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Episode 55: The Ten-Dollar Founding Father · Political Junkie Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_02: It was May 12, 2009.
0:02
SPEAKER_02: A crowd had assembled at the White House for a program billed as An Evening of
0:07
SPEAKER_02: Poetry and Music in the Spoken Word.
0:10
SPEAKER_02: Barack Obama,
0:11
SPEAKER_02: the first black president of the United States,
0:13
SPEAKER_02: and his wife Michelle had been in residence for less than five months.
0:18
SPEAKER_02: I doubt that anyone remembers who else performed that night.
0:21
SPEAKER_02: But the next day,
0:22
SPEAKER_02: the Historian's Network was chattering about a skinny kid with a buzz cut,
0:27
SPEAKER_02: a graduate of Wesleyan University,
0:29
SPEAKER_02: who had recently had a more than modest success with the musical he wrote for his
0:33
SPEAKER_02: senior project.
0:35
SPEAKER_02: And that evening,
0:36
SPEAKER_02: to the delighted laugh of the new president,
0:39
SPEAKER_02: Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that he was going to present a hip-hop song about the
0:44
SPEAKER_02: first Secretary of the Treasury.
0:47
SPEAKER_02: Alexander Hamilton, he deadpanned, as the dignitaries in front of him laughed.
0:52
SPEAKER_02: And then Miranda's accompanist and longtime musical director hit the opening chords.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: How does a bastard,
1:02
SPEAKER_01: orphan,
1:03
SPEAKER_01: son of a whore,
1:04
SPEAKER_01: and a Scotsman dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence,
1:10
SPEAKER_01: impoverished and squalor,
1:12
SPEAKER_01: grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
1:14
SPEAKER_01: The ten dollar...
1:15
SPEAKER_01: founding father without a father got a lot farther by working a lot harder by being
1:21
SPEAKER_01: a lot smarter by being a self-starter by 14 they had placed him in charge of the
1:26
SPEAKER_01: trading charter and every day while slaves were being slaughtered or carted away
1:31
SPEAKER_01: across the waves our Hamilton kept his guard up inside he was longing for something
1:36
SPEAKER_01: to be a part of the brother was ready to
1:39
SPEAKER_01: What's your name, man?
2:08
SPEAKER_01: alexander hamilton his name is alexander hamilton and there's a million things he
2:15
SPEAKER_01: hasn't done but just you wait just you wait when he was 10 his father split almost
2:23
SPEAKER_02: six years later in february 2015 miranda's full show hamilton the musical debuted
2:29
SPEAKER_02: at the public theater an off-broadway venue in lower manhattan with a reputation
2:34
SPEAKER_02: for incubating hits
2:35
SPEAKER_02: Hamilton moved to Broadway in late summer,
2:37
SPEAKER_02: where it became a cultural and sociological phenomenon,
2:41
SPEAKER_02: spawning YouTube imitators by the hundreds,
2:44
SPEAKER_02: multiple traveling companies,
2:45
SPEAKER_02: and a London production.
2:47
SPEAKER_02: Hamilton has remained at the Richard Rogers Theatre ever since.
2:51
SPEAKER_02: It re-energized a popular fascination with early American history and with the
2:55
SPEAKER_02: founding fathers,
2:57
SPEAKER_02: inspiring tourists to roam New York to visit sites associated with Hamilton,
3:02
SPEAKER_02: a man who previously had been best known perhaps for being shot and killed in his
3:06
SPEAKER_02: prime by Vice President Aaron Burr.
3:09
SPEAKER_02: Although Founding Fathers come in and out of fashion, Hamilton the musical was special in many ways.
3:15
SPEAKER_02: It flipped everything,
3:16
SPEAKER_02: using hip-hop to tell the story of the nation's founding and an ensemble cast of
3:21
SPEAKER_02: black and brown actors who challenged audiences to reinterpret national heroism
3:26
SPEAKER_02: through bodies of color.
3:28
SPEAKER_02: You can read more about this phenomenon in a book of essays I edited with Renee C.
3:32
SPEAKER_02: Romano,
3:33
SPEAKER_02: Historians on Hamilton,
3:34
SPEAKER_02: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past.
3:39
SPEAKER_02: But in the end,
3:40
SPEAKER_02: and in the beginning,
3:41
SPEAKER_02: actually,
3:41
SPEAKER_02: since the musical was based on Ron Chernow's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography
3:47
SPEAKER_02: of Hamilton,
3:48
SPEAKER_02: Miranda's musical was great man history and told a great man's story.
3:53
SPEAKER_02: Yes, there were terrific female characters, but Hamilton repeated familiar tropes.
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SPEAKER_02: An empty continent waiting to be filled up by white people.
4:02
SPEAKER_02: A band of brothers risking everything to bring a country into being.
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SPEAKER_02: A nation that was extraordinary because the founders were extraordinary.
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SPEAKER_02: The founding, as portrayed in Hamilton, was nostalgic for a lost world of ideas, ambitions, and growth.
4:18
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't the real world of those turbulent years.
4:22
SPEAKER_02: More significantly,
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SPEAKER_02: perhaps,
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SPEAKER_02: it was not the real world of 2015,
4:24
SPEAKER_02: when the United States was veering ever more sharply into talk of borders,
4:30
SPEAKER_02: limits,
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SPEAKER_02: partisanship,
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SPEAKER_02: and lies.
4:33
SPEAKER_02: Here's another problem with great man history.
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SPEAKER_02: It deadens the true excitement of the early American nation,
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SPEAKER_02: oversimplifying a world that was just as full of schemers,
4:43
SPEAKER_02: dreamers,
4:44
SPEAKER_02: alternative futures,
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SPEAKER_02: and fascinating bit players as our political world is today.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: And that means we have more myth-busting to do, listeners.
