Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, opened off-Broadway at the Public theater in New York City in February 2015. All performances sold out. Hamilton upgraded its venue to Broadway—the Richard Rodgers eater—in August 2015. The lyrics, music, and book for the show were written by Miranda and based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton.
Despite being the winner of eleven Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Grammy Award and countless others, Hamilton is not without flaws.
Members of Hamilton performing.
Photo courtesy by Wikipedia Commons
Miranda gathers together the strands of uniquely melded-in- America musical genres; Hamilton is sung and rapped and includes music from hip-hop, rhythm and blues, pop music, and traditional Broadway. Hamilton, which is about the Founding Fathers, is also a revolutionary sensation because the members of the cast, unlike the Founding Fathers, are racially diverse.
Think of the portraits of the Founding Fathers. They glow white. But the actors in the musical, as Ben Brantley points out in his article “Hamilton, Young Rebels Changing History and eater,” don’t look like “the men they’re portraying… they’re black or Hispanic…which turns out to be the perfect voice for expressing the thoughts and drives of the diverse immigrants in the American colonies” (and the generations of Americans that have continued to arrive).
Part of Miranda’s rationale for Hamilton’s casting was that Hamilton was a Caribbean-Creole, the son of a mixed-race woman, emigrant to the U.S. He was born on what is now Saint Kitts and Nevis, but was at the time the town of Charlestown on Nevis, in the British Leeward Islands. Critic Erik Piepenburg emphasizes that the musical is a “story of immigrants from creators who are the children of immigrants.” Piepenburg touts Hamilton for contributing to the national conversation about immigration. The musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda even started a national campaign “Immigrants: a reference to the musical’s song “Yorktown.” The organization raises money for immigrant’s rights organizations.
Indeed, celebrating and underlining America’s diversity is wonderful.
However, is the musical also not an uncomfortable equivocation? Hamilton swallows and romanticizes, as many do, the history of the United States. Although U.S. history is the history of immigrants and their impact on the indigenous population, the show focuses on the story of the white immigrants of America, not the people whose voices are continually and institutionally silenced. It doesn’t give us a new or honest perspective on the American history we have been told. We don’t see American history from the subaltern point of view. What were the successes and glories and struggles of non- white American heros, rather than of whites portrayed by non-white actors?
Set during the Revolutionary War, the musical tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, an orphan from the Caribbean, who achieved the american dream. Hamilton served in the war as a general in the Continental Army and was the right hand man to General George Washington. Throughout the musical, George Washington is portrayed as the brilliant war hero who founded this country, while his ownership of slaves is never acknowledged. Slave- owning was the norm at the time, yet the show criticizes only Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves. Missing from the musical is the fact that both George Washington and James Madison, as did many Northerners. In fact, many prestigious Northern universities were built on the backs of slaves, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Georgetown.
Dr. Catherine Fung, a Lick-Wilmerding English Teacher and Hamilton fan, gave the musical a rave review, yet offered realistic criticism. She said that the musical “still puts front and center the perspectives of these powerful white men as opposed to, say, people like Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent who
American Revolution, or Phillis Wheatley, a black poet who was the first black woman to have a book published.” These people aren’t the ones Miranda highlights, but rather he chooses to showcase the powerful white men who already have roles in our mainstream historical narrative. “ The show might nurture in us a different relationship to American history, in that we can ‘feel’ closer to it because of the style of music and the actors that are embodying it. But it doesn’t o er a new narrative or perspective on that history.”
is manipulation of history serves the writer’s narrative purpose quite well, as is exhibited in the song “Cabinet Battle #1.” Jefferson starts off by commenting “don’t tax the South cuz we have it made in the shade,” and Hamilton responds by pointing out “your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor.” The show portrays Thomas Jefferson as an aggressive slave owner in order to t the story Miranda is telling. Jefferson is a cocky elitist who opposes Hamilton from the very start, whereas for the purpose of the show, Washington has to be seen as a good man, above-reproof. e classic hero-villain storyline works well paired with rap-battles, stand- offs, and duels.
The narrative of Washington in American history is consistently idealized, consistently ignoring his slave ownership. The truth is that he was a deeply awed person, and Hamilton continues to put him atop a pedestal.
A junior at Lick-Wilmerding notes Hamilton’s inaccurate portrayal of the Founding Fathers. “My biggest criticism is how Lin-Manuel Miranda decided to cast Hamilton as a postcolonial multiculturalist, and therefore as more progressive than he actually was. Even his anti- slavery sentiments contradict the fact that he married into a slave- owning New York family. Hamilton’s speaking out against slavery was politically [rather than ethically] motivated because his supporters were from the northeast and some were even abolitionists.”
Another issue with Hamilton is the musical’s portrayal characters: Elizabeth Schuyler (whom Hamilton marries), Angelica and Peggy Schuyler, Eliza’s two sisters, and Maria Reynolds, the woman Hamilton had an a air with.
The main role of Eliza, Hamilton’s wife, is to show how he betrays her by having an affair which is publicized on a national scale. Eliza Schuyler-Hamilton only accomplished anything noteworthy after her husband’s death. The things she does accomplish, like creating “the first private orphanage in New York City,” and “raise[ing] funds in D.C for the Washington Monument” were all to glorify Hamilton. Eliza created the orphanage as a way to remember Hamilton, as she extols in the line “in their eyes I see you Alexander,” in her final song, “Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story.”
Of course women didn’t have many rights in colonial or Nineteenth Century America. They didn’t get the vote until August 1920, 150 years a er the Revolution, but the show might have shown women’s importance during the revolutionary time, just as it might have included the forgotten characters from American history who were people of color.
Suzanne Aldridge-Peacock, a Lick history teacher, comments “the portrayal of the Schuyler sisters was interesting and the musical gave them a voice. Eliza didn’t just have an emotional connection with Hamilton. She was more than his wife.”
In a critical portrayal of history, the objective is to find the facts and turn them into a cohesive story. Hamilton creates a fluid story, but it doesn’t acknowledge the facts in their entirety. In order to honor all the components of history, multiple perspectives must be present, which in Hamilton, they are not. The problematic implications of Hamilton are relevant today, highlighting the fact that if we can only accept one perspective as the norm, we can never fully uncover and face the truth of our own history.
Wow so well written Isabella!