Posted on 04/27/2016 5:56:25 PM PDT by massmike
The Democratic Party is poised to change the name of its annual fundraisers from The Jefferson and Jackson Day Dinners to the Harriet Tubman and the Artist Formerly Known as Prince Day Dinners, where crow will be served to atone for the sins of slavery and misogyny and celebrate the triumph of racial- and gender-identity politics over reality.
Not really. But the $20 bill is about to get a pc makeover, with Harriet Tubman, an obscure figure in U.S. history (an escaped slave who aided the Underground Railroad), replacing the 7th president of the United States, a man who gave his name to an era – the Age of Jackson.
Due to popular demand (from the White House and the Democratic Party's core constituencies) other changes are in store for our currency, including feminist block parties on the backs of $5 and $10 bills. Can Margaret Sanger doing the Charleston with Rosie O'Donnell be far off?
The changes were announced with much fanfare last week by Treasury Secretary Jacob L. Lew, whose job I thought it was help the president to screw up the economy, not to rewrite history.
As a headline in a Washington Post blog admits, "If you have no idea who Harriet Tubman is, you're not alone."
Andrew Jackson's life is the stuff of legend. Born dirt poor to Irish immigrant parents (the first president of humble origins), he served in the Revolutionary Army at age 14. Taken prisoner, he took a saber-cut across the face when he refused to polish the boots of a British officer – a scar he carried for the rest of his life, which seared nationalism into his soul.
A self-educated, frontier lawyer and judge, he became a plantation owner and fought duels (including one with a man who'd publicly insulted his wife). He rose to national prominence as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans where his ragtag army of 4,500 militia, Indians, freed slaves, frontiersmen and pirates defeated 8,000 British regulars, many seasoned veterans of the Napoleonic wars.
He served two terms as president, but won the popular vote three times. The first president from West of the Alleghenies, Jackson represented the triumph of the common man in national politics, a development which appalled the Eastern elites of his day. His home, the Hermitage in Nashville, has more than 180,000 visitors annually and tours in five foreign languages.
From Virginia to Oregon, 43 cities and counties in 26 states are named after him – not to mentions schools, parks and army bases. He took the first steps toward bringing both Florida and Texas into the Union, stood for money backed by gold and silver and opposed nullification (a move toward secession).
Of the 13 polls of historians and political scientists taken between 1948 and 2009, most ranked Jackson among the top 10 presidents.
This giant is now reviled as a slave owner (so were four of the first five presidents) who committed atrocities against American Indians. His detractors neglect to mention that he adopted two Indian children, one a ten-month-old found on a battlefield in the arms of his dead mother. As an orphan himself, he could relate.
If humane treatment of racial minorities is the hallmark of greatness, what's Franklin Delano Roosevelt doing on a dime? In far more enlightened times, he put 110,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps – 62% of them U.S. citizens.
The New York Times explained the absurdity in an April 20th story, where the establishment's bulletin board gloated: "But the broader remaking of the nation's paper currency, which President Obama welcomed (try orchestrated) 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."
The mutation of our paper money represents the triumph of symbolism over substance. One nation under God, RIP. Welcome to the tribal America of the 21st. century.
The Democratic Party has destroyed the black family (73% of African-Americans are born out-of-wedlock). Its latest big idea is giving sexual predators access to ladies' rooms, in the name of equality. But, it's putting the face of a black woman on a $20 bill.
At the risk of committing a capital offense, let me state what should be obvious: American history was made by white males, who were overwhelmingly Christian.
Until the current mixed-race occupant of the White House, every president was a male Caucasian – as were overwhelming majorities of Congress and every Supreme Court Justice until 1967.
White males established our nation, forged our identity, fought and won our wars and built our economy. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers didn't just identify as men, but actually were men.
And it was white males who ended slavery in 1865 and gave women the vote in 1920.
The faces on our currency reflect the reality of American history. They represent individual achievement, not interest-group pandering. George Washington isn't on a $1 bill because he was a farmer. Lincoln's face doesn't grace a fiver because he was born in poverty. On a $10 note, Alexander Hamilton doesn't represent immigrants who were born out of wedlock.
The next president will take office on January 20, 2017. The new $20 bill won't be in circulation until 2020 at the earliest.
The Times reports that Secretary Lew "expressed confidence that his successors would not veto the currency makeover. 'I don't think somebody's going to probably want to do that – to take the image of Harriet Tubman off our money.'"
His smug self-assurance is well-founded. When the left goes eyeball to eyeball with Republicans, you know who's going to blink first.
Since Republicans live in abject fear of being called racist or sexist, the smart money isn't on a rescue of Old Hickory.
not to worry... with the way the Feds print and inflate our currency it won't be worth anything by then... except perhaps as T.P.
You may not want to share that fact w/ lots of people. It really makes you look not too bright.
Honestly— I never heard of her. Don’t really think she is equal to Ronald Reagan— do you?
I don’t want her because she is absolutely NOBODY!! I suggest Ronald Reagan, who ended the COLD WAR !! I share that with who ever I want!! I wouldn’t talk about my sharing if I were you— It is embarrassing you.
Thursday - April 21, 2016 at 9:24 pm
By Patrick J. Buchanan
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of the American People,” there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman.
“An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.”
Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War — Andrew Jackson.
Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed an Indian uprising at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, in the War of 1812, then was ordered to New Orleans to defend the threatened city.
In one of the greatest victories in American history, memorialized in song, Jackson routed a British army and aborted a British scheme to seize New Orleans, close the Mississippi, and split the Union.
