Earlier this month, I wrote a post in defense of and contextualizing “bling.” Some guy had said he had a “visceral” dislike of “bling,” in regards to Straight Outta Compton on a Facebook thread and it bugged me. Bugged me BAD.
It occurred to me, in the week following seeing Hamilton on Broadway, an experience from which I still have not recovered, that there is a connection to Alexander Hamilton.
He loved finery. Only the best. He loved silk tailored suits, colors, shiny shoes. He insinuated himself, through his charm and smarts, into the Schuyler family, one of the wealthiest and most influential in New York. He knew he had to “marry up” and he did. His tastes ran towards the lush and ostentatious. Attention-getting. For this (and for many many other things), he was sneered at behind his back (and to his face). People made fun of his finery. Early America was in revolt against a lush over-the-top monarchy. Even if one was wealthy, one played it down, dressed plainly, did not make a show of one’s money. It just was not done. Even Thomas Jefferson, who also loved all the best things, like wine and gadgets and velvet and rare books, made a big show of being “one of the guys”. It was a political consideration. People were suspicious of you if you made a show of your wealth.
So not only did Hamilton’s enemies hate his finery because he seemed to be “putting on” too much, especially since he had such humble beginnings, but they thought it was a dangerous sign of yearning for a return to monarchy. This was borne out (at least in their minds) by his belief in a strong central government. Abigail Adams warned her husband, “That man is another Bonaparte.” He wasn’t, though. But he went against the grain of his time. (And, as Chernow points out, and as is totally obvious, it is Hamilton’s world we are living in now – for better or for worse – not Jefferson’s, not Adams’.)
But Alexander Hamilton’s “bling” came from the same place that pro-basketball players’ bling comes from, or rap stars, or guys like Elvis, or even nouveau riche folks who made their money the hard way, remembering being poor, and now reap the rewards, in gigantic homes, flashy cars, where success MUST MUST be visible. From poverty to millionaire in a matter of years? Hell yes to the bling. It means you SURVIVED.
Hamilton was born illegitimate in St. Croix. His father abandoned the family. There was some modest wealth in his mother’s family, but because she had a baby out of wedlock she was thrust outside the circle of civilized society and she was not given a cent. Hamilton grew up poverty-struck, surrounded by absolute chaos. His mother kept a goat in her yard, and sold apothecary-type stuff out of her house. And soon after she was abandoned by her lover, she died of an unspecified but grotesque illness. Hamilton fell sick from the same thing at the same time, and the two of them lay together in a sick room, being given “cures” of the most horrible kind. They were given enemas, laxatives, purgatives, all to get the sickness OUT of them, by any orifice necessary. So one can only imagine what mother/son experienced in that room. Hamilton recovered but his mother died (of the disease or the “cure” can’t be certain), in wracking pain and anguish, right next to him. He and his brother were not eligible for any kind of money from either his mother’s family or his father’s. They were bastards. “Whore-children” as one family member put it in a document. Nice. Hamilton’s cousin took him in, a cousin who “lived in sin” and total squalor with a black mistress. The cousin shot himself and stabbed himself multiple times, a suicide. Hamilton witnessed the aftermath of that also, a bloody horrific scene. He was 14 years old, remember. He had had almost no schooling, although tutoring from his mother. He was excellent at math, he was a voracious reader, he spoke French with ease, he wrote poetry (one poem, written at age 14, basically describes how to make a woman come. Boy was either putting on a big show of being grown-up or he was sexually precocious. I assume the latter, but who knows. He grew up FAST.) He had no prospects in life. He was destined to live a small narrow life, with financial disasters, physical frailness, and probably become some kind of scam artist like many of his relatives. Because of his clear mathematical abilities, Hamilton got a clerkship with a trading company. He managed the whole complicated and stressful operation. He was 15, 16 years old. There were multiple currencies in flow, and he had to manage all of those exchanges. He had to scold ship captains for bringing in faulty/broken products. He did so with arrogance and panache. He had nothing to fall back on. He had no money, no family, and had already learned rejection, treachery, betrayal, sickness, poverty, trauma, chaos. But his mind was so fine, his writing so good, that it got the attention of a local influential pastor, who took up a collection to send Hamilton to college in the colonies. When Hamilton showed up at Princeton, he informed the admissions committee, that he would be going at his own pace in his studies (meaning: as quickly as possible.) They were like, “Who do you think you are? You’ll go at the pace of everyone else and graduate with everyone else.” Hamilton said, “Thanks but no thanks” and ended up going to King’s College (now Columbia) in Manhattan, which let him do whatever the hell he wanted and also put him smack-dab in the middle of the Revolution, where he belonged.
