SO THE government will not, after all, air-brush Alexander Hamilton’s portrait from the $10 bill. Who says Americans don’t care about history? When the current secretary of the Treasury announced that he wanted to take the first secretary of the Treasury off the currency, the only surprise in this oh-so-modern time and times was the blowback he got for his efforts.
Sure, some pointy-headed academic types or even some musty editorialists who haven’t been in the sun for years might object. But who listens to them? All aboard for making a public relations splash in 2016! Let’s get rid of yet another dead white man from the ancient times and replace him with a more politically correct choice.
And why not make Alexander Hamilton an unperson? His innumerable services to the republic he helped mold into a nation are noted in the history books, which are getting as musty as editorialists. He was so 18th century. Down the memory hole with him. Along with other people in that era now known by their last names, such as a Washington or a Jefferson or an Adams or a Madison. And why not allow a poll of modern Americans decide who should take his place? Maybe it’ll be a Kardashian.
That was the path we saw—until the outrage set in.
You’d have thought that a football game had been canceled. The people just wouldn’t stand for it. Not Alexander Hamilton. The apparatchik now running the Treasury had explained that the $10 bill was next in line for a revamp, doncha know, and this administration is all about the glitter. So naturally Colonel/Secretary/Editor/ Founding Father Hamilton would step aside. It was his turn. Or at least the turn of the $10 bill.
But after fans of Alexander Hamilton—and they are apparently legion—made their voices heard, the current cabinet secretary at Treasury decided, well, maybe the colonel should stay after all. “These timelines are not written into law,” he said. “It’s a question of how fast these wheels can move. It can be speeded up.” Especially if the public is howling for your head. His meek statement reminds us of Japan’s emperor making his address to his people in mid-August, 1945: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
The whole business was idiocycompounded by ignorance and arrogance, bad taste and historical amnesia and who knows what else. Who could better represent the American spirit of individual achievement than an orphan born in the West Indies (“That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler!”—John Adams) who became a war hero, Founding Father, chief author of the Federalist Papers, outspoken opponent to slavery and person most responsible for putting a still new United States of America on sound financial footing?
Alexander Hamilton’s face removed from the currency? What fool first proposed that? And does he, she or it still have a job?
THANKFULLY, helpfully, pleasingly, the bright folk in Washington have decided to change the $20 bill instead. Which has needed changing for years, maybe since the first time somebody thought to put an Indian killer and economic illiterate out to scuttle the country’s banking system on the note. (Please see John Deering’s editorial cartoon Thursday, which needs to be cut out and clipped on the fridge of all who doubt the previous sentence.)
In his place will be the visage of Harriet Tubman, who has waited long enough, thank you. The noted abolitionist, humanitarian and hero of the anti-slave movement should have had her place on the currency long ago. She was said to never have lost a passenger in the Underground Railroad, and we wouldn’t doubt it. When much of the nation was enslaving a people, she was setting them free. Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, free at last.
Come to think, maybe we should think more on Harriet Tubman, and less on the bureaucrats and place-holders in Washington who seem to want to plaster over history for the sake of making a news cycle or to score public relations points. It sure would help our blood pressure.