At home, Virginia Republicans thought Hamilton ("our Bonaparte" Jefferson called him) might march his Federalist-led army into the southern states, to shock and awe his opponents. While Chernow finds that "the record shows that the inspector general did have domestic as well as foreign enemies on his mind," Hamilton did not, in the end, invade the Republican heartland. He did, however, contemplate heading still farther south and seizing territory from Spain. ("... we ought certainly to look to the possession of the Floridas and Louisiana and we ought to squint at South America.") Chernow considers this "imperialist escapade" to have been "woefully misguided," "an unspeakable piece of folly," and "one of the most flagrant instances of poor judgment in Hamilton's career." Even Washington grew dubious about any continuing need for the new Army. By 1800, according to President Adams, Hamilton's military had become "as unpopular as if it had been a ferocious wild beast let loose upon the nation to devour it." Congress authorized its dismantling, and Adams swiftly shut it down (noting that had Hamilton been left to his own devices, the country might yet have needed a second army to disband the first).

Where is the exhibition on all this? AWOL. One might have thought Hamilton's thirst for military glory merited at least some attention, given Brookhiser's worries about banana republic-hood - defined in my dictionary as a country both dependent on a single crop and "governed by a dictator or officers of the armed forces." Yet the Whiskey Rebellion rates barely a mention. The analogous Fries Rebellion - a protest, also put down by massive force, against taxes imposed to pay for the new Army - isn't mentioned at all. And while the "Soldier" case includes (along with flags, muskets, cannonballs and grapeshot) a document labeled "Alexander Hamilton's Commission as Inspector General of the Army," the laconic label suggests that Hamilton was appointed "against his own inclination." This is a decidedly minority view among historians (even Brookhiser's book doesn't advance it) and Chernow's position - that Hamilton jockeyed frantically for the position - is much the more compelling. "For someone of his vaulting ambition," Chernow notes, "the leadership of the new army was a shiny, irresistible lure," and he proved "cunning, quick-footed, and manipulative" in extracting the post from a deeply reluctant Adams. There's one additional reference to this episode - a cryptic Time Line notation ("1800: He disbands the army at Congress's direction") with zero explanation of its significance. I'm not suggesting that the exhibit should have portrayed Hamilton as a militarist - this remains a subject of scholarly debate (see Kohn vs. Walling4) - only that the show's presentation of its Hero is deeply selective.

The selectivity is on display at the "Rule of Law" screen as well. Here we get long loving zoom-in-zoom-out images of the Capitol (with flags), the White House (with flag), and the (flagless) Supreme Court. The implicit argument, straight out of a 1950s civics schoolbook, seems to be that the separation of powers is the centerpiece of our 21st century political universe - though of course, in the real world, so are political parties, corporate lobbyists, the mass media, and big-monied campaign contributors - and that this constitutional structure is another Hamiltonian legacy. But Hamilton, notoriously, proposed to the Philadelphia convention a very different schema, centered on a President elected for life during "good behavior" (imagine growing old with George W. Bush), though privately he believed the office "ought to be hereditary" (imagine Jenna as next in line).

What gets sidestepped here, and throughout the exhibit, are the reactionary aspects of Hamilton's political vision. Far from being Visionary and Modern, Hamilton [as Chernow notes] "harked back to a past in which well-bred elites made decisions for less-educated citizens." And while he couched his public reservations about republican government in abstract terms - the difficulty of achieving a proper balance between "liberty" and "order" - his private correspondence more straightforwardly fretted about "the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property"; he was, Chernow observes, prey to "lurid visions that the have-nots would rise up and dispossess the haves."

Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights - "one of his real failures of vision" according to Chernow. He favored transferring power from the states (too accessible to the populace) to a better-buffered central government. And for all his putative attachment to the Rule of Law, when in 1800 his opponents swept the New York City elections, Hamilton urged Governor Jay to retroactively change the rules and reverse the results - "in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be overscrupulous." This "disgraceful action," Chernow notes, was perhaps "the most high-handed and undemocratic act of his career." Yet apart from a scattered reference here and there, the exhibit refuses to acknowledge Hamilton's politics in anything like their entirety.

The "Economy" screen is equally obfuscatory. It offers videoclips of a CNN stock ticker, a Times Square stock ticker, and a New York Stock Exchange stock ticker, along with a Wall Street subway station. The only nonfinancial activity on view is a high-rise building going up in lower Manhattan - undoubtedly an office tower or luxury condo. There's no sign of commerce or agriculture in these "vignettes of modern American life" - unless the glimpse of a Wall Street fruit-and-veg stand is meant as a stand-in for both - nor any trace of manufacturing, for all the claims that Hamilton was its progenitor. Not even banking makes an appearance; this is a stockbroker's eye-view of the economy.

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