What America’s Money Could Celebrate

John Dale Beety
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

Science is out and literature is in as the Bank of England changes the design of the ten-pound banknotes used throughout the United Kingdom. Biologist Charles Darwin has appeared on the “tenner” since 2000, but in September, novelist Jane Austen will replace him.

Video by: Bank of England

Quips about natural selection aside, Austen’s ascendancy is revenge for the fiction faction, as Darwin replaced Charles Dickens. Austen is also the second historical woman (as opposed to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the one constant on all these post-decimalization designs) to appear on ten-pound notes; the first was famed nurse and “Lady of the Lamp” Florence Nightingale. All this since 1975, and on just one denomination!

Jane Austen joins a lineup of statesman Sir Winston Churchill, economist Adam Smith, and steam engine pioneers Boulton and Watt. Past and future British banknote portraits draw from art (painter J.M.W. Turner), social reform (Elizabeth Fry), and mathematics (Sir Isaac Newton). This turnover of subjects and breadth of achievements celebrated presents a stark contrast to U.S. currency, where Harriet Tubman’s announced but not yet implemented debut on the twenty-dollar bill will be the first such change since 1928.

Video by: ABC News

A Narrow View from Long Ago

Money is a medium of communication as well as exchange. Regardless of form, it declares a value and an authority, “how much” and “who says so.” Even the words “United States Dollar” on a table of exchange rates state that much: one dollar, according to the U.S. government.

Just as Athens honored the goddess Athena and her owl on its iconic tetradrachm, modern-day nations honor people, places, objects, and even ideas on their currency. As late as 1947, the United States issued half dollars with Liberty-as-goddess on their obverse or “heads” side, and the word “LIBERTY” on coins is a legally mandated holdover.

In the late 1920s, U.S. banknotes went from a larger physical size to the dimensions spent today. A committee put together by the Secretary of the Treasury selected U.S. presidents as a theme for the new banknotes, with the Secretary of the Treasury making exceptions for polymath Founding Father Benjamin Franklin and two past Secretaries of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton and (on the long-gone $10,000 bill) Salmon P. Chase.

Video by: KHOU 11 — Houston

On that initial modern-size series of banknotes, the “Series of 1928” (actually released in July of 1929), the first seven portraits are the same as today’s, from George Washington on the dollar bill up to one hundred dollars and Benjamin Franklin.

Returning to the idea that nations place what they honor on their money, it is more accurate to say that those in power do so. Since 1862, the Secretary of the Treasury has had the authority to choose the subjects and designs of U.S. currency, though not always the budget; a provision preventing the Secretary from using any money to redesign the dollar bill has become a staple of recent spending bills, to the delight of the vending machine lobby.

Yet every portrait besides Washington’s has survived as well. That lineup predates the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. It predates the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the bills with “HAWAII” printed on them that became the currency there, ready to be declared worthless if Japan invaded. It predates every event in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and the dollar bills that flew on the Apollo 11 “Moonshot.”

Video by: Billy Joel

That lineup has persisted through the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, and even the security-enhancing currency redesigns of the 1990s that finally removed the 1920s-era cars from the back of the ten-dollar bill.

That lineup reflects a narrow view of American achievement from a time when those not white and male were virtually excluded from politics; in 1925, there were more states run by the Ku Klux Klan than woman senators and African-American senators combined. And unlike U.S. coins, where Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were honored after their deaths, U.S. currency never took notice of later events.

A First Step

The 2016 announcement starts to correct both the narrow range of subjects and the lack of twentieth-century history on U.S. currency. Harriet Tubman is an international icon of freedom. Depicting events associated with the Lincoln Memorial (Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert and the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. took place on its steps) and the Treasury Building (the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913 ended there) will reinforce the symbolic power of both sites.

Video by: Hearst / UCLA Film & Television Archive

Yet even the ten-dollar bill’s update dodges the original intent to replace Alexander Hamilton’s portrait with a woman’s. Public outcry, fueled in part by the eponymous Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, helped change the target to Andrew Jackson, whose reputation has waned since the 1920s.

Video by: The Obama White House

Unlike the United Kingdom, where changes in currency subjects every fifteen years or so are normal, U.S. currency has remained in stasis. Further, the decision to change only one portrait created a perception that Alexander Hamilton was being “picked on,” a perception that remains with Andrew Jackson’s scheduled banishment to the back of the twenty-dollar bill.

If the United States is to celebrate even more of its heroes and its legacy, it must create a new set of expectations. Each notable figure will have their time, and then another will take their place.

A New Slate

What notable people might U.S. currency celebrate as it goes beyond Founding Fathers and Civil War figures?

A few ground rules are in order. First, George Washington will remain on the dollar. Second, new portraits must represent a range of American achievement. Third, in accordance with law, there can be no living subjects.

Here is a possible slate of six.

Two dollars: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804. A descendant of a judge from the city’s infamous witch trials, he used a Puritan setting for stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” and his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter.

Video by: America Magazine — The Jesuit Review

Five dollars: St. Francis Xavier Cabrini. The literal patron saint of immigrants, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini left Italy for the United States in 1889. She and the religious order she founded tended to the Italian immigrant community, orphans, and the sick. She became a U.S. citizen in 1909, eight years before her death, and was canonized in 1946.

Ten dollars: Luis Walter Alvarez. Scientist and inventor Luis Walter Alvarez pioneered the ground-controlled approach method of air traffic control and made, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “decisive contributions to elementary particle physics.” He collaborated with his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, on the “Alvarez hypothesis” that an asteroid impact led to the mass extinction of dinosaurs.

Twenty dollars: Harriet Tubman. Born into slavery in Maryland, she escaped in 1849 and became one of the Underground Railroad’s most famous “conductors.” As a nurse and scout for the Union Army, she led the Raid at Combahee Ferry in South Carolina in 1863 that freed hundreds, and she campaigned for women’s suffrage for the rest of her long life.

Video by: Talks at Google

Fifty dollars: Duke Kahanamoku. Duke Kahanamoku was born in 1890 in the Kingdom of Hawaii. He won three Olympic gold medals in swimming, and at swimming exhibitions he popularized Native Hawaiian surfing, most notably in Australia and in California. Already a sport and cultural icon, he later served as Sheriff of Honolulu for more than a quarter-century.

One hundred dollars: Abigail Adams. The top advisor of second U.S. President John Adams as well as his wife, Abigail Adams was the prototype of the active First Lady. While John Adams served in the Continental Congress, Abigail warned him to “Remember the Ladies” in letters that give historians insight into both momentous events and everyday life at the time.

Many Worthies

There are far more worthy subjects for currency portraits than possible places. One can look at the above list and ask, why not Casimir Pulaski, Emily Dickinson, Albert Einstein, Maria Martinez, Audie Murphy, and Sarah Breedlove? Why not Mary Cassatt, Scott Joplin, Grace Hopper, the Marquis de Lafayette, Jane Addams, and Sequoyah? Why not Daniel Inouye

And why not them, in time? U.S. currency has a chance to reflect notables from all across its history, not a narrow slice of the past chosen before anyone living could have had a voice in the matter.

When Harriet Tubman debuts on the twenty-dollar bill, every face around her would have looked down upon her in life. She deserves better.

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John Dale Beety

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Professional hobbyist and writer/editor. Opinions are my own.

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