This is so Alexander Hamilton.
The “$10 Founding Father without a father,” as composer and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda had been planning to describe him every night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre starting next month, was in the midst of a spectacular posthumous comeback.
Ron Chernow’s great biography has for a decade now been establishing him in the minds of reader after reader (latest convert, the Wall Street Journal’s Dennis K. Berman) as perhaps the most influential and definitely the most interesting of the Founding Fathers. Now Miranda’s transcendent musical, drawn from Chernow’s book, is about to storm Broadway -- and maybe, just maybe, American popular culture -- after its acclaimed run at the Public Theater downtown.
And now this. The Treasury Department that Hamilton built wants to throw him off the $10 bill, or maybe make him share it with an as yet-to-be-chosen woman of historical significance. There was already a campaign in the works to replace the $20 bill's scurrilous mascot, Andrew Jackson, with a woman, but it's the $10 that was next on the redesign schedule, so it's the $10 and its comeback kid that's in the crosshairs. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew says Hamilton may end up on another bill -- he actually replaced Jackson on the $10 in 1928. But for now it looks like another setback for the man whose late career included so many, including getting shot and killed in 1804 by the vice president, Aaron Burr.
