Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 30: The Hamiltonian ideology

I referred in the last post in this series to a case in 2016 in which Hillary Clinton offered up a bit of Lost Cause history.

Matthew Yglesias picked up on that moment to talk about how the prevalent understanding of US history has evolved in recent years, How Hillary Clinton got on the wrong side of liberals' changing theory of American history Vox 01/26/2016.

Hillary's blooper was about how the Yankees were too mean to (white) Southerners after the Civil War:

The kind of politician Bill Clinton — supported by Hillary as, by all accounts, a genuinely trusted adviser and confidante — was at that time has gone badly out of style, and Hillary Clinton's reemergence as a Northern suburbanite is part of that process. But answering the question of which historical president she most admires, Clinton named Abraham Lincoln. That's a safe choice in almost any context. But she went on to espouse a theory about the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination that would have been banal for almost any 20th-century Democrat but that cuts sharply against the modern progressive view of American history. [my emphasis]

Yglesias describes the dominant view in the Democratic Party of 2016 this way, "Most liberals now believe that Reconstruction was a noble project to secure racial equality that was stopped by unjustified Southern racism and violence."

That also happens to be a view based on empirical reality. Whether that was desirable or not is to some extent a matter of judgment. White supremacists obviously don't agree with the desirability of Reconstruction's project to achieve racial equality before the law. But I would argue that value judgments can't legitimately be abstracted from empirical history, either.

I share the broad view of Reconstruction as a democratic project. But I think of my own outlook on American history as a left viewpoint or interpretation. And from my perspective, the general Democratic view of the Civil War period and Reconstruction is basically accurate from an empirical standpoint and is also consistent with a left, left-liberal, or even (theoretically) conservative perspective.

But the popular left and left-liberal versions of early American history and the antebellum period I find very problematic. HistoryNet's definition of antebellum: "The Antebellum Period in American history is generally considered to be the period before the civil war and after the War of 1812, although some historians expand it to all the years from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the beginning of the Civil War."

Continuing with Matt Yglesias: "Modern-day liberals no longer feel the need to talk around the embarrassing fact that it was a Republican who saved the Union." So far, so good.

But he continues, "and are in the process of constructing an entirely new usable history in which Alexander Hamilton is a heroic Founding Father and the post–Civil War effort at Reconstruction was a noble failure, not a regrettable consequence of Lincoln's death." Reconstruction, I'm down with that.

But the idea of Alexander Hamilton as an admirable admirable historical model for the left and/or center-left, that's where I get off the train. Alexander Hamilton was a great American and a supporter of the American Revolution, which does make him a revolutionary, at least for part of his career. He also was one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, along with James Madison and John Jay. The lazy left-liberal version of history right now is very jumpy about saying positive things about the American Revolution. Because, you know, "revolution" is a BernieBros thing.

At least we seem to be largely spared, for the moment, of a re-run of the old capital-p Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution as the real revolution and the Constitution as a counter-revolution (more or less) of self-serving rich white guys at the Constitution Convention. This was the famous theory of Charles Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). It has been thoroughly refuted on empirical and theoretical grounds in the ensuing 105 years. But it still pops up now and then. It's only a matter time, I'll pessimistically guess, before corporate Democrats discover Beard's theory, which set up the Revolution up as a good event and the Constitution as the bad one, and use it only in reverse: the Revolution as bad (BernieBros!!!) and the Constitution is good (Hamilton the "heroic Founding Father.")

BTW, it's been pretty common for a while to use "Founders" for "Founding Fathers," although all the Founders at the Constitutional Convention were men. But referring the the founders of the country in a more general sense, I tend to use the more inclusive version.

Before we leave Hamilton, the guy was a conservative at best later in his career and I would go with reactionary. He was a brand of monarchist, wanting to set up the American President as a de facto king. He believed that a popularly elective legislature could only function practically if they were being regularly bribed, preferably by the Executive or his allies. The Citizens United decision in that sense was a very Hamiltonian one. The Bank of the United States, which he is conventionally praised for advocating, eventually came to undertake that function by paying regular stipends to members of Congress. The Bank was a private institution given special approval by the federal government, paying members of Congress before whom it could advocate for policies favoring the very rich.

