As many of you know, I wrote my senior thesis on Hamilton's democratic theory and am not shy about citing him as my favorite Founding Father. So, naturally, I was intrigued (and a little miffed) by DiLorenzo's thesis and decided to do a little research on DiLorenzo and the reasoning behind his claims. What I found was that DiLorenzo seems to be the kind of "historian" (and I use the term very loosely here) who prefers to manipulate history to fit within his own political biases than to report it accurately. For purposes of fairness it should be noted that DiLorenzo is a professor of economics and not history. However, this is no excuse for his distortions.
Since Hamiltonian scholarship is a bit of a passion of mine, I could go on at length on the subject. However, I will spare you all the boredom and simply attack a few of DiLorenzo's most egregious distortions.
First, DiLorenzo, in an column published on Lew Rockwell's website, claims that Hamilton "lied through his teeth in The Federalist Papers when he spoke favorably about states' rights and federalism," and thus betrayed the Revolution. The problem is that this is a hyperbolic statement based on quotes that DiLorenzo cherry picked to fit his particular ideology. DiLorenzo bases his assertion that Hamilton "lied through his teeth" on a speech given by Hamilton during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which he appears to advocate for what DiLorenzo calls a "dictatorial chief executive with king-like powers." In this speech, Hamilton stated that "the hereditary interest of the King was so interwoven with that of the nation, and his personal emolument so great, that he was placed above the danger of being corrupted from abroad; and at the same time was both sufficiently independent and sufficiently controlled, to answer the purpose of the institution at home." This particular speech had to do with Hamilton's belief in benefits of looking to the British Crown as a model on which to base the American executive. He was not, however, advocating an American monarchy. Rather, Hamilton was noting that even though the American Colonies had rebelled against the abuses of the British monarchy and Parliament, that some lessons could be learned from the model and modified to fit within the principles and ideals of the American Revolution. Specifically, Hamilton looked to the independence of the British monarch as a source of stability against the potential abuses of pure democracy. Hamilton, more than any other Founding Father, recognized the possibility that the colonies, having recently thrown off the yolk of a corrupt monarchy, would go too far with its brand of republicanism and establish a nearly anarchical state that would quickly become destabilized and destroy itself. DiLorenzo either did not do the necessary research or simply chose to ignore the context surrounding Hamilton's ideas for the American executive. If he had, he would have discovered another portion of Hamilton's 1787 address to the Constitutional Convention in which he states, "we ought to go as far, in order to attain stability and permanency, as republican principles will admit."
A second distortion is DiLorenzo's claim that Hamilton advocated "the creation of a large national debt for the sake of having a large national debt." Further, DiLorenzo claimed that the purpose of this debt was to tie the wealthy people to the national government so that they would "always support tax increases and bigger government." This is such an outright distortion (blatant lie) that I cannot even give DiLorenzo the benefit of the doubt. What DiLorenzo calls Hamilton's "creation of a large national debt" was not a creation of debt at all. Rather, it was a consolidation of the debts that the individual states incurred during the Revolution. The goal of this consolidation, as outlined in Hamilton's "First Report on Public Credit," was to allow the United States to quickly pay off the debts that it owed to other nations in order to establish good credit. Hamilton recognized that "states, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct." Thus, in order to gain the respect of the world, one of the first steps that the young nation had to take was the swift repayment of the debts it owed. In developing a policy for the repayment of public debts, Hamilton considered "whether such a provision cannot be more conveniently and effectually made by one general plan, issuing from one authority, than by different plans, originating from different authorities." To put it simply, would the Revolutionary War debts owed by the individual states be more efficiently paid off if left to the states to pay them or if they were assumed by the federal government and consolidated into a national debt? Since the states were no longer autonomous entities under the Union created by the Constitution, Hamilton believed that the best solution was to consolidate the debt in order to prevent the destabilization of the nation's credit that would occur if one or more of the states was unable (or unwilling) to pay off the debts that they owed. The assumption of the state war debts by the federal government also accomplished a secondary goal that Hamilton had: it created a sense of goodwill amongst the states to the federal government and further unified the nation. At that time, citizens of the United States felt more loyalty to their individual states than to the nation as a whole. This is understandable since prior to the Revolution each colony was autonomous, owing its only loyalty to the British monarchy. Once independence was declared, the colonies gained even more autonomy, creating only a loose confederation for the common purpose of throwing off the monarchy. The assumption of the state debts by the national government was one way that Hamilton believed a greater sense of unity could created amongst the individual states. This union, he rightly believed, was essential for the survival of the young republic.
Finally, DiLorenzo claims that Hamilton "spent his entire adult life lobbying for 'excessive' government." As I have shown in the above discussion on Hamilton's framework for the executive, DiLorenzo's claim is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hamilton. Again, drawing from Hamilton's speeches at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, we see that "excessive" government was not part of Hamilton's vision. Rather, his speeches reveal a fundamental belief that power naturally begets tyranny whether it is concentrated in the hands of the few or the many. The solution advocated by Hamilton was that power "ought to be in the hands of both [i.e. the few and the many] and they should be separated." Power, then, "if separated [...would] need a mutual check." Thus, when we actually look to history and Hamilton's own words, we see a political philosophy that advocates the quintessentially American notion of separation of powers as opposed to "excessive" government.
Since he has either been a lazy historian (at best) or blatantly distorted history to fit within his own political biases (at worst), Thomas DiLorenzo is officially on notice.
1 comment:
People seriously ought to be more comprehensive with their 'historical' research or else cease referring to themselves as historians or writers in any sense of history. I refuse to be lumped together with that ilk.
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