LMM News Part 2 (sort of): Hamilton, impeachment and the current news cycle

I started tweeting about Alexander Hamilton and impeachment this morning as a way of avoiding working on my end-of-the semester grading, and it kind of got out of control.  Here it is in mildly more coherent form:

Pep Montserrat for The Washington Post

It all started this morning when I was reading the Washington Post’s morning newsletter The Daily 202 that carried the headline “Alexander Hamilton has been cast in a starring role for impeachment’s closing arguments.” (I might also note that it came with a fantastic bit of artwork by Pep Montserrat.) In it, Post journalist James Hohmann writes, using an abundance of references to the Hamilton musical, about how politicians of both the Republican and Democratic persuasion have been using the nation’s first treasury secretary and defender of the constitution to talk about the impeachment of President Trump.

Most of the talk has come Hamilton’s work on the Federalist Papers, a collection of essays written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in defense of the U.S. Constitution.  (If you want to actually see the original text, Congress’s web site has a good on-line version of them.) And while Hamilton (and Madison’s and Jay’s) writings are as germane today as ever, there’s no question that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical is a big part of what we are paying so much attention to the first treasury secretary.

https://youtu.be/o78c23qSR4g

As a side note, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote and starred in the musical Hamilton, told The New York Post (a newspaper co-founded by Hamilton!) that it never occurred to him that his musical would be so big. “I thought it would be popular with teachers, and I hoped it would appeal to hip-hop fans and musical theater fans alike, [but] I never anticipated how it would catch on with people in power, and how often I hear politicians and people who work in DC quoting the show,” Miranda told the NY Post.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs with the cast of “Hamilton” at the 2016 Tony Awards.

But I think there’s one more reason I can think of for Alexander Hamilton to come to the forefront right now. Hohmann, writing for The Daily 202, said that Hamilton never got to be president because he was killed in a duel. While that is certainly true, Hamilton’s political career was over much earlier for a range of reasons.

Among the reasons Hamilton was never president was because he paid hush money to cover an affair he had with Mariah Reynolds. When his political enemies found out about the payments, they initially assumed they had to do with evidence of improper currency speculation. Hamilton responded by publishing  The Reynold’s Pamphlet — an exhaustive documentation of his affair and subsequent blackmail payments. That pamphlet, I think, is one of the reasons he never became president. (That and the so-called Adams Pamphlet that attacked President John Adams from his own party.)

Anyway, James Hohmann has a great news commentary in the Washington Post today, but keep in mind the rest of the story.

And finally… when people say that political times have never been this bad before, just remember there was a time when the sitting vice president gunned down the former treasury secretary in a duel.  So far we don’t have that happening… Yet, anyway.

The duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton at Weedhawken, N.J.