Authors Forum: Hamilton's Curse

0:00Well, my book, Hamilton's Curse, that's not it, explains the current economic crisis. I wrote a book on Alexander Hamilton. My publicist at Random House wrote a great press release in October when it came out saying, this is the book that explains the origins of the current economic crisis, and it was apparently written so well it was intriguing to NBC News How can a book on Alexander Hamilton explain what's going on? And so they invited me on MSNBC, the Morning Joe show, and sat me down next to Pat Buchanan, and the first thing he says is, Alexander Hamilton is my hero. And so I'm supposed to explain my book, Trashing Alexander Hamilton, and so he let me speak for about ten seconds, and then it became a shouting match, and the three of them shouted me down.

0:55So, it's on the web, but you can't understand what the heck the book is about if you were to watch it because of that. So, I just gave up, but I did get one final word in, and I told them at least Aaron Burr had a good reason for shooting someone, unlike Dick Cheney. And that made it onto NBC News. So in the short time I have, I thought I'd ask or answer two questions. One, is there a Hamilton cult in America? And then a second question, what is Hamiltonianism anyway? There is a bit of a Hamiltonian cult. It's not as big and powerful as the Lincoln cult, which has been on display in the past month of Lincoln's 200th birthday.

1:45But I just have some quotes from some of the people that I quote in my book that illustrate that there is sort of a cult-like behavior behind Alexander Hamilton. My friend Clyde Wilson told me that when he visited friends in New York City about 20 years ago, they took him to this 300-year-old church where Hamilton is buried and there were flowers on the grave and he said the Wall Street people put fresh flowers on his grave every week. So they certainly revere Hamilton. Well, here's his most famous biographer these days is Ron Chernow. He said this, Hamilton is the prophet of the capitalist revolution in America, end quote. And of course, that is dead wrong. He was not a capitalist. He was a mercantilist. He should be better be called the prophet of mercantilism in America. David Brooks, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, neoconservative author said this, Hamilton created capitalism. One guy created capitalism.

2:44Forrest MacDonald says, Hamilton is responsible for America becoming the richest, most powerful and freest nation in the history of the world. Again, one guy. This is what what Pat Buchanan actually said to me was, how can you criticize Hamilton? He's the architect of the American and Economy." That's a quote. So again, there's this idea that there was one man, sort of like the Wizard of Oz, behind a curtain, the architect of the whole economy. There's a museum, New York Historical Society had a book published and they had a display entitled Alexander Hamilton, The Man Who Made America. So again, there's this idea that there was Hamilton is a founder of a great Republican empire that explored the outer reaches of space, welcomed millions of immigrants, led the effort to defeat fascism and communism, produced countless technological advances, and abolished slavery and Jim Crow.

3:53So, all one guy is responsible for all that. He didn't mention any of the bad things that the American government has done over the years that Hamilton is supposedly the creator of, just these things. David Brooks and William Crystal, when they announced what national greatness conservatism was, which is on display today in Iraq, among other places, this was a 1997 Wall Street Journal article, they said this, this, conservatives need to reinvigorate the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt. So the neocons think of themselves as sort of the political heirs of Hamilton. Michael Lind, another, I guess he called him a liberal slash neoconservative.

4:41Most of the great American statesmen have been nationalists in the Hamiltonian tradition. In the Civil War, Hamiltonian defenders of national unity dealt a crushing blow to Jeffersonian champions of states' rights." George Will said in one of his columns, Americans honor Jefferson that we live in Hamilton's country. And that's certainly true, I argue in my book. The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., which is the oldest so-called think tank in Washington, they have something called the Hamilton Project. It's a big, long series of proposals for economic intervention of all kinds, and naturally it's called the Hamilton Project. And it's financed by Wall Street banksters, including Rubin, Clinton's former Treasury Secretary, Hamilton Project.

5:33When the first bailout occurred, when Bush was still president, Forbes.com got out there and defended the bailout right away, as did the Wall Street Journal in a few articles. And one of the articles in Forbes.com was entitled, Ron Paul versus Alexander Hamilton. The bailout plan is conservative and constitutional by someone named Jerry Bauer. And so since Ron Paul is a Jeffersonian, and proudly so, this guy was saying, don't believe either Jefferson or Ron Paul that the bailout is a bad idea, it's a good idea, Hamilton would approve. Then in the Wall Street Journal, John Steele Gordon came out and blamed the whole economic mess on Thomas Jefferson.

6:24Not Alan Greenspan, Thomas Jefferson. Here's what he says. How could the richest and most productive economy in the world, as ever known, have a financial system so prone to periodic and catastrophic breakdown? The second answer is the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson. This is October 10th, 2008, Wall Street Journal. To Jefferson, the concept of central banking, Hamilton's idea, was what today might be called a giveaway to the rich. And so he makes the case that the reason for the current crisis is that the Fed is not powerful enough. We need a more powerful Fed. And there are too many government agencies that regulate financial markets. We need one super regulator. And Bernanke was sort of making a case for that two days ago in a speech in front of the Council of Foreign Relations that I caught on the Faux News Channel, and he is arguing for a systemic risk authority, a new central planning authority that will regulate all risk-taking in America.

7:29And so this is just a few examples of anything from the Wall Street Journal to Forbes to political scientists and academe saying these things about, to Patrick Cannon saying these things about Hamilton and it really is a cult-like following and the second question I have is well what is Hamiltonianism? What are Hamilton's core ideas that all these pretty influential people, William Crystal, David Brooks, Patrick Cannon, George Will revere so much I'll just put on a list. Well, he was the founding father of American nationalism, as far as I'm concerned, and Clyde Wilson defends nationalism as this, the unhealthy love of one's government, accompanied by the aggressive desire to put down others. That's nationalism.

