One of the possibilities for the new $10 bill.
In 2020, a woman's visage will share the $10 bill with Alexander Hamilton's come 2020., Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday in a conference call:
Our paper bills and the images of great American leaders and landmarks that they depict have long been a way for us to honor our past and discuss our values. This decision of putting a woman on the $10 bill reflects our aspirations for the future as much as the reflections of the past.
The last time
a person replaced on currency in general circulation was in 1929, the newly downsized bills included $20s with the image of Andrew Jackson engraved on them. He replaced Grover Cleveland.
Jackie Calmes reports:
The note will continue to have some image, also to be determined, of the current $10 honoree, Alexander Hamilton, a founding father (there were, of course, no mothers) and Treasury secretary to President George Washington (he of the $1 bill). Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, who by law makes the selection of an honoree, will disclose his choice by the end of the year. The new note will appear in 2020 — the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
The only criterion under law is that the chosen person must be dead, but the Treasury said Mr. Lew was looking for a woman “who was a champion for our inclusive democracy.” That would include the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who was the top choice on social media of a campaign to put a woman on the $20 bill.
The Treasury Department will seek the public's advice in choosing the woman and has asked people to use the Twitter hashtag #TheNew10 to spread the word.
The replacement of Jackson with a woman on the $20 bill would have had the added benefit of removing one of the three slave-owners on our bills as well as the presidency's worst scourge of American Indians. But the Treasury Department had already decided in 2013 that the $10 bill would be the one to depict a woman long before the campaign of Women on 20s got underway.
Follow me below the fold for more about this decision, which will probably cause some right-wingers' heads to explode.
As I wrote last March about Women on 20s in "Group seeks to replace Jackson with a woman on the $20 for 100th birthday of the 19th Amendment," Harriet Tubman is my first choice. She was also the choice a majority of people who voted in response to the list of 30 female potential replacements for Jackson listed by Women on 20s. Other choices were Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Betty Friedan and Sojourner Truth.
Tubman strikes me as especially good because it's past time we had a disruptor of business-as-usual engraved on our money:
Herself a fugitive slave, armed with a pistol, she risked capture and worse at least 13 times by returning to Maryland to pull some 70 slaves out of bondage, guiding them along the Underground Railroad to safety in Canada. She endorsed John Brown's efforts, raising money and recruiting ex-slaves in Ontario to join the attack on the Harpers Ferry armory in what was meant to be the spark setting off a rebellion to end slavery. During the Civil War, she served as a nurse and in the summer of 1863 a leader of scouts and the first woman of that war to lead an armed assault, part of the Combahee River Raid that freed 750 slaves. She then recruited most of the liberated men into the Union Army. She spent her later years fighting for women's suffrage.
You don't get more disruptive of the established order than that.
The only woman ever to appear on the front of U.S. currency was Martha Washington on the 1886 $1 Silver Certificate. She also appeared on the reverse of the 1896 $1 Silver Certificate paired with husband, George.
But she wasn't the first woman engraved on our currency. In 1865, an idealized image of the 17th Century Powhatan Indian Pocahontas appeared on the reverse of the $20 banknote. The steel engraving was a reproduction of John G. Chapman's treacly painting, "The Baptism of Pocahontas."
Of the 53 Americans who have appeared on our national currency, the only other person of color was Running Antelope (Tȟatȟóka Íŋyaŋke), a principal chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, the same band as Sitting Bull. He was depicted on the 1899 $5 Gold Certificate. The bill caused a ruckus among Indians since it depicted the Sioux leader in a Pawnee headdress. That was decided because the Sioux headdress was too tall for the engraver to include.