away from Broadway, I was beginning to see grey-haired liberal ladies carrying Hamilton tote bags. That the play was supposedly a mashup of the American Founding and hip-hop threatened to spoil both the American Founding and hip-hop for me.
And then, one morning late in 2016, I woke to find songs from Hamilton coming from my own stereo — the official cast recording of Hamilton had become urgently popular among American 10-year-olds, and my oldest child was 10 at the time. The final barrier between me and musical theatre had been breached. But I couldn’t disdain those songs as I may have wanted to, since my daughter loved them so much, and since she and her friends were singing and rapping along to them with such charming exuberance. And since, well, some of those songs, some of that Broadway hip-hop, I had to admit I kind of liked. They were like… songs, pretty good songs. There was, for example, the winning Beatles bounce of “Washington on Your Side”, and the ingenious, absurdly infectious rhythms of “Wait for It”.
What really broke my resistance, though, was Hamilton’s hip-hop side. Now, a musical about America’s first secretary of the treasury is obviously miles away, in sensibility and setting and street cred, from what is generally considered hip-hop, which was fine because so am I. What of hip-hop Hamilton does have — rapid-fire rhymes and expert word-play — it has in abundance. I can only imagine how much fun it would be to deliver such lines from a stage. What I do know is it’s consistently a kick to hear them.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2020, though, when Disney Plus released a filmed version of a 2016 stage production of Hamilton, that I saw the play as a single work of musical theatre, start to finish. And my official critical assessment of Hamilton would be that, dramatically or narratively, it is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Still, those parts are pretty great. And the individual scenes built from the dozens of fun songs, the countless witty lines and clever couplets, create their own cumulative pleasure that more than compensates for the narrative flimsiness. (This may be how musical theatre works in general. I wouldn’t know.)
By then the play’s public reputation, which had been in flux for several years, was in something like a crisis. Initially, back in 2015 and 2016, it had been an object of fervent public adulation among people with real power, including Obama. Its standing was so exalted that the play’s cast felt entitled to direct a pointed, critical plea at the Vice President-elect of the United States, Mike Pence, when he and his wife attended a Hamilton performance shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. Speaking for the entire cast after the show, one actor addressed Pence directly, expressing anxiety that “your new administration will not protect us” — the “diverse America” the mostly black cast took itself to represent — “or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights”. He went on to express “hope” that Pence would be “inspired” by Hamilton “to uphold our American values”. In its melding of patriotic boilerplate and the language of Obama liberalism, this was a very Hamilton sort of message. (In retrospect, Trump’s whining response — saying the cast had “harassed” Pence and violated the “safe place” of the theatre — reads as a weirdly literal omen of how New Right Machiavels like Chris Rufo and Stephen Miller would take up the campus Left’s weepy pretexts for punishing wrong-think when the chance arose.)
But by the time I finally watched Hamilton on Disney Plus, not quite four years later, America was two months into the “racial reckoning” incited by the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. An unprecedented moral pageantry of protest and public kneeling and rote apologies had just been underwritten by the strange but effective teamwork of multinational corporations and urban rioters. The play’s affirming take on the American Founding, with its multicultural casting and its fond portrayal of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, had been a perfect sendoff for the Obama years, but it didn’t fit so well with this puritanical moment. Openly conjuring the Founding Fathers so as to adulate the nation they wrought was the sort of thing that could get you cancelled — and indeed, the hashtag #cancelhamilton was briefly a thing on Twitter. Miranda was accordingly scolded by Harvard students and lectured by Columbia lecturers. The 2020 backlash was not huge, but it was big enough that Miranda embarked on a minor apology tour that summer, in which he absorbed without complaint every bit of criticism that came his way and, of course, promised to do better.
In fact, a small number of people had been finding Hamilton problematic more or less from the beginning, and for reasons of simple historical fact that are pretty sound. For example, shortly after the show began its massive run at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway, in August 2015, the black novelist Ishmael Reed wrote a long and (characteristically) angry essay pointing out the historical errors and evasions that enable both Miranda and Ron Chernow, author of the bestselling Alexander Hamilton biography on which the play is based, to portray Hamilton as an early abolitionist. Hamilton does indeed seem to have disliked slavery and looked forward to its dissolution, and he was close friends with abolitionist dreamer John Laurens, and he was a founding member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated the voluntary freeing of slaves by slaveowners. But, as Reed and others have pointed out, he married into a slave-owning family, seems to have owned slaves himself, brokered the sale of other slaves, and represented slave-owners in his capacity as a lawyer. Hamilton disliked slavery, but not enough to take a stand against it in his personal and professional life.