4:53
SPEAKER_02: Today's guest is William Hoagland,
4:55
SPEAKER_02: author of a new book on the period,
4:57
SPEAKER_02: The Hamilton Scheme,
4:58
SPEAKER_02: an epic tale of money and power in the American founding.
5:02
SPEAKER_02: As Bill tweeted recently,
5:03
SPEAKER_02: people really like the Jefferson versus Hamilton binary as an explanation of
5:08
SPEAKER_02: American history,
5:09
SPEAKER_02: and the Hamilton scheme is out to smash it,
5:12
SPEAKER_02: not just triangulate it by reviving the 18th century labor activists,
5:17
SPEAKER_02: that too,
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SPEAKER_02: he promised.
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SPEAKER_02: Jeffersonianism turned out to be only Hamilton-lite.
5:24
SPEAKER_02: Tempting, isn't it?
5:25
SPEAKER_02: And there's so much more in this wonderful book,
5:27
SPEAKER_02: whether you are a Hamilton fan,
5:30
SPEAKER_02: love the complexity of early America,
5:32
SPEAKER_02: or,
5:32
SPEAKER_02: and I know some of you are out there,
5:34
SPEAKER_02: whether you are just a finance nerd and think nonstop about the national debt.
5:40
SPEAKER_02: So join Bill and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: And I'm your host,
5:46
SPEAKER_02: Claire Potter,
5:47
SPEAKER_02: professor of history emeritus at the New School for Social Research,
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SPEAKER_02: a contributing editor at Public Seminar,
5:53
SPEAKER_02: and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
5:56
SPEAKER_02: This is episode 55, The $10 Founding Father.
6:25
SPEAKER_02: Welcome, William Hoagland.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: It's so good to be here.
6:29
SPEAKER_02: We've been friends since you contributed to Historians on Hamilton back in 2017, I think it was.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: Probably, yeah.
6:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
6:40
SPEAKER_02: So listeners, that's a collection that Rene Romano and I did on the Hamilton phenomenon.
6:46
SPEAKER_02: And Bill wrote an essay that I now see in this book.
6:52
SPEAKER_02: I would say people come for the Hamilton and stay for the gripping narrative about finances.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, it is.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think this is a cool idea.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: Like people come for the Hamilton, stick around for all the other stuff.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: Because on the one hand,
7:08
SPEAKER_00: part of the story is that it's a different Hamilton from the one that everybody
7:11
SPEAKER_00: thinks they know now,
7:13
SPEAKER_00: thanks to the musical and also thanks,
7:14
SPEAKER_00: I think,
7:15
SPEAKER_00: to the biographies,
7:16
SPEAKER_00: especially.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: The Ron Chernow biography,
7:18
SPEAKER_00: which I did write about for you and Renee in that book,
7:21
SPEAKER_00: and that helped me get going on this.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: So that was cool.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: So it's about Hamilton, and it's about a different Hamilton.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: It's also about a Washington who's a different Washington than the one we often see,
7:30
SPEAKER_00: and many of the other famous characters.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: But the story is really about a conflict between those characters...
7:37
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton, Washington, but also Jefferson and the others who are well-known.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: And a whole group of people who are not as well-known,
7:45
SPEAKER_00: which we could refer to,
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
7:47
SPEAKER_00: if we're using today's terminology in an anachronistic way,
7:50
SPEAKER_00: as like the white working class of the founding period,
7:54
SPEAKER_00: the free-laboring class,
7:55
SPEAKER_00: you could say.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: And the conflict there, it's over finance, because that was Hamilton's big deal.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: But it's also, I mean, when we say finance, it doesn't sound that exciting, right?
8:05
SPEAKER_00: Whereas to Hamilton, like that was the most exciting thing on earth.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: That's what got him up in the morning and out the door and caused all of his
8:11
SPEAKER_00: amazing conflicts and everything.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: But think of finance as being about money,
8:16
SPEAKER_00: about power,
8:17
SPEAKER_00: about building great nationhood,
8:19
SPEAKER_00: about who gets to keep what,
8:21
SPEAKER_00: who's in charge.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, literally all that stuff flows into finance.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: So very broadly speaking,
8:26
SPEAKER_00: because it is a narrative,
8:27
SPEAKER_00: a story of characters,
8:28
SPEAKER_00: but that's what the characters are all fighting about.
8:32
SPEAKER_02: One might also say this is a history of the national debt.
8:37
SPEAKER_02: And we talk about the national debt a lot,
8:40
SPEAKER_02: but debt was actually at the center of Hamilton's idea about how you create a
8:47
SPEAKER_02: nation in the first place.
8:49
SPEAKER_02: Can you explain the birth of the national debt and why Hamilton thought it was so
8:55
SPEAKER_02: essential to this fledgling country?