So those are the bare-(ish) bones of his early life. Horrifying.
Of course when he became a lawyer he would stock up on beautiful silk clothes, gleaming over-the-top carriages, and gorgeous ostentatious homes filled with expensive things.
Poverty brings shame. Not just then, although it was more acute then, even though there were charities and churches designed to help the poor. But Hamilton’s shame about his past, filled with scandal and lawsuits and imprisonment (his mother was jailed for four months at one point, in a horrifically rough and unsanitary prison) was so strong that he never spoke of it, except in a vague way in letters to close friends. The bare-bones of his story was well-known to his political colleagues and enemies, who used it against him. (John Adams dismissed him, referring to him as “the bastard brat of a Scotch peddler.”)
The pain was so great he turned his back on it once he boarded the ship to the colonies and he never (seemingly, although there are exceptions) looked back.
His eventual “bling” needed to be visible because of where he came from. It was a message, a warning, to those who underestimated him, sneered at him: I am not to be trifled with. I have come from a worse place than you ever could fucking imagine. I deserve every single good thing. I have EARNED it.
It was also a visible reminder, to the world, to himself: I will never ever go back to such despair and impoverishment. I will never again be that poor. I will not only BE somebody. I already AM somebody. Look at me GLEAM. Watch me SHINE.
// one poem, written at age 14, basically describes how to make a woman come. //
Give the BLING to the boy! All the bling!
Hahahaha.
hahaha I know! Let me see if I can find the poem. It starts with the immortal line: “Celia’s an artful little slut.” hahaha
Spoken like a true Founding Father.
Uhmmmm ….
HA HA HA, now I really want to read the whole poem!
I also have complicated feelings about the bling and being poor. I’ll wait a little and see if I can articulate something that goes with what Carolyn clarke is saying below.
For me – or what I’m talking about – are those whose fortunes change drastically almost over night. It creates its own very specific mindset. It happens to almost nobody – and most of those it happens to are in the entertainment business or professional sports – because Talent has a way of plucking people up from that situation, EARLY, and plunging them into millions and millions of dollars.
In a way, that’s what my cousin Mike’s show Survivor’s Remorse is about. A family who grew up with nothing suddenly are in the lap of luxury. How does that change your feelings about yourself? What connections do you still have with your past? And the FEAR (Mike’s show deals with that a lot) that a ghost from your past might arrive and drag you down. The fear that all this will vanish. The guilt that you can’t save everyone. Guilt that you got so lucky.
Elvis used to say, in his first year of fame, that he was afraid it was all a dream and he was going to wake up. He also described the experience as LIKE a dream. Distinctly unreal. Considering the desperation of his family’s financial situation since the time of his birth in a shack made by his father, it’s not hard to understand why.
Hamilton’s back story is fascinating, and I love your pieces on the Founding Fathers. John and Abigail were so entrenched in their Puritanical attitudes, with Boston being a New World Sparta where luxury equates to softness of character. Their inflexibility to look beyond their ideal to individual stories such as Hamilton’s should color my love of them and yet they are still favorites of mine. I’m a little afraid to examine that in detail. Do you think that visceral reaction to bling and luxury can be passed down through generations?
