There’s been rather a fuss in the British media lately over the
teaching of history in schools. Niall Ferguson, professor of
history at Harvard and Oxford and what the British call a “telly
don,” decries the ignorance of British schoolchildren and the
parlous state of history teaching when “it is possible to leave
school in England knowing only about Henry VIII, Hitler and Martin
Luther King Jr.” Others say that the study of history is alive and
well. Somehow, I doubt it. In America, we have heard similar
arguments, and they are perhaps alluded to in the scene in the new
documentary, “Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton,” (screening on PBS
at 10:00 on Monday, or check local listings), when the host and
narrator, Richard Brookhiser, goes to Hamilton’s alma mater, then
known as King’s College but now as Columbia University in New York,
and asks random students if they know who Alexander Hamilton was.
Not surprisingly, although Hamilton’s name is everywhere as the
university’s most distinguished alumnus, few of them do. Where do
you start with these kids?
I found it rather touching that the one group which had
heard something about this once well-known Founding Father whose
face is on the ten-dollar bill were part of Columbia’s equivalent
of ROTC, still banned on campus at the time the film was made, who
called themselves “The Hamilton Society.” They did so as a tribute
not only to the great man himself but to the militia which he
helped to form while still a 19-year old student and which he led
to assist General Washington at the battle of Princeton in January
of 1777. Elsewhere in the film, we see high school kids from
Virginia re-enacting Hamilton’s heroic action at the Battle of
Yorktown, using brightly colored red and blue plastic bats as
weapons. Afterwards a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan explains to
the youths the differences and similarities to real battles today.
He tells them that in real battles people get hurt and killed.
Perhaps that’s where you start.
What I liked best about the film is that it begins and
ends with the idea that, although he has no equivalent to the
magnificent monument in Washington of his great rival, Jefferson,
Hamilton’s monument is really the world’s great commercial center
of New York City, as beautifully photographed here as you will ever
see it, which would not have evolved as it did without the legal
and economic system he did so much to put in place in the early
days of the Republic. Hamilton, “the bastard brat of a Scotch
pedlar,” as John Adams called him, was born in the West Indies and
came to colonial America while still in his teens, making his way
to pre-eminence there entirely by his own efforts. As President
Washington’s Treasury Secretary, he set us on the course to become
the commercial and cosmopolitan nation we have always been rather
than the agrarian utopia that Jefferson would have preferred. In
this sense Hamilton is, in spite of political failure and ultimate
tragedy during his lifetime, victorious in the eternal struggle
between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that many see as still
continuing to this day.
One way in which it continues is in the spitefulness of
Gore Vidal, who tells Mr. Pack’s camera that both Hamilton and his
nemesis, Aaron Burr, were “tiny guys” with “the egos of giants.”
Well, he ought to know. They never wrote any novels, after all.
This is one of numerous interviews which Mr. Brookhiser, the author
of Alexander Hamilton, American, and his
producer-director Michael Pack are to be commended for using to get
around the inherent difficulties of making a film about the days
before photography. It’s a great story, and they tell it with great
resourcefulness and originality. Yet they also show that they are
aware of the great, perhaps fatal concessions they have to make to
an audience that knows next to nothing about Hamilton or the early
days of the nation’s founding.
As today’s history teachers will tell you, the way to get
history into the heads of today’s children is by analogizing from
the familiar to the unfamiliar. You know the sort of thing: imagine
that you are a soldier in Washington’s army or an Indian girl at
the time of Pocahontas or whatever. The trouble with that is that
you bring too much “you” with you, and it is bound to get in the
way of trying to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else. It’s
no criticism of “Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton” to say that it
takes analogizing to its limits and beyond, as that is doubtless
what PBS, no less than the teaching profession, has expected of it.
In addition to the Yorktown reenactment, there are also amusing
representations of Hamilton as he argues a case before the People’s
Court’s Marilyn Milian and of his meeting with Talleyrand as
impersonated by the dapper French philosophe,
Bernard-Henri Lévy — BHL, as he is known to his legion of French
fans, didn’t care much for Mr. Hamilton’s wine — and, less
amusingly but without live ammunition, of the fatal duel between
Hamilton and Burr with two present-day members of their respective
families in the starring roles.
The limits of the analogizing technique, however, are
reached with the part where the sex scandal involving Hamilton and
Maria Reynolds prompts a visit to Larry Flynt and his team of
muckrakers, where they are asked for their tips on “covering” such
scandals. Though Mr. Flynt is described as a modern-day Callender
— the pamphleteer who broke the story in 1797 — there are too
many differences between them, and between the political culture
then and now, to make the comparison seem very helpful. Almost as
bad was the interview with some plug-ugly gang members, one of whom
has “Death Be4 Dishonor” tattooed on his beefy arm, to get their
take on the duel with Burr. Mr. Brookhiser asks one of these thugs,
who aren’t exactly into analogizing themselves, what he thinks of
the speculation that Hamilton wasted his shot in the duel with
Burr. “Stupid,” says the thug. Duh!
This kind of thing too often produces not knowledge but
the illusion of knowledge. “Oh,” the ignorant are encouraged to
say, “so x is just like y,” where x is a person or an event in the
past of which he has no knowledge and y is a person or event in the
present of which he has some — if, usually, very little —
knowledge. But of course x is not like y, or is like y
only in the most superficial ways and, in fact, everything that
ought to be most interesting about x is precisely what is
unlike y. Thus, the honor code that Hamilton felt himself
bound by in 1804 has a very superficial similarity to that which
today’s street toughs promulgate among themselves, to the
bewilderment or admiration of the larger society, but the ways in
which it was different are legion as well as being more likely to
repay the effort necessary to explore them.
In spite of such blemishes, “Rediscovering Alexander
Hamilton” tells in a thoroughly accessible way one of the great
American stories that too few among the young today will have heard
of before. If they can be inveigled to watch it by parents or
teachers who still care, as some of them surely must care, about
historical literacy, I think I can promise them an enjoyable couple
of hours with a great man whom they may be surprised to find it is
well worth their while to know more about.