8:59
SPEAKER_00: so often when the debt comes up in discussions of the early period, you know, it does come up.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
9:04
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton was the guy who kind of figured out how to deal with the war debt because
9:09
SPEAKER_00: of course we had to go into debt to finance the war.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: It's seen so often as a problem or a,
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SPEAKER_00: a massive challenge that Hamilton had to manfully strive to get under control.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: Whereas to Hamilton and his mentor,
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Robert Morris,
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SPEAKER_00: who's rarely also mentioned in current Hamiltoniana,
9:28
SPEAKER_00: but it was critically important,
9:30
SPEAKER_00: to Hamilton,
9:31
SPEAKER_00: the debt was a massive opportunity,
9:33
SPEAKER_00: the war debt.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: And it sounds weird now because we think of national debt frequently as being just
9:38
SPEAKER_00: a drain,
9:39
SPEAKER_00: a drain and a drag on the country and something that has to be dealt with.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
9:43
SPEAKER_00: he saw it specifically the domestic debt,
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SPEAKER_00: meaning the debt to Americans,
9:48
SPEAKER_00: rich Americans,
9:49
SPEAKER_00: the public debt to rich Americans.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: as an opportunity to connect the interests,
9:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
9:54
SPEAKER_00: literally by interest payments,
9:55
SPEAKER_00: but like the broad financial interests and economic and social interests of that
10:00
SPEAKER_00: small class of elite lenders to connect their power to government power in America
10:07
SPEAKER_00: and thereby unleash really a dynamic force for building nationhood.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: And that's where the public debt of the United States really gets started.
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SPEAKER_00: It gets started as a war debt, but then Hamilton constructs it as an ongoing post-war debt
10:21
SPEAKER_00: which is intended to yoke financial power to political power.
10:26
SPEAKER_02: You know,
10:26
SPEAKER_02: as a 20th century historian and now a 21st century historian,
10:30
SPEAKER_02: I realized when I was reading this book that I have forgotten more about the early
10:36
SPEAKER_02: American period than I ever thought I knew.
10:38
SPEAKER_02: However,
10:40
SPEAKER_02: one thing that you recall to me is that a piece of this debt,
10:45
SPEAKER_02: and you just mentioned it,
10:46
SPEAKER_02: is extremely wealthy Americans who had in many ways underwritten the war.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: And they want their money back.
10:57
SPEAKER_02: But then there's a whole other group of Americans,
10:59
SPEAKER_02: which is the vast majority of people who fought the war,
11:03
SPEAKER_02: who simply haven't been paid.
11:05
SPEAKER_02: So can you talk about the different kinds of debt that make up the national debt?
11:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a really good point.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: Because debt, just as a concept, indebtedness, operates on so many levels in the founding of the country.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: Because there is the public debt, meaning the
11:23
SPEAKER_00: really the Continental Congress,
11:24
SPEAKER_00: and then it was inherited by the first Congress of the United States,
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SPEAKER_00: had this debt to these rich war investors,
11:30
SPEAKER_00: the domestic part of the public debt.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: But there's so many other levels of debt that play into this and get into people's
11:36
SPEAKER_00: real conflicts over what the country should be about,
11:39
SPEAKER_00: on whose behalf government should operate,
11:41
SPEAKER_00: really.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, you have the soldiers, the rank and file, who are owed army pay,
11:48
SPEAKER_00: So that's another piece of the debt.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: You've got the officer class, which is also part of the army, which wants to get paid as well.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: And they want to become the kind of rich families who were the war debt lenders.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: So they have an interest of a different kind.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: Then you have this other piece of debt, which isn't really public debt.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: It's private debt.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: There's a ton of it.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Of course, we know.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: I think Jefferson was very indebted.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: All these people were quite indebted.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: The rich people who are lending money are also borrowing money at the same time.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: So there's all this debt floating around the elites.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: And there's an indebtedness situation in which poor and ordinary people
12:24
SPEAKER_00: strapped for cash because money was very scarce at the time,
12:28
SPEAKER_00: have no choice really but to borrow from the lending class who are on the one hand,
12:33
SPEAKER_00: the people who are lending to the public and the Congress and so forth.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: But they're also private lenders charging huge interest rates to ordinary people to
12:42
SPEAKER_00: kind of just try to build up their small businesses,
12:45
SPEAKER_00: their small farms and so forth.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: So you have ordinary people being crushed by debt.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: at the same time, and by taxes levied to pay the debt to the rich people who lend it to the public.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: So you have these weird kind of concatenations of clashing forms of debt.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: And they're really all about who's going to be okay,
13:04
SPEAKER_00: who's going to get ahead,
13:05
SPEAKER_00: who's going to get left behind or crushed.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: It isn't just about sort of finance as a dry topic.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: It's about how you're going to live in this country with all these different
13:14
SPEAKER_00: classes in conflict with each other.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: thinking about this,
13:17
SPEAKER_02: the money situation then reveals a whole different set of tensions about what the
13:24
SPEAKER_02: United States could be.
13:27
SPEAKER_02: And listeners,
13:28
SPEAKER_02: you probably think about it as slave or free,
13:31
SPEAKER_02: and that that was one of the big questions that went unresolved.
13:35
SPEAKER_02: But the Hamilton scheme suggests that there are a range of other questions.
13:40
SPEAKER_02: For example, Hamilton doesn't actually want to have states at all, right?
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: There are so many other conflicts among the people who were free to have those conflicts,
13:53
SPEAKER_00: which of course leaves out so many people.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
13:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
13:56
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton got up at the Constitutional Convention and kind of the way he put it to
14:00
SPEAKER_00: paraphrase was,
14:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm not even going to propose this crazy plan because you won't like it.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: But the only reason I'm not going to propose it
14:08
SPEAKER_00: is that you won't like it so much that it has no chance of going anywhere.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: But yet,
14:13
SPEAKER_00: I want to point out to you that there's no point in really having these separate
14:16
SPEAKER_00: state governments.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's a drain and a drag, and we should just get rid of state sovereignty completely.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe there should be regional departments of the federal government,
14:25
SPEAKER_00: and maybe they would track with the states and have some limited power.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: But to other people in that room listening to him talk about this,
14:33
SPEAKER_00: this was just a shocking and insane idea.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: But it was out there,
14:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:38
SPEAKER_00: and Madison,
14:39
SPEAKER_00: who certainly did not openly take that position at that time,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: during that part of the relationship he had with Hamilton,
14:45
SPEAKER_00: which goes on the rocks later.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: But at that time, Madison also definitely wanted to...
