American conservatism is not a stable tradition. Even during a supposed era of conservative dominance like the Gilded Age, biographies of Alexander Hamilton, arguably the central icon in American conservatism, by Henry Cabot Lodge and William Graham Sumner - writers usually considered conservative at the time and by later historians - offered sharply different characterizations and evaluations of the personality and policies of the founder of the Federalist Party. In 1882 Lodge offered Hamilton as a role model for aggressive nationalists, a vigorous statesman whose appreciation of stable order and deployment of effective power provided enduring benchmarks for his successors, soon to include Lodge himself. By the time Sumner"s study of Hamilton appeared in 1890, the Yale professor had come to feel that, due to the unintended consequences inevitable in a complex, inter-related economic and social system, a conservative should choose not to act at all unless the supporting data were scientific and compelling. From Sumner"s perspective, Hamilton failed as a nationalist statesman primarily because he aimed too aggressively at statesmanship.
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