Tag: harriet tubman
Report: Mnuchin Delayed Harriet Tubman $20 Bill To Avoid Offending Trump

Report: Mnuchin Delayed Harriet Tubman $20 Bill To Avoid Offending Trump

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

In May, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the redesign of the $20 bill featuring abolitionist Harriet Tubman would not be unveiled in 2020 as previously announced. The delay, Mnuchin said, was due to security concerns and technical reasons. But the New York Times’ Alan Rappeport reports that according to Treasury Department officials, Mnuchin delayed the Tubman redesign to “avoid the possibility” that President Donald Trump “would cancel the plan outright and create even more controversy.”

Mnuchin, according to the Times, seems to believe that the president is so opposed to adding an image of Tubman to the $20 bill that he feared Trump might terminate the project altogether. And by delaying it, Mnuchin at least left open the possibility of the project going forward at some point in the future. Trump has been critical of the project, dismissing it as “pure political correctness” when he was campaigning for president in 2016 — he proposed featuring Tubman on $2 bills instead.

Mnuchin, however, is denying the allegation that the delay came about in order to avoid offending Trump. Last week, the Treasury Department secretary told the New York Times, “Let me assure you, this speculation that we’ve slowed down the process is just not the case.”

A Treasury Department employee, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Times that he or she personally viewed a digital image of the Tubman $20 bill while it was being examined by engravers and U.S. Secret Service officials as recently as May 2018 — and the Tubman redesign process, according to the Times’ source, appeared to be far along at that point.

The proposal to replace President Andrew Jackson with Tubman on the $20 bill came from Jack Lew, who served as Treasury Department secretary during President Barack Obama’s second term.

In May, Mnuchin announced that the Tubman version of the $20 bill wouldn’t be unveiled until 2028 — long after Trump is out of office. Mnuchin, during a House Financial Services Committee last month, told Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, “The primary reason we have looked at redesigning the currency is for counterfeiting issues.”

Tubman was a key figure in the civil rights struggle in the United States. Born in Dorchester County, Maryland in 1822, Tubman was a slave until the 1840s and battled slavery via the Underground Railroad (a network of secret routes and abolitionist safe houses). And after slavery was abolished in the U.S., Tubman made women’s suffrage a high priority. Tubman was in her early 90s when she died in 1913.

This week, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, wrote a letter to Mnuchin asking him to find a way to accelerate the release of the Tubman $20 bill. Hogan wrote, “I hope that you’ll reconsider your decision and instead join our efforts to promptly memorialize Tubman’s life and many achievements.”

 

 

Mnuchin Stumble Over Harriet Tubman Is A Missed Opportunity

Mnuchin Stumble Over Harriet Tubman Is A Missed Opportunity

It would have been so easy, a way for the Trump administration to honor an American icon and reach out to some of those Americans who believe the Republican Party has no use for them. But did anyone honestly think any member of the team leading the country under the direction of Donald J. Trump was going to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill?

Instead Trump and company’s song-and-dance about why a plan put in place before they moved into the White House would be delayed until well after they leave just confirms that they care little for the wishes of Americans who probably did not vote for them, but who are Americans nonetheless, and that they have no knowledge of or interest in the history that has shaped this country.

The move to again force Tubman to the back was a clarion call to Trump’s base, a signal of who is important and who is not.

That the woman tossed aside as the embodiment of “pure political correctness,” as the move was described by the president, deserving of, in his view, maybe a place on the $2 bill, was a Civil War spy, scout and nurse, an abolitionist, a suffragist and a hero called “Moses” for her strength and her grit, is just more proof of how far the Republican Party’s relationship with people of color and women has fallen.

According to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the move on the “Tubman” would be postponed until at least 2026, with the bill not likely to be in circulation until 2028 (and it has been reported that the tactic was to head off Trump canceling the Obama administration action altogether). So much for the plan to unveil the redesigned bill in 2020 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

At a congressional hearing, Mnuchin’s figuratively foot-shuffling, downward-gazing performance was in response to questioning by Massachusetts Democrat Ayanna S. Pressley, an African-American House freshman. The delay is needed to focus on addressing security and counterfeiting concerns, he said, though who doubts fast-tracking would be in order if the action were more to the administration’s liking? But when your slogan is “Make America Great Again,” you are always stuck in reverse.

Besides the president’s obvious displeasure with the choice of Tubman, there is his professed admiration of the man she would replace, the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson. Trump has seen Jackson as a kindred spirit, as someone who has defied the “arrogant elite,” and has laid a wreath at Jackson’s tomb at the Hermitage, his plantation in Nashville.

Who can forget the White House ceremony honoring Native American “code-talkers,”when he turned the focus from their World War II sacrifice into an offensive attack on  Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all while a portrait of Jackson looked on?

Trump always glides past the unsavory portions of Jackson’s character, including his status and wealth built on the buying and selling of men, women and children and their labor, and his signing of the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the deaths and forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans.

Mnuchin’s misdirection did not hide a thing.

In reality, Trump should admire Tubman. She was a perfect example of a strong leader, a quality he admires, at least in dictators. After escaping her own brutal enslavement, she returned time and again, as conductor and driver of the Underground Railroad, to free others, despite the dangers, and with the law, shamefully on the side of the morally lawless, against her.

Trump professes to love the military. Tubman, Civil War hero, was buried with military honors in 1913. And as supporters of the Second Amendment, Trump and Republicans should recognize Tubman, who carried a gun on her missions, as one of their own.

