This Independence Day weekend was a weird one for most people. Cities across the country canceled their firework shows and parades out of fear of the coronavirus. Protests that characterized most of June raged on into the holiday weekend, during which Baltimore saw the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue. A statue of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was downed in Rochester, New York, reminding us once again that the churning of grievance on the Left against monuments is more of an unfocused tantrum than a calculated statement about our nation’s complicated origin story.
We’ve always been a country at war with our own history, but this weekend that war felt high pitched. Enter stage left: Hamilton, the smash-hit Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda that really took the country by storm in 2015. Filmed for the big screen but released exclusively to Disney+ on July 3 because of COVID-19, Hamilton could not have come to us at a better time.
We need to talk about our history, its contradictions, aspirations, and consequences, all of it. Hamilton opens the door for intergenerational discussion that dignifying, shrieking millennials vandalizing statues simply do not.
The play revolves around founding father Alexander Hamilton’s rivalry with Aaron Burr, a fellow New York lawyer, a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and eventual third vice president of the United States under then-President Thomas Jefferson. Major spoiler alert: Burr kills Hamilton in a duel after their very public animosities reached a fever pitch in 1804. The musical could best be described as taking liberties with history, but for a specific and virtuous purpose: to engage, own, and reassert a new narrative about America’s founding.
“Exclusion” seems to be the buzzword of choice these days by young, leftist demonstrators and agitators alike on the subject of Independence Day. Look back to Frederick Douglass, the man whose statue now lays broken and irreparable in Rochester, who said of Independence Day in 1852 that for the slave it is, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Douglass was of course correct, but the feeling has metastasized beyond slavery into a larger argument for racial justice that no amount of argumentation about the ideals of the Declaration of Independence can satisfy.
If you want a modern method to open conversations with your children about our history and exclusion, there’s no better way to start than by watching Hamilton as a family. Once described in Vox as a Founding Fathers “fanfiction,” Hamilton takes “exclusion” head-on with a race-bending approach to telling the story. To put it in the sung-words of Hamilton’s wife Eliza, minorities and people of color are written “back into the narrative” of our founding story in a one-two punch of meta-commentary and loving critique of a country built on ideas, not men.
Hamilton takes the founding for what it was, a remarkable challenge undertaken by a collection of flawed men from wildly different backgrounds, viewpoints, and experiences. They were not all simply, “white men,” they were people. You have Hamilton, the “bastard, orphan, son of a whore;” Washington, the reluctant patriarch; Jefferson, the ideologue; Burr, the excessive moderate; Marquis de Lafayette, the globetrotting revolutionary; and John Laurens, the fallen abolitionist.
John Adams is nowhere to be seen, and you get the distinct impression that it’s by design. It’s also possible that the real Hamilton wouldn’t have had it any other way. And therein lies the point.
Hamilton the musical isn’t “history” but it invites you to think about history differently, which is as a set of competing narratives. In an age of increasing generational divide on even the most basic elements of America’s story, any conversation starter oriented toward optimism will do.
With my town’s weekend fireworks show canceled, I sat out on my front stoop with my young daughter after watching Hamilton in its entirety. Fireworks were being set off by families in every direction we could see. In all of its disorganized glory, it was beautiful.
My daughter asked about the characters of Hamilton, “Did they all really argue that much?” To which I responded, “Of course. Wouldn’t you fight your hardest if you were creating a new country … for it to be as good as it can be?”
In this moment of iconoclastic rage washing over the nation yet again, we mustn’t forget to talk to our children about the substance of the great debates that shaped our country. Arguing with young people over the virtue of one statue over another is a dead end.
Watch Hamilton. Talk about the long-running battle of narratives and ideas that make up America’s complete story, not just the greatness of individual men.
The musical may be nearly three hours, but it’s time well spent.
Stephen Kent is the spokesperson for Young Voices, host of Beltway Banthas Podcast, and a political commentator as seen on Fox Business, BlazeTV, and Fox 5 DC.