Paula – As a person whose family hails from Boston – I feel you on the love of John and Abigail. I love them too! I kind of love all of these people – whose fractious contentious polar-opposite arguments helped forge this whole thing – through compromise and all that.
We used to have Thanksgiving in Quincy where my aunt and uncle live, in walking distance of the Adams house. So I was a kid, and we’d drive by the house, and Dad would say, “That’s John and Abigail’s house” and I thought that we knew them, that they were family members. I wonder why they can’t join us for Thanksgiving dinner??
// Do you think that visceral reaction to bling and luxury can be passed down through generations? //
Ha! It seems to be it goes in cycles: a parents’ bling becomes a child’s simple-tastes (in reaction) – and then the child of the simple-taste person decides, “Eff that, I want a Porsche.” and on and on and on …
//why can’t they join us for Thanksgiving?// I love that your local celebs were John and Abigail. Did you ever see the musical 1776? I saw the movie when I was seven and still can’t think of John Adams without thinking of Bill Daniels and the song, “Sit Down John.”
When in high school, I wrote an English paper on love from Abigail Adams POV taking passages from her letters. My teacher thought it was fabulous at the time. I cringe today thinking how idealistic it was considering I had never been in love or had sex yet. That colors your perspective a little.
Oh their letters are so amazing. I love 1776! “Salt peter. Pins!!”
And “Sit Down John” is hilarious!
and yeah – humorous side note: My grandmother said that her husband (my grandfather) had never given her any reason to be jealous of other women – “except Abigail Adams.”
hahaha It’s a family trait.
I suppose anyone who hails from Boston is so steeped in this stuff because you can’t walk 2 feet without tripping over a landmark.
The town I grew up in was a town where Washington slept (although that’s not really unusual – he got around!) But the library where I had my first job had been there since colonial times, and Washington and his contacts had secret Revolutionary meetings there.
So it all seemed quite real and vivid to me as a kid.
I’ve waited a bit before responding to this post, because I find that I personalize a great deal of what you comment on and no one should be that self indulgent.
But I get what Hamilton was doing and I fully agree with your comments about bling //Poverty brings shame//, but I’m not sure if the emotion is that simple. It can also breed fear that the only thing you are is a poor person and that one adjective describes the whole you. Poor people rarely get the opportunity to discover the other adjectives they are because they rarely see them. If everyone else around you is poor than there is no shame. It’s only when you discover what really is or what could be does it become shameful to be poor. That’s when you fight very hard using whatever you have to get out of the world of “poor”.
Oh sure, I think fear is a huge part of it. And also a huge part of what happens when a poor person, destitute really, becomes fabulously fantastically wealthy overnight. This is what I’m interested in and what these posts are about. Poverty is always close to those who are air-lifted out of it by some miracle of talent or circumstance. And how many people like that just BLOW it? They have financial advisors for NFL draft members, etc. because of this issue. These guys go crazy with the objects! Very few people have a “healthy” relationship to money anyway – but to people who had nothing – who were evicted, had to live in their car, had to live in a one-room shack (Elvis, on all counts) – money wasn’t just money – it’s freedom, ease, safety. Elvis didn’t care about money as money. He cared about it because it allowed him to have what he wanted, provide for his family, buy cars for his friends – but really it was the eradication of WORRY. That’s what money meant to him.
His manager got him world-class financial deals but Elvis didn’t care about any of that. He wasn’t playing the stock market trying to get more money. He didn’t invest. (And actually, when he died, his estate was in really bad shape. The creation of Graceland as a museum was one of the ways Priscilla – and his other friends – tried to salvage the financial situation. And yeah, that worked out well!!)
