Bruce Springsteen was the first artist I saw in concert—in 1976, when I was 15. He had recently graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and journalist Jon Landau, who would later become his manager, had dubbed him “the future of rock ‘n’ roll.” His early Dylan-esque reveries of streetwise characters on the margins, songs like “Sandy” and “Spirit in the Night,” felt lived-in and alive, and evoked charm and scruff. By the time he came out with 1975’s Born to Run, his music’s ever-bigger sound propelled working-class frustration and disillusionment into a high-octane overdrive of expansive dreams and open-road odysseys.

My frustrations were different: I was a lonely, awkward, self-absorbed, diffident suburban teenager, aching for a way out of myself. For me, Springsteen’s songs unlocked a liminal sweet spot between joy and fury that quickened my teenage rebellion fantasies and affirmed my angst-ridden realities.

The second time I saw Springsteen was at Madison Square Garden, in that transitory summer between high school graduation and freshman orientation. By then he was graduating too, from intimate concert spaces to cavernous ones, from Next Big Thing to bona fide rock star.

He brought a new vulnerability to his first-person confessions and laments. When he performed “Adam Raised a Cain”—a lightning-bolt-at-first-listen for me—you could picture him on his knees, pounding the floor, letting out a Brando-esque wail. He wasn’t just telling you about his fraught relationship with his father; this was primal-scream therapy. He was willing, in a room full of tens of thousands of strangers, to offer a sonic squall from the soul. This forced me to sit and listen. A catharsis of that visceral magnitude can power-drive you into silent submission. His concerts were epic transformations, doing what good art does.

As I grew—physically, emotionally, intellectually—I expanded my heart and mind to other music, other sounds, other affirmations. I hosted four different shows as a DJ at my college radio station: punk/new wave, jazz, classical, and the graveyard shift, the most freeform playground of all. I seldom, if ever, played Bruce. My musical palette broadened and deepened. His hadn’t. And while I would forever be in his debt for taking me to new places, I had moved on.

Like old friends from previous chapters in your narrative, some artists are of a certain time and place. The joyful fury and furious joy that fueled Bruce’s music lost its immediate relevance for me. But several decades later, Bruce returned—and I took notice.

In 2016, exactly 40 years after I stood in his audience at my very first concert, Springsteen published his memoir, Born to Run. The following year, as a sort of companion piece, he created and performed his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway, which would later stream on Netflix. These works revealed to me an artist who had foraged through the attics, crawl spaces, and basements of his mind and reconstituted a life. They reminded me of the best aspects of a reunion—as a barometer of personal trajectory and an opportunity for rediscovery and recontextualization, where old friends reimagine friendships. Such became my reconnection with Bruce in my late-middle age—from a mutual place of wisdom and grace.

Media coverage around Born to Run homed in on Bruce’s description of his long battle with depression. Critics found it ironic that one who put everything he had into a four-hour offering of roof-raising exaltation would suffer from an illness that can lock you in a deep, dark world, where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” But as someone who lives with depression, I understood. Depression is a monster; sometimes that monster is Shrek and sometimes it’s Godzilla. You pray for the Shrek days, but you prepare for the Godzilla days, deploying every weapon in your arsenal to keep Godzilla off your trail. And if that means, for Bruce, a scorching guitar solo, a larynx-ripping roar, a band that amplifies your pain, and if it takes four hours, night after night, city after city, then you do it.

With Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce mined his music for a deeper exploration into his process and evolution as an artist, not so much performing the songs we’ve all known for so long but reimagining them to suit the sensibilities of a then-sexegenarian who has seen and felt and lived.

It’s just him, on guitar and piano, with occasional accompaniment from his wife, Patti Scialfa, in a 960-seat Broadway theater. This was a next frontier for Springsteen, where he could center his prowess as a storyteller, scribe, and poet, and reimagine his oeuvre as an evening-length narrative.

Full disclosure: I watched Springsteen on Broadway 3,000 miles from Broadway, in the comfort of my living room in Los Angeles, on Netflix. Just as reading a book is a solo act and a deeply personal interchange between author and reader, watching Springsteen on Broadway let me engage in Bruce’s psychological/emotional/artistic journey. No need for dancing in the dark. Just processing on my own.

