One might rather have assumed that Gilder and Lehrman would
line up behind Grover Nordquist's crusade to evict Soft-on-Big-Gov'mt
Hamilton from the ten dollar bill and replace him with Ronald
Reagan. Yet the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think
tank Gilder once chaired, has for four years now been handing
out "Alexander Hamilton Awards" to noted conservatives;
this year's honorees included National Review founder William
F. Buckley Jr. and (posthumously) the Wall Street Journal's
longtime editorial page editor Robert Bartley. If the Man
Who Made Modern America was responsible for some of the things
the sponsors like least about Modern America, wherein lies
his attraction?
I think it's less a matter of Hamilton's specific policies,
than his grand goal of nurturing the merchant class as agent
of economic development, and that this show makes political
sense when seen as a tribute offered by grateful New York
financiers to their very own business-class hero.
From this perspective the exhibition has a long pedigree,
running back to Hamilton's day, and to the mercantile and
legal elite of which he was a member. Hamilton helped make
his colleagues richer and more powerful, and they adored,
respected and honored him from the beginning. In 1791 five
merchants commissioned John Trumbull to paint a full length
portrait for City Hall (it's featured in the exhibition),
and in 1795, the New York Chamber of Commerce gave him a valedictory
banquet on leaving office.
He was equally revered by subsequent generations. After
city businessmen erected a Merchant's Exchange on Wall Street
(1827) they ordered up a fifteen-foot-high statue of a be-toga-ed
Hamilton for its grand rotunda; when the building was engulfed
in flames during the Great Fire of 1835 some nearly lost their
lives trying to rescue the marbled Hamilton. In 1880, a ten
foot high granite Hamilton (nineteen feet with pedestal) was
unveiled in Central Park, just west of the Met, with Chauncey
Depew (orator, railroad lawyer, and soon-to-be-president of
Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central) remembering him with
"reverence and gratitude." The 1890s brought a blossoming
of Hamilton Clubs, composed chiefly of prosperous Republicans;
in 1893 the Brooklyn Heights club unveiled an eight foot bronze
(thirty feet when fully be-pedestaled) at the corner of Clinton
and Remsen. The twenties were Hamilton's glory years. In 1923,
President Harding, a long time admirer (as was Coolidge),
dedicated a statue in front of the Treasury, the ceremony
presided over by then Secretary Andrew Mellon, vigorous advocate
of tax cuts for corporations and the investment communities
off which Wall Street lived and thrived.
The crash of '29 discredited bankers and brokers, and Hamilton
along with them. The Hamilton Club of Brooklyn went bankrupt
in 1936, its statue shuttled to the front yard of Hamilton's
Grange on Convent Avenue, where it languished in weedy obscurity.
Franklin Roosevelt, though arguably "Hamiltonian"
in practice, professed a staunch Jeffersonianism; for FDR
the mid 20s resembled the 1790s when Hamilton "ran the
federal government for the primary good of the chambers of
commerce, the speculators and the inside ring of the national
government." After WW2, conservatives also shied away
from him, identified as he was with big government (in 1957
Fortune Magazine called him "the first Keynsian").
During JFK's presidency Cold War liberals seeking to justify
a strong executive picked up his mantle, while Barry Goldwater
hoisted a Jeffersonian flag. When Vietnam rendered the Imperial
Presidency suspect, liberals dumped him; and during the economic
crises of the 1970s, capitalist heroes had few acolytes.
Hamilton made a comeback in the 1980s, thanks in part to
neo-conservatives' backing a strong executive to prosecute
the Cold War. Hamilton stock was also bulled by rightists
like Gingrich, counter-revolutionaries out to dismantle what
remained of the New Deal's social welfare provisions and regulatory
restraints, but who preferred to think of themselves as revolutionaries.
In a similar fashion, as Steve Fraser explains in his excellent
Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American
Life (forthcoming from HarperCollins), a rising generation
of 1980s Wall Streeters cast themselves as rowdy rebels against
an ancien regime of corporate managers and state bureaucrats.
Speculators and arbitrageurs were transmuted into Wall Street
warriors, whose raids on the bastions of privilege and paternalism
would shake things up, unleash creative energies, and extend
the realm of the free market, the realm of freedom itself.
As the '80s and 90s economic booms restored Wall Streeters'
self confidence, and rehabilitated their standing in the culture,
they embraced Hamilton as their man in the Revolutionary pantheon
(like the Poles hailed Kosciusko, the Germans Von Steuben).
For financial elites and their ideologues, Hamilton was not
just a man of business who had set in place a fiscal infrastructure
- an important contribution, to be sure, but as Brookhiser
notes in his book "nobody loves his accountant."
He was also a warrior for freedom (which they, unlike Hamilton,
conflated with the free market) - a full-fledged revolutionary
like themselves. None of the other Founders would do - tainted
as they were with populist sensibilities, ruralist pieties,
anti-financial, and pro-slavery attitudes: Hamilton's resurrection
was enabled by Jefferson's fall from grace.
True, Reagan-era reality didn't quite work out as supply-siders
intended (any more than the 1790s unfolded quite as Hamilton
had hoped). The tax cuts produced not the promised new savings
and investments (these fell below even the average level of
the 1970s, much less the booming 1950s and 60s) but rather
the rampant market speculation (and bonanza for brokers) which
blew the bubble that burst in '87, a scenario instantly replayed
in the '90s dot-com boom, punctured in 2000. Deregulation,
meanwhile, led to stunning levels of fraud and corruption
(not just at Enron and WorldCom, but in much of the Wall Street
banking and brokering establishment), featuring flagrant conflicts
of interest, insider trading, book cooking, and pension fund
looting; and to soaring levels of inequality, as corporate
chieftains propped up share prices to cash in on stock options,
sending their incomes to stratospheric heights.
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