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V19 2016 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 19, Number 17, April 24, 2016, Article 18

The big numismatic news this week was the anticipated U.S. Treasury announcement of changes to portraiture on paper money. In short succession David Klinger, Pablo Hoffman and David Sundman forwarded a New York Times article reporting that Harriett Tubman had been selected to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, with Alexander Hamilton keeping his place on the $10. Arthur Shippee forwarded a BBC News video for perspective from across the pond.

Coin World summarized the announcement in an April 20, 2016 article by Joe O'Donnell with a mockup of a Tubman $20. -Editor

The U.S. Treasury announced in a Wednesday afternoon press release that Harriet Tubman will indeed replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the $20 Federal Reserve note.

The Underground Railroad pioneer was the leading vote-getter in a 2015 poll sponsored by the Women on 20s campaign, which made headlines last year as it advocated for replacing Jackson with a woman.

Today's decision represents a change in direction for Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who in June 2015 pegged the $10 FRN as the denomination that would don a notable woman's portrait.

"Since we began this process, we have heard overwhelming encouragement from Americans to look at notes beyond the $10," Lew wrote in a letter that accompanied the press release. "Based on this input, I have directed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to accelerate plans for the redesign of the $20, $10, and $5 notes."

Lew said he anticipates that final concept designs for the new $20, $10 and $5 notes will all be unveiled in 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

Jackson became the target of Women on 20s as a president who was behind the mass relocation of Native Americans by way of what is commonly called the Trail of Tears.

Jackson will still have a spot on the $20 FRN. Lew said an image of him will appear on the back of the note along with a portrait of the White House.

Abraham Lincoln will continue to appear on the face of the $5 FRN, but the redesigned back of the note will depict historic events that have occurred at the Lincoln Memorial.

Here's a short excerpt from the Times article. -Editor

Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on Wednesday announced the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of American currency in a century, proposing to replace the slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, and to add women and civil rights leaders to the $5 and $10 notes.

Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical based on the life of the first Treasury secretary.

But the broader remaking of the nation’s paper currency, which President Obama welcomed on Wednesday, may well have captured a historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century.

Mr. Lew directed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hasten the redesign of the $20 and $5 notes at the same time. Subsequent production of the $10 bill would take precedence, though Mr. Lew said all three notes could be in wallets before 2030. The final decision on release is up to the Fed.

One wild card is that Mr. Lew and President Obama have just months left in office. But Mr. Lew expressed confidence that his successors would not veto the currency makeovers.

As with any hotly debated topic, there were those not happy with the outcome. Here's an excerpt from a note from E-Sylum regular Dick Johnson. -Editor

Replacing General Jackson with a portrait of Harriet Tubman is political correctness run amok. As one writer stated there is a single sentence about Tubman in Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of American People” while there are five pages on Andrew Jackson.

Placing a woman on our currency is an admirable move by the Treasury. However, a far better choice would be a Generic Woman – honoring ALL women.

General Jackson deserves to stay on the $20 bill to continue to be recognized as one of the great patriots in early American history.

Historian Eric Foner, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad approves, and nicely addresses the quandary of changing views of history. -Editor

... this also goes to the core of a broader debate: what is the best way to publicly acknowledge all of the facets of our history?

“The context is the ongoing debate over how history should be represented in public,” Foner said. “I approve of this. I think the best way to deal with it is to add, not necessarily subtract. The public recognition of history should represent the actual history. Including Harriet Tubman is more representative of the history of the United States.”

“In the south, I don’t think they should take down statues of Confederate leaders,” Foner continued. “They should put up statues of black congressmen and senators. It makes the public history more accurately reflect our entire history.”

Now the $20 bill literally represents two sides of our history — slave ownership and abolitionism.

The Washington Post Editorial Board was also pleased. -Editor

THE USUAL concern of an editorial page is government ineptitude or corruption, but it is also our occasional pleasant duty to call attention to cases of government competence — the most recent of which is Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s proposed redesign of U.S. currency. In fact, “competent” is too weak an encomium for Mr. Lew’s elegant handling of a sensitive task — to include images of women and minorities on heretofore white-male-dominated paper money.

In responding to a groundswell that began with Internet-based petition drives to replace Andrew Jackson’s image on the $20 bill with that of a woman, Mr. Lew had to navigate all the treacherous crosscurrents that characterize identity politics in 21st-century America. He initially planned to meet the demand for a woman by replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, which was due for a redesign anyway. When that met with resistance from Hamilton’s admirers — ranging from former Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke to fans of the eponymous Broadway musical — Mr. Lew took their good arguments into account and pivoted to a wider, and even more inclusive, plan to modernize several bills, not just the $10 or the $20.

