In a country overflowing with statues and museums, the lack of fitting memorials to Hamilton is not only shocking, it is evidence of a dastardly plot to have the man most responsible for the shape of the modern American economy airbrushed from history.
Immediately following the end of the War of Independence, there was a great groundswell of feeling in the young republic that America would remake the world in a manner wholly different from the corrupt old ways of Europe, and particularly the Evil Empire based in London. The extension of democracy from colonial levels to a broader, though still limited basis was only part of the idea: society itself was to be set up in a way that any the creation of type of elite would be impossible. In fact the words “elite” and “aristocracy” were seen as interchangeable.
Since there was little real chance that America would see the emergence of “Lord Philadelphia” of “The Duke of New Jersey”, the elites in question were what Jeffersonians called “The Money Aristocracy” and they were sworn to block the creation of a financial system that allowed a new money oligarchy to develop. Of course they were well motivated to do this partly since they were old money oligarchs themselves.
Had they won and Americas development been kept to a slave holding peasant republic, America and the world would have been a sadder and poorer place. Hence the importance of our hero.
War hero, main author of the Federalist Papers, duelist and all-round genius, Hamilton pretty much created the blueprint for the entire US financial infrastructure, saved America from a ridiculous infatuation with the bloody French Revolution, allied the bankrupt young republic with the most powerful and dynamic economy in the world and set America on a path of economic development that even decades of utopian Jeffersonian chaos could not derail.
Yet not one public memorial in the nation’s capital!
No comments:
Post a Comment