‘Let me tell you what I wish I’d known, when I was young and dreamed of glory: you have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story…’ (Miranda, Hamilton) These lyrics exemplify what it means to have a legacy and to have stories told about you. No one can control how their legacy is perceived or created once they are gone even if they try hard to create that story while they are alive. These types of stories are told all across America. The story of Alexander Hamilton and his involvement in the creation of America as we know it is one such story. While alive, Hamilton strove to create the legacy that he believed he deserved to an obsessive level. ‘For Hamilton, his sense of self included his achieved ambitions.’ (Tchen, 33)
However, after he died, his legacy became something else entirely. His wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, worked tirelessly throughout the 1800s to preserve her husband’s legacy after his death but it seemed to fetter out under the pressures of brighter stars amongst the Founding Fathers. While Hamilton’s story faded to smaller items throughout the years, his name has been brought to the limelight again but another story teller is attempting to show how this ‘founding father without a father’ (Miranda, Hamilton) exemplifies the story of America and the American Dream through song. In creating the hit musical, Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda has not only told the story of Alexander Hamilton, but the story of America and how dreams and legacies belong to everyone.
The musical brings forth not only a new age for Broadway or a new understanding of who one of our Founding Fathers was, but a new and brighter America as well. To understand why Alexander Hamilton’s story is so important and why this new musical telling is an interesting way to tell it, one must first understand why Hamilton’s life exemplifies the American Dream. He grew from a life of poverty into one of the Founding Fathers of our nation. He founded some of the most known and important functions of our country (The New York Post and the Coast Guard) and helped negotiate the movement of the US capital from New York City to Washington D.C. He also penned the majority of the Federalist Papers and participated heavily in the American Revolution, including being George Washington’s right hand man during some of the most significant battles.
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All of these things contributed to the legacy that Hamilton left behind after his fateful and famous duel with Aaron Burr. The greatness of his achievements is best described by the biographer Ron Chernow (on who’s biography of Hamilton the musical was based): ‘The magnitude of Hamilton’s feats as treasury secretary has overshadowed many other facets of his life: clerk, college student, youthful poet, essayist, artillery captain, wartime adjutant to Washington, battlefield hero, congressman, abolitionist, Bank of New York founder, state assemblyman, member of the Constitutional Convention and New York Ratifying Convention, orator, lawyer, polemicist, educator, patron saint of the New York Evening Post, foreign-policy theorist, and major general in the army. Boldy umcompromising, he served as a catalyst for the emergence of the first political parties and as the intellectual fountainhead for one of them, the Federalists. He was a pivotal force in four consecutive presidential elections and defined much of America’s political agenda during the Washington and Adams administrations, leaving copious commentary on virtually every salient issue of the day.’ (Chernow, 3)
At its core, Hamilton’s story is one of pushing past adversity at every turn in order to create something great. After facing being orphaned, death, and even a hurricane, Hamilton left the small island of St Croix for a better life in America. The American dream was alive and well before the revolution even began, the ideals of being able to find a better life and make something of yourself appealed to his nature of wanting to create the best legacy possible. His story itself matches the young first generation American that created the musical to tell his story. Lin-Manuel Miranda was born in Washington Heights to a young immigrant couple and has now grown into to one of the greatest creative minds today.
The work of creating the musical not only served to preserve Hamilton’s legacy, but to create Miranda’s legacy as well. ‘It tells the stories of two revolution. There’s the American Revolution of the 18th century, which flares to life in Lin’s libretto….There’s also the revolution of the show itself: a musical that changes the way that Broadway sounds, that alters who gets to tell the story of our founding, that lets us glimpse the new, more diverse America rushing our way.’ (McCarter, 10) Hamilton had a dream that America would be a place where all citizens lived happily and he worked tirelessly to build that. Miranda’s musical, with its hip hop music and diverse casting, brings that America to light. Hamilton: An American Musical imagines an America where the story is more important than the color of an actor’s skin or the mode in which the story is told.
It imagines an America where the stories of immigrants to this nation are not lost to fear or to other words or so called brighter stars. It imagines the America Hamilton imagined all those years ago while he was helping create it, one where people would be able to grow their own stories and legacies in the same way Hamilton and Miranda have. Much like the Founding Fathers strove for America and the American Dream, the creators of Hamilton all strove to put their mark on the theater and Broadway. Hamilton began its journey with a bang, a now viral video of Lin-Manuel Miranda performing the still in the works opening number for the then President and First Lady Obama.
‘The American Songbook concert put Hamilton on the path to Broadway. It also offered the first glimpse of the show’s ambitions, the way it would challenge the audience to think differently about Broadway. ‘Just as we continue to forget that immigrants are the backbone of the country, we forget that musical theater is a mongrel art form,’ Lin says. Broadway absorbed jazz, then it absorbed rock, but it hadn’t absorbed hip hop, even though he saw the enormous potential of fusing those sounds.’ (McCarter, 47) Much as Alexander Hamilton, the man, shook things up even to the point of frustrating America’s first president – ‘[Washington was] distraught by the growing factionalism within and outside his administration, especially by squabbling of Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton’ (Lepore, 135) – Hamilton, the musical shook up the way that American’s viewed Broadway in many ways, adding further to the revolutionary story it was presenting and creating.