14:51
SPEAKER_00: at least vitiate the power of the states.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: That was what he was there partly at the Constitutional Convention to do.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
14:57
SPEAKER_00: he'd give the federal government a veto of power over state laws and stuff like
15:02
SPEAKER_00: that that was just anathema to many,
15:05
SPEAKER_00: many other leaders in America who...
15:08
SPEAKER_00: had been fighting the British in order to preserve what they saw as their sacred
15:12
SPEAKER_00: colonial charter,
15:14
SPEAKER_00: now state powers.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: So yeah,
15:16
SPEAKER_00: that's one of so many conflicts among,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: within the elite,
15:19
SPEAKER_00: the governing elite,
15:20
SPEAKER_00: and then there are others with people outside the governing elite too,
15:23
SPEAKER_00: in the free world,
15:24
SPEAKER_00: in the free white world.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: And then there's another conflict over what kind of nation we're going to be,
15:31
SPEAKER_02: which is,
15:32
SPEAKER_02: will the United States be a country of people who are more or less freehold workers
15:41
SPEAKER_02: who have their little shops and have their little whiskey mills?
15:46
SPEAKER_02: And we should talk about the whiskey and so on.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: Or is the United States going to be an industrial giant?
15:53
SPEAKER_02: And-
15:54
SPEAKER_02: Hamilton thinks,
15:55
SPEAKER_02: actually industrial giant,
15:57
SPEAKER_02: and he starts building a whole town in New Jersey with that in mind.
16:01
SPEAKER_02: Can you tell us that story?
16:03
SPEAKER_00: I talk in the book a lot,
16:04
SPEAKER_00: naturally,
16:04
SPEAKER_00: because the big drama for Hamilton was getting his finance plan through.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: And it's a drama.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a fight.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: But his ultimate goal wasn't just to get that debt funded.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: It was like,
16:15
SPEAKER_00: okay,
16:15
SPEAKER_00: so what if we have a national government which has access to money and links the
16:20
SPEAKER_00: interests of the rich to national power?
16:23
SPEAKER_00: What are we going to do with that?
16:25
SPEAKER_00: What's the point of having that?
16:26
SPEAKER_00: And to him...
16:27
SPEAKER_00: One of the main points was to seize a certain moment that he was very right in
16:32
SPEAKER_00: identifying that was going on,
16:33
SPEAKER_00: which was already going on in Britain.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: We could call it the factory moment, the manufacturing moment.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: There's an industrial revolution in the offing, right?
16:41
SPEAKER_00: And even though Hamilton was not pressing and could not see the future, he and others, Washington too,
16:48
SPEAKER_00: certainly identified that something big was going on and the U.S.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: should get on top of it and have that here.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean?
16:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
16:54
SPEAKER_00: it's a funny,
16:55
SPEAKER_00: it completely goes against the agrarian idea,
16:58
SPEAKER_00: of course,
16:59
SPEAKER_00: but it goes also to this place where the whole thing we rarely talk about in public
17:04
SPEAKER_00: history anyway,
17:04
SPEAKER_00: is sort of,
17:05
SPEAKER_00: and in popular history,
17:06
SPEAKER_00: is who's going to be running the machines in these factories,
17:09
SPEAKER_00: right?
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Well,
17:10
SPEAKER_00: regular people are a laboring class,
17:13
SPEAKER_00: basically,
17:14
SPEAKER_00: who at the moment,
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton sees them kind of,
17:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
17:17
SPEAKER_00: all their productive energy dissipated on small farms,
17:20
SPEAKER_00: as you were saying,
17:21
SPEAKER_00: and in small shops and so forth.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, all that labor power is just sort of spread around.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Let's gather that up.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: Let's get that consolidated like the money's consolidated in government.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: Let's use government power to consolidate the labor force.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: into a manufacturing force.
17:37
SPEAKER_00: So he didn't succeed very much in this particular area while he was treasury secretary.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: The people who say he was the founder of,
17:43
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:44
SPEAKER_00: the kind of the inventor of modern America,
17:45
SPEAKER_00: they're talking about this aspect,
17:47
SPEAKER_00: this industrial aspect.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: And he did envision it.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: He envisioned, you
17:53
SPEAKER_00: laboring long,
17:54
SPEAKER_00: long hours in completely unregulated factory,
17:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
17:58
SPEAKER_00: with no labor law to protect workers.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: He envisioned, you know, the future before we actually began to get labor reform here.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: He definitely had that in mind.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: Others definitely did not.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: One of the thoughts I had when I was reading this book is,
18:12
SPEAKER_02: okay,
18:13
SPEAKER_02: what Alexander Hamilton knew was the British imperial system.
18:17
SPEAKER_02: And he knew that intimately from the ways that he had worked on the fringes of it
18:21
SPEAKER_02: as a child and then come to the colonies.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: And he kind of imagined this new nation in North America as England, but better, right?
