Currency should reflect our nation’s rich past

By Clarence Page

Saturday, April 30, 2016 | 5:45 p.m.

If I didn’t know better, I would have expected today’s conservatives to love Harriet Tubman. After all, she was a pistol-packing black Republican who repeatedly risked her life to lead slaves to freedom. What’s not to like?

But real life isn’t that simple. Reaction to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s plan to put Tubman’s likeness on the front of the $20 bill sometime after 2020 clearly fell along racial and political lines.

Eighty-one percent of Democrats polled recently by SurveyMonkey support putting Tubman — who helped hundreds of slaves find freedom via the “underground railroad” — on the $20 bill, reported Politico, while 50 percent of independents and only 34 percent of Republicans agree.

Among supporters of the Grand Old Party’s front-runner Donald Trump, 7 out of 10 opposed the plan, which would move Andrew Jackson — a war hero and populist, but also a Democrat and, let’s face it, a genocidal racist — to the flip side of the $20 bill.

Trump himself called Tubman “fantastic” on NBC’s “Today” show but denounced Lew’s plan to move Jackson to the back of the bill as “pure political correctness.”

Why, I wondered, is it any more PC to put Tubman on the $20 bill than it was to put Jackson on the $20 in the first place?

Trump proposed, “Maybe we do the $2 bill or we do another bill.” His surrogate, Ben Carson, suggested the same idea earlier in the day on Fox Business.

But what, I wondered, do Trump and Carson have against Thomas Jefferson, who currently graces the $2 bill, in case you have forgotten — as most Americans probably have?

Why, I wondered, do Trump and Carson — who both say they love Tubman — only love her enough to want to put her on currency that hardly anyone ever sees?

Arguments about the past are feverish and never-ending because, as an old saying goes, they really are arguments about the future.

With that in mind, I am pleased to note that not all conservatives were unhappy with Treasury’s move.

“Given the sheer number of blows that Tubman struck for liberty,” tweeted National Review writer Charles C.W. Cooke, “she belongs on the currency more than most. Good choice.”

I agree. I have nothing against white males, dead or alive, but they didn’t build this country alone. As much as the denial of uncomfortable history seems to be our national pastime, we Americans have more than one historical narrative to tell.

Jackson, who owned hundreds of slaves and shut down the national bank in the name of the common man’s struggle against elites, always has been a controversial, larger-than-life figure, even in his own time.

But there is also a bracing irony to his forced relocation to the backside of the $20 bill. After all, as famous as he may be for his heroic victories as a general in the War of 1812, he also instigated the “Trail of Tears,” a series of forced relocations of Native Americans under his deplorable Indian Removal Act of 1830. Thousands died from exposure, disease and starvation along the route.

We should never try to erase history. We should try to put it into context. In that spirit, few life stories show more grit, courage and determination than Tubman’s. After escaping slavery in Maryland, where she was born around 1822, she returned to the South more than a dozen times to lead friends, relatives and others to freedom. She also instructed dozens in how to make their own way to freedom.

During the Civil War, she served as a scout and spy for the Army, and led a raid on plantations in South Carolina that probably made her the first woman to lead this nation’s troops into combat.

Before she died in 1913, she worked with Susan B. Anthony and others to become a leading advocate for the right of women to vote.

Traditionalists gripe at the inconvenience of having to get used to a new face on our currency. But until paper currency falls to the rising age of digital dollars, Tubman’s likeness can remind us that America works best as a land of inclusion, not exclusion.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.