Jews don’t have a dog directly in this fight, but nevertheless I’m compelled to speak up about the new controversy concerning who, if anybody, should replace current faces on U.S. currency.
I’m not a big fan about tampering with the iconography of the currency, which certainly won’t sustain the dollar in world markets, but—if it is to be done to honor a woman this is how.
The Treasury Department, which initially proposed replacing President Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill with Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is now vacillating toward replacing Alexander Hamilton on the ten. Jackson, the founder of the modern Democratic Party, is still honored at annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners. Hamilton, a Federalist, is an indirect founder of the Whigs and then the Republicans.
The partisan politics aside, my UCLA mentor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Professor Emeritus Daniel Walker Howe, the preeminent historian (and booster) of the Whig Party, taught me that Andy Jackson was a white racist with genocidal tendencies who is deserving of condemnations—not congratulations. Charlton Heston, Cecille B. DeMille’s Moses, played Jackson heroically winning the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 against the British, but Jackson aso led the American forces that not ony defeated the Creek Indians, but butchered them in a manner that turned even Davy Crockett's stomach.
If we are to honor a woman in Old Hickory’s stead, there is no better choice than Harriet Tubman, “The Moses of Her People” who led at least 300 slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad and also spoke up for women’s rights. She was an African American Republican. Does this disqualify her?
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