Alexander Hamilton: A Biography
McDonald, Forrest
B00K IN REVIEWS - "Alexander Hamilton: A Biography" not lost on the Russians. In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lebanon they have exploited the fact, evidenced in Cuba, that relatively untrained guerrillas can master the Soviet equipment quickly and use...
...As McDonald summarizes: The Jeffersonians labored for a dozen years to tear down what Hamilton had built, only to blunder their way into a war and thereby to discover the necessity of putting it back together again...
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...In this superb biography by Forrest McDonald, professor of...
...For this access Hamilton earned the envy of Jefferson and Madison, who continually maneuvered to dilute his influence...
...distinguishes between ethical individualism and destructive egoism...
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...In fact, it was their failure to do so that inspired them to launch the Democratic Republican Party, which continually sniped at the administration's policies and made for so much political divisiveness...
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...In fact, his killing of Hamilton was less a tragedy than perhaps a meting out of just deserts...
...history at the University of Alabama and distinguished senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern History and Cuttta'e, such historical myths are not suffered gladly...
...Those in the South adopted Jeffersonian rules and their society continued to rest upon the mystique of the land, upon slavery and upon the exercise of force without the impartial restraint of law...
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...In addition, McDonald points out that Hamilton was the moving force behind the first Presidency: Washington seldom made a move without consulting his indispensable Treasury Secretary...
...This splendid biography will doubtless remain the standard against which subsequent Hamiltonian scholars will measure their labors...
...T h i s is not to suggest that Hamilton was without faults...
...And once he was involved in a messy extramarital affair, including blackmail, that could have brought him personal ruin and sabotaged the financial structure he labored so diligently to construct...
...His independence and the ease with which he could grasp intellectual detail led him to a certain impatience...
...A generation later the Jeffersonian heirs, the J acksonian Democrats, tore it down again with a peculiar result...
...91 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980 35 the economy with the combustible elements of a free market, in which money, as a commodity, would serve as the ultimate leveller, in a sort of monetary merit'system...
...By comparison, Jefferson, and others, profited from, among other things, land speculation, which not incidentally guided Llbel Ld rtyC szs Democracy and Leadership By Irving Babbitt A penetrating work of political and moral philosophy, first published in 1924, Democracy and Leadership is packed with wisdom...
...describes true and false liberals...
...The Civil War brought the triumph of the Hamiltonian way, leaving Jefferson's beloved South a wretched and accursed backwater...
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...F101,163-09 Depot, Flushing, NY 11358 siderable contributions to our nation's history, McDonald contends that Hamilton's intent in creating a new financial system was, in part, to supplant a stagnant social order of plutocrats whose power and prestige rested less on ability than on inheritance...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1980...
...ALEXANDER HAMILTON: A BIOGRAPHY ForrestMcDonald / Norton I $17.50 Alan L. Miller The shifting winds of historical interpretation have been especially unfair to Alexander Hamilton...
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...Granted, Hamilton was intelligent and clever about money matters, but his fiscal policies lined the pockets of the rich...
...Indeed, in the process of praising Hamilton's conAlan L. Miller is a free-lauce writwr whose reviews have appeared in National Review and Saturday Review...
...The rest of the nation moved on to greatness...
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...With a foreword by Russell Kirk...
...Irving Babbitt was a distinguished professor of French literature at Harvard and a leader of the intellectual movement called American Humanism...
...He summarizes the principal political philosophies...
...In the absence of an effective national government it became possible for each state to make its own rules of the game...
...Moreover, Jefferson's counsel, often epigrammatic and tendentious, bordered on being irresponsible, especially in matters of foreign policy...
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...In Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lebanon they have exploited the fact, evidenced in Cuba, that relatively untrained guerrillas can master the Soviet equipment quickly and use it effectively...
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...Instead of receiving the appreciative appraisal he surely deserves, this brilliant architect of our national foundation is too often reduced to playing the villain opposite Thomas Jefferson, the one dour and dispassionate, the other humane...
...In McDonald's account, Hamilton emerges as an idealist who, although incurring heavy personal debts in the meager pay of government service, never compromised his integrity by using the power of his position for personal gain...
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...But even here he confronted the problem squarely, foiling the blackmailers and regaining the confidence of his wife...
...Fortunately, Hamilton's calmer voice usually held sway, as when he convinced Washington to steer a middle course in 1793, when the fledgling nation came perilously close to a rematch with the British...
...We are told, for instance, that Jefferson extolled the virtues of the common folk, while Hamilton referred to them as " a great beast...
...This was his only directly political book, and in it Babbitt applies the principles of humanism to the civil social order...
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...In place of pedigree and privilege, Hamilton, as the nation's first Treasury Secretary, sought to infuse Changing Your Address...
...contrasts Rousseau with Burke...
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...That is one reason why his conclusions were sound enough to launch the nation, and sustain it through many assaults...
...Those elsewhere adopted Hamiltonian rules, and their society rested upon the market, free labor, contractual relationships, and law...
...Thus, it is Jefferson, with his spirit of noblesse oblige, who qualifies for historical canonization, not Hamilton, the bastard who grew too fast, trading his modest past and humanity for the trappings of wealth and power...
...many came to resent his intellect and detached manner...
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...Democracy and Leadership joins the broken links between politics and morals-and that accomplishment marks it as a work of genius...
...For this effort Hamilton was branded a sympathizer with the Empire when in fact his philosophical pragmatism determined a stable course that Jefferson's irrational attachment to the French would never have allowed...
...And if this is not quite enough, it turns out that Aaron Burr was not really a scoundrel after all...
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...Given the many insurgency movements sponsored by the Russians today, and given the fact that those who oppose the insurgents will have to fight without full outside support, perhaps the Bay of Pigs should be remembered as an example less of our own ineptitude for directing the course of events in the Third World than of the Soviets' great aptitude for it...
...Above all else, Hamilton was an economic genius who, in consolidating our national debt, establishing a mint, revising the tax system, and creating a national bank, drew upon a wide range of intellectual sources...
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Vol. 13 • January 1980 • No. 1
