Kick Grant Off the $50 Bill
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Kick Grant Off the $50 Bill
Let’s replace him with an American who shows our best side.
By Nate DiMeo
Posted Monday, April 27, 2009 - 3:59pm
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.
As the architect and face of the Union victory, Grant was the obvious popular choice when he ran to succeed the train wreck known as the Andrew Johnson administration. As a steward of the economy, however, the 18th U.S. president was a disaster in ways that are eerily familiar today. On Grant's watch, a housing bubble, a tech bubble (of a railroad-y, 19th-century sort), market manipulation, government corruption, cronyism, overleveraged lenders, and the sudden popularity of new, unregulated financial instruments turned a postwar boom into a deep depression that makes the Great Depression seem full of itself.
The general was ill-prepared to run the country. He was a military man, used to designing battlefield strategies and barking instructions on horseback. But when he realized that senators don't salute and congressmen couldn't be ordered around, Grant found comfort in the company of captains of industry and Wall Street wizards. The 18th president couldn't play at their level and, instead, got played, over and over again.
Comments
I found lots of interesting
I found lots of interesting information here. The post was professionally written and I feel like the author has extensive knowledge in the subject. Keep it that way.
well, why not Jack Benny?
well, why not Jack Benny? heehee
Why not Jack Benny?
Because we don't have a 39 dollar bill
Kicking grant off the $50 bill
The purpose of any portrait or design on currency is to make counterfeiting more difficult. Always having the same people on the same denomination of bill seems to me to make it easier for the counterfeiters. We would be better off if we, like some other nations, changed the design of our bills based on security from counterfeiting rather than some sort of political agenda.
Replacement figure heads on money
I signed up to comment on this topic. I really like the way you are going with this. I hate to be cliche but I really do believe that George Washington Carver should be on a bill, if not to at least to replace Andrew Jackson. I have felt strongly about Carver as being one of the most historically important people in American history for a long time. Great article!
Really, Jackson needs to go...
I agree completely with pizzuti that the dollar coin was the reason that females haven't succeeded on money. More specifically, I think it's been that the recent dollar coins have been the same size as the quarter.
Jackson needs to go. Actually, many of the founding fathers had a views that would make them political pariahs today, but most of them also accomplished something that helped define our nation despite themselves.
It's hard to think of many uncontroversial choices to put on money. Douglass would be a good choice. There were some good jurists, John Marshall, Thurgood Marshall...
Maybe the best choice would be to go through a list of moments that defined our country and issue a series for each one. Early civil rights might feature Douglass and Tubman and Lincoln, the suffragette movement could have a series, WWII, the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's... it might be nice to see some of the people who stood up to Joseph McCarthy too.
Kick 'em all off
If I were redesigning the currency, something I've probably thought way too much about, I'd like to see us start from scratch and have money that honors different accomplishments, and also changes things out a little more frequently. Here's my scheme for who should go where:
$1 - Presidents, but no playing favorites - do them all in order with a new one every year
$5 - Artists and writers - It's about time we saw Twain, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville to begin with on the money.
$10 - Scientists and explorers - Lewis and Clark, Armstrong, Edison, etc.
$50 - Great social leaders - significant Americans who've never held elected office - MLK, Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony
$100 - Founding documents - let's not forget we're a nation of laws. Go ahead and honor the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights on their own bill
Of course, I know full well nothing like this will ever happen. The knack for designing attractive American money seems to have gone the way of the Indian head nickel.
Just live the American money
Just live the American money as is. More than Grant I like Franklin when I hold $100 in my hands.
Susan B. Anthony on Money...
The reason why the Susan B. Anthony and Sakajawea dollars collapsed was because nobody wants to use dollar coins, not because they were women.
I am kind of wary of the "women as lesser historical figures" claim this article makes. People don't use money because of who is on it, they use it because they like that bill.
Put Susan B. Anthony on the $50 and you'll have the same number of people using $50 as currently use it. There are certainly more people who know who she is than President Grant. Heck, there are more people who know who she is than know Frederick Douglas.
Barack Obama will find his way onto our currency in due time, maybe 50 or 100 years, and John F. Kennedy will find himself in a more prominent position before long. Lets do the right thing now and put Anthony on something that is likely to be circulated.
Yeah, don't go there
We're kind of busy right now trying to keep the $50 bill from falling to the value of those dollar coins so maybe this can wait.
Even if we did try and change the face of the 50 it would be more likely that we would wind up with Reagan on it than some figure from over a 100 years ago. Face it, the GOP would push for it and an overwhelming majority of the populace would want Uncle Ron instead of somebody that they have never heard of before. And be careful, the $50 could become as ubiquitous as the $20 if we go into an inflationary spiral as a result of several years of $1 trillion deficits.
If Reagan did wind up on a bill I wouldn't be surprised if that denomination gained the nickname of the Fucker.