Writing the book on Hamilton
Jeremy McCarter says First World War jingoism right at home in time of Trump
Jeremy McCarter’s upcoming non-fiction book, Young Radicals, chronicles the intellectual and political adventures of five young activists who fought for freedom and equality in America before the First World War.
Social critic Randolph Bourne, editor/poet Max Eastman, socialist Walter Lippmann, suffragist leader Alice Paul and journalist John Reed sensed that America held great promise in those years. Then the war came, bringing with it a reactionary wave that may look uncomfortably familiar to anyone paying attention to the current climate in America.
“When the war started it all fell apart,” says McCarter, in an interview from his home in Chicago. “They had to decide: Do you continue to fight for your ideals? All of us here, since the election, have gone through such a huge shock that it’s a little timelier than I would like it to be. Many days, I would end my writing day and catch up on the news and feel like I had not closed the right window on my laptop because it was the same stuff.”
McCarter worked on Young Radicals for six years and it will be released in June. So he admits he needed to take some sort of a break. He has told his publishers that he will be “in the mountains and off the grid” this week during his residency at the Banff Centre to contemplate bigger, albeit related, questions about culture and democracy. He will give a talk on Friday at the Centre under the rather general heading Creativity in Society.
McCarter has had a good vantage point to gain valuable insight into the way culture works in American society in the past six years. He was a cultural critic for Newsweek and New York Magazine before joining the staff of the Public Theatre in New York. That put him behind the scenes of Hamilton: An American Musical, the Pulitzer Prize winning culture-shifting phenomenon created by Lin-Manuel Miranda. In 2016, McCarter co-wrote the bestseller Hamilton: The Revolution with Miranda.
“I’m interested in pushing deeper into the questions of how artists affect their society,” says McCarter. “What is the role of culture in a democracy? The election has caused a lot of people here in the states to put some big questions back on the table about this country and how its institutions do and do not work. I’m interested in looking at the piece of it that says ‘Our imaginative artists play some role in shaping our society’ and I want to understand more clearly what that role is and if they are playing it.”
So McCarter plans to chat about his experiences with Hamilton and Young Radicals and with the Public Theatre in general. But it’s Hamilton, specifically, that seems a good case study when it comes to delving into these big forward-thinking questions. McCarter and Miranda’s book quickly became a New York Times bestseller and a bit of a phenomenon all its own, straying from the standard Broadway coffee table form offering a deeper look at the show’s origins and impact.
It chronicles the development of Hamilton, the hip-hop musical about the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution. It was an instant hit with audiences and critics, won 11 Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize for drama and arguably changed the face of American theatre.
Hamilton has been dubbed the perfect musical for the Obama era, a reflection of a country run by a hip-hop loving African-American president who emphasized intellect and inclusion. So what happens now that America has a president who not only seems to thrive on division but has vowed to gut federal arts funding?
“It feels like all the big questions are on the table,” McCarter says. “Lots of things that Americans value very highly are in jeopardy, support for the arts being one of them. The most gratifying thing that has happened in a long time in this country was the women’s march on Jan. 21 because it showed that a lot of Americans, millions of Americans, are willing to take to the streets in defence of what they believe. On the one hand, I am highly concerned about the news coming out of Washington. On the other hand, I am encouraged and inspired by the news coming from everywhere else in America.”