Nate DiMeo: Kick Grant Off The $50 Bill (and replace him with Frederick Douglass)
[Nate DiMeo is the creator of the history podcast, The Memory Palace.]
There's somewhere around $750 billion worth of U.S. currency circulating around the globe. We're talking actual cold, hard cash—billions of pieces of paper, with their portraits and their signatures and their bouts of bizarro Masonic iconography. During this time when American power and prestige is in flux, at best, and when the United States and its new president are trying to press the perezagruzka button and change its image around the world, I say we start with its actual images. Let's put our paper currency to work, helping us tell a different story about America. It's time to put our mouth where our money is.
I'm coming after you, Ulysses S. Grant.
You seem like a swell guy (and happy 187th birthday this week!). Your plainspoken dignity helped define what America wanted from its Midwesterners. Your beard—well-kempt, but vital and robust—was perhaps the Platonic ideal of 19th-century Federal facial hair. You weren't nearly as awful to black and American Indian people as a lot of your contemporaries—or as your critics urged you to be. And, heck, you saved the Union on the battlefield and, as president, saved it all over again by keeping postwar tension from boiling over into Civil War II.
So grant Grant all of that. But as the face of the $50? It's time for Grant to go....
So why is this guy on the $50? Because in the late 1920s, the Department of the Treasury decided to shrink down U.S. currency to a new size that would fit in a wallet in a gentleman's back pocket. A crack team of Treasury officials went into a room and came up with a list of dead dignitaries whom they thought the American public would recognize.
Eighty-some-odd years later, it's time to rethink that decision.
While, ultimately, I'd enjoy going in an entirely different direction portraitwise (say, swap out Mr. Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson, for Geronimo), I understand the messy politics of booting a beloved Republican and Tennessean like Jackson—even Harold Ford Jr. wouldn't defend that on Olbermann. We need a figure who not only embodies the image that the current government would like to project to the world but who is actually politically feasible. Since the choice is, by law, up to the Department of the Treasury, and Tim Geithner doesn't need another fight on his hands, we need to give him a candidate who no one would gain political points by tearing down.
Drop Grant in exchange for Frederick Douglass.
First, let's dispense with the obvious racial symbolism....
Read entire article at Slate
There's somewhere around $750 billion worth of U.S. currency circulating around the globe. We're talking actual cold, hard cash—billions of pieces of paper, with their portraits and their signatures and their bouts of bizarro Masonic iconography. During this time when American power and prestige is in flux, at best, and when the United States and its new president are trying to press the perezagruzka button and change its image around the world, I say we start with its actual images. Let's put our paper currency to work, helping us tell a different story about America. It's time to put our mouth where our money is.
I'm coming after you, Ulysses S. Grant.
You seem like a swell guy (and happy 187th birthday this week!). Your plainspoken dignity helped define what America wanted from its Midwesterners. Your beard—well-kempt, but vital and robust—was perhaps the Platonic ideal of 19th-century Federal facial hair. You weren't nearly as awful to black and American Indian people as a lot of your contemporaries—or as your critics urged you to be. And, heck, you saved the Union on the battlefield and, as president, saved it all over again by keeping postwar tension from boiling over into Civil War II.
So grant Grant all of that. But as the face of the $50? It's time for Grant to go....
So why is this guy on the $50? Because in the late 1920s, the Department of the Treasury decided to shrink down U.S. currency to a new size that would fit in a wallet in a gentleman's back pocket. A crack team of Treasury officials went into a room and came up with a list of dead dignitaries whom they thought the American public would recognize.
Eighty-some-odd years later, it's time to rethink that decision.
While, ultimately, I'd enjoy going in an entirely different direction portraitwise (say, swap out Mr. Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson, for Geronimo), I understand the messy politics of booting a beloved Republican and Tennessean like Jackson—even Harold Ford Jr. wouldn't defend that on Olbermann. We need a figure who not only embodies the image that the current government would like to project to the world but who is actually politically feasible. Since the choice is, by law, up to the Department of the Treasury, and Tim Geithner doesn't need another fight on his hands, we need to give him a candidate who no one would gain political points by tearing down.
Drop Grant in exchange for Frederick Douglass.
First, let's dispense with the obvious racial symbolism....