H.W. Brands

speaker

313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

H.W. Brands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · NYT Bestselling Historian: Why George Washington Was the Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived — H. W. Brands · 12 May 2026 podcast

And what he saw in Washington, first of all, was an opportunity to get on the ladder and to rise from the ladder.

It's hard.

I have a hard time understanding what's really moving Hamilton because I have a great deal of difficulty separating Hamilton's ambition from Hamilton's emotions.

Now, it was that ambition that got him to where he wanted to go.

But there came a point when, I mean, this is very much like Hamilton, although it sounds pretty bold for somebody as young as he was, and he was very bold.

Hamilton felt that he outgrew Washington and that Washington, he helped get Washington the presidency.

And now Washington made him the secretary of the treasury.

And he's going to propose all these ideas.

It's going to make the executive branch really strong and powerful.

But Washington isn't as enthusiastic as he is.

And eventually Hamilton decides to bail out of the administration so he can essentially go off into politics on his own.

So part of it had to do with the fact that Washington was no Democrat in a small d. He didn't believe that ordinary people had the capacity to govern themselves.

He was an aristocrat as president.

And it's one of the reasons the Washington model has limited value for subsequent presidents who preside in an age of democracy.

So Washington was looking for those institutions, those developments that would give greater energy to the executive branch.

Now, Hamilton was a very keen thinker on economics, on finance, on banking, and all this stuff.

Washington was not.

Washington knew how this stuff worked, generally speaking.

But here again, it's worth taking ourselves back in time to an age before there were banks.

There were almost no banks in the United States, and nobody knew what banks did.

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