$20 Bill: Beautiful American, Ugly American

Honoring Harriet Tubman, among many possible American women to honor, is about as good as it gets.

There is no better choice I can think of to put on the $20 bill. She stands for everything Americans -- let alone women -- are when they're at their best: courageous, compassionate, selfless, loving, fiercely loyal.

But I question why Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew failed to do only one right thing when he could have done two. 

Why didn't he dump Tubman's polar opposite, Andrew Jackson, when he had the chance? Why did he keep the seventh president on the back of the bill?

Nobody alive today knows why in 1928 a committee from the Treasury Department decided to put Jackson's face on the twenty. Not even societies formed to preserve his memory.

A lot is made of Jackson's slave trading. If it were only the delicious irony of a slave-trader being pushed to the back of his bill by an escaped slave, I would be laughing myself silly. But, no, there's more.

There is no uglier American than Andrew Jackson. He was a mass murderer. He engineered the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, campaigns to force at least 46,000 Cherokees, Choctaws, Muscogee-Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles off their ancestral lands. Why? Greed. Specifically so that their stolen lands could be used to expand cotton farming and slavery.

He knew thousands of Native Americans would die on the trail, it's in his papers.

If you believe I'm just taking incidents out of historical context, think again. Jackson's racist policies were controversial even in his own time. After the Indian Removal Act only narrowly passed Congress, an 1832 Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional. But the president ignored that decision and got away with it. 

In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a passionate letter calling Jackson’s policies “… a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?"

I never realized until this week that a statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback, saber drawn, sits on the lawn of the White House. The White House is hallowed ground, the statue should go.

Both lives, sadly -- Harriet Tubman's and Andrew Jackson's -- were American stories. One starting in the lowest place of all, risking her own life to save others and extend freedom to hundreds; the other coming from humble origins but achieving and using power and leadership for personal gain, no matter how terrible the cost.

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery. She escaped to Philadelphia, yet she bravely risked her life to return to the South and help more than 300 enslaved people escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, she served our country as a nurse, armed scout, and spy for the Union Army, and wrapped up her heroic life by campaigning with Susan B. Anthony for women’s right to vote. 

It doesn't get more inspirational than that.

I heard some people Wednesday scoff at the news of Tubman replacing Jackson on the face of the twenty. Here we go with more political correctness, they said. I say OK, maybe. But this issue isn't merely cosmetic. Symbolic change and real change really are connected sometimes. Symbols do matter. I believe that by exposing and confronting the symbols of our violent and racist history -- just as we do in celebrating the prouder accomplishments in our nation's history -- we open the door to conversations about how our legacies continue to affect people today.

For women, this is maybe one more crack in the glass ceiling. Still left behind on the pay train, yes, but maybe gender equality in the workplace isn't as far away as we imagine. In the meantime, every time we look at a $20 bill, Harriet Tubman will be a reminder that women in American history also fought long and hard and won.

Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith