Overview

""William Hogeland is the best guide I have found to understanding how we today are, for good and evil, children of Alexander."" --J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Slouching Towards Utopia How Alexander Hamilton embraced American oligarchy to jumpstart American prosperity. ""Forgotten founder"" no more, Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name. Millions imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight? It's ironic that the Hamilton revival has obscured the man's most dramatic battles and hardest-won achievements--as well as downplaying unsettling aspects of his legacy. Thrilling to the romance of becoming the one-man inventor of a modern nation, our first Treasury secretary fostered growth by engineering an ingenious dynamo--banking, public debt, manufacturing--for concentrating national wealth in the hands of a government-connected elite. Seeking American prosperity, he built American oligarchy. Hence his animus and mutual sense of betrayal with Jefferson and Madison--and his career-long fight to suppress a rowdy egalitarian movement little remembered today: the eighteenth-century white working class. Marshaling an idiosyncratic cast of insiders and outsiders, vividly dramatizing backroom intrigues and literal street fights--and sharply dissenting from recent biographies--William Hogeland's The Hamilton Scheme brings to life Hamilton's vision and the hard-knock struggles over democracy, wealth, and the meaning of America that drove the nation's creation and hold enduring significance today.

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9780374167837

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"""I've always loved William Hogeland's writing, especially the confidence and verve with which he knocks down others' stupid sentimentalities in favor of a smart sentimentality that's actually worth holding onto: that American can truly be democratic. This book reveals a knockdown, drag-out, and often violent class war that hid in plain sight over what kind of economy America should have. It makes for as riveting a story as any hip-hop Broadway musical. And it's far more accurate to boot."" --Rick Perstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland"

Author Information

William Hogeland is the author of several books about the founding period, including Autumn of the Black Snake, The Whiskey Rebellion, and Declaration, as well as the essay collections Founding Finance and Inventing American History. He has been a contributor to The New Republic and Boston Review and publishes Hogeland's Bad History on Substack.

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