This manifestation of vulnerability, of personal excavation, inspired a new appreciation, a different connection—to an artist in service of and in full allegiance to his art, who is still searching, still seeking, but through different means, and who is willing to interrogate the mysteries and wonders of his long odyssey, and all that he created and shared along the way.

We all have chapters in our ongoing narratives that we would rather leave closed and unexamined. Perhaps we’d even want to excise them altogether. But Bruce, in this late-period exhumation, was more than willing to go there. While my teenage fandom was cause for escape, exultation, and empowerment, my late-middle-aged appreciation has inspired me to reexamine my own back pages for deeper truths about where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

The rock icon who once had me in his thrall is today a greater inspiration as a human, endowed with foibles and grace, darkness and light, demons and angels, in equal measure.

The post What Bruce Springsteen Taught Me Then—And Teaches Me Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Musicals are an everywhere phenomenon. They touch an enormously broad swath of American lives, unapologetically building worlds that don’t yet exist. I see this commitment to the not-yet as an aspiration for the rest of us stuck living in the here-and-now.

I recently wrote a book about musicals, and visited communities in the heartland that were using musical theater to help understand their place in this country. I watched an original musical about Samson and Delilah in Branson, Missouri; took note of the prestigious musical theater training centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and discovered traces of musical theater cultures in remote corners of Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond. I chose to focus on the middle of the country because that’s where so many of America’s favorite stories about itself take place, the characters here extreme in either their moral winnings or their moral failures. It’s no surprise that this is where so many of America’s iconic musicals like Oklahoma!, The Wizard of Oz, or The Music Man spin their clever fantasies, the Professor Harold Hills hopping off trains and stealing their way into our hearts again and again. But ya gotta know the territory.

In musicals as in real life, the middle is a powerful idea in this country. Caught between reality and fiction, truth and fantasy, and the amateur and professional, musical theater in the middle of America captures the heart of what this place can be on its best-dressed days. Musicals break through class and political strata in America better than any other style of entertainment; and because these productions often involve whole communities, audiences and performers in the heartland reflect a more dynamic mix of race, class, gender, and religion than any Times Square theater has been able to manage. It may be that musical theater in the middle of America, with school performances of The Little Mermaid and church sermons expounding the traditional family values of Fiddler on the Roof, captures wide-eyed American possibility better than Broadway ever could.

I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and always knew first-hand that musical theater mattered here. Middle school and high school productions were frequent even in my small town, and the several churches in the area put on musicals regularly, to say nothing of the ease with which Broadway tunes like Carousel’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and Godspell’s “Day by Day” made their way into weddings, funerals, parades, and revival meetings. It wasn’t until I scanned wider that I discovered how it mattered in these overlooked, under-examined spaces. Musicals spread across the geography of this place in ways that illuminate how we believe and imagine. In place after place, musicals matter because they help us practice belonging to America and continue believing in it.

Take the fundamentalist Mormon community in rural Arizona who adapted The Sound of Music into a polygamous propaganda piece where songs and dances swapped from other musicals made sure the governess Maria fell not for a grieving captain with seven children but rather for a multi-wived captain happily seeking yet another. The production was shocking and also touching. Its creators crafted an idea of America in their own image by crafting a musical where they belonged. Their example shows how musicals help communities of all kinds rehearse living in better versions of America. How can you belong in America, they ask, if you don’t first find yourself in an American musical?

It’s no surprise, really, that you find musical theater mattering in profound ways within religious settings, in those American communities where faith matters most. A performance of the musical Samson in Branson, Missouri, used the magic of the stage to make Samson and Delilah’s distant (if not mythical) past align with values of today’s evangelical Christianity—the musical providing the enchanted spackling to cover gaps and cracks in a modern religious façade troubled by secular reasoning. Through strange rituals and performative customs, musicals, like many religions, look beyond this world with bleary-eyed anticipation. All things will work out in the end, they celebrate. And in the end, we can live in a world that has been fully remade, with villains banished and problems resolved.

