Posted on 04/23/2016 10:27:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
In many of our history books today, Christopher Columbus did not discover America, instead he was a ruthless white European marauder who brutalized peaceful indigenous people and helped spread disease among their midst.
This type of historical revisionism was on full display this week when one of our greatest Presidents and military heroes, Andrew Jackson, was removed from the front of the $20 bill. Eventually, he will be featured on the back of the bill, while the image of Harriet Tubman, an African American slave who escaped and led hundreds of other slaves to freedom, will adorn the front.
These changes were among many announced by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to promote a more inclusive look to our currency. Along with Tubman being added to the $20 bill, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and opera singer Marian Anderson will be included on the back of the new $5 bill. Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all acclaimed womens rights activists, will be highlighted on the back of the new $10 bill.
It will take over ten years for all of these changes to be completely implemented. However, announcing the new designs was a major step forward for the Obama administration and the culmination of years of planning and public input.
Originally, the image of Alexander Hamilton on the face of the $10 was slated to be removed, however, the nations first Treasury Secretary was saved by the popularity of Hamilton, a hip-hop musical on Broadway.
Unfortunately, Jackson did not have any rap artists on his side, he just had a history of fighting and sacrificing for his country. While Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he lost the battle of political correctness over two hundred years later.
Of course Tubman is a great American who deserves to be honored, but not at the expense of Andrew Jackson, one of the most consequential figures in the history of our country. According to columnist Pat Buchanan, changing the face of the $20 bill is affirmative action that approaches the absurd. Whatever ones admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.
Sadly, in todays America, Jackson is no longer viewed as a successful two-term President, but as a plantation slave owner who mistreated Native Americans.
Ironically, Jackson is considered the founder of the modern Democrat Party, which hosts fundraisers in his name. The partys Jefferson-Jackson dinner also honors former President Thomas Jefferson, another giant of American history. However, since Jefferson and Jackson were both slave owners, the party of racial pandering has been canceling these dinners all across the country. In this day and age of political correctness our American heroes are now being judged by their countrys moral values two hundred years later.
As military leader, Andrew Jackson successfully fought Indians in Alabama and Georgia and suppressed a British uprising in Florida, seizing the area for his country. In his greatest victory, the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, Jackson led a disorganized and motley army of misfits to a tremendous victory against the most celebrated fighting force in the world, the British Army. In the process, he not only rescued New Orleans from being captured and the Mississippi River from being closed, but he also saved our country from being split in two by the British.
As President, Jackson was a strong fiscal conservative who railed against the national bank and reckless debt. He was the last President to actually run a surplus and pay off the countrys national debt. Ever since that time, we have accumulated $19.3 trillion in debt with no end in sight. Wouldnt it be nice to have a President once again who believed in paying our countrys bills?
Andrew Jackson also opposed term limits and the power of a financial elite who worked against the interests of average Americans.
He was the original outsider who defeated a political system controlled by power brokers intent on expanding their own influence at the expense of the American people.
In 2016, angry citizens tired of being abused and mistreated are looking for a leader like Andrew Jackson once again. It is quite ironic that he is being demoted from our currency at the exact time he should be promoted as the model for the next President of the United States.
Yes... and it’s demeaning, very demeaning.
I know the temptation of a “pet” situation myself, and I view it with mixed feelings. A crutch might help you get better from a broken leg, but you also don’t want to be using the crutch forever.
“Why not leave it the hell alone? “..........
I agree, changing it only costs us more money. It’s not broken so don’t fix it.
Can this degeneration be reversed by a subsequent administration(excluding “The Wicked Witch Of The West.)? Anyone know?
Take a pill and calm down. All I’m simply saying is if they’re going to change it anyway, why not put Reagan on it instead of Tubman?
Conversely, leaving it alone is ok with me too.
I’m NOT an exclusive Trump supporter, ok? Get that through your head.
I’m ok with EITHER Trump or Cruz.
Tubman is a deserving figure and better than the other names that had been thrown out there but I would have preferred a different denomination be the one chosen.
They are obviously to dumb to see it.
Good point.
Replacing the slave owning founder of the Democrat party with a Christian, pro-gun Republican is fine with me. I don’t think the SJWs who came up with the swap thought of that, though.
That’s because liberals/progressives/idiots (but I repeat myself), only see a member of the collective (in this case, blacks), without looking at the qualities of any one individual.
Once liberals figure this stuff out, they’ll be the ones screaming (after they got what they wanted).
seconded
The write reminds us of the so-called "progressive" Democrat Party's "Jefferson-Jackson Day" events.
What a farce!
Consider this:
Excerpt from the 1801 Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson"Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafterwith all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizensa wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
"About to enter, fellow-citizens, on the exercise of duties which comprehend everything dear and valuable to you, it is proper you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our Government, and consequently those which ought to shape its Administration. I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations. Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies; the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the peoplea mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burthened; the honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid; the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason; freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."
Now, the question is: do current Party leaders subscribe to principles and ideas which will lead us to "retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety"?
That seems to rule out any connection for current Democrats with Jefferson, which, might lead to a consideration of a possible ideological connection with Jackson. Consider this:
By the Founders' formula, "the People's" written Constitution was the anchor of our liberties, binding government to the "People's" limitations on its power.
Current Democrat Party philosophy, in effect, undoes all the monumental work accomplished by the Founders on behalf of liberty and leaves the law afloat and without anchor, relying, as of old, on mere men and women.
From Page xv of "Our Ageless Constitution," here are excerpted words from President Andrew Jackson's Proclamation of December 10, 1832:
"We have received it [the Constitution] as the work of the assembled wisdom of the nation. We have trusted to it as to the sheet anchor of our safety in the stormy times of conflict with a foreign or domestic foe. We have looked to it with sacred awe as the palladium of our liberties, and with all the solemnities of religion have pledged to each other our lives and fortunes here and our hopes of happiness hereafter in its defense and support. Were we mistaken, my countrymen, in attaching this importance to the Constitution . . .? No. We were not mistaken. The letter of this great instrument is free from this radical fault. . . . No, we did not err! . . . The sages . . . have given us a practical and, as they hoped, a permanent* Constitutional compact. . . . The Constitution is still the object of our reverence, the bond of our Union, our defense in danger, the source of our prosperity in peace: it shall descend, as we have received it, uncorrupted by sophistical construction, to our posterity. . . ."
*Underlining added for emphasis
And, it was Thomas Jefferson who used another metaphor with reference to the Constitution when he indicated that "the People" must "bind them (government) by the chains of the Constitution." In another instance, he declared: "It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers. . . ."
Perhaps a Wilson-FDR Dinner might be more appropriate now! And, while they're at it, relegating Jackson to the back of the bill may be the first step in that direction. Perhaps they fear that citizens may now read Jackson's philosophy on the Constitution and realize the degree to which they have perverted its principles and ideas in recent years.
Identity politics at its best!
Have you noticed that white heroes, e.g. Columbus, are people who have actually accomplished great things. Black heroes, for the most part, have done only one thing: further the interests of blacks, usually at the expense of whites.
It would be much more appropriate to put the Tubman on an EBT card.
Not true: Both Harding and Coolidge ran surpluses every year and paid off 1/3 of the debt coming off of a war, a better record than Jackson’s.
After perusing most of the posts here is my two cents...
Negotiate with the Democrats. Yep, allow Tubman
(a Republican anyway) to replace Jackson (a Democrat)
on the twenty while Reagan replaces Grant on the fifty.
Some of our history minded Southern friends might
not mind trading Grant for Reagan.
All and all I would prefer to leave if alone. But if
the Rats want to push it then we need to get something
in return IMO.
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