New York capitalists' founding father

Even New York capitalists need a founding father, apparently. The New-York Historical Society's soon-to-close exhibit on Alexander Hamilton - part of a Hamilton boom which also includes Ron Chernow's recent biography - was, according to the historian Mike Wallace, a severely compromised work of public history.

Wallace's review of the exhibit is long and meandering, but it does a very good job of deconstructing both the physical exhibit - statues, guns, documents - and the underlying ideological argument: that Hamilton created the conditions for modern capitalism to emerge in the U.S. and thereby profoundly shaped our present society more than the better-known founding fathers.

As Wallace points out, drawing those causal connections across more than 200 years is dicey history and actually obscures the picture of Hamilton as a figure who was as deeply interested in furthering what we'd call free enterprise as he was in creating a kind of aristocracy in the new United States. And - again, as Wallace points out - those intersecting concerns are the same ones shared by 21st century plutocrats like those who bankrolled the exhibit and who currently hold the reins in Washington. Wallace's piece is thus an excellent oblique comment on how our capitalism-mad society is remaking its history.