* Our current money is rife with slaveholders, sexists, and racists. I suggest a clean sweep:
$100 – Martin Luther King Jr.
$50 – Rosa Parks
$20 – Harriet Tubman
$10 – Frederick Douglass
$5 – W. E. B. Du Bois
$3 – Harvey Milk
$2 – Carrie Nation
$1 – Barack Obama
$1 coin – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Half-dollar – Abigail Adams
Quarter – Thurgood Marshall
Dime – Cesar Chavez
Nickle – Booker T. Washington
Penny – Malcolm X
* The “natural-born citizen” clause was introduced into the Constitution mostly to keep out the West Indian-born Hamilton, whom none of the other Framers could stand.
Guy was a genius, though.
* Rootless, illegitimate, ruthlessly ambitious, willing to run huge debts, spend lots of a military with an idea to self-aggrandizement, sexually amoral, good with figures- Hamilton would be seen as a sensible, moderate pol, a real statesman, by the NPR, CNN crowd and their audiences and the Chamber of Commerce sorts.
* Of all the great men depicted on present-day US currency, Hamilton is one of two who never owned slaves (the other, of course, is Abe Lincoln). That Washington, Jefferson and Jackson were slave owners is common knowledge. Less well known, however, is that Franklin and Grant were also slave owners. Grant owned slaves through his wife Julia (who was from Kentucky) and kept them until they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. Ben Franklin owned slaves as a young man but later freed them and became an abolitionist in his old age.
So clearly, anyone who wishes to remove the plutocratic Hamilton from the currency is in favor of slavery. But if he is to be replaced by a woman, I would suggest Julia Dent Grant, a distinguished First Lady. BTW, Grant’s family refused to attend their wedding because the Dents were prominent slave owners.
* To comport with the essence of American culture, why not just use movie stars?
* I would rather use great American directors:
DW Griffith*
Buster Keaton
Howard Hawks
John Ford
Orson Welles
* 1/ I’m surprised that Steve didn’t mention that Hamilton was closer to being an immigrant than any of the other founding fathers having not only been born outside the 13 colonies, but having been born on an island that at one time wasn’t even British.
2/ Given this website’s current fondness for meritocracy you would think that Hamilton, born a poor bastard, would be lauded, certainly over his many rich born contemporaries. Indeed I see more than a few parallels between him and say Clinton (Bill not DeWitt), a favorite of the NY crowd.
* Alexander Hamilton brought central banking to the United States.
He didn’t wake up one morning and think “Wow, European-style central banking is exactly what this incipient republic needs!”
I’m sure Hamilton was well-compensated for his role in the establishment of the FBOTUS.
* Cuckservatives and libertardians have for almost a generation been flirting with the idea that inner city drug dealers- go-getting entrepreneurs trading in a product there is clearly a demand for but which a meddling nanny state has outlawed- are the REAL Americans, not those clock-watching, pink-complexioned stiffs working in auto plants or the Oakland docks for $65/hr. This is the implicit rationale behind Rand Paul’s claim that the justice system is unfairly incarcerating too many young, black males (too bad, BTW, since Paul seems like one of the smarter candidates; loved it when in one of the debates he pointed to Christie and said, “If you want WWIII, you have your candidate.”)
The Welfare Reform Act of 1996(?) was white America’s last great act of self-assertion; but then Michael Jordan hugged every single last white man and high-fived every single last white boy in the country, and we’ve been living under this dopey illusion of racial comity ever since. Actually, no, he didn’t hug or high-five them, he sent them a complimentary pair of sneakers made in a Third World sweat shop with his image on them. And actually, no, those sneakers weren’t free, but marked up like 2000%.
* There used to be only one face on American coinage, and that face happened to be female. She was Lady Liberty. If we need to put a woman on the folding green, I propose her. Besides, she’d focus attention on a rather neglected principle (at least in this day and age) instead of a individual person, and nobody would be able to argue that she’s not an appropriate selection.
* My wife and I have a running bet on how long one can be at a social event in Manhattan before talk turns to Hamilton. Usually it’s somewhere in the 5-10 minute range, but it can be as low as 2 minutes, and it almost never fails to happen.
* Seeing as how we are probably never going to get another (besides Franklin, of course) American man* who did significant work in the arts and the sciences on our money, I’m still going to plunk for putting one of these ladies on US currency:
Emily Dickinson
Edith Wharton
Willa Cather
Mary Cassatt
Hamilton as immigrant hero: Interesting reversal. American historiography used to see that as Hamilton’s weakness. It was thought that that prevented him from truly understanding the American mind.
Pop culture and Hamilton: Hamilton was depicted as something of a villain in the John Adams HBO miniseries. Wonder if that will be the last time that we will see a negative version of him.
Falling liberal idols: Who’s in bad odor these days: Jefferson (whole slavery thing), Madison (ditto), Jackson (slavery plus Amerinds),Woodrow Wilson (the vile racist who lauded Birth of a Nation), FDR (father of redlining, didn’t do enough to stop Hitler, Japanese internment), etc.
*Although I still think that it’s positively criminal that people like Edison, the Wright Bros, Mark Twain, William James, Poe, Melville, Howard Hawks, etc, have never been on US currency.
* I nominate Monica Lewinsky for the currency.
Nothing epitomizes the character of the postmodern U.S. better than Clinton getting a blow job in the Oval Office…
* It’s the work of one man, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who born into a upper-middle class Puerto Rican family in New York and educated at Wesleyan. He looks mostly, but not wholly, white, slightly less white than, say, Marco Rubio. You’d probably identify him as Latin-looking.
* For the same reason movies set in the past always involve sympathetic characters with modern 21st century US values. Most people don’t seem to have the imagination to hold it in their heads that many perfectly good people didn’t think like them, and indeed historical “heroes” usually had ideas not unlike those of their surrounding society.
