Jefferson and Hamilton by John Ferling Read Free Book Online Page B

the people would be secured.”
    In the shadow of the first laudatory biographies of Hamilton, two editions of Jefferson’s papers were issued beginning in the 1890s. They were accompanied by several favorable life histories. A veritable army of historians portrayed Jefferson as having stood for advancing the liberating tendencies unleashed by the American Revolution while Hamilton had represented the forces of reaction.
    Busts, statues, and memorials of Jefferson sprang up across the landscape. Democratic Clubs sponsored a Jefferson celebration at Monticello in 1896, and the next year the Democratic Party inaugurated its Jefferson Day Dinner, which thereafter has been held annually on the anniversary of the Founder’s birthday. Attendees sang a song with lyrics proclaiming Jefferson the “symbol of the nation” who had stood for “the Universal Brotherhood of Man.” Many of the tributes to Jefferson portrayed each federal law that aided Wall Street and corporate America as “a monument to the memory of Alexander Hamilton.”
    In the 1920s, countrywide fundraising efforts, including “Jefferson Week” in April 1924, raked in money as part of a generation-long campaign to make Monticello a public memorial. During the Independence Day celebrations in 1926, the sesquicentennial of America’s break with Great Britain, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation formally dedicated Monticello and opened it to the public. In 1927, the gigantic sculpture at Mt. Rushmore was dedicated, a shrine to Jefferson, Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt as the greatest Americans.
    Hamilton did not fade away during the reawakening of appreciation for Jefferson. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first occupant of the White House to openly extol Hamilton, calling him “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived.” Roosevelt also praised Hamilton as having possessed the “loftiest and keenest intellect” among the Founding Fathers, touted his “constructive statesmanship,” and asserted that he had “a touch of the heroic, the touch of the purple, the touch of the gallant.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was of like mind. A biographer of Hamilton, Lodge praised his subject as an exemplary American nationalist.
    Roosevelt and his followers understood that the national government had to play a role in coping with the harshness and inequities ushered in by industrialization and urbanization. Hamilton, the exponent of a strong executive branch and broad federal powers, was their hero. Some turned their scorn and malice on Jefferson, suggesting that a Jefferson government was a do-nothing government.
    Roosevelt and his adherents were also ultranationalists who longed to extend the reach of American power, influence, and economic interests. They were drawn to Hamilton, the exponent of a robust, powerful United States capable not only of defending itself but also of expanding its borders. Early in the twentieth century, the admirers of Hamilton erected statues in his honor in numerous communities, organized a movement to preserve his home in Manhattan, the Grange, and in 1904 commemorated the centennial of his death. In the 1920s the Coolidge administration put Hamilton’s image on the ten-dollar bill (and Jefferson’s on the seldom-seen two-dollar bill). 6
    Nevertheless, Hamilton never eclipsed Jefferson in popularity in early-twentieth-century America, and admiration of the nation’s first Treasury secretary vanished almost entirely during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt governed through a New Deal coalition of farmers and urban industrial workers seeking relief from the economic collapse and eager for social and economic reforms, and he openly embraced the legacy of Jefferson. Indeed, FDR was sometimes called the “new Jefferson.” FDR saw the battle waged by the New Deal against “the moneyed class” as similar to Jefferson’s struggle against Hamiltonianism.