18:33
SPEAKER_02: Right.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: There were so many ways in which he was so impressed by the British constitution,
18:40
SPEAKER_00: for one thing,
18:41
SPEAKER_00: and then by what the British were doing with factory labor and the use of
18:45
SPEAKER_00: government power and what they were so good at doing with the public debt.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: In one way, he was very original.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: In another way, he's got models for this stuff because he wasn't completely eccentric.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: He's looking at what works.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: And he's very often looking to Britain on so many levels, factories, public debt,
19:01
SPEAKER_00: And the Constitution,
19:02
SPEAKER_00: too,
19:03
SPEAKER_00: which he liked because it had a very powerful executive,
19:06
SPEAKER_00: putting it mildly,
19:08
SPEAKER_00: although not completely independent,
19:10
SPEAKER_00: but a powerful executive.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: In that same speech where he talked about getting rid of the states at the
19:15
SPEAKER_00: Constitutional Convention,
19:16
SPEAKER_00: he talked about having a monarch as the executive branch.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: He didn't mean, you know, a hereditary monarchy, and he was accused of that.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: That's not really what he meant.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: But he did mean, you know, someone with lifelong powers, veto power over representative legislation,
19:30
SPEAKER_00: with no recourse for the legislature, et cetera, et cetera, that kind of strong leadership.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: All of that he thought was good,
19:36
SPEAKER_00: probably necessary in his view,
19:39
SPEAKER_00: to really developing a dynamic,
19:41
SPEAKER_00: powerful,
19:41
SPEAKER_00: safe,
19:42
SPEAKER_00: secure,
19:43
SPEAKER_00: growing nation.
19:44
SPEAKER_02: And I kept thinking Putin, Putin, Putin.
19:49
SPEAKER_02: That Alexander Hamilton imagines modern autocracy before there is modern autocracy.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: oligarchy is one of the words that,
19:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm using for sort of,
19:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't have it in the book really,
19:59
SPEAKER_00: because it's sort of a story about people then and what they're doing,
20:02
SPEAKER_00: not a disquisition on it exactly.
20:04
SPEAKER_00: But he built the nation as a powerhouse.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: He also built the nation as an oligarchy.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting because Putin is,
20:10
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:11
SPEAKER_00: looking,
20:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
20:11
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't thought of that until you said it,
20:13
SPEAKER_00: but Putin's looking back in that sort of romanticized,
20:16
SPEAKER_00: like,
20:16
SPEAKER_00: We need to get back to the spirit of Russia.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: And he's looking back over like a thousand years, right?
20:21
SPEAKER_00: The fantasies, the sort of mythopoeic fantasies of Russia that Putin has.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting that Hamilton's like at the beginning of something.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
20:29
SPEAKER_00: he looks to Britain,
20:30
SPEAKER_00: but he's also got this incredible opportunity,
20:33
SPEAKER_00: and they all did really,
20:34
SPEAKER_00: to start something that felt very new,
20:36
SPEAKER_00: taking what was good from Britain and starting something American kind of at the beginning.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of cool.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it must have felt pretty cool at the time.
20:45
SPEAKER_02: It seems cool now on a certain level, if you forget the morality of all of it.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: But what he's also able to do is he's able to use other people's greed to his advantage.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: And I'm thinking of George Washington in particular,
21:00
SPEAKER_02: who had all of those Western lands in Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley.
21:05
SPEAKER_02: And there were squatters living on these lands everywhere.
21:10
SPEAKER_02: And Washington couldn't do anything with them unless he got rid of those people.
21:14
SPEAKER_02: So there had to be something bigger in place.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: There had to be a national army to push them out.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: There had to be systems of taxation to wear them down.
21:24
SPEAKER_02: So really, in some ways, Hamilton is using people's greed against them, right?
21:34
SPEAKER_02: Right.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: What's fascinating to watch him try to work,
21:37
SPEAKER_00: I think,
21:38
SPEAKER_00: as you go through this thing where he's figuring out what to do and then trying to
21:41
SPEAKER_00: actually pulling it off.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: He learned so much about the class whose interests he wanted to yoke to government power.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, his in-laws, you mentioned Washington, for sure.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Also, his in-laws, the Skylers.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, these powerful... And Robert Morris, again, I've got to come back to him.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: These very rich, powerful, and not just rich...
22:00
SPEAKER_00: But they're rich and about getting richer all the time.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: This sort of incredible ceaseless drive for personal gain, which defined the class.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't a dirty little secret.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: They saw it as part of the good, part of the opportunity, part of what they should be doing.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: There was an ethos of this.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: He saw that as a positive force to be used,
22:23
SPEAKER_00: as you're saying,
22:24
SPEAKER_00: like to be kind of leveraged for what he saw as a higher goal,
22:28
SPEAKER_00: which was building up the country.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: So there's this weird dynamic because he's one of those people in one way,
22:35
SPEAKER_00: but his interests are not just line his own pockets.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have so much of that driving interest.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: He just sees that that exists and sees that the most competent, the most educated, the most
22:47
SPEAKER_00: and powerful people in the country have this.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: And if you can get their desire for gain lined up with public good, you can do a lot.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: But it's true that some of it's quite unedifying when you look at it up close.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: So that you get people who are important,
23:03
SPEAKER_00: powerful revolutionaries like Washington,
23:05
SPEAKER_00: like Schuyler,
23:06
SPEAKER_00: and so forth,
23:07
SPEAKER_00: and you see the lengths that they're willing to go to to assert their financial and
23:11
SPEAKER_00: political power,
23:12
SPEAKER_00: to connect their financial power to their political power and their military power,
23:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's a pretty intense situation to try to manipulate, which is what Hamilton's trying to do.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: Take this massive power and these personalities who he knew really well,
23:28
SPEAKER_00: these are his people,
23:30
SPEAKER_00: and then turn it toward a higher goal.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes he really stumbled across...
23:35
SPEAKER_00: The problems that come with that.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: He was sometimes super frustrated with the fact that some of these people's
23:41
SPEAKER_00: interests were way too short term.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: He was just like, you know, settle down.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: So there are like financial bubbles that are out of control and he's got to deal with that.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: And people just are not they're not getting with the program all the time.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: And then you get this question of like, well, who's using who?
