The fuss about 'Hamilton' is well-deserved

By Michael J. Fitzgerald

The award-winning stage musical “Hamilton” is one of those clever shows that remain cemented in your consciousness well beyond the confines of the theater and last strains of music.

Nearly a week after seeing the play in San Francisco, the song “The Room Where It Happens” still rings in my ears.

Lin Manuel Miranda

It’s not just the catchy hip-hop lyrics, stunning dance choreography or haunting tunes. It’s how pertinent this Broadway snapshot of historical events from 200-plus years ago is today.

The life and times of Alexander Hamilton are likely hazy for people who haven’t been swept up in the mania generated by this musical or history buffs immersed in the founding of America.

To many people, he’s just the guy on the $10 bill.

But Hamilton was a key figure in the American Revolution, credited with creating the foundations of our modern banking and financial systems. He died famously in a duel fought with pistols with political rival Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804.

That’s an exceptionally bare-bones description of a very complicated life, detailed in an excellent 2004 biography written by award-winning author Ron Chernow.

It was Chernow’s book that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to spend six years writing the lyrics, music and pulling together the show that has been racking up an impressive stack of awards.

But the Hamilton tale reaches far out of the late 18th century into today’s headlines, featuring a racially diverse cast (reflecting 21st century America) emphasizing Hamilton’s humble early life and struggles.

He was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Illegitimate, and orphaned in his early teen years, he was a scrappy survivor using his writing skills to essentially pen his way out of poverty.

The play makes much of his intensity, offering in one pivotal scene that he authored 51 of the 85 documents we know as The Federalist Papers.

It also points out that Hamilton — and many other key figures in the American Revolution and among those drafting the U.S. Constitution — were immigrants.

“Immigrants! We get the job done!” Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette shout at one point in a song. The line gets a huge roar of approval in every “Hamilton” performance.

Chernow writes in his biography: “He embodied an enduring archetype: the obscure immigrant who comes to America, recreates himself, and survives despite a lack of proper birth or breeding,”

The heady victory of the colonists over the British gives way to darker scenes in the latter part of the musical. Political struggles among Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, take center stage.

If you follow today’s news from our nation’s capital, much seems hauntingly familiar.

Not much has changed politically in the last two centuries.

That the nation’s capital is Washington D.C. — and not then-favored New York City — is a product of Hamilton’s aggressive politicking. He engineered a compromise so the federal government would assume states’ Revolutionary War debts in exchange for locating the capital somewhere in the then-agrarian states of Maryland or Virginia.

Throughout the musical, Aaron Burr is ever-present, always in competition, never quite achieving the fame, fortune, or power that Hamilton garnered.

And Burr jealously competed for attention.

The Burr-Hamilton duel — one bit of American history still taught in schools — was preceded by a less-famous volley of pistol shots, resulting in the death of Hamilton’s oldest son, Philip.

Philip’s duel was over an insult spoken about his father by a political supporter of Jefferson. Philip died from a bullet wound he received at the same Weehawken, N.J. dueling area where his father would die three years later.

Maybe one of the most important lessons from “Hamilton” is that the history taught in most schools is a sanitized version of what really happened as our nation was being formed.

“Hamilton” is changing that.

Fitzgerald worked for six newspapers as a writer and editor as well as a correspondent for several news services. He splits his time between Valois, NY and Pt. Richmond, Calif. You can email him at Michael.Fitzgeraldfltcolumnist@gmail.com and visit his website at michaeljfitzgerald.blogspot.com.