This June, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew announced a redesign of the $10 bill that would replace the current figurehead, Alexander Hamilton, with a to-be-determined woman “pioneer” and “champion of democracy.” However, Hamilton’s removal from the $10 bill drew widespread criticism, and rightly so. Replacing Hamilton, the Treasury’s foremost founding father and an emblem of national unity, inclusion, and prosperity, represents an affront to his achievements and legacy. At the same time, continuing to feature Andrew Jackson—widely criticized today for his racist policies and opposed to a strong central banking system—on the $20 bill suggests the comparative value of his perspective and achievements. As it looks towards featuring a female American icon on U.S. currency, the Department of the Treasury should first review and consider the meaning conveyed by its current featured individuals.
Hamilton’s contributions to the establishment of a national treasury, common currency, and national monetary policy in the aftermath of the ratification of the Constitution in 1791 are unparalleled. As a renowned Federalist and co-author of The Federalist Papers with James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton served as the United States’ first Secretary of the Treasury from 1789-1795 and authored the country’s first fiscal policies. His belief in a strong central government as a force for unity in the nascent republic drove his signature political and economic achievements. Over the course of his tenure as Treasury Secretary, he initiated the payment of federal war bonds, proposed authorizing the federal government to assume states’ war debts, instituted a federal system for tax collection, and allowed the United States to establish credit with foreign nations.
Hamilton was the architect of U.S. economic policy. In the 1930s, the Treasury Department famously described how it placed Hamilton on the $10 bill to help “restore faith in economic power of the United States and currency” after the stock market crash of 1929. Uniquely qualified to retain a prominent place on American currency, Hamilton also laid the theoretical foundation for the American federalist system detailed the U.S. Constitution. He is a sustaining symbol of the American dream. The Treasury’s current actions would remove its spiritual father, without whom the Department would not exist.
Featuring an iconic American woman on currency undoubtedly represents an admirable and important initiative, even while functioning under the same logic that would retain Hamilton’s image on the $10 bill. The movement supporting this decision—long in the making—gained momentum and funding in 2012. That year, political operative Barbara Ortiz Howard established Women On 20s, a grassroots organization aimed at replacing Jackson with a female American leader on the $20 bill by the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Cherokee Nation chief and Native American activist Wilma Mankiller were ultimately chosen as finalists. Howard’s campaign was both timely and logical, and received hundreds of thousands of votes for the candidates.
However, Secretary Lew’s decision failed to address an equally important component of Women On 20s advocacy: that Jackson’s enduring position on the $20 bill communicates a backwards message to the American public. Women On 20s did not advocate in favor of featuring a woman on any currency; it targeted the $20 bill specifically, protesting Jackson’s position as a purported figurehead of American values and attributes.
Jackson spearheaded the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized forced relocation of Native Americans settled in the American Southeast, in order to make room for white settlers. Born in the antebellum South, Jackson was also a slave owner and a staunch advocate of a Southern agrarian way of life. Whereas Hamilton’s principal achievement surrounded the establishment of a centralized banking and money-printing system, Jackson opposed the existence of a national bank. In his executive decisions, Jackson acted as a proponent of states’ rights to determine and structure their own economic institutions.
The Department’s justification for choosing the $10 over the $20 —and thus replacing Hamilton as opposed to Jackson—appears to value short-term gain over the long-term importance of currency figureheads. As the $10 bill was already slated for redesigning, the Treasury would not have to invest in additional redesigning efforts and funding for the $20. The Treasury Department’s website details how “[c]urrency is primarily redesigned as necessary to address current and potential security threats to currency notes,” but although the Treasury’s Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence Steering Committee recommended a redesign of the $10 bill, as of 2013 the $20 bill was the most counterfeited denomination in the country.
Under the Department’s own justification, then, it ought to continue its anti-counterfeiting work by revising both the $20 and the $10, without replacing Hamilton as a figurehead. Redesigning the $20 would both act as a precautionary measure against counterfeiting and remove the bill’s sustaining symbol of racism and antebellum values in favor of someone such as Harriet Tubman, the most popular candidate and a genuine figurehead of American values.
Our currency, in its display of prominent American social, political, and economic figures, acts as a simple day-to-day reminder of the United States’ founding principles. It features individuals we consider instrumental to success of the American system. Currency design ought to celebrate progress and achievement—as both Hamilton and each of the candidate women do— rather than backwardness and division, exemplified by Jackson. The Treasury Department would do well to see the specific value in Women On 20s campaign, rather than blindly espouse a different philosophy: that our currency should feature a female American leader, regardless of whom she would replace. As the organization concludes: “Because our money sends a message both at home and abroad about what and whom we value as a nation, we believe wholeheartedly that we have to get that message right, not just as an afterthought to a security overhaul, but in a calculated and timely way.”
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