In her 1966 book, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that communities decide what makes dirt dirty, that describing something as “dirty” has little to do with impurity; rather, dirt is, as she put it, “matter out of place.” I’ve come to think of musicals in similar ways. Musicals lie about the world—they smooth over our reality with their alternate one, where people burst into song and dance and strangers know one another’s choreography. They rush to simplified and tidy endings, and unlikely reconciliations. I saw this in a homemade production by the Oklahoma Senior Follies in which senior citizens portrayed youthful scenes of lust, danced suggestively, and good-humoredly essentialized the older years as the best time of their lives. Americans often conflate increased aging with decreased value. But through the musical stage, aging performers created a not-yet world where this was not the case. Our here-and-now world doesn’t work that way.

Musicals are clever lies—and we need more of their deceptions. Lies have a bad reputation. With truth a fluid concept these days, it sometimes feels as if we are stuck pitting one set of truths against another and battling it out indefinitely. Lies offer a way out. They open space for stories about worlds that don’t yet exist. They give us a chance to invent the kind of idylls we want to live in, places more committed to justice, community, and healing. Don’t get me wrong, truth does matter. But there are times when telling a lie is more righteous than being honest: when doctors recommend a harmless placebo for an anxious patient, for instance, or when one flatters a friend with exaggerated feedback they want to hear. Lies are exercises in imagination, hotbeds of creativity, projections of promise. Lies, like musicals, to borrow Douglas’s phrase, are stories out of place.

This lesson gets lost if we crease musical theater’s map to only one city—New York—and chart performances only as some escapade of selling silliness. The pandemic has given America an opportunity to rethink where, how, and why musicals happen. Broadway may be returning with ticker tape but my experiences in the middle of America suggest that musical theater ought to be re-placed—reimagined as powerful, multi-sited performances of an America that might be.

I am happy for the return to normalcy Broadway’s reopening signals. I am glad for my friends and former students whose livelihoods depend on the theater industry. And I’m glad for the laughs, tears, and thrills audiences can once again come to expect night after night. But I also keep it in perspective. Musical theater is bigger than Times Square. Its hopes and dreams and fantasies and deceptions spill the banks of New York, flowing through the hills and cities of America’s middle lands and into the hearts and minds of people most would never think to associate with musical theater. Musicals are as big and wide as America, and America can only be as big and wide as our musicals help us to imagine.

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The play debuted in 1959 and made Hansberry the first African American woman dramatist produced on Broadway, and its tensions unfold as the United States worked to convince people of color that they would never be at home. Facing segregation and housing discrimination, African Americans cultivated what I call homemade citizenship—a deep sense of success and belonging that does not rely on mainstream recognition or civic inclusion.

Suburban home ownership became a barometer of American success in the 1930s and 1940s, with mortgage loans newly subsidized by the Federal Housing Administration. But Black and Brown citizens were systematically excluded, so most African Americans could not pursue home ownership until the 1950s. Placing Black people’s struggle to attain this marker of American achievement on Broadway, Hansberry accomplished a feat parallel to that of the family she portrayed. Both the Youngers and their creator encountered hostility for daring to reach for what the country defined as success.

Revisiting Hansberry’s 1959 triumph proves poignant in the wake of the open letter to “White American Theater,” which is part of the racial reckoning prompted by the video-recorded police murder of George Floyd. Signed by more than 350 practitioners and creators of color, including Lin Manuel Miranda and Viola Davis, the letter exposes how the theater world resembles other arenas: Its institutions prioritize solidarity statements over self-reflection, structural transformation, and material redress. The letter also suggests that theater criticism facilitates exclusion and condescension: “We have watched you amplify our voices when we are heralded by the press, but refuse to defend our aesthetic when we are not, allowing our livelihoods to be destroyed by a monolithic and racist critical culture.”

Though Hansberry became “a darling of the theater world,” according to biographer Imani Perry, she experienced the racism of its critical culture. Because United States citizenship is built on the exclusion of African Americans, even when Black success does not prompt naked brutality, it inspires condescending reminders of difference, of outsider status. A Raisin in the Sun therefore places a spotlight on what historian Carol Anderson calls white rage: In portraying Black ambition, the play also showcases the white hostility that always accompanies it.