Then there's this. Yglesias writes about:

... the sensibilities of the modern-day Democratic Party, which includes very few white people with deep family ties in the South. But it's an institutional problem for the Democratic Party to the extent that admitting Republicans were right on racial issues in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s leads to awkward questions about why committed white supremacists from earlier periods (like Andrew Jackson) and later ones (like Woodrow Wilson) are celebrated as pillars of the party.

I'm not a particularly fan of Woodrow Wilson, though I'm a "fan" of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. More specifically, they represent the trend in actual American history that successfully fought and won the American Revolution. Jackson at age 17 was a soldier in the American Revolution, so he can legitimately be counted as one of the Founders. They also represent the strain in American history that worked, with considerable success, to expand democracy among the American political community.

Today, we take a different view than at least white American males mostly took in, say, 1820, of the historical reality that the American political community was made up almost exclusively of white males.

But it's also true democrats all over the world looked to the United States of the Revolution and the early Republic and the antebellum period as a radical experiment in democracy. Which it was. So the movements that expanded democracy, as the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian period did, matters historically. Those were the people who were going in the direction that the Democratic Party celebrates in retrospect. The Abolitionist movement matters, the women's rights movement mattered, the growth and activism of labor union matters, advocates for immigrants' rights, Indian rights, and much more, they all matter. They don't erase the horrors of slavery or Indian dispossession. But they didn't drop down from Heaven in a divine intervention like Yahweh opening the earth to swallow up Korah and his followers, the Biblical event Walter Benjamin celebrated as sweeping away the old order to make way for an entirely new one. They happened in the process of real struggles by real people.

Real achievements in national independence for the American Republic are also important: the Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans. That doesn't make American policy toward the native peoples of North America moral or pure. It doesn't make imperialist wars acceptable. But it's part of real history. And to ignore real democratic advances or the flawed human beings who achieved them and came to symbolize them is also ahistorical. And not a meaningfully "left" approach to history.

It's foolish from a left or left-liberal perspective to celebrate a monarchist like Hamilton as a democratic hero but dismiss Jefferson and his democratic tradition entirely. It would be even more absurd to ignore the radical difference between John Calhoun and his followers, on the one hand, and Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian reformers, on the other.

As I've noted before, John Brown is the figure on which the half-baked Democratic historical view that Yglesias describes always founders. John Brown was an anti-slavery activist who took an active part in the guerrilla war between pro- and anti-slavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas." And his failed raid on Harper's Ferry was part of a serious plan to set up armed resistance units in the Appalachians to encourage runaways and harass slaveowners with guerrilla tactics. So his antislavery credentials are solid! He was also unusual among white men in not only opposing slavery but advocating for political and social equality for blacks. And for women. He's one of the few famous white men of pre-Civil War America that advocated racial and gender equality in a way that would today be considered mandatory for a Democratic politician, and to which even many Republicans politicians feel they need to make rhetorical nods.

But, oh, that guerrilla war against slaveholders and their armed supporters ... That makes him a "terrorist" by today's standards. Even though it was proslavery guerrillas he was fighting against in Kansas, i.e., also "terrorists," good egalitarian white liberals in the United States tend to shy away from taking him as any kind of acceptable model, symbol, or hero. Because people who quake at Republicans calling them "socialists" - or even "liberals"! - certainly don't want to be caught saying nice things about the "terrorist" John Brown. It doesn't fit into Hamiltonian narrative that venerates Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams, also anti-slavery but as much of an advocate for the narrow class interests of the wealthy as Hamilton himself.

Any view of 19th-century US history that celebrates the liberation of the slaves at the hands of the Union Army but is too squeamish to acknowledge the democratic, political, and moral necessity of the anti-slavery guerrilla war against the Slave Power's supporters in Kansas is seriously lacking something.

Yglisas also comments, "Lincoln is, obviously, the president who freed the slaves and saved the Union. Alongside George Washington he's the conventional choice for greatest American president." Yglesias doesn't elaborate on the status of George Washington, although he seems to grudgingly concede his importance in American democratic history in that comment.

