Welcome NPR listeners! I do most all my money-related blogging now over at Pocket Change, the blog of the American Numismatic Society. If you are looking to read a bit about nineteenth-century U.S. history and/or explore the fascinating story of the American circus, please stay and have a look around this site…
The NPR segment can be heard below. One thing that was regrettably cut which I spoke about is that the reason that the ten-dollar bill is presently being redesigned is because the government is in the process of making a long-overdue change that will place tactile features on US paper money for the visually impaired. In this context, I suggested Helen Keller might be the best choice for #TheNew10 as she embodied both of the rationales behind the present redesign, i.e., including a woman and adding features for the visually impaired. For more on what should be a very interesting story to follow through the end of the year when the decision on whom to add is made, see this post.
I made my national television debut earlier today in a segment with the effervescent Nancy Giles on the history of the penny. You can view the video here. As regular readers will already know, I am doing the majority of my digital work over at Pocket Change, the website/blog of the American Numismatic Society. One of the things that Nancy and I spent some time discussing, and something that I will be exploring in more detail in a future post on Pocket Change was the relationship between evolving notions of womanhood and representations of ‘Liberty’ in the antebellum United States. The images below show how Liberty’s hair was tamed from the ‘Flowing Hair’ cent of 1793 to the ‘Braided Hair’ cent of the 1840s and 1850s.
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For more information about how and why representations of Liberty followed this course, head here. And thanks to Alan Golds, Nancy Giles, and the wonderful crew for producing the segment!
This weekend I was quoted in a column by Gail Collins of the New York Times about the campaign to replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. WomenOn20s certainly seems to be gaining steam, but here’s hoping that this also sparks a broader conversation about US paper money, which is going on a hundred years without a significant redesign, whomever the personages pictured. For whatever reason, many Americans seem to regard the look of their currency as sacrosanct and any change is bound to be controversial, but it seems past time for something to happen.
As I pointed out in the column, Australia equitably has a woman and a man on each of their paper money denominations. Australians have also embraced a broader view of the type of person worthy of such an honor by choosing figures beyond the world of politics–artists, poets, inventors, etc. Making room for more and different kinds of people on American money would seem to be a worthwhile goal and might spark an interesting national discussion about who and what we value about our country. In this vein, the Times is hosting a fascinating Room for Debate discussion on potential candidates for the twenty. Collins cites me as supporting Amelia Earhart, but this was something that I mentioned in the course of a larger discussion about the politics of finding a replacement for Jackson. Quite simply, it needs to be a figure that can both garner popular support and be palatable to those on both sides of the political divide. I think, to take one example, that Margaret Sanger’s sexual politics would excite enough consternation to doom her candidacy. From a purely practical perspective, I think Amelia Earhart is an excellent candidate. She is someone who is a feminist icon, but also seems to be politically non-controversial. Her name is a familiar one to most Americans and her pioneering efforts in aviation certainly provide a strong narrative to mobilize around. Again, she is not my preferred candidate all things considered, but she seems like a more practical and possible one than some of the other names being bandied about.
For historians, I think this discussion is an interesting reflection of the vagaries of historiography and the volatility of the popular historical imagination. As numerous commentators have pointed out, when the decision was made to put Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill in 1928, his reputation was that of a war hero and as a hard-charging advocate for the common man. Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Jackson (1940) perhaps marked the peak of Jacksonian adulation, but his reputation has more or less been on the decline ever since. In a recent, acclaimed, and perhaps now definitive history of his era, Daniel Walker Howe essentially presents Andrew Jackson as a villain. Moreover his reputation as a violent racist and infamy as the architect of Indian removal has even seeped into the popular imagination. The hit musical Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, for example, rather sympathetically portrays him as a democrat gone awry, and if you haven’t seen it, please watch the clip below. Sean Wilentz and a few other historians have mounted a measured defense that emphasizes Jackson’s essential contribution to American democracy, without ignoring his obvious failings. Still, it seems to me that Jackson now has one of the most compromised reputations in antebellum American history. This was why I described Jackson as the “low hanging-fruit” of figures on US currency, and why I think this effort to replace him will ultimately succeed. Moreover, I have not as of yet seen anyone leaping to Jackson’s defense. And while I am not inclined to do so here, it is worth exploring why Jackson gets singled out for derision given that many of his ‘moneyed’ peers were also slave-owning (Washington), Indian-hating (Jefferson), and corrupt (Grant).