Over the course of the play, as the Youngers pursue a better life, Mama Lena spends part of her insurance payout to place a down payment on a house in the Chicago suburb of Clybourne Park. In response, her son Walter Lee disappears for three days. When he returns, his hopelessness convinces Lena that she has helped the United States strip her son of his manhood and kill his dreams. So she gives him the $6,500 left after the down payment, instructing him to put $3,000 in a savings account for Beneatha’s medical school education and the rest in a checking account under his name. “I’m telling you to be the head of this family from now on like you supposed to be,” she says.

On moving day, Mama Lena is out when a representative of the suburban neighborhood association arrives. Karl Lindner, who is white, tells Walter Lee, “Our association is prepared, through the collective effort of our people, to buy the house from you at a financial gain to your family.”

Insulted by this “civil” effort to keep his family out of the neighborhood, Walter Lee declines. However, he later realizes he has been swindled out of every penny entrusted to him, having given it to an acquaintance who promised to speed up the liquor license process and then skipped town. He invites Lindner back and rehearses a speech to accept the humiliating offer.

In the end, Walter Lee cannot stomach the routine he has practiced. “We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick,” he tells Lindner.

“What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren’t wanted?” Lindner demands.

The play ends with the Youngers moving out of the tenement, heading for the suburbs, despite every indication that their fellow Americans will not welcome them. Mama Lena is the last to exit the apartment, and her pensive farewell serves as a prelude to a future of offstage malevolence.

Hansberry’s drama highlights the mundane cruelty of denying people of color desirable homes. While the federal government encouraged “all” Americans to pursue home ownership, FHA redlining enacted bloodless violence by making whiteness a qualification for access to the American Dream. At the same time, the labor movement’s “family wage” campaign empowered white heads of household while excluding non-white people, given that (like most American institutions) unions discriminated based on race, as cultural historian Chandan Reddy has shown.

Employment and housing discrimination prevented most citizens of color from organizing their households according to the nuclear family ideal, a male breadwinner and his financially dependent wife and children. The few whose households fit this mold achieved a level of success that would not go unchecked. White Americans attacked families of color who dared to move into “their” neighborhoods. Thus, declarations about the nation’s preferred domestic configuration amounted to discursive violence—telling everyone to aspire to an ideal while affirming only white examples of it—that encouraged physical violence.

The Youngers understand that they invite injury by clinging to a suburban definition of success. As they reach for what white Americans will attack them for securing, they do not pursue white acceptance, but instead, claim what they believe to be rightfully theirs. Aligning with the tradition traced by legal historian Martha S. Jones, Walter Lee declares his family to be birthright citizens, telling Lindner, “This is my son, and he makes the sixth generation of my family in this country.”

Interpretations of Raisin have been shaped by the presumption that it is a protest play, that it resists segregation. This lens obscures what most drives the action: a pursuit of success. If one focuses on accomplishment as African Americans do, it becomes clear that pursuing achievement in the face of white opposition requires the Youngers to define and re-define the parameters of success. They are not pursuing integration as a form of protest or resistance, but rather, to accomplish goals and claim resources. The play reveals that what has been framed as “integration” is really about getting white people to stop hoarding everything desirable. Further, “civil rights” are human rights—pursued not for “equality” with white people but as an assertion of clarity about one’s due.

While pursuing success, most members of the Younger family prioritize patriarchy, so the play showcases a reality that protest-obsessed audiences miss: the damage done in Black households when prevailing ideas about gender are not questioned. The Youngers subscribe to the rhetoric of the 1950s Black church that often vilified single women’s goals. Christianity’s message of affirmation routinely failed to reach single black women—represented in Raisin by Beneatha—even in their own homes. Beneatha personifies all that must remain “beneath,” as Mama Lena pursues a particular vision of success. Beneatha’s future is sacrificed because, although Walter Lee shows little capacity for leadership, he is male and therefore his mother is determined to make a leader of him. Beneatha is not only teased for her pan-African sensibilities and denigrated for valuing career over marriage, but also, in an iconic scene, she is slapped by her mother in the name of God.