Which brings up another problem with the Hamiltonian corporate Democratic historical narrative. Lincoln the Great Emancipator had his own model Presidents. But his two main models were ... Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, both condemned to the dustbin of American history by the Hamiltonian outlook. How is it that the Great Emancipator took those two Presidents as the model for his own democratic project? The Hamiltonian view finds that very hard to explain. For a more straightforward democratic left view, it's fairly obvious.

Do conservatives totally own early American history now?

Does liberal historical consciousness really have to be this lazy?

I can't let it go yet. I'm still mourning the blog's "Old Hickory's Weblog" name. Which it still had until a few days ago.
And here's Krugman piling on: In Hamilton’s Debt New York Times 04/22/2016.

It seems that the left side of the political spectrum has decided by default to completely surrender the symbolism of the American Revolution and the early decades of the Republic to conservatives. Here's Krugman on Andrew Jackson, giving what passes for nuanced history in public discussions right now: "Andrew Jackson, a populist who campaigned against elites but was also, unfortunately, very much a racist, arguably an advocate of what we would nowadays call white supremacy."

Which would make him like, uh, every President and pretty much every white person in America up until after the Civil War. (See Lincoln, Abraham, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.)

As I said here before only one white man I know by name from the antebellum days in the US who arguably held 21st century liberal attitudes toward blacks, women and even Indians. That would be John Brown. Who by today's standards was also a "terrorist." And he was a convicted traitor and experienced guerrilla fighter (Bloody Kansas) who had a plan to set up guerrilla war bases in the Appalachians to free slaves and fight slaveowners. But what respectable liberal today is going to praise John Brown without qualifications in the same breath? Anti-abortion zealots do, though, just like they praise Martin Luther King as a conservative.

Maybe Walt Whitman and Herman Melville would qualify along with Brown in the 21st-century category. But, heck, even radical white Abolitionists in those days often supported sending African-Americans back to Africa like Theodore Bilbo.

And, yes, I checked about John Brown's attitude on Indians.

Krugman goes on to praise Alexander Hamilton! The monarchist who thought republican government could only function by massive corruption. I'm sure he would have approved of the post-Citizens United campaign financing we have now. One of the reasons he wanted the Bank of the US was to make payoffs to Congress, which it was still doing in Jackson's time. The guy also persuaded Washington to pay off effectively defaulted Revolutionary War bonds to give a big windfall to the vulture investors of the day.

How long until we let conservatives claim the New Deal, too? Or has that already happened when I wasn't paying attention?

Andrew Jackson and the plague of hack history

I'm sorry. But despite the liberal facade, this is conservative, hack history. And in this case the headline is consistent with the text of the article, Anti-Slavery Hamilton May Get To Stay On $10 Bill While Genocidal Slaver Jackson Gets Pushed Off The $20 Huffington Post 04/17/2016.

In the article, Ryan Grim, Laura Barron-Lopez and Zach Carter write:

... now that nobody uses cash, a woman will finally get a spot on a dollar bill.

The tragedy, though, is which bill. Instead of pushing aside pro-slavery, genocidal President Andrew Jackson, the Treasury Department has decided to sideline the first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to make way for a yet-to-be named woman.

Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, was a strong opponent of slavery, and was an early member of the New York Manumission Society, an abolitionist group that organized boycotts against merchants connected to the slave trade and lobbied for legislation abolishing the institution.

The article is a reprint of a 06/18/2015 piece. They reprinted it because the Treasury now says they are again considering replacing Jackson on the $20 bill.

I explained my own position on this in Andrew Jackson as a 21st-century political symbol 07/25/2015.

The Huffington Post's polemical contrast of the good Alexander Hamilton, the monarchist that believed republican government could only function through massive corruption on behalf of the wealthy, and Andrew Jackson, is hack propaganda, not any serious left view of history.

I say "left" rather than "progressive" here because part of the problem is that Progressive historian Charles Beard is responsible for a lot of this nonsense. Beard identified with the Progressive movement. And through much of his career, his views on more contemporary issues was in line with the pro-regulation attitude of the Progressives. The Frankfurt School's journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung published an short article by Beard, "The Social Sciences in the United States" in its 4:1 (1935) number.

