Ever wonder what Harvard professors sing in the shower? These days, there’s a good chance it’s a song from the musical Hamilton.
“I’m a huge fan of the music,” says Glenn Cohen, law professor and director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy. “I often sing it in the shower. As a Canadian, much of the American history I’ve learned is what’s directly relevant to constitutional law, so I really appreciate learning more about the personalities involved.”
Hamilton: An American Musical—which debuted on Broadway this summer to widespread critical acclaim—is based on the life of Alexander Hamilton. It traces the story of his impoverished childhood in the West Indies, his rise to power as the first Treasury Secretary of the newly-minted United States government, and his death in a duel with sitting Vice President Aaron Burr. Composer Lin-Manuel Miranda imagines Hamilton as the archetypical American Dreamer, “young, scrappy, and hungry,” an orphaned immigrant who came to the U.S. at age 17 and “got a lot farther by working a lot harder/by being a lot smarter/by being a self-starter.” In Hamilton, the Founding Fathers are all played by people of color, and hip-hop is the musical language of the Revolution. It is, in Miranda’s words, “the story of America then, told by America now.”
One person who was listening to Hamilton before it was popular was constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. In 2012, Tribe taught a General Education course on constitutional law to undergraduates at Harvard University. While preparing a lecture on McCulloch v. Maryland—the case that affirmed the constitutionality of the Second Bank of the United States under the necessary and proper clause—Tribe was looking for a way to “challenge students’ expectations about a course on a legal topic.” He had recently stumbled across Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton Mixtape, a sample of the musical Miranda was still in the process of completing, and was struck by the song’s opening lines:
How does a bastard boy, son of a whore
and a Scotsman,
dropped in the middle of a
forgotten
spot in the middle of the Caribbean, by providence
impoverished, in squalor,
grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
“I couldn’t imagine a better way to begin the course than with Lin-Manuel’s marvelous lyrics, asking how someone with Hamilton’s humble beginnings could rise to become among the greatest of the Nation’s founders and its greatest Treasury Secretary,” recalled Tribe. “From Hamilton’s rise to power and influence to his absurd death at the hands of Aaron Burr, the saga was a terrific introduction to the controversies over the Bank of the United States.”
Rather than simply play the YouTube video, Tribe handed out the lyrics to his students and performed the song himself. McCulloch v. Maryland, he says, is “otherwise hard to bring to life for undergraduates.”
On the other side of the Yard, history professors at Harvard College also have Hamilton on their playlists. Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, attended the show earlier this year with a group of early Americanists. “The show was researched as rigorously as any Harvard dissertation. History and law geeks appreciate its accuracy; everyone loves its more than slightly transgressive playfulness,” said Chaplin. “What if we thought of Thomas Jefferson, notorious slaveholder, as a black man? Lin-Manuel Miranda is asking serious questions about race, immigration, rights, and human self-worth.”
Chaplin views Hamilton both as an exploration of the past and a potential vision for the future. “Our America—our history—is right there and yet it isn’t. It’s a relief to see it differently, and Hamilton is therefore a challenge to us to make it different.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, is more skeptical of the musical’s portrayal of Alexander Hamilton as an American underdog. Hamilton’s life story, she points out, is far from the typical immigrant experience. “Hamilton marries into one of the first families of New York as a young man,” she says. “He was coming from one part of the British Empire to another, [unlike] immigrants who come to the U.S. speaking a different language and without real prospects.”
Hamilton also makes much of Hamilton’s abolitionist stance, in one scene showing him cut Thomas Jefferson down to size with the line “‘We plant seeds in the South. We create.’/Yeah, keep ranting/we know who’s really doing the planting.” “The musical exaggerates Hamilton’s abolitionist fervor,” says Gordon-Reed. “He and his wife may have owned an enslaved person, and he did help others buy and sell enslaved people. Hamilton the fervent abolitionist exists to burnish his image as a good guy and to heighten the contrast with Thomas Jefferson.”
It’s also unsettlingly incongruous, she feels—at a time when public skepticism about Wall Street is widespread—that Hamilton, the “patron saint of banking and speculation,” should suddenly emerge as a popular hero. Nonetheless, says Gordon-Reed, “Hamilton is a work of genius, just enormously entertaining. I have the cast album on my iPhone.”
Dr. Alexander More, who teaches a Harvard University course on the history of welfare and healthcare policy, recently used lines from Hamilton’s “Cabinet Battle #1”—a debate between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists reimagined as a rap battle—to introduce students to primary sources on Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s interpretations of the welfare clause and the role of the federal government. “As we study government responsibilities and responses to issues of health and disease, we come to see how people, historically, came to define and understand the role of government in their daily lives,” said More. “That is one of the central themes of the musical and it’s a central theme of our class. But really, it’s just fun to drop a hilarious line from the musical, from time to time, and lighten up seminar discussion.”
Reflecting on the current cultural resonance of Hamilton, More said that it raised questions about the American experience that have been around since colonial times. “Lin Manuel Miranda reimagines early debates about the nature and responsibilities of a new nation. His lyrics embody the notion that everyone, rich or poor, immigrant or not, in the theater or in the classroom, in the past and in the present, has a personal stake in the story of American citizenship.”