WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew
on Wednesday announced the most sweeping and historically symbolic
makeover of American currency in a century, proposing to replace the
slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, and to add women and civil rights leaders to the $5 and $10 notes.
Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical based on the life of the first Treasury secretary.
But the broader remaking of the nation’s paper currency,
which President Obama welcomed on Wednesday, may well have captured a
historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial
nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century.
Tubman,
an African-American and a Union spy during the Civil War, would bump
Jackson — a white man known as much for his persecution of Native
Americans as for his war heroics and advocacy for the common man — to
the back of the $20, in some reduced image along with the White House.
Tubman would be the first woman so honored on paper currency since
Martha Washington’s portrait briefly graced the $1 silver certificate in
the late 19th century.
While
Hamilton would remain on the $10, and Abraham Lincoln on the $5, images
of women would be added to the back of both — in keeping with Mr. Lew’s
intent “to bring to life” the national monuments depicted there.
The
picture of the Treasury building on the back of the $10 bill would be
replaced with a depiction of a 1913 march in support of women’s right to
vote that ended at the building, along with portraits of five suffrage
leaders: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice
Paul and Susan B. Anthony, who in more recent years was on an unpopular
$1 coin until minting ceased.
On
the flip side of the $5 bill, the Lincoln Memorial would remain, but as
the backdrop for the 1939 performance there of Marian Anderson, the
African-American classical singer, after she was barred from singing at
the segregated Constitution Hall nearby. Sharing space on the rear would
be images of Eleanor Roosevelt, who arranged Anderson’s Lincoln
Memorial performance, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in
1963 delivered his “I have a dream” speech from its steps.
The
final redesigns will be unveiled in 2020, the centennial of the 19th
Amendment establishing women’s suffrage, and will not go into wide
circulation until later in the decade, starting with the new $10 note.
The unexpectedly ambitious proposals reflect Mr. Lew’s tortuous attempt
to expedite the process and win over critics who have lodged conflicting
demands, pitting mainly women’s advocates against Hamiltonians newly
empowered by the unlikely success of their hero’s story on Broadway.
Mr.
Lew’s design proposals are the culmination of 10 months of often-heated
public commentary that began almost immediately after he invited
Americans last June to help him decide which woman from history to honor
on the $10 bill. That feel-good initiative proved to be hardly as
simple as he first imagined.
Immediately an online group called Women on 20s
insisted that the woman to be honored — Tubman was its choice — had to
go on the more common $20 note, displacing not the popular Hamilton but
Jackson, whose place in history has suffered lately with attention to
his record of forcibly relocating Native Americans, supporting slavery
and — despite his prominence on currency — opposing a national banking
system and paper money. But the $10 was next in line for redesign, based
on federal officials’ assessment of counterfeiting threats.
Yet other women mobilized by the Girls’ Lounge,
a networking organization for female corporate leaders, demanded that a
woman go on the $10 note, as Mr. Lew first proposed, because they did
not want to wait years for a new $20 bill. Within the administration,
Rosie Rios, who as treasurer of the United States oversees the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing, was also pushing for a woman on the $10 bill.
But nothing so roiled the debate as the phenomenon of the musical “Hamilton.”
Weighing
in for his place on the $10 bill were well-to-do theater patrons and
teenagers rapping to the soundtrack, as well as the show’s creator and
star, Lin-Manuel Miranda. When Mr. Lew and his wife caught a performance
last August, the Treasury secretary hinted to Mr. Miranda that Hamilton
would stay. Just this week, the show won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
By
July, in fact, Mr. Lew already had decided to keep his long-ago
predecessor on the $10 note, and put a vignette of suffragists on the
back, with Tubman scheduled for the $20 bill and changes to the $5 note
as well.
“I had a kind of ‘aha’ moment where I said we’re thinking too small,” Mr. Lew said on Wednesday.
He
decided to redesign all three notes to accommodate the various views,
and sooner. As for the choice of Tubman, he said that in the public
comments he reviewed each night, “the pattern became clear that Harriet Tubman struck a chord with people in all parts of the country, of all ages.”
“This
is a good solution,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine,
who wrote to the secretary “strongly suggesting he not remove Hamilton”
from the bill.
Mr.
Lew directed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hasten the
redesign of the $20 and $5 notes at the same time. Subsequent production
of the $10 bill would take precedence, though Mr. Lew said all three
notes could be in wallets before 2030. The final decision on release is
up to the Fed.
One
wild card is that Mr. Lew and President Obama have just months left in
office. But Mr. Lew expressed confidence that his successors would not
veto the currency makeovers.
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“I
don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the
image of Harriet Tubman off of our money? To take the image of the
suffragists off?” he said.
Not
since 1929 has American currency undergone such a far-reaching change.
That year all paper money changed, with more standard designs and
smaller size to save costs.
In advance of Mr. Lew’s decision, the emotion that the Treasury initiative had prompted was reflected in a letter
to the Treasury secretary on Tuesday evening. More than three dozen
women including actors, feminists, corporate executives and journalists
objected to preliminary news reports that he was planning to renege on
putting a woman on the $10 face, calling it, if true, “a major blow to
the advancement of women.”
They
admonished the Treasury secretary, saying: “ Could there be a better
metaphor for second-class status that continues to limit our girls?”
The
signers included the actresses Ellen DeGeneres, Geena Davis and Jane
Lynch; the former soccer star Abby Wambach; former Representative
Gabrielle Giffords; the news media figures Katie Couric and Arianna
Huffington; the feminist leader Gloria Steinem; and the photographer
Annie Leibovitz.
Mr.
Lew’s compromise did not satisfy the letter writers since the new note,
the $10 bill, will picture women on the back. But Women on 20s released
a statement “celebrating” the decision, despite Mr. Lew’s inability to
say how quickly the government can accelerate a new $20 note given
technological and production complexities.
Yet, as Mr. Lew said Wednesday: “I said we were going to listen. We really did listen.”
Correction: April 20, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the number of slaves escorted to freedom by Harriet Tubman. It was hundreds, not thousands. The error was repeated in a capsule summary.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the number of slaves escorted to freedom by Harriet Tubman. It was hundreds, not thousands. The error was repeated in a capsule summary.
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