In his biography, Chernow deals with these inconvenient facts by labouring to discover a sort of heroic ambivalence in Hamilton’s heart for which, in the documentary record, evidence is scarce. Miranda deals with them by briefly, glancingly, playing up Hamilton’s anti-slavery side and otherwise rushing past the whole topic. In a cabinet debate over government debt, Hamilton mocks the Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson: “A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor/Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.” And earlier, in the rousing anthem “My Shot”, Hamilton identifies himself and his fellow rebellious New Yorkers, and Laurens, as “A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists”. The couplet’s second line — which clinches a killer bit of wordplay — is heading elsewhere in a hurry: “Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is.”
For Hamilton’s harshest critics, though, invoking the play’s historical evasions and exaggerations is merely a way of prosecuting a deeper case against it. Miranda’s undergrad critic from Harvard accuses him of “blindly ask[ing] BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors”. (That “blindly” is a very undergrad touch. The notion that contemporary actors are being oppressed by men from the 18th century nicely illustrates the collapsed version of historical time that operates in the minds of certain progressive commentators on race in America.) For Ishmael Reed, Hamilton’s historical characters are so fundamentally defined by their involvement in slavery that it should blot out all other ways of talking about these men.
In other words, it’s the implicit optimism of the play that is unacceptable to these critics. Historical details about Hamilton merely confirm this prior conviction. In the event that someone like Miranda stirs up a hopeful mood about America, a battalion of academic historians stands on call to provide these details, with angry writers ready to send them through their megaphones. Cornily, Miranda grants American Founder Alexander Hamilton the liberal honour of being an “immigrant”, because he came from a different part of the British Empire, and he lets the word “abolitionist” hang in the air like a sort of Kantian cologne for Hamilton and his revolutionary friends to pass through and bear the smell of for the rest of the play. And then the historians and professional pessimists step in to say: Wrong! Racism! Slavery!
“In other words, it’s the implicit optimism of the play that is unacceptable to these critics.”
But many of Hamilton’s admirers already knew it was wrong, or at least a happy distortion of a darker history. The play’s most famous and powerful admirer, Obama, was surely not duped into beliefs contrary to the historical record after seeing it, formed as he was by the more radical traditions of black thought and black struggle. But I imagine that, as president of the country whose founding was being portrayed in that delightful and hugely successful musical, Obama welcomed the opportunity to indulge the happy distortion for as long as the inertial forces of public discourse would allow. I imagine him thinking, “It’s healthy and useful to think about it this way for a while. No doubt we’ll have to go back to thinking about it the other way at some point.”
That is, the warm reception given to Hamilton by influential and historically savvy people like Obama, and indeed the writing of the play by the Puerto Rican phenom Miranda, are examples of what Benedict Anderson calls “memory and forgetting” in Imagined Communities, his great book on the origins and moral logic of nationalism. Since nation states were typically put together and solidified through enormous violence, often fuelled by ethnic or racial hostility, they bear these injuries and outrages as undeniable facts of their national histories. But — unlike the multinational agglomerations known as empires — the nation state carries a civic and communal promise, in its very form, to all those contained within its borders, including those who were gathered in and politically domesticated through conquest and violence: “You are members of this national community, brothers in nationhood.” Because this promise and this history are radically at odds with each other, those who generate the legitimating stories of these nations are forced into an almost comically impossible task. They can’t simply engage in perpetual remembering of the formative outrages, since this contradicts the unifying conceit of nationhood and threatens to undo this work of unifying and legitimating. But they can’t simply forget these outrages since they’re too well-remembered, especially by the groups whose ancestors bore this formative violence, and they remain communally important for those groups. And so the nation’s legitimating stories, and everyone who imbibes them in moments of national affirmation, do both. They forget and remember at the same time, or they forget and then later they remember, or vice versa.
Anderson’s great example comes from his own people, the English, whose founding hero arrived from a different country and indeed bears this alienness in his name: William the Conqueror. But the name is rendered blurry in national myth, so that one can imagine William, touched with some primordial Englishness back in France, conquering not England but someone else on England’s behalf. As Anderson writes, the sobriquet “‘the Conqueror’ operates as [a] kind of ellipses… to remind one of something which it is immediately obligatory to forget”.
