Hamilton

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By H. George Frederickson
September 16, 2016

Rare it is when the theories and practices of public administration are the subject of a Broadway musical; indeed, Hamilton is so rare that every bureaucrat should rejoice and sing along. Lin-Manuel Miranda describes Alexander Hamilton as the “bastard son of a whore,” the “founding father, without a father.” All serious students of public administration know he was not only one of the nation’s founding fathers; Hamilton was the father of American public administration. Some argue that Woodrow Wilson is the father, but Vincent Ostrom, in The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, destroyed that argument. It is Ostrom’s claim that Madison and Hamilton together crafted the American theory of democratic administration based on management in the context of the separation of powers and overlapping jurisdictions. This claim is pushed even further in Bertelli and Lynn’s brilliant Madison’s Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution. But, here the focus is on Hamilton and his particularly compelling story, the quintessential American story.

He was born in St. Croix in the Caribbean, the illegitimate son of James Hamilton, an itinerant Scot and Rachel Faucett, of Huguenot decent. Prior to meeting James, Rachel had been jailed for declining to live with her husband. Although still married, she and Hamilton had two sons, James and Alexander. Not long after Alexander was born, his father left. Rachel kept a provisions store in St. Croix to support her children. Alexander was bright, had good early schooling and, at an early age, apprenticed as a clerk to a merchant-trader. At age 14, he sailed alone to New York with virtually no money. He worked as a clerk, put himself through Kings College, now Columbia University and read the law. A hero of the Revolutionary War, he served as one of General Washington’s primary aides. At age 32, he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in Washington’s first cabinet and served throughout the president’s first term.

It is generally agreed that Hamilton’s organization of the Treasury Department was fundamentally important to the early stability and effectiveness of American government. He took accounts that were in shambles and put them in order, balanced the books, paid off both the national Revolutionary War debt and states’ war debts, and built the foundation for what is now the Federal Reserve Bank. He died at 47, killed in a duel with then-Vice President Aaron Burr. He is buried in the yard of Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the World Trade Center.

Hamilton’s story is compelling and his service to his country remarkable. More than any other founder, he shaped the Federalist perspective; that perspective has always shaped American public administration. Yet it is his words and ideas that have endured.

On the executive branch:

“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential…to the steady administration of the laws, to the protection of property against…irregular and high-handed combinations, to the security of liberty against the enterprises…of faction.”

“The vigor of government” is “essential to the security of liberty.”

“When the dimensions of a State attain to a certain magnitude, it requires the same energy of government…which [is] requisite in one of much greater extent…The citizens of America have too much discernment to be argued into anarchy. And…experience has…wrought a deep…conviction…that greater energy of government is essential to the welfare…of the community.”

“[T]he true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.”

An energetic executive is necessary “to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations [factions] which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy.”

On the legislative branch:

“The tendency of the legislative authority to absorb every other, has been fully displayed…In governments purely republican, this tendency is almost irresistible.”

“[T]he representatives…in a popular assembly seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves, and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter; as if the exercise of rights, by either the executive or judiciary, were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity. They often appear disposed to exert an imperious control over the other departments; and as they commonly have the people on their side, they always act with such momentum as to make it very difficult for the other members of the government to maintain the balance of the Constitution.”

On the judicial branch:

“The independence of the judges is…requisite to guard…the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjectures, sometimes disseminate among the people…and which…have a tendency…to occasion…serious oppressions of the minor party.”

“[T]he interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts.”

The courts must “do their duty as faithful guardians of the Constitution, where legislative invasions of it had been instituted by the major voice of the community.”

*This article was originally published in the Summer 2016 edition of PA Times. To view the article in its entirety, click here.

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Author: H. George Frederickson is distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Public Affairs and Administration of the University of Kansas. A past president of ASPA, he can be reached at [email protected].

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