But he also articulated a cynical, misleading and basically reactionary theory of early American history in which the Constitution was basically an anti-democratic document that represented overwhelmingly the interest of the wealthy only.

It was an interpretation that did not stand up to scrutiny. Nor did the accompanying idea that the pro-Constitution side can be identified easily with the later Federalist Party of John Adams and the anti-Constitution side with that of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party, known in Jefferson's time as the Republican Party but under Jackson's leadership became known as the Democratic Party. It was a simplistic, distorted view whose long survival even in some forms today reflects in large part the interest of the economic Establishment in discrediting the traditional of radical democracy which was, yes, carried in major part by leaders like the slaveowners Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

Yes, that seems contradictory. And it seems that way because real history is contradictory. If even that much of a hint of Hegelian view of history is too much to swallow, well, welcome to David Barton territory. Even if the hackery is articulated under a liberal rather than a conservative framework.

But, as flawed as Beard's work was in major ways even before he wound up as the chief prophet of rightwing Pearl Harbor revisionism after the Second World War, he had a more informed and sophisticated approach to American history than a David Barton could even fathom. This passage from America in Midpassage (1939) by Charles and Mary Beard shows both the strengths and weaknesses of their approach to the early years of Constitution democracy in the United States (pp. 922-3):

For at no time, at no place, in solemn convention assembled, through no chosen agen ts, had the American people officially proclaimed the United States to be a democracy. The Constitution did not contain the word or any ward lending countenance to it, except possibly the mention of "we, the people," in the preamble. Nor, indeed, did the Constitution even proclaim a republic. It did guarantee a republican form of government in the states, but as John Adams wrote to Mercy Warren, during their heated controversy over political aims, nobody knew just what that meant. As a matter of fact, when the Constitution was framed no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat. The very word then had low connotations, though it was sometimes mentioned with detachment; and the connotations became distinctly horrible to Respectability after the outbreak of the reign of terror in France. Though denounced as a Jacobin by Federalists, Jefferson did not call his party "democratic," and was chary about mentioning the term even in private correspondence. As was said lang afterward, the founders of the republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin. Not until Andrew Jackson had retired from the presidency did his followers completely discard the old name "Republican" and officially call themselves "Democrats." After that date references to democracy usually meant "the Democracy," that is, Jackson's party which, strange to relate, soon passed largely under the control of slave owners.

The Whigs and their successors, the Republicans, whatever their popular inclinations, could hardly style themselves democrats, or the United States a democracy, after Jackson's partisans seized the title and identified democracy with their peculiar organization. Moreover one strong wing of the Whig-Republican combination was just as much opposed to everything that savored of democracy as any slaveholder or as any good Federalist of the Hamilton school had been in the latter days of the eighteenth century. If a "sound Republican" had been asked to characterize the United States between 1865 and the end of the century, he would doubtless have called it "a representative republic." Democracy he would have identified with direct government, the initiative, the referendum, popular election of Senators, majority rule, and disrespect for the Supreme Court. As the battle over "more democracy" intensified in the early years of the twentieth century, conservative Republicans grew still more suspicious of democracy. If they mentioned it with any favor, they were quick to make a distinction between "the true democracy" which they espoused and "the false democracy" which "demagogues" were trying to promote. [my emphasis in bold]

Even there we see some rhetorical hairsplitting that is always a sign that caution is in order. For instance, "Jefferson did not call his party "democratic,'" is true only in the sense that the Democratic-Republican Party he led was referred to in common practice as the Republican Party.

Here is the account from the ever-respectable Encyclopædia Britannica on the Democratic Party (online version as of today, text only; internal links not included:

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their antimonarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. Another faction to emerge in the early years of the republic, the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favoured a strong central government. Jefferson’s faction developed from the group of Anti-Federalists who had agitated in favour of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. The Federalists called Jefferson’s faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the “radical democrats” of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the country’s first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive Democratic-Republican label as their official name.