In our society, you are never far away from reminders of the “haves”. That was true in Hamilton’s time and it’s true in ours. Even Russian serfs, toiling in obscurity, who had never been outside their village, eventually had the idea that things must be better elsewhere. Maybe they could be free, make their own way. The label of “poor” has different meanings in different times – the “poor” house or workhouse in Victorian times in England – huge shame attached to those places, scars for generations – and once you dropped that far low it was almost impossible to get out. And then you were “marked.” The cycle of poverty. But none of us live in isolation. We are aware of those who have more, from our earliest age on the playground. To some people it doesn’t matter – but what I’m interested in is those whose later wealth so far exceeds any kind of normal upward mobility thing – it’s like they explode into the stratosphere like a rocket: From sharecropper ‘s son/mechanic (Elvis) to super-star in literally 8 months. With millions POURING in. Those are the people I am talking about and that is the phenomenon that interests me, especially when connected to Hamilton.
Hamilton’s ancestors came from Scotland, and they had money – but Hamilton’s father (biological father) was kind of a useless guy, who inherited nothing because he was the 4th son in the lineup. But he never developed a personality, or any drive. He messed up every job he ever did. He was bored, a loafer. He wanted to get rich quick but all of his ideas sucked and he racked up debts and nobody trusted him. Hamilton was born into an already chaotic situation – which got worse and worse over his formative years. But he dealt with shipping magnates and wealthy people who shipped the goods through the trading operation he ran. He knew very well what wealth meant, looked like. He was good with money. Money would not be his way out. His way out was his gift with words, and his sensitive agile mind. But he was able to ingratiate himself with wealthy people – smart move – and always had a “flash” to him, an arrogance – so that nobody ever presumed where he came from. Everyone (who didn’t know he was a charity case, once he arrived at college) assumed he was aristocratic, due to his bearing and self-confidence. He DECIDED to be confident (similar to Elvis, similar to the guys from NWA, similar to all of these people I’ve mentioned in these posts.) They were not defined by their circumstances. They made their OWN. And the money came pouring in. And the bling is a visible reminder of that journey.
Behind all Hamilton’s frantic activity – his sheer grit and determination – and also his love of fine things – was terror that he would somehow “fall back” into the horror of his early years. Every choice he made – every single one – showed a determination to never look back, and to rise as far and as fast as he could. He was that desperate, things had been that bad (obviously: just look at the facts listed out. It’s horrifying. Any ONE of them would ruin most people’s lives, and he experienced all of them in a two-year period). I think that’s one of the reasons why he was in such a hurry. He literally could not get through things fast enough. College, everything. He had to keep moving. (In an eerie way, it is as though he knew he didn’t have a lot of time on this earth.)
Anyway, that’s what interests me about Bling in all its forms. I agree that it is a very complex issue!
I know I would fall in love with that man if I lived then. Look at him. I love a man who stands up proudly and wears a suit of clothes with pride. You see so little of that these days. And I guess he had a reputation as a tomcat. I can see why.
Bling is not bad. Overdone, ugly, pretentious bling is bad. But Hamilton’s is in good taste.
And I also am still recovering from seeing “Hamilton” on Broadway. I’m still listening to the cast album on repeat.
L.V.
// overdone, ugly, pretentious bling is bad. But Hamilton’s is in good taste. //
I disagree with that quite strongly. As strongly as I can actually – and your comment shows how people so often miss the point.
Coming out of poverty and nothing-ness, bling is a signifier, a warning, a loud and attention-getting message that “I will never go back THERE again.”
What is “good taste” anyway? Good taste is an extremely middle-class word.
I don’t say that to be mean – I say that to just reiterate the point I was making in this post – which perhaps you have misunderstood.
I hope you’ve read Chernow’s book. It’s a gold-mine. I’m re-reading now – second time through (read it when it first came out). :) Richard Brookheiser’s book is really good too (and much shorter).
Yes, the show and the music is wonderful! Saw it on September 13th and still haven’t come down. I’ve loved Hamilton since I was in high school (a long long time ago) so it was like stepping into an alternate universe where everyone was catching up with my long-time crush.