Irked historians duel with Hamilton
A new play features Miranda haunted by founding father’s victims
NEW YORK— Ever since the historical musical Hamilton began its march to near-universal infatuation, one group has noticeably withheld its applause: historians. Many academics argue the portrait of Alexander Hamilton, the star of U.S. $10 bills, is a counterfeit. Now they’re escalating their fight.
Ishmael Reed, who has been nominated twice for a National Book Award, has chosen to fight fire with fire, collecting his critique of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acclaimed show into a play.
Reed’s The Haunting of Lin
Manuel Miranda is an uncompromising takedown of Hamil
ton, reminding viewers of the Founding Father’s complicity in slavery and his war on Native Americans.
“My goal is that this be a counternarrative to the text that has been distributed to thousands of students throughout the country,” said Reed, who teaches at the California College of the Arts and the University of California at Berkeley.
Reed, whose play had a recent reading in New York and who is raising money for a four-week production in May, is part of a wave of Hamilton skeptics, often solitary voices of dissent amid a wall of fawning attention, who have written articles, op-eds and a 2018 collection of essays, Historians on Hamilton.
Miranda’s glowing portrayal of a Hamilton who celebrates open borders — “Immigrants, we get the job done!” — and who denounces slavery has incensed everyone from professors at Harvard to the Universi- ty of Houston to Rutgers.
They argue that Miranda got Hamilton all wrong; the Founding Father wasn’t progressive at all, his actual role as a slave owner has been whitewashed and the pro-immigrant figure onstage hides the fact that he was, in fact, an anti-immigration elitist.
“It’s a fictional rewrite of Hamilton. You can’t pick the history facts that you want,” said Nancy Isenberg, a professor of American history at Louisiana State University who has written a biography of Aaron Burr and is the author of White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.
It’s not just the portrait of Hamilton that has drawn fire. Critics also say Miranda’s portrait of Burr is horribly distort- ed and argue that Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler, was in no way a feminist, as she is portrayed in the musical.
Reed considers Hamilton so problematic that even edits to it wouldn’t help. “I think the corrective would be to close the show,” he said.
Reed’s own play borrows from Charles Dickens in portraying a naive Miranda being visited by a succession of ghostly slaves, Native Americans and indentured servants — people Reed argues never made it into the Tony, Grammy and Pulitzerwinning musical.
“What I tried to do was to cover the voices that were not present onstage,” Reed said.
Reed, who has not seen Hamilton but read it, criticizes the musical as just the latest piece of entertainment that is sympathetic to slave owners.
“I say this is a successor to Gone With the Wind,” he said. “But at least in Gone With the Wind, Hattie McDaniel had a speaking part.”
In Reed’s play, Hamilton is unmasked as a slave owner who once worked for a slave trading firm in St. Croix. “You’ve been up to your blue eyes in the slave trade from the time you were a child,” he is told. A slave tells Miranda that the Schuyler family, which Hamilton married into, were brutal slave owners and life under them was “no damned musical comedy.”
A horrified fictional Miranda is eventually convinced by the evidence. “I have to undo the damage that I have done,” he wails at the end. “Because of me, thousands of schoolchildren are trapped intellectually in the same lies as I was.”
Perhaps the true villain of the piece is historian Ron Chernow, who wrote the award-winning biography of Hamilton that Miranda relied upon. (“You should have read books by Black people,” a slave tells Miranda in Reed’s play.) At the play’s conclusion, the fictional Chernow advises the fictional Miranda to stop making a fuss and just enjoy their “good hustle.”
Chernow has declined to comment on Reed’s criticisms, and a publicist for Hamilton and Miranda also declined to comment.
However, Miranda has said in interviews that while he felt a responsibility to be as historically accurate as possible, Hamilton is necessarily a work of historical fiction, including dramatizations and imprecisions.
Perhaps in a veiled response to the critics, producers of Hamilton have created an immersive exhibit — to open in Chicago this fall — that promises to take “visitors deeper into the life and times” of Hamilton. How much it will try to correct the impressions made in the musical are unclear.
Harvard Law professor and historian Annette GordonReed, who has criticized the show in the past, is offering her historical consultation for the exhibit. She attended a reading of Reed’s play and sounded a hopeful note that both sides can come together.
“There’s room for my earlier commentary, Mr. Reed’s take, the grand musical itself and now a good-faith effort to consider the musical’s subject in his real-world historical context, which is what the exhibit is designed to do,” she said.