ARTICLE EXAMINES SATIRICAL HARD TIMES BANKNOTE

Blur your eyes, and the banknote above looks normal enough. It has the right proportions. It’s covered in intricate line drawings, so as to discourage counterfeiting. It’s got serious-looking slogans and strongly penned numbers. If someone passed it to you across a counter after a long night, you might not look twice.

Focus, though, and you’ll notice a few weird things going on. A panel on the left side shows a bony, balding person dressed in a tattered American Flag. Across the top, a dragon rides a carriage through the streets, crushing pedestrians willy-nilly. The right side sports a donkey defecating into a monkey’s top hat. And along the bottom, a dung beetle with a human face rolls a poop ball emblazoned with the bill’s weird denomination: 75 cents.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this bill is not legal tender. It’s a parody note, “issued” during the Panic of 1837 to lampoon the figures on whom the artists blamed the crisis. Today, it provides a monstrous sort of history lesson, along with a timeless example of bonkers political art.

Look closely at its weird populace, and you’ll see the caricatured faces of towering historical figures. That lady on the left side? “That’s Andrew Jackson in drag,” says Lepler. Jackson is dressed as Lady Liberty, and holding a knife that says “veto,” meant to remind everyone of that time he had vetoed the Second Bank of the United States. The cracked globe he is standing next to represents The Globe, the leading newspaper of his party. “It was kind of the Fox News of its time,” says Lepler.

Jackson also makes a second cameo on the right side, this time as an incontinent donkey. “He’s pooping out gold currency because that’s supposedly what he wants to happen to the money supply,” explains Lepler. His vice president and successor appears too: “Martin Van Buren, his little trained monkey, is collecting the poop in a top hat.” Van Buren was also widely maligned, both for sucking up to Jackson and for continuing his policies once he himself had taken office. (He was also considered overly stylish, which explains the top hat.)

It is also Van Buren’s face on the crazy dragon on the top of the note, hoarding bags of money and riding in a wagon labeled “Treasury Department.” The wagon is being pulled by Loco Focos, who in turn are being whipped by John C. Calhoun, an infamous Southern successionist who supported Jackson on economic issues, if very little else. The whole crowd is running roughshod over people in the street. “A lot of Democratic support came from working class men,” says Lepler. “They’re trampling them.”

And then there’s the dung beetle, sporting the small, determined face of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. “Benton was known as Old Bullion Benton, because he was really in favor of hard currency,” says Lepler. “People called specie ‘Benton’s Mint Drops.’” The Benton bug is pushing a massive lump of dung, labeled with the banknote’s supposed value. Around him, in pompous script, loops a promise “to pay out of the United States Treasury, seven years after it is convenient, the amount of seventy-five cents.”

It’s difficult to consolidate a whole issue into an image, as evidenced by today’s one-panel political cartoons. As monstrous as this one looks, it’s actually pretty subtle, lampooning the country’s sad situation in its form—a useless piece of paper, dressed up as money—as well as its weird, weird content.

To read the complete article, see:
The Best Political Cartoon In History Is This Fake Banknote from the Panic of 1837 (www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-best-political-cartoon-in-history-is-this-fake-banknote-from-the-panic-of-1837)

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