This excise tax had further aims that would help reorganize American social and economic life. William Hogeland writes in The Whiskey Rebellion that Hamilton designed the law to favor large producers over smaller ones. The tax would undercut the prices of independent distillers and self-employed farmers, driving them out of business and "into the factories of their creditors." Hogeland writes:
Hamilton not only argued for a military response to the uprising, the Treasury Secretary actually took command of a militia led by George Washington to the mountains of western Pennsylvania's Allegheny Valley. His goals were more far-reaching and strategic than merely to implement compliance and enforce the law. He sought to make an example of the organizations and protesters of the consequences of challenging federal authority. As Hogeland writes, "Hamilton was out to remove the hear of the people's movement he'd been struggling with for more than a decade, not to prosecute individuals." [4]
As commander of the military force that sought to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, Hogeland writes that Hamilton sanctioned large-scale plunder:
Naturally, this history is absent from Miranda's sanitized version of Hamilton. Instead, there is a feel-good, liberal version of Hamilton that fits the propaganda needs of the present-day American empire.
As Paul Street wrote recently in his CounterPunch article "Miranda, Obama, and Hamilton: an Orwellian Menage a Trois for the Neoliberal Age", Miranda's Broadway spectacle is a "brilliant ahistorical monument to Orwellian, fake-progressive bourgeois identity politics in service to the very predominantly Caucasian financial elite and ruling class hegemony."
Miranda also ignores the structural social and economic forces that, since the founding of the United States, have kept the elite rich and the landless poor. Instead, he propagates the illusion that a person's success (or lack thereof) are based on meritocracy. This is a convenient narrative for apologists of inequality.
"Adding to the 'valorization' of the American System," Street writes, "Hamilton's 'Bootstraps Immigrant Narrative' (McMaster) feeds Caucasian capitalism's timeworn victim-blaming story line on why some few folks succeed in climbing up the nation's steep racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic pyramids while most fail."
The reality in Puerto Rico is that the population is suffering due to the same financial empire Hamilton was instrumental in designing and implementing. Like the small farmers and artisans whose livelihoods were crushed by Hamilton's policies that transferred their wealth to the financial elites, Puerto Ricans are being forced to keep paying their ever-shrinking incomes to service the claims against them.
One can imagine Hamilton delighting in the privatization of Puerto Rico's highways and airports, as well as the stipulation in the PROMESA bill that would allow an un-elected junta appointed by the U.S. Congress to lower the minimum wage.
While Miranda advocates for more flexibility for Puerto Rico to restructure its debt and help stabilize social life on the island, he doesn't seem able to recognize that Puerto Rico's problems are rooted in its political status as a colony conquered by the U.S. empire.
The fiction that Puerto Rico is anything other than a colony was put to rest recently when the Supreme Court's Sanchez Valle ruling acknowledged Puerto Rico does not have sovereignty and the U.S. Congress holds all political authority over the island. As a colony ruled by outsiders for their own benefit, the population of Puerto Rico is powerless to change the socioeconomic system imposed on them through the political process. This is exactly how Hamilton would have wanted it.
For Miranda, who talks eloquently of the problems facing his family and the people of Puerto Rico, there should be no greater symbol of the dispossession and social destruction that appear to be reaching a breaking point in Puerto Rico than Alexander Hamilton and his feudal politics that stripped people of their livelihoods and turned them into little more than commodities whose station in life was to produce wealth for others.
References
[1] Richards, Leonard L. Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
"The goal was industry consolidation. Hamilton had learned from the English that commercial agriculture and large industry, when publicly chartered, given tax breaks, and financed by large loans, might turn the United States into an industrial empire to compete with England's. The labor power dissipated on small family farms and in artisan shops could be gathered up, deployed at factories and diversified commercial farms, and boosted through efficient organization." [3]It is not clear whether Hamilton intended to provoke an insurrection, so he could then use the military power of the newly formed government to crush it and serve as an example to others who sought to challenge its dictates. But if Hamilton did indeed want the revolt that logically followed by those impacted by the tax, he was rewarded soon thereafter.