8:17Patriotism, on the other hand, according to Wilson, is the wholesome, constructive love of one's land and people, different than nationalism. Hamilton wanted a foreign policy that would pursue, in his words, imperial glory. Quote the historian Clinton Rossiter from Cornell, the late Clinton Rossiter, is saying, Hamilton's overriding purpose was to build the foundation of a new empire. As you can see why Jefferson didn't like him very much. He thought that Jefferson thought the role of government was the protection of life, liberty and property and not to create an empire. He proposed, Hamilton proposed, a king-like chief executive at the Constitutional Convention and the effective abolition of states' rights or federalism, and of course we achieved that.

9:02Hamilton philosophically was a Jacobin. He was constantly imploring anyone who would listen to give limitless powers to the central state, assuming that wise men like himself would use that power in the public interest. I quote Rossiter again. Rossiter went through Hamilton's speeches and writings and came up with about a hundred different phrases that Hamilton used for the public interest. He was always making the argument that we need to expand the state in the public interest, the national interest, the community interest, his very creative use of language. Hamilton was the founding father of constitutional subversion. He literally invented the notion of implied powers and a living constitution. He did this in his statement on the constitutionality of a central bank, which he wrote for George Washington, where he essentially said that, well, yes, the Constitutional Convention considered a central bank a national bank, but rejected it, but you need to read between the lines of the Constitution.

10:04If you read between the lines, there is room for a bank run by politicians out of a nation's Jefferson's view was essentially that there's blank space between the lines, that there's nothing in there. But Hamilton argued that the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution allows for a bank. Jefferson came back and said, well, what you're saying is it's convenient. It would be convenient to have a government-run bank to deposit tax revenues in. That's not necessary because we have banks. There are banks everywhere. You need a government-run bank. But Hamilton won the argument sort of because George Washington did go along with the creation of the First Bank of the United States, but the way in which he won the argument is George Washington wanted the District of Columbia to border his property in Virginia.

10:54And so the deal was George Washington went along with the creation of the First Bank of the United States, precursor of the Fed, if when they moved the nation's capital to what is now Washington, D.C., it would be adjacent to Mount Vernon. and so that was the political deal he signed off on the Bank of the United States. Hamilton invented the notion of implied war powers. He advocated a standing army, and I'm convinced, I make the argument in my book, is the reason he wanted a standing army, which Jefferson did not, was he wanted a standing army of tax collectors to intimidate Americans, not to defend against foreign invaders, and he proved that to me by leading 15,000 troops with George Washington in the Whiskey Rebellion into Pennsylvania to put down a tax revolt. That was a standing army of conscripts. The soldiers were conscripts, the officers were mostly affluent bondholders, government bondholders from the Eastern Seaboard who wanted to make sure there was enough money in the treasury

11:54through the whiskey tax, among other things, to pay off their bonds. And so I'm convinced that that's why he wanted a standing army, he wanted a standing army of tax collectors. He provided the original intellectual argument for a large national debt. John Steele Gordon, who I mentioned before, wrote a book called Hamilton's Blessing. Hamilton argued that a large national debt would be a public blessing. And the reason he gave for this was that it would enable the government to grow much larger than what the Constitution allowed for. He was Machiavellian in this argument and he said that it would tie the wealthy people of the country to the government because they would be the bondholders and they would therefore Jefferson was right. Just as we tie the poor people today to the state, he wanted to tie the wealthy. That worked for a long time. That was the basis of the Whig Party and the Republican Party in the 19th century. He despised men like Jefferson, who he said, quote, has

12:56an excessive concern for liberty, end quote. After Jefferson gave his first inaugural address Hamilton's speech was denounced by Hamilton as the symptom of a pygmy mind, as a Fed publication called A History of Central Banking in America that boasts that Hamilton was the founding father of central banking in America. It even says that he sounded like a modern Fed chairman, and I was telling someone this This morning I tell some of my students that Greenspan always sounded to me like my old uncle with Alzheimer's, crazy sounding, congressional speeches he would make, and I would read some of them, bring them into class and read their Greenspan's comments, and it's like you're on and on and on and nothing, no two sentences are connected, and so yeah, Hamilton did talk like that.

13:54I've read all of his reports and speeches. It was Hamilton who invented the big lie that the states were never sovereign and that the The Constitution was somehow created by the whole people of the United States. He invented that argument out of thin air. And here's what Clinton Rosser says about Hamilton and the Constitution. The principles of nationalism and broad construction expounded by Hamilton and his disciples have long monopolized constitutional law. The formula for congressional authority today, this is back in the 1960s he's writing, the formula for congressional authority reads commerce power plus the war powers plus the the power to tax and spend for the general welfare times the loosest possible reading of the words necessary and proper. And I quote him also as saying he really provided the roadmap for generations of lawyers to twist the words of the Constitution because Hamilton's view of the Constitution was that, properly interpreted, it could be a potential rubber stamp for unlimited government.

14:54Just the opposite of Jefferson's view that it could be something that would constrain government. and so he was also the founding father of crony capitalism I have 30 seconds left I'll quote William Graham Sumner who wrote a great biography of Hamilton which is online he said Hamilton naturally could not consent to a policy which would have dictated to him to hold his rash hands when his whole being was in a quiver to seize that which he thought was going wrong and a press upon it at once and with unshrinking reliance on his own judgment input so he was sort of an early Day, Barack Obama, in that regard, in order to regulate and control all human behavior. Thank you very much.