“The American national myth,” I wrote in that earlier article, “reflects an even more vigorous effort of memory and forgetting, in which… the enslavement of Africans serves as mere prelude to their emancipation into civic brotherhood.” Yes, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of black people was a founding fact of American history, but so was their eventual, inevitable emancipation into membership in this great nation, thanks to the elevated sentiment and noble political philosophy of founding Americans like Hamilton. Yes, our greatest Founding Father George Washington owned slaves at Mount Vernon, but, in an almost perfect working-out of this mythic logic of founding and emancipation, he also freed those slaves when he died. It feels almost Christ-like in the national telling, as if Washington died in order to free his slaves. This is how it works.
Critics accused Miranda of ignoring or downplaying slavery in Hamilton, of forgetting it if you will. This was true, sort of. He definitely didn’t dwell on it — except that, in the small matter of casting his play almost entirely with descendants of its victims, and having them perform in a musical style invented by other such descendants, he was very much remembering American slavery. The play wasn’t about slavery in its text, but in the subtext or metatext of its casting and music, it was about slavery quite powerfully, and quite obviously. In this way, Hamilton is one of America’s most pointed and elegant and self-aware achievements in memory and forgetting.
Of course, this is what its critics dislike about it. The funny practice of memory and forgetting, even if it contains ample portions of regret and self-critique, generally sustains the national myth and thus serves the national project. Otherwise, it would just be memory, bitter remembering as perpetual critique, cynical rebuke to the claim of belonging. (You might say that America’s racial pessimists are “all memory”, in which case Trump, who recently complained that America’s national museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was”, would accurately be described as “all forgetting”.)
And, of course, this balance of symbolic influences, along with those songs and that quasi-hip-hop wordplay, was another reason why I liked that corny musical when my daughter started playing it on my stereo. It felt like a healthy antidote to the dominant way of thinking about race in America at the time — the post-Ferguson years when activists had turned their flamboyant pessimism into an ongoing business, latching onto ambiguous individual tragedies as iron confirmation of a sort of paranoid metaphysics of racist oppression. It’s a convenient and profitable circularity, in which murky events, interpreted according to those invidious assumptions, are pointed to as proving those assumptions. In casting the American Founders in his hip-hop musical with black actors, Hamilton conveyed that adopting such blanket convictions about America’s “structural” and “systematic” — and thus permanent, unchanging, and inexpugnable — racial guilt was a political choice, and that other choices were available. There were other ways for black Americans to look at and inhabit their country.
And these ways are better. It’s not that the stance of pessimism and stubborn aggrievement has nothing behind it. This attitude must be especially hard to shake for a satirical writer like Reed. The satirist’s state of inflamed scepticism has an easy foil in America, with its vanity and vaulting ideals, on one hand, and its much less ideal history and sometimes ridiculous present, on the other. The satirical novelist looks upon such a nation and sees nothing redeemable, only a rich cast of targets — everyone appearing a clownish agent of racist evil or patriotic delusion or both. This harsh outlook serves the satirist, as it serves the activist with her hands out for the philanthropy of racial guilt, but it’s hard to imagine that it serves the material interests of everyday black people.
I’ll give an example of what I mean. At a middle school I’ve visited for my children’s football matches, a school in the poor and violent “Deep East” of my town Oakland, an exterior wall is adorned with a quotation. The quotation — an official message or motto of the school itself, though it’s spray-painted in a graffiti-style script — is from Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers, who said: “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lies advertised around them.” This is the perverse endpoint of racial cynicism, a middle school’s leadership sending a hopeless message about school itself to their impressionable students — many of them restless boys who, like me at that age, are already looking for reasons to shed the burdens of school and to avoid caring about anything but themselves.
The pedagogical and political wisdom of Hamilton lay in rejecting this dispiriting attitude while allowing the history behind it to function as musical suggestion and visible spectre. It took the material Reed turns into bitter satire and made something much less bitter of it. In doing so it revealed that, despite the cynicism dominant in commentary about America by high-status black figures, most black Americans would prefer to inhabit their country uncynically, at least some of the time. They loved Hamilton as much as everyone else. The black Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed was one of the scholars who felt compelled to remind everyone that Hamilton was less of an abolitionist than Miranda implied, and yet she also loved Hamilton. “Evidently,” she wrote in 2016, “many of us enjoy feeling good about America.” “It makes perfect sense,” she went on, that people would want “to celebrate” as well as “to complicate” their national story. It makes perfect sense that black Americans — like everyone else who seeks a citizen’s spiritual home in a flawed nation — would find it worthwhile to forget sometimes, even as they remember.