23:55
SPEAKER_00: He thinks he's using them.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: They definitely think,
23:58
SPEAKER_00: oh,
23:58
SPEAKER_00: we've got a guy in the treasury who's doing all the things we want to get done,
24:02
SPEAKER_00: except when he doesn't do what they want,
24:04
SPEAKER_00: then there's more conflict.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: That's the sort of the story,
24:06
SPEAKER_00: really,
24:06
SPEAKER_00: I think,
24:07
SPEAKER_00: of Hamilton is that kind of conflict,
24:09
SPEAKER_00: some very big successes and some real flops.
24:13
SPEAKER_02: He sees into the future in a way that other people don't.
24:18
SPEAKER_02: And,
24:18
SPEAKER_02: you know,
24:19
SPEAKER_02: I'm thinking about that classic book about the Constitution,
24:23
SPEAKER_02: A Popular History of the Constitution,
24:24
SPEAKER_02: Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle in Philadelphia.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: And that book does the work that you talk about in the article you did for our Hamilton book.
24:34
SPEAKER_02: It sort of makes the Constitution seem inevitable, right?
24:39
SPEAKER_02: You know,
24:39
SPEAKER_02: that there were all of these stumbles along the way and misdirects and places it
24:44
SPEAKER_02: could have failed.
24:45
SPEAKER_02: But actually, the Constitution comes into being as this perfect document like the Bible.
24:52
SPEAKER_02: And you say,
24:54
SPEAKER_02: well,
24:54
SPEAKER_02: actually,
24:55
SPEAKER_02: no,
24:56
SPEAKER_02: because what Hamilton realizes is that he can't do any of this with the Articles of Confederation.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: a lot of what happened in the 1780s was an attempt by Hamilton,
25:08
SPEAKER_00: Morris,
25:09
SPEAKER_00: Madison at the time,
25:10
SPEAKER_00: with support from Washington and others,
25:12
SPEAKER_00: to turn the Confederation system kind of into a national government,
25:16
SPEAKER_00: step by step,
25:17
SPEAKER_00: seemingly within the same structure.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: Keep the Continental Congress, the Confederation Congress...
25:23
SPEAKER_00: and just get it to do more and more national like things like pass one freaking federal tax.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: That was like, they're like, can't we get this one thing done?
25:34
SPEAKER_00: And they just had such difficulty with it,
25:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
25:37
SPEAKER_00: that it was just like,
25:38
SPEAKER_00: okay,
25:38
SPEAKER_00: finally,
25:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
25:39
SPEAKER_00: after time and again,
25:40
SPEAKER_00: this everything falling apart,
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Finally,
25:43
SPEAKER_00: it was just like,
25:43
SPEAKER_00: you know what,
25:44
SPEAKER_00: we're not actually going to be able to sort of subvert the confederation into a
25:49
SPEAKER_00: national government step by step,
25:51
SPEAKER_00: willy nilly.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: We're going to have to throw it out.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: But they didn't start out thinking that.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
25:56
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton did actually early on was like,
25:58
SPEAKER_00: we ought to just have a convention and come up with a new government.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: But they weren't publicly stating that a lot.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: They thought they could kind of step by step push,
26:06
SPEAKER_00: kicking and screaming the confederation into a more and more national situation.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the big failures, really, that comes early in his career.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, this isn't working.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: And so in the end,
26:18
SPEAKER_00: they end up with the Constitutional Convention,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: which really overturns the Confederation and replaces it with sort of a
26:25
SPEAKER_00: categorically different kind of government.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: And then to rip through what is a very longish book,
26:33
SPEAKER_02: but an entertaining one,
26:35
SPEAKER_02: there are other characters who take the stage in this book who are not elites,
26:41
SPEAKER_02: who have their own idea of what this new nation can be.
26:47
SPEAKER_02: Can you talk to our listeners about some of these characters who I don't think they
26:51
SPEAKER_02: will have heard about before?
26:53
SPEAKER_00: undeservedly obscure.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to fix that,
26:56
SPEAKER_00: but it's an uphill battle,
26:58
SPEAKER_00: sort of like Hamilton trying to get a federal tax through the Confederation Congress.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
27:03
SPEAKER_00: the reason they called the Constitutional Convention,
27:06
SPEAKER_00: and they were upfront about this,
27:07
SPEAKER_00: was that there was a whole other thing going on that they wanted to stop.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just that the states were weak and sort of
27:14
SPEAKER_00: energy dissipating and so forth and so on.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: The states were weak in the face of a whole third movement that isn't talked about very much.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: You have the state sovereignty people versus the high federalists, whatever.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: They're clashing and that's a clash within the governing elite.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: There are these other people who are representing that sort of semi-organized
27:34
SPEAKER_00: movement that I'm calling kind of the white working class movement of the day,
27:37
SPEAKER_00: the movement on behalf of free labor.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: And there are amazing characters in that movement who don't get enough attention.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: The most famous of them who does get attention is Thomas Paine,
27:48
SPEAKER_00: who is actually writing early on about a hyper democratic national government with
27:53
SPEAKER_00: an incredibly weak executive branch,
27:55
SPEAKER_00: a huge,
27:55
SPEAKER_00: huge unicameral Congress type of legislature,
28:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
28:00
SPEAKER_00: elected judges and just massive representation.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: And this is in common sense.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: It's in his pamphlet, Common Sense, which everyone talks about.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: But all people talk about,
28:11
SPEAKER_00: largely,
28:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
28:12
SPEAKER_00: in the public sphere,
28:14
SPEAKER_00: is how he called for independence from Britain.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: But what Paine is going up against is all of the sort of pro-British constitution thinking of Hamilton.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: The idea that Britain has failed itself, it's gone against its basic constitution, it's oppressing us.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: Paine's like, its constitution is a joke.