In 1800 Adams was defeated by Jefferson, whose victory ushered in a period of prolonged Democratic-Republican dominance. Jefferson won reelection easily in 1804, and Democratic-Republicans James Madison (1808 and 1812) and James Monroe (1816 and 1820) were also subsequently elected. By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the country’s sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that year’s presidential election. [my emphasis]

It makes the important historical point that Jefferson's party found its antecedents not among the opponents of the Constitution as such but among the fact which considered a Bill of Rights to be a necessary component of the Constitution. The view that actually prevailed when the first Congress approved the addition of the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

The bottom line for this post: hack history is bad history.

Hamiltonian notions of government

Alexander Hamilton: not a Jefferson-Jackson Democrat

One idea that's become a commonplace in American history that has bugged me for a long time is the idea that the "Hamiltonian" notion of government won out over time against the "Jeffersonian" form. In this framework, even the New Deal is presented as "Hamiltonian": the New Deal, a signature accomplishment of the Party founded by Thomas Jefferson.

Historian William Hogeland challenges some more recent hagiography about that old reactionary monarchist Alexander Hamilton in Inventing Alexander Hamilton: The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance Boston Review Nov/Dec 2007. He discusses the "Newburgh Crisis", an effort by Hamilton and his allies to get up a military coup in the 1780s:

Certain aspects of the Newburgh Crisis are worth arguing about. (How willing were the Morrises and Hamilton to support an actual coup? Were they gambling on avoiding one at the last minute? How would they have controlled events if the Gates mutiny had succeeded?) What hasn’t been at issue in any serious way since E.J. Ferguson and Richard Kohn wrote about these events in the 1960s and ’70s is Hamilton’s eagerness to avoid applying the rule of law to his view of what was best for the country. He was developing an urgent desire for authoritarian government, whose well-funded debt, supported by nationally enforced taxes, would increase the wealth of the richest class of Americans and yoke that class to national purpose. He bet everything, including his reputation as a loyal patriot, on forging a common project between the military and the investor classes to override the will of elected governments. [my emphasis]

Jefferson's objections to Hamilton's financial schemes during the Washington administration was not based on some agrarian utopianism. Jefferson objected to the fact that Hamilton wanted to basically award swindlers who had accumulated government bonds from small investors. He also objected to Hamilton's cynical notion of governance. Although Jefferson thought Hamilton himself was personally honest, Hamilton thought that American democracy could only function on the basis of bribing members of Congress.

Hogeland in the quote above touches on the key problem in the notion that "Hamiltonian" government won out over "Jeffersonian". To justify such an argument, one basically has to focus on broad structural issues and ignore the concrete political content of those competing notions. It is Jefferson's notion of broad-based democracy that won out over time, certainly in the perceptions of the public about what democracy means. Unfortunately, we still have our Hamiltonians around. And our system of campaign financing, which Jerry Brown even back in 1992 was calling a system of "bribery", actually does represent a kind of triumph of the dark side of "Hamiltonian" governance.

Hogeland also discusses the issue of the Revolutionary War debt, which is another incident that is often grossly distorted by Hamilton's apologists.

One complaint about Hogeland's piece. He doesn't communicate that the "liberal" Hamiltonian Project that he mentions has actually been an important player in the anti-Social-Security "entitlement reform" scam.

I would also add that Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury under the current Constitution was a key player in establishing the basic American finance system, although the Jefferson administration and Jefferson's Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin should actually be given more credit.

Hamilton's greatest contribution to political theory, and a positive one, was his advocacy of the proposed Constitution, as preserved in his essays in The Federalist Papers. It may be his greatest public contribution overall. In that political fight, he was one the same side as serious democrats like Jefferson and James Madison against the conservatives and reactionaries who opposed the Constitution.

That's another of my historical pet peeves, the still-influential notion popularized by "Progressive" historian Charles Beard, who became a rabid isolationist and FDR-hater, that it was conservatives who supported the Constitution and the liberals/progressive/left who opposed it. Not the case. But I'll get into that some other time.

Tags: alexander hamilton, thomas jefferson, william hogeland