This complexity has been overlooked because theater criticism kept Hansberry preoccupied with defending Lena’s humanity. White critics’ casual vilification of Mama Lena as an emasculating matriarch revealed a lack of empathy for the pressures she faced, and led Hansberry to defend Mama Lena as fiercely as Mama Lena had defended Walter Lee.

However, if one focuses on how African Americans would encounter the work’s theme of Black achievement, the terms of the debate change. In the Younger household, success is defined in patriarchal terms, devaluing half the community. Scholars and readers rarely notice this, however, because most insist upon seeing Mama Lena as the embodiment of resistance to racism. Even the insightful biographer Perry argues, regarding Lena, that “in Lorraine’s literary world, mother wisdom is trustworthy though subtle, and paternal inheritances are thorny and overpowering.” If Lena’s behavior is examined not as a reaction to white hostility but for its impact on Black people, however, it becomes clear that when family members do not live up to patriarchal ideals, she not only withholds affirmation; she is violent. Besides slapping Beneatha, she “starts to beat [Walter Lee] senselessly in the face” for losing the insurance money. The Younger household is not a safe haven, especially for women who question (divinely ordained) male leadership.

Perry, Hansberry’s most nuanced chronicler, notes the playwright’s frustration with white critics’ failure to engage the work itself. A crucial question therefore arises: “How does one navigate racial perceptions that overlay everything … such that they effectively become part of the production no matter what the artist does? For Lorraine the answer was to become a critic.”

Hansberry could not ignore what the recent open letter to white American theater calls a “monolithic and racist critical culture,” so she wrote cultural criticism herself. Nevertheless, the complexity of her creative work proves undeniable, if examined with Black audience members in mind. Because African Americans pursue success despite the odds against them, the art they produce while doing so offers insight into how they remain invested in accomplishment despite the white rage it attracts.

Debating what constitutes achievement is part of the labor of cultivating homemade citizenship, but it is complicated work. As performance theorist Soyica Colbert suggests, Raisin’s tense scenes expose “the conditions that enable Mama to create a house” as well as those “that establish Beneatha’s homelessness.” Beneatha is outnumbered, yet Hansberry’s play honors her struggle. With her last words, Beneatha stands firm: “I wouldn’t marry [the man everyone approves of] if he was Adam and I was Eve!” In preserving Beneatha’s bold perspective, Hansberry’s work encourages African Americans to question whether their definitions of success account for the entire community.

This message remains relevant, as Black and Brown women succeed against the odds, only to become targets for abuse. When hostility does not come in the form of attack, it manifests as erasure: Black women’s leadership is often relegated to the margins, even as their ideas set the course that many others later advocate. Meanwhile, Black and Brown women continue to be ridiculed whenever they prioritize their own goals rather than simply serve everyone else. These tensions are as deep now as they were in Hansberry’s time, and we should heed her call to address them both within communities of color and on the national stage.

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Walt Whitman once compared Broadway to a river, and that’s what it seemed to me when I finally walked along its path a year later. Broadway really was a noisy, urban Mississippi overflowing with people, cars, and trucks, its shoreline lined with skyscrapers and bathed in electric light. Right next door to Times Square and its peep shows were churches (St. Mary the Virgin, on 46th Street, and Holy Cross, on 42nd Street) and in the middle of everything a statue of a Roman Catholic priest (Francis Patrick Duffy, decorated World War I chaplain and Holy Cross’s pastor). Coming from Gainesville, I thought the contrasts were rather extreme, and that Broadway was the most perplexing, distorted place I’d ever seen.

For many years, visitors have been thinking exactly the same thing: Illustrator Valerian Gribayedoff, a Russian immigrant, thought that Broadway was “a kind of animated mirror, looking back at you with its myriad faces in the same mood in which you regard it.” That was way back in 1893.

Even George M. Cohan, the prolific song-and-dance man who sold Broadway to the masses in the form of sheet music and traveling musicals, and more than anyone cemented the street as the epicenter of American popular culture, couldn’t quite get his head around it. “Nobody understands Broadway,” one character in Cohan’s 1912 production Broadway Jones proclaims. “People hate it and don’t know why. People love it and don’t know why. It’s just because it’s Broadway.”