In 1818, ordered to clean out renegade Indians rampaging in Georgia, Jackson stormed into Florida, seized and hanged two British agitators, put the Spanish governor on a boat to Cuba, and claimed Florida for the USA.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams closed the deal. Florida was ours, and Jacksonville is among its great cities.
Though he ran first in popular and electoral votes in 1824, Jackson was denied the presidency by the “corrupt bargain” of Adams and Henry Clay, who got secretary of state.
Jackson came back to win the presidency in 1828, recognized the Texas republic of his old subaltern Sam Houston, who had torn it from Mexico, and saw his vice president elected after his two terms.
He ended his life at his beloved Hermitage, pushing for the annexation of Texas and nomination of “dark horse” James K. Polk, who would seize the Southwest and California from Mexico and almost double the size of the Union.
Was Jackson responsible for the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears”?
Yes. And Harry Truman did Hiroshima, and Winston Churchill did Dresden.
Great men are rarely good men, and Jackson was a Scots-Irish duelist, Indian fighter and slave owner. But then, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were slave owners before him.
To remove his portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Tubman’s, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd.
Whatever one’s admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.
Indeed, if the fight against slavery is the greatest cause in our history, why not honor John Brown, hanged for his raid on Harper’s Ferry to start a revolution to free the slaves, after he butchered slave owners in “Bleeding Kansas”? John Brown was the real deal.
But replacing Jackson with Tubman is not the only change coming.
The back of the $5 bill will soon feature Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, and opera singer Marian Anderson, who performed at the Lincoln Memorial after being kept out of segregated Constitution Hall in 1939.
That act of race discrimination came during the second term of FDR, Eleanor’s husband and the liberal icon who named Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court and put 110,000 Japanese into concentration camps.
And, lest we forget, while Abraham Lincoln remains on the front of the $5 bill, the war he launched cost 620,000 dead, and his beliefs in white supremacy and racial separatism were closer to those of David Duke than Dr. King.
Alexander Hamilton, the architect of the American economy, will stay on the $10 bill, due in part to the intervention of hip-hop artists from the popular musical, “Hamilton,” in New York.
But Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth, who fought for women’s suffrage, will be put on the back of the $10. While Anthony and Stanton appear in Morison’s history, Sojourner Truth does not.
Added up, while dishonoring Andrew Jackson, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is putting on the U.S. currency six women — three white, three African-American — and King.
No Catholics, no conservatives, no Hispanics, no white males were apparently even considered.
This is affirmative action raised to fanaticism, a celebration of President Obama’s views and values, and a recasting of our currency to make Obama’s constituents happy at the expense of America’s greatest heroes and historic truth. Leftist role models for American kids now take precedence over the history of our Republic in those we honor.
While King already has a holiday and monument in D.C., were the achievements of any of these six women remotely comparable to what the six men honored on our currency — Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, President Grant and Ben Franklin — achieved?
Whatever may be said for Eleanor Roosevelt, compared to her husband, she is an inconsequential figure in American history.
In the dystopian novel, “1984,” Winston Smith labors in the Ministry of Truth, dropping down the “memory hole” stories that must be rewritten to re-indoctrinate the party and proles in the new history, as determined by Big Brother. Jack Lew would have fit right in there.
Absolute political correctness run amok. I totally and completely disagree with you on that for the reasons I don’t have to restate. I am appalled at this “nobody” on my currency. I suggest Ronald Reagan!! Get someone who served this NATION!! and not political correctness ( which is dieing fast!!)
It’s about time the US Treasury replace the slave owning, Indian hating, murdering Democrat with a loving, pro-life, Republican person of color!
OK, well we'll have to agree to disagree, at least for the moment. Maybe I'll change my mind. I'm not extremely animated about it either way at the moment, though there is plenty I am animated about...
Vote Trump
Narcissism, affirmative action and reparations hubris all rolled into one.
But...according to historical records, good old Democrat Andrew Jackson ignored and did not protect the Constitution, you know, the oath he took as president to preserve, protect and obey the Constitution.
Sorry, I don’t strongly care one way way or the other, but to be stark ravingly proud that you don’t know a famous historical figure.......yeah, that puts you in idjit territory.
I do hope Trump says NO to all of this monopoly money.
This is disgraceful! I don’t object to Tubman’s picture being on the back of the bill but no president should be removed.
The Secretary of the Treasury should not be making this decision! The President should wait for Congress to make any changes. Congress should prevent the president from making changes without their approval. Next thing you know, Jenner’s picture will grace one of our bills!
And continue to make it plain as day...
Quit while you can...or educate yourself.
So how much do you know about Amerigo Vespucci ?
“Vespucci’s real historical importance may well rest more in his letters, whether he wrote them all or not, than in his discoveries.”
America is a myth. How about something concrete and relevant? I suggest Marxistan.
I mentioned this to my teen daughter.
“Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill? Hmm. I guess if they are going to change it she’s okay. Covers both blacks and women. I wonder if they know how strong of a Christian she was?”
He didn’t say he didn’t know who she was, he said she was “nobody”, i.e. “relatively insignificant”. See, you can’t even read! Anyway, I’m guessing he did know who she was.
Fair enough.
I see that some people are getting a little bent about what they perceive as politically correct tampering with our currency. I however, view things somewhat differently. A homicidal and racist sociopath, who was also coincidentally the founder of the modern Democratic Party has been bumped from the $20 bill in favor of a black female gun toting Republican.
Problem?
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