Founding Financiers

In a source I cannot now recall, I once read that following the failure of a movie set during the era of the American Revolution a Hollywood mogul decreed: “No more quill pen pictures!” The studio head’s commercial instincts were sound. In public consciousness, the Civil War marginalizes the War of Independence, and American history between the Founding and the Jacksonian era has been lost to a kind of collective amnesia. The American republic in its first few decades, with its East Coast patricians and aristocrats, its balls and wigs and buckled shoes, seems more like a detached fragment of the Old World than the germ of a New, best suited for cinematic treatment by “Masterpiece Theater” or Merchant and Ivory.
Thomas McCraw’s The Founders and Finance is not likely to be optioned by Hollywood for a big-budget motion picture. Bankers and immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion by a certain strain of American populism, and McCraw’s story is about immigrant bankers. But subsequent American history is rooted in the thoughts and actions of McCraw’s subjects, even if the tale won’t soon be coming to your neighborhood metroplex.
Four of the first six secretaries of the U.S. Treasury—serving for a cumulative 21 of the first 27 years of the U.S. under the federal Constitution—had been born abroad. They were Alexander Hamilton, born in St. Croix in the Caribbean; Albert Gallatin, born in Geneva, Switzerland; George W. Campbell, born in Scotland; and Alexander James Dallas, born in Jamaica.

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/founding-financiers-2/