28:33
SPEAKER_00: We don't want to do anything remotely like the British do.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: We want a really representative government.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: And he's writing about a welfare state in the 1780s.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
28:40
SPEAKER_00: he's writing,
28:42
SPEAKER_00: speaking of seeing the future,
28:43
SPEAKER_00: writing about something we would call,
28:45
SPEAKER_00: he didn't call it that,
28:46
SPEAKER_00: something like a welfare state.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: So he's the most famous of these people.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: And yet, as famous as Thomas Paine remains today, this part of his thinking is so often kind of
28:57
SPEAKER_00: left out of who he was.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: And sometimes he's treated as someone who didn't have any real thinking at all,
29:01
SPEAKER_00: just a great writer and a great propagandist for the cause.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: But he really was an interesting thinker.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: And his ideas were not his alone.
29:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
29:10
SPEAKER_00: the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 was a radically democratic constitution based
29:16
SPEAKER_00: on Paine's thinking in part,
29:18
SPEAKER_00: brought about by other people who are far less famous,
29:20
SPEAKER_00: like Thomas Young,
29:21
SPEAKER_00: who was a doctor of medicine and
29:24
SPEAKER_00: a difficult guy,
29:25
SPEAKER_00: a loud guy,
29:27
SPEAKER_00: sort of a,
29:27
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
29:28
SPEAKER_00: boisterous fellow who had a lot of really radical ideas about really kind of a
29:33
SPEAKER_00: dictatorship of the proletariat,
29:35
SPEAKER_00: although they didn't use terms like that.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: There were others too.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: James Cannon was an amazing organizer,
29:40
SPEAKER_00: a math teacher in Pennsylvania who organized the militia system kind of against the
29:45
SPEAKER_00: elites and basically took over Pennsylvania.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: For a long time, they had a radically democratic, not that, a brief shining moment, I guess.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: But for the time, it was a long time to have a radically democratic government.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So there are those people.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: And then some of this, I mean, Paine's a hyper-rationalist in a
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Herman Husband was an evangelical Christian mystic who was a unique personality and
30:08
SPEAKER_00: very important throughout this period in a way that has been completely underrated,
30:12
SPEAKER_00: I think.
30:12
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was in the North Carolina regulation.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: He was in the radical Pennsylvania assembly.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: And he shows up again in the Whiskey Rebellion, always kind of fighting this idea, this Hamiltonian idea.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: And he ends up being the first person Washington and Hamilton arrested when they
30:26
SPEAKER_00: cracked down on Western Pennsylvania.
30:28
SPEAKER_00: So that's just a sampling of the kind of the,
30:31
SPEAKER_00: This other seething thing that's going on,
30:33
SPEAKER_00: which for me helps bust up the old binary between Hamilton and Jefferson that we're
30:38
SPEAKER_00: so familiar with and triangulated at least.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: There's a whole third element there that is really democratic,
30:45
SPEAKER_00: in some ways communitarian,
30:47
SPEAKER_00: a sort of a labor movement really is how I think of it.
30:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, a nascent labor movement.
30:52
SPEAKER_02: I have to tell you, Husband was my favorite.
30:54
SPEAKER_02: Every time Husband came back into the book, I was like, yes.
30:59
SPEAKER_02: Have you always known about him?
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, not always, but you know.
31:03
SPEAKER_02: Well, not when you were like three, but.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I heard him when I was three, but I know what you mean.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: Like I've known about him for a while.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: And others know about him too.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: And I should say,
31:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
31:13
SPEAKER_00: all of this stuff that I'm saying,
31:14
SPEAKER_00: you know,
31:15
SPEAKER_00: about husband and people like that,
31:16
SPEAKER_00: some of it sounds new,
31:17
SPEAKER_00: right?
31:18
SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
31:18
SPEAKER_00: it is new kind of when you're writing pop history,
31:21
SPEAKER_00: it's new in pop history because people just don't write about it.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: in that vein.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: But everything I know, I know because other people have written about it.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Scholars have written about it.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: That's why I know about it.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: It's just that some of this stuff is outmoded in scholarship.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Some of it never gets into the public discourse.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Husband's a good example of that because I've known about him.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
31:40
SPEAKER_00: I first heard about him long before I even wrote about the Whiskey Rebellion.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: And that was a long time ago.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: I just had a feeling that this is a, this is a weird guy.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is a, someone who was in the North Carolina regulation.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: And then as an old man turns up in the whiskey rebellion, what was his arc?
31:54
SPEAKER_00: What was his trajectory?
31:56
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't really know anything about him.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: And the more I found out about husband, the more I was just like,
32:01
SPEAKER_00: wow.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he had mystical visions.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: He had, he had a biblical idea of what the country should be.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: Nowadays we think of like biblical ideas about what the country should be as being right wing.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: But he was probably the most, one of the most left people of his day.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And he was left in a, in a kind of in a modern, in a modern sense.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: So I'm just delighted to hear you say he was your favorite character because I've
32:23
SPEAKER_00: been trying for a long time to kind of get him the attention I think he deserves.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, he's a,
32:28
SPEAKER_00: He's a tricky, tricky character and a really interesting one and sort of a great early American.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about the greatness thing, you know, exactly.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: He was a really, I don't know, idiosyncratic early American.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: He seemed like sort of a precursor to John Brown to me.
32:45
SPEAKER_02: That he has, in fact, this explicit political vision that is based on radical equality and
32:53
SPEAKER_02: and it's religiously inspired,
32:56
SPEAKER_02: and it really speaks to other people who aren't necessarily educated,
33:01
SPEAKER_02: but who are smart and can imagine themselves as part of that kind of political community.
33:07
SPEAKER_02: So,
33:08
SPEAKER_02: Bill,
33:09
SPEAKER_02: I want to come back to the question you raised in the essay you wrote for Renee and me,
33:14
SPEAKER_02: which is,
33:16
SPEAKER_02: that popular biographies of founders are,
33:21
SPEAKER_02: on the one hand,
33:22
SPEAKER_02: very enjoyable for people,
33:23
SPEAKER_02: and they take great pleasure in them,
33:25
SPEAKER_02: and it's a way to teach people history.
33:28
SPEAKER_02: And then,
33:28
SPEAKER_02: on the other hand,
33:30
SPEAKER_02: it suggests that the American nation that we live in was inevitable somehow,
33:36
SPEAKER_02: that these guys had the vision.
33:38
SPEAKER_02: And in fact, at the Supreme Court, that's basically what they're saying.
33:42
SPEAKER_02: This is what
33:43
SPEAKER_02: The Federalist Society is saying they knew it all.
33:46
SPEAKER_02: They saw it all in advance.
33:48
SPEAKER_02: But how does your book intervene in that?
33:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
33:53
SPEAKER_00: it's a weird imaginative process in a way of trying to project yourself back into a
33:58
SPEAKER_00: time when it hadn't already happened.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: And,
34:00
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:01
SPEAKER_00: it's true what you say that like the popular biographies,
34:04
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
34:04
SPEAKER_00: they'll even say some of the authors will even say,
34:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:06
SPEAKER_00: it wasn't inevitable.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of amazing.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: What how things had to kind of the stars had to align and this and that or certain things had to happen.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: They can say it,
34:15
SPEAKER_00: but I don't feel like they're dramatically invested enough in the way they tell the
34:19
SPEAKER_00: stories to make it seem real.
34:22
SPEAKER_00: It's a funny thing because like there's no suspense, right?
34:24
SPEAKER_00: Like the country is going to get founded.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, Hamilton is actually going to get his financial plan through ultimately.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: Herman Husband is going to get arrested.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: The Whiskey Rebels are not going to prevail.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: Blah, blah, blah.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: You know, Jefferson is going to get elected.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: None of this is new or unknown, so it's not suspenseful.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: But to the people involved,
34:43
SPEAKER_00: it was super suspenseful every minute of every day because they didn't know what
34:46
SPEAKER_00: was happening.
34:47
SPEAKER_00: And I think if,
34:48
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:48
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
34:49
SPEAKER_00: it's a process of just trying to project yourself into that from all the different
34:53
SPEAKER_00: character points of view,
34:54
SPEAKER_00: including Hamilton.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: including someone as far from Hamilton as Herman Husband,
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Paine,
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Washington,
35:00
SPEAKER_00: all these people,
35:01
SPEAKER_00: where were they at at that moment?
35:03
SPEAKER_00: And it is in that sense more of a drama because the characters are in action all the time.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: You know,
35:10
SPEAKER_00: I've got this underlying kind of thesis about how the country was really formed,
35:15
SPEAKER_00: which has to do with this class conflict issue.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And the notes in the back of the book kind of, to some extent, you can glean the thesis from it.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: But what I want to try to do,
35:26
SPEAKER_00: because I am trying to write for an ordinary readership,
35:29
SPEAKER_00: a general readership,
35:31
SPEAKER_00: is make it a drama because I just think it was a drama in a way.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: And it's just about projecting yourself into the characters and where they're at,
35:38
SPEAKER_00: whether you like them or not.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: You know, you can be rooting for one guy one minute and then rooting against him another minute.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: That's good for me.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: I like.
35:44
SPEAKER_02: You use the word epic in the title, an epic tale of money and power in the American founding.
35:49
SPEAKER_02: It,
35:50
SPEAKER_02: did read as epic to me.
35:51
SPEAKER_02: And it sort of read in a way like a play.
35:55
SPEAKER_02: And I don't think it's because I spent two years of my life living with Hamilton
35:59
SPEAKER_02: the musical all the time.
36:01
SPEAKER_02: It felt like a great national drama.
36:04
SPEAKER_02: I could talk to you endlessly about all of this, Bill, but our time together is drawing to a close.
36:10
SPEAKER_02: So I want to ask you my final question.
36:13
SPEAKER_02: Why should our listeners read this book now?
36:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, you just told them why.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: It's awesome for me to hear you say that it's like a play and that it actually
36:23
SPEAKER_00: feels epic because that ultimately is what I'm going for.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: While I think we could talk for a long time about various resonances that are
36:31
SPEAKER_00: contemporary and current and maybe future and so forth,
36:35
SPEAKER_00: to me,
36:36
SPEAKER_00: the reason to read a book rather than just hear somebody talk about it on a podcast
36:40
SPEAKER_00: or read a review or whatever or get the thesis statement is because it's a journey.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: It's a trip.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: You're on a trip.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, it's kind of an emotional and an imaginative experience.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: And I think it is a different kind of origin story of the founding, ultimately.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: It is about come for the Hamilton,
36:57
SPEAKER_00: stay for the different origin story about the founding involving a class conflict
37:02
SPEAKER_00: that is too rarely discussed.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: But that's got to come to you through turning pages and just being involved in a drama.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in a play.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: So thank you for saying that.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: And that's it for today's show.
37:34
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37:53
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38:31
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