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The problem with any attempt to debunk Hamilton, currently America's most beloved musical, starts with the history of the word debunk. It was coined by the writer W. E. Woodward in his 1923 novel Bunk, whose protagonist was notable for "taking the bunk out of things." Inspired by a newspaper article he had read about delousing stations for European soldiers, Woodward came up with debunking. As it happens, he almost never used the word again. But just a few years after his novel came out, Woodward published George Washington: The Image and the Man, in which he attempted to correct the record on the first president. Washington, he insisted, wasn't so much a saint or a military genius as a great businessman.
Woodward didn't necessarily intend to debunk Washington in his biography. His goal, he said, was to liven up history writing, which he considered "dull, insipid and far too scholarly in style." Not unlike the producers of Hamilton, he was trying to introduce the man in the street to a real Founding Father, whom he described as possessing a "typical captain of industry attitude." The 1929 crash was years away; it wasn't a slam. Indeed, coming from Woodward, who had himself worked in the financial industry and written something called Watch Your Margin: An Insider Looks at Wall Street, it was probably a compliment. Nonetheless, Woodward was "attacked," as the New York Times noted in his 1950 obituary, "by patriotic societies and history scholars."
He tried to disassociate himself from the word he had created. "As a matter of fact," Woodward wrote, "I am an admirer of George Washington, and there is not a debunking paragraph in the whole book." It didn't matter. When he published a glowing biography of Thomas Paine in 1945, the Herald Tribune headlined its review woodward debunks the debunkers of tom paine. And in his memoirs, which also appeared more than two decades after his novel, he was still bemoaning his unhappy invention: "If I had it to do over again I would hesitate a long time before creating the word 'debunk,' and would make an effort to find another way to express the idea."
All of which is to say that the past is complicated, and explaining it...