Firstly, Hamilton began with fusing hip hop into every moment of its two hour and forty-five minute running time. It starts out with a quick fire explanation of who Hamilton was at his very core and moves into quick, sharp verses that mimic the way that Hamilton wrote each and every one of his papers throughout his life. The seminal Farmer Refuted, both the song and the pamphlets, match each other in tone and movement even if hip hop style is a long way off from Hamilton’s old writings stylistically, the quick and smart movement of each word and response matches them together in perfect harmony. ‘If they dropped mics in 1776, Hamilton would’ve dropped one here.’ (McCarter, 47) The revolutionary change that fusing this type of music with the historical fights that the musical takes time to tell the stories about brought upon people’s understanding of Hamilton and Broadway has been tracked throughout the years of the musical’s run and continued success.
The matching pace of hip hop allows for Hamilton’s words to transcend the paper they were originally written on allow his story to touch a new generation of America’s who are changing things the same way he did. Secondly, the diverse casting of the show allows for the story of the creation of America to be told by those who wouldn’t normally be given the opportunity despite the fact that people of color were there for every moment of our nation’s history. ‘…American history can be told and retold, claimed and reclaimed, even by people who don’t look like George Washington and Betsy Ross. Alexander Hamilton, who spent his life trying to live down his lowly origins, knew better than the other founders that even something as unprecedented and revolutionary as the United States would carry traces of many tangled traditions…’ (McCarter, 95)
American history belongs to every citizen of the United States and the musical’s casting allows for that part of the story to be told in a new light. It is a radical and changing idea for all those that have learned the history before. However, it is a good one. Not only did this casting style influence further shows to do the same such as Disney’s Frozen or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but it influenced Americans as a whole to begin to see their history in a new light. It changed the way an entire generation of American children could relate to their history and began to include several groups of people in a history that they have always belonged to. It added people to the telling of a story that they have always known but been excluded from before.
Thirdly, the story serves the interests of America in the same way that Hamilton had always wished America would. It doesn’t hold back from the dark parts of his past, his affair that even he spoke publicly on (America’s first sex scandal in politics) is just one example, in order to serve the interests of those who stayed behind and told his story. It tells Hamilton’s story from start to finish with nothing left completely to the wayside and allows even the flaws of the man (and other Founding Fathers) to shine through. The struggle that Lepore describes in her book is one where the stories are always told by the winners and given in too much to these fantastical ideals that the legacy of creating something like the United States give to the people involved.
Hamilton fights against that struggle to show that despite their several flaws, these men fought and won to create the nation that still exists today. Who has a right to be a part of the United States isn’t ‘foreordained, or even stable’ (Lepore, 3) and it never has been. It wasn’t when Washington and Hamilton and all the Founding Fathers were drafting up their vision of America in 1776 and it isn’t now in 2019 where the vision of America and what we can be has changed and become new. Though they match together at their very core – that those who wish to ‘come of age with our young nation’ (Miranda, Hamilton) will be able to create their own stories.
Overall, at it’s core Hamilton: An American Musical is a story of two different men – Alexander Hamilton and Lin-Manuel Miranda – living out the American Dream the way that it presents to them. To Alexander Hamilton, that was creating a legacy and being a part of the ‘comic book version of America’s history,’ to where he serves as The Flash amongst ‘Washington’s Superman and Jefferson’s Batman’ (Lepore, 61). He was going so quickly in every direction, he didn’t stop to think about the idea of making mistakes and in the end, he left his mark upon the halls of the Capital and the annuls of American history.
To Miranda, that is to give back voice to the forgotten and left behind members and creators of our nation. He saw a distinct lack of Hamilton’s story in our history and a lack of adding those to whom the story belongs as well in its telling. For example, Lepore’s book only mentions the man once, a quick comment on the 135th page about his involvement in the Washington Administration, and where 1776 and its famously non-diverse cast were lacking in pieces of the story. The meshing of these two men allowed for the struggle that Lepore describes to be one in a spectacular way and to bring this version of the story of the origin of America to life. It serves the interests of the American people and the story of their history that belongs to the whole nation.
In the end, that is its greatest success about the cultural phenomenon that is Hamilton: An American Musical, its ability to have brought the story of the creation of America and one of our more lost Founding Fathers back to the people to whom it belongs. The world accepted Hamilton into the folds of Broadway with a bright and shiny 8 Tony Awards and Grammy Award the same way that ‘a Chinese enameled punch bowl given by the Schuyler family to Alexander Hamilton and the Schuylers’ daughter Elizabeth in 1780 to commemorate their marriage, for example, signified acceptance of Hamilton into the family and its social circles. The marriage (and bowl) marked Hamilton’s rise in New York society.’ (Tchen, 32)
This change in story and addition to the history of the nation will not be forgotten. In fact, the American story is always changing as Lepore says in this quote: ‘The story of America isn’t carved in stone, or even inked on parchment; it is, instead, told, and fought over, again and again.’ (Lepore, 4) The story of America has been told in parchment, paper, ink, screen, and even stage, and now through hip hop music. This is only one continued step in the ever growing and changing way in which this story is told and will be told for generations.
References
- History.com – Alexander Hamilton
- Biography.com – Alexander Hamilton
- Library of Congress – Alexander Hamilton Papers
- Mental Floss – Facts About Alexander Hamilton
- Mount Vernon – Introduction to the Founding Fathers
- Teaching American History – Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on Manufactures by Alexander Hamilton