Through the 19th century, Broadway was a continuous source of American civic pride, a “Path of Progress” where everything promising about the country’s future came together in one long allegorical strand. “Broadway represents the national life,” journalist Junius Henri Browne wrote soon after the Civil War. In order to see America, he suggested, all that was required was a station point along Broadway. “Take your stand there,” he advised, “and Maine, and Louisiana, the Carolinas, and California, Boston, and Chicago, pass before you.”

Herald Square, 34th Street and Broadway, undated. Photo courtesy of New York Public Library.

To understand its history, follow the street from south to north.

Broadway begins at Manhattan’s southern tip, where it forms the spine of the financial district and provides a stage set for ticker tape parades. Skyscrapers, including the majestic Woolworth Building, cloak the street in shadow. At the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street, administrative assistants and stockbrokers lunch amid the graves of Trinity Churchyard, where Alexander Hamilton rests beneath a monument close by a wrought-iron fence along Rector Street.

Continuing to the north, Broadway pierces SoHo, where cast-iron buildings from the mid-19th century look down on a district that 50 years ago was so desolate the city’s fire chief nicknamed it “Hell’s Half Acre.” Now it’s a mall of expensive shops for tourists.

At 10th Street, Broadway suddenly bends to the north on its way to Union Square, which began in the early 19th century as the “Forks,” the rural intersection of the Bowery and Broadway, and was enclosed as a public park in 1833. Union Square became the most fashionable district in the city—in 1865, the six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession pass below the window of his grandfather’s mansion at the corner of Broadway and 14th Street—and by the 1890s, the old mansions, having been torn down or converted to sweatshops, had become the main gathering place for labor unions, socialists, and anarchists.

Six blocks to the north, Madison Square was the site of riots in 1901 when the city arranged nice new chairs in the park and tried renting them for a nickel. Now you can sit for hours, for free, in folding chairs arranged in the wedge of space between Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Once that narrow space was a perpetual tangle of trolleys, trucks, and cars and on election nights, crowds pressed into the hectic intersection to watch as vote tallies were projected onto a giant screen attached to the Flatiron Building. Now that same storied section of Broadway is nothing if not peaceful, a place of beautiful, trendy people and Shake Shack burgers.

Madison Square was the original starting point of a lurid playground bathed in the glow of electric streetlights and billboards that by the early 1900s had been nicknamed the “Great White Way.” That section of Broadway became so famous, and its stores, theaters, hotels, and restaurants so profitable, that every small-town chamber of commerce had to have its own version. “[Let us] get together and have a Great White Way as soon as possible,” urged the editors of the Richmond, Kentucky, Daily Register in 1919. “It is an indication of a prosperous condition, and a progressive spirit.”

City councils in El Paso, Pensacola, Topeka, and Albuquerque were soon busy carefully planning new downtown business districts in emulation of Broadway, but the original Great White Way was an accident; even those weird, interstitial trapezoids (not squares) that became Herald Square and Times Square, two of the most vibrant public spaces in the world, were nothing more than the byproducts of the misalignment of Broadway’s angled path with the later straight avenues of the city grid. Broadway’s transformation from colonial cowpath to cosmopolitan thoroughfare was nothing if not organic.

At Columbus Circle, Broadway brushes past Central Park’s southwest corner, widens, and becomes something else entirely, a remnant from the Gilded Age that was originally called the Boulevard and was meant to put New York City on par with Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s grand boulevards of Paris. That ambitious section of Broadway was carefully designed, with a planted “mall” running up the center and whimsical apartment houses in the Parisian Belle Époque mode on either side.

The old Boulevard continues up the West Side, past restaurants, delis, and dry cleaners, all the way up to 168th Street, where in the midst of a predominantly Dominican neighborhood it takes over the narrower path of the former Kingsbridge Road, which dates to the early 18th century. At the island’s northern tip, Broadway crosses over the Harlem Ship Canal by way of the Broadway Bridge, continues through the Bronx, and, as Route 9—not so much Great White Way as Adequate Grey Highway—winds its way to the Canadian border.