Some Republicans have stepped up to support bipartisan legislation to speed up action on printing the “Tubman.” There is the Harriet Tubman Tribute Act of 2019, introduced in the Senate by New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, and its companion bill in the House, with New York Republican John Katko as lead sponsor. Pressley, a co-sponsor, has said, “People other than white men built this county.”

Who would think that sentiment would be controversial in 2019? But with a president whose campaign was based in part on grievance and “white identity” politics, it is where we are.

Tubman’s attributes and achievements are mind-boggling, especially considering her status as a woman born into enslavement, almost fatally injured by brutal mistreatment, illiterate, who still never let anything stop her from her life’s and the country’s work.

Perhaps Trump feels insecure when he compares that record to what he, with all his wealth and privilege, has done for his fellow man.

He is not alone, though. This latest action is, with a few exceptions, the culmination of the Republican Party’s decades-long mere lip service to inclusiveness, since its Southern strategy of appealing to whites after civil rights laws were passed and its voter suppression tactics that have sought to nullify those gains ever since.

Increasingly, it is the party of Lincoln in name only.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as a national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: The Harriet Tubman Memorial in Cambridge, MD.

Endorse This: Samantha Bee On The $20: Jackson Was ‘Trump With Better Hair’

Endorse This: Samantha Bee On The $20: Jackson Was ‘Trump With Better Hair’

The conservative backlash against Harriet Tubman’s new spot on the twenty has been amazing to watch. For starters, the right seems to fundamentally misunderstand how frequently throughout history our currency has changed in small and large ways (all the time). Instead of seeing Tubman for who she is (the first of many black women throughout American history who ought to have their actions officially acknowledged in this way), the right has gone bonkers implying this is the start of some cultural insurrection.

Against whom? Andrew Jackson? Good riddance.

This argument sounds less like a legitimate debate about the future of currency and more like a great national panic attack over change.

Samantha Bee knows more about change than most people on TV: she’s the only woman on late night TV. And last night, she broke down why protesting the Tubman twenty is such a useless waste of time.

Photo: Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

Tubman’s Twenty Moves Us Closer To A More Perfect Union

Tubman’s Twenty Moves Us Closer To A More Perfect Union

The journey toward a more perfect union was quickened with the announcement that Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, Union spy and activist for women’s suffrage, will grace the front of the $20 bill. The Tubman twenty will be unveiled in 2020, timed to honor the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.

She will be the first woman on U.S. paper currency in more than a century and the first black American ever. That a black woman who was born a slave will be given such a prominent commemoration is a testament to American exceptionalism, a reminder of the nation’s slow and erratic but continuing march toward a more just version of itself.

Not all Americans see it that way, of course. Some are already grumbling about the demotion of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, to the back of the bill. (Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren has called the change “stupid.”) Others insist that the Treasury has simply caved to an ill-conceived political correctness. (Donald Trump claims that’s the case.) A few will venture commentary that has no place in polite society.

Indeed, the announcement of a revamped and more-inclusive currency comes at a fascinating time in our politics, a time when a sizable portion of the electorate is roiled by anger, agitation and fear. While some of that anxiety has its roots in economic uncertainty, much of it — especially among the supporters of Trump’s presidential bid — has its foundation in a deep-seated resentment of the nation’s changing demographics.

It’s no accident that Trump — who is among the “birthers” who insist President Barack Obama is not an American — leads the Republican presidential field while denouncing Mexican immigrants and denigrating Muslims. There is a substantial minority of white American voters who are threatened by the loss of numerical advantage, furious over the election of a black president, and resentful of the growing racial and ethnic diversity in American life.

Trump and his supporters have dominated the political narrative in this election season and ignited a civil war inside the Republican Party. They have panicked the Republican establishment. They have set off alarm bells in faraway capitals.

Yet, the racially intolerant are losing the battle for primacy in the American story. They no longer dominate the nation’s culture or mythology, as the changes in the currency illustrate.

Last year, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew invited the public to comment on his decision to recast a paper bill to feature a woman. Of the 15 women suggested by the activist group Women on 20s, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks, Tubman received the most votes.

A genuine American hero, she deserves the honor. As a young woman, she escaped the Maryland plantation that had enslaved her, and then made several trips back to assist others. Over a little more than a decade, she helped around 70 enslaved men and women find their way to freedom, traveling by night, using ingenious disguises and employing the hideouts established by the Underground Railroad.

She became an outspoken advocate for abolition, and when the Civil War broke out, she worked first as a cook and a nurse, and later as a scout and spy for the Union Army. After the war ended, she moved to a home she had purchased in upstate New York and campaigned for women’s suffrage.

Giving her prominence on the $20 bill forces the nation to acknowledge its original sin, slavery, as does demoting Jackson, a slaveowner. An accurate history further notes that the seventh president was notorious for his brutal treatment of native Americans, whom he forcibly removed from their lands. From now on, it will be difficult for history texts to ignore Tubman or to venerate Jackson.

Lew plans other changes, as well. A depiction of a 1913 march for women’s suffrage will be added to the back of the $10 bill, as will portraits of leaders of that movement. Images of Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt will be added to the back of the $5 bill.

That’s as it should be. The journey toward a more perfect union demands an acknowledgment of where we’ve been.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Photo: Flickr user House Divided Project.