One price of political greatness is to be forced to campaign even long after death. The Founding Fathers, particularly, have been constantly dragged from their graves for partisan purposes. The shades of Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison have been invoked right up to the present by American politicians seeking to add luster to their own political agendas.

In 1923 Arthur H. Vandenberg, not yet a United States senator but already a power in Republican politics, went so far as to write an entire book called If Hamilton Were Alive Today. In it Vandenberg presumed to know how Alexander Hamilton would have reacted to the great questions facing the country in the post-World War I era. Deeply conservative himself, Vandenberg not surprisingly thought that Hamilton would come down on the conservative Republican side of all the issues.

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