Hamilton not only argued for a military response to the uprising, the Treasury Secretary actually took command of a militia led by George Washington to the mountains of western Pennsylvania's Allegheny Valley. His goals were more far-reaching and strategic than merely to implement compliance and enforce the law. He sought to make an example of the organizations and protesters of the consequences of challenging federal authority. As Hogeland writes, "Hamilton was out to remove the hear of the people's movement he'd been struggling with for more than a decade, not to prosecute individuals." [4]
As commander of the military force that sought to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, Hogeland writes that Hamilton sanctioned large-scale plunder:
"He made theft legal. The quartermaster corps, he announced would impress civilian property along the way. Now families watched helplessly as bayonet-wielding soldiers - no longer freelancing thieves but officials, authorized by the president - commandeered hard-won winter supplies of grain, meat, firewood, and blankets on behalf of the government of the United States. A steady, freezing rain meant the arrival of winter. Families whose sustenance was carted away faced grim months ahead." [5]When Hamilton's forces reached the rebels, they terrorized the local population with night raids that resulted in mass arrests. Prisoners were threatened with hanging and left shackled, freezing and nearly starved. In the end, only 20 prisoners were brought back to Philadelphia for trial. All except one were found innocent. The one conviction was later overturned.
As Paul Street wrote recently in his CounterPunch article "Miranda, Obama, and Hamilton: an Orwellian Menage a Trois for the Neoliberal Age", Miranda's Broadway spectacle is a "brilliant ahistorical monument to Orwellian, fake-progressive bourgeois identity politics in service to the very predominantly Caucasian financial elite and ruling class hegemony."
Miranda also ignores the structural social and economic forces that, since the founding of the United States, have kept the elite rich and the landless poor. Instead, he propagates the illusion that a person's success (or lack thereof) are based on meritocracy. This is a convenient narrative for apologists of inequality.
"Adding to the 'valorization' of the American System," Street writes, "Hamilton's 'Bootstraps Immigrant Narrative' (McMaster) feeds Caucasian capitalism's timeworn victim-blaming story line on why some few folks succeed in climbing up the nation's steep racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic pyramids while most fail."
The reality in Puerto Rico is that the population is suffering due to the same financial empire Hamilton was instrumental in designing and implementing. Like the small farmers and artisans whose livelihoods were crushed by Hamilton's policies that transferred their wealth to the financial elites, Puerto Ricans are being forced to keep paying their ever-shrinking incomes to service the claims against them.
One can imagine Hamilton delighting in the privatization of Puerto Rico's highways and airports, as well as the stipulation in the PROMESA bill that would allow an un-elected junta appointed by the U.S. Congress to lower the minimum wage.
While Miranda advocates for more flexibility for Puerto Rico to restructure its debt and help stabilize social life on the island, he doesn't seem able to recognize that Puerto Rico's problems are rooted in its political status as a colony conquered by the U.S. empire.
The fiction that Puerto Rico is anything other than a colony was put to rest recently when the Supreme Court's Sanchez Valle ruling acknowledged Puerto Rico does not have sovereignty and the U.S. Congress holds all political authority over the island. As a colony ruled by outsiders for their own benefit, the population of Puerto Rico is powerless to change the socioeconomic system imposed on them through the political process. This is exactly how Hamilton would have wanted it.
For Miranda, who talks eloquently of the problems facing his family and the people of Puerto Rico, there should be no greater symbol of the dispossession and social destruction that appear to be reaching a breaking point in Puerto Rico than Alexander Hamilton and his feudal politics that stripped people of their livelihoods and turned them into little more than commodities whose station in life was to produce wealth for others.
References
[1] Richards, Leonard L. Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty. Simon and Schuster , 2015. Kindle edition.
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