The hallmark of Mr. Lew’s plan is addition, not subtraction; to embroider ever more of the country’s complex history, and the characters who made it, into these most widely used of government documents — as opposed to purging them or dumbing them down. Harriet Tubman, the great leader of the Underground Railroad and hero of the Union intelligence effort during the Civil War, will take Andrew Jackson’s place on the front of the $20; she becomes the first woman so honored on paper currency in more than a century, and the first African American. However, Jackson’s image will be retained in a redesigned reverse side of the bill — due recognition of his pivotal presidency and military leadership and, perhaps, a conversation-starter about his darker side as a slaveholder and oppressor of Native Americans.

To read the complete article, see:
The Treasury’s brilliant plan to redesign U.S. currency (www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-treasurys-brilliant-plan-to-redesign-us-currency/2016/04/21/0866c700-07d0-11e6-bdcb-0133da18418d_story.html)

Eugene Robinson published an opinion piece in the Washington Post laying out more of Tubman's background. -Editor

Conservatives should be delighted that Harriet Tubman’s likeness will grace the $20 bill. She was a Republican, after all, and a pious Christian. And she routinely exercised her Second Amendment right to carry a gun, which she was ready to use against anyone who stood in her way — or any fugitive slave having second thoughts. On her long road to freedom, there was no turning back.

Tubman was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore around 1822. She escaped to Philadelphia in 1849 but returned to the South more than a dozen times, risking life and liberty, to lead runaway slaves to freedom. Slave owners reportedly offered bounties of thousands of dollars for capturing the diminutive woman known on the grapevine as “Moses.”

“I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” she said later in life, “and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

But that was just the beginning of Tubman’s heroic service. During the Civil War, she guided a team of Union scouts operating in the marshlands near present-day Beaufort, S.C. In 1863, she led a raid on plantations along the Combahee River that freed more than 750 slaves — becoming, apparently, the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault.

Later in life, she worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and others in the crusade for women’s suffrage. She died in 1913, frail yet still unbowed, having lived one of the greatest of American lives.

Is it political correctness and historical revisionism to put her defiant likeness in our pockets? Of course — and high time, too.

Coin World's Bill Gibbs commented favorably on the additional changes announced this week. -Editor

Tubman’s story will not be the only new tale to be told on our future paper money. Lew also announced that the backs of the $5 and $10 notes will be redesigned as well, with the now familiar structures on the two notes (the Lincoln Memorial on the $5 note and the Treasury Building the $10 issue) retained but gaining scenes of historic events conducted in the name of liberty and freedom at both sites.

The back of the $5 note will show historical vignettes of the growing movement for equal rights for African Americans in the 20th century: Marian Anderson’s triumphal 1939 operatic performance in front of 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial after being denied a venue at one of the capital’s segregated concert halls; Martin Luther King’s stirring “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. A portrait of Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the Union and helped end slavery, will remain on the face of the note, the two sides meshing perfectly in telling a shared story.

Similarly, Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury secretary and a financial genius, and the Treasury Building will remain on the $10 note, but the back will feature scenes like the March 1913 gathering at the Treasury facility of women’s suffrage advocates and a vignette honoring Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul for their contributions to women’s suffrage.

Historical vignettes have largely disappeared from our paper money. Their return, with stirring new stories, should be exciting.

E-Sylum readers know I advocated for keeping Alexander Hamilton on the $10 and making any change elsewhere. And my personal pick for a woman on money was Tubman as well, so I'm also pleased with the outcome. But as with any change, it will take some getting used to.

I'll withhold judgement on the other proposed changes. I think showing famous events where the Lincoln Memorial was a backdrop is a great idea, adding life to an otherwise cold, classic depiction. A vista of the crowd at MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech could be inspiring. But attempting to acknowledge multiple events in one image could dilute the effect. Despite the expense perhaps a series of commemorative reverses would better meet the need.

And finally, in the life-imitates-art department, I'll end with an image of the first note in money artist J.S.G. Boggs' 1990s Women's Series, where he advocated putting women on our currency twenty years ago. His first pick? Harriet Tubman as a young girl.

Note to other editors in the numismatic and general press - find Boggs and interview him (he lives in Brandon, FL). He deserves some acknowledgement. Artists lead a tough existence, often dismissed and overlooked in their lifetimes, only to be lauded as visionaries long after their deaths. It would be interesting to hear his take on this week's announcements. -Editor