‘Hamilton’ rehearsal marred by currency demotion
The cast of “Hamilton” is feeling giddy. The show, which begins performances on Broadway next month, is the talk of the town, and is selling well. The subject, Alexander Hamilton, is resurgent in the popular imagination. But on Thursday, as the cast gathered to begin rehearsals, there was one sour note in the air: just a day earlier, the Treasury Department announced it was going to redesign the $10 bill to feature a woman, keeping Hamilton on the currency but presumably in a less prominent position.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer and star of “Hamilton,” had settled down after a bit of Twittering. “I thank Jack Lew and the good people of the Treasury Department for putting Hamilton in the national news on our first day of rehearsals,” he said.
But Ron Chernow, the historian whose biography of “Hamilton” is the basis for the musical, was not so stoic. As he introduced himself to the gathering, standing in the traditional circle that kicks off rehearsals for Broadway shows, he noted the musical opens with a description of Hamilton as “the $10 Founding Father without a father,” and said he did not want the show to have to change the lyric.
Later, Chernow went further, saying he thought the Treasury was making a big mistake. He called Hamilton “the most important person in American history who never reached the White House.”
“It was really a shockingly wrongheaded decision for our Treasury secretary to diminish the status of our greatest Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton,” he said. “Hamilton’s position on the $10 bill has been so important in terms of placing him in the pantheon of American political heroes — after all, his image is not carved on Mount Rushmore, he doesn’t have a big fancy memorial in D.C., so really his claim to fame has been his position on the $10 bill, and I find it sadly ironic that at a moment where so many people are discovering Alexander Hamilton for the first time.”
Chernow said he was all for featuring a woman on American currency — he suggested Harriet Tubman or Eleanor Roosevelt or Susan B. Anthony — and said “I am pro-Hamilton, not anti-women, in this controversy.” But he said the $20 bill was the right place for a change.
“The figure whose time has come for a reappraisal is really Andrew Jackson,” he said. “Hamilton was a passionate abolitionist; Andrew Jackson had hundreds of slaves in the course of his life, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Native Americans during the infamous Trail of Tears — that’s really the figure who should be reconsidered. Hamilton’s niche in the pantheon should be secure.”