“Broadway,” Whitman also wrote, “will never fail in riches, arts, men, women, histories, stately shows, morals, warnings, wrecks, triumphs—the profoundest indices of mortality and immortality.” That’s another way of saying that Broadway is much too long and varied to understand in one lifetime. Stephen Jenkins, writing in 1911 in The Greatest Street in the World, thought that Broadway was the place where New Yorkers felt most at home.

I’m not sure I’ll ever feel at home on Broadway, but at least I understand it a bit better than I did when I saw it for the first time almost 30 years ago. Perhaps Broadway resonates because it’s a place where anyone, native or immigrant, can freely wander, like the cable cars Stephen Crane described in 1896 as plying the street “up and down, up and down, in a mystic search.” For some, Broadway might even reveal the key to happiness.

“I guess Broadway, for me, was everything in life I’ve never had,” George M. Cohan once said. “My education, and the friendships, games, adventures, and just plain fun of boyhood and growing up.”

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The musical follows an old playbook that divides the founders into heroes and villains. This started after the Revolution when Charles Willson Peale began compiling portraits of “Revolutionary Patriots” and displayed them in his renowned Philadelphia Museum. In 1818, a Russian diplomat and artist, Pavel Petrovich Svinin, observed that “every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have images of God’s saints.” In death, Washington figuratively became a god, when an artist attached his iconic face and head to a classic pose of Jesus sitting on a cloud and ascending into heaven. The impulse to glorify the founders is still with us. They were romanticized in the silent film era, and in innumerable, hokey Hollywood movies since. The Patriots awed New York theater critics during World War II, and 1776 rocked Broadway in 1969, with Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin singing and dancing their way to independence. Have we already forgotten HBO’s gushing tribute, John Adams?

“The Apotheosis of Washington,” an 1800 engraving of the first U.S. President by David Edwin.

 
The drama of the founders has overtaken the reality. In the undergraduate seminar I teach, “America’s Founding Myths,” I ask my students to identify the life masks of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, produced in 1825, which is as close as we can come to capturing their likenesses. None of my students recognized them. Why? They are old. Adams is jowly and bald. There isn’t an ounce of glamor in these unflattering busts. The reason that Hamilton is so popular is that the theatergoer is treated to vigorous youth, brazen sex appeal, macho brashness, capped by so-called genius—all wrapped up in a loving and whimsical portrait of a Hamilton who “tells it like it is” in the pounding, nonstop rhythms of hip hop. Which guy do you want to be? A shrunken Jefferson, or the dashing and daring Hamilton who, like Peter Pan, never appears to grow up?

No one watching Hamilton will want to be Burr, one of the most interesting figures of early American history. Leslie Odom, Jr., who plays Burr, has a lovely voice, but his portrayal echoes a familiar slur: the opportunist. Or to use Hamilton’s favorite insult of Burr (and others): a “cunning” man, who carries himself with aristocratic airs. In Hamilton, Burr is a mere prop, a villainous foil, his personality an overblown caricature. He is portrayed as a man who lacks principles, unwilling to believe in, or fight for, anything that matters.

The historical Burr was no less passionate about the Revolution than Hamilton, eagerly joining the arduous 350-mile march through Maine wilderness to Canada in 1775. He was appointed aide-de-camp to General Richard Montgomery, who died during the invasion and lived on as a Revolutionary martyr. For courage under fire, Burr received a commendation from Congress. Contrary to the song lyrics, he wasn’t “waiting” for anything.

The men he later commanded admired him, and he believed in expanding democratic rights to uplift and empower poorer men. He was not pompous or aloof, nor a man of mere surfaces, nor a Chesterfieldian dandy, as his slanderous enemies pretended. His New York wing of the Jeffersonian party, the “Burrites,” were men of mixed class backgrounds, whereas the Schuyler-Hamilton Federalist faction was a top-down organization favoring elite interests. Falsely casting Burr as an aristocrat is a rhetorical ploy: It incorrectly shifts the blame for class prejudice onto him.

By taking sides in a mudslinging fight for power that goes back more than 200 years, Hamilton misses Burr’s actual contributions. He was a skilled innovator of democracy, working to make elections, financial services, and even the U.S. Senate more fair and transparent. In New York, he was charged with “revolutionizing the state,” because he backed progressive policies for funding internal improvements, debtor relief, and establishing a more democratic method of electing state senators. He founded the Manhattan Company, the first bank to extend financial services to ordinary merchants and mechanics outside the ruling elite. As vice president, he presided over the Senate’s impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. His judicious behavior, which helped to maintain the impartiality of the judiciary, won him grudging praise from many Federalists; one called him “one of the best presiding officers I ever saw.” A man with sophisticated ideas, respected for his impartiality and scrupulous conduct—this Burr never appears in Hamilton.

An 1802 portrait of Aaron Burr by the painter John Vanderlyn.

 
Reducing Burr to a villain turns the musical into a lopsided morality tale, glossing over the complexity of early America in favor of characters we can cheer for. Thus hip-hop Hamilton unabashedly celebrates the American Dream; the conceit that the country has always been the land of opportunity. Hamilton represents the immigrant made good, because he was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Left out of the upbeat story is that Hamilton—and the Federalist Party he headed—were hostile to the idea that the United States should ever be led by newcomers. It was the Federalists who pressed for a constitutional amendment barring naturalized foreigners from elected offices, and it was that villain Burr, in the New York Assembly at the time, who gave an eloquent speech defending the liberal promise of the young republic. “America stood with open arms and presented an asylum to the oppressed of every nation,” he said. “Shall we deprive these persons of an important right derived from so sacred a source as our Constitution?”

The musical puts feminist words in the mouth of Angelica Schuyler, Hamilton’s sister-in-law, presuming she wanted to tell Jefferson to rewrite the Declaration to include women. This is absurd. In truth, Aaron Burr was far ahead of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Adams in advancing the ideas of English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, the leading Enlightenment advocate of women’s rights. Burr and his wife Theodosia educated their daughter as they might have a son: She could read and write at the age of 3, then mastered French, Italian, Latin, Greek, mathematics, history, and geography. The idea that women were the intellectual equals of men was a radical one, and Hamilton attacked Burr for it, calling him a proponent of “Godwinism.” (William Godwin was Wollstonecraft’s husband.)

Finally, Hamilton wrongly claims that the duel with Burr was over the election of 1800, and that Burr knowingly shot Hamilton after he saw him fire a bullet in the air. Wrong again. The real cause of the duel was that Hamilton attacked Burr’s character (and refused to apologize) when Burr ran for the New York governorship in 1804. Conveniently missing is the fact that Hamilton supplied the pistols, and the one he used had a secret hair trigger. This gave him an unfair advantage and violated the gentlemanly code of conduct.

Can we expect a more accurate musical someday? Probably not. Interestingly, in times of political turmoil, the pop-culture pendulum often swings in a critical direction. In the 1930s, the iconoclastic painter Grant Wood (best known for his American Gothic) mockingly reworked the Parson Weems tale of George Washington, as the cherry tree slayer who would not lie. The same artist turned Paul Revere’s ride into a surreal jaunt through a fairytale town, with Revere astride a miniature rocking horse. Wood’s point was simple: In the midst of the Great Depression, bedtime stories about the founders were suitable for children but not adults. It was time for Americans to grow up and embrace their real history, a darker one. Gore Vidal did the same in 1973, when the breakdown of Nixon’s Watergate was in full sway, publishing Burr, a fictional history, in which Jefferson is savagely shown as a Janus-faced, dilettantish, ruthlessly power-hungry politician. In times of trouble, a little skepticism (and sarcasm) goes a long way.

Hamilton may be delight to watch, but let’s not convince ourselves that it honors the discipline of history. When he interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda, Late Show host Stephen Colbert joked: “I didn’t have to read the Bible, because I saw Jesus Christ Superstar.” That pretty much says it all. The musical Hamilton is to the historical Hamilton what Charlton Heston’s Moses is to … well, you get the picture.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that Elizabeth Hamilton wanted to tell Jefferson to include women in the Declaration of Independence in the musical Hamilton. It was Angelica Schuyler, her sister.

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