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Make U.S. Dollars as Diverse as Our History

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

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 Thursday by SurveyMonkey support putting Tubman -- who helped hundreds of slaves find freedom via the "underground railroad" -- on the $20, reported Politico, while 50 percent of independents and only 34 percent of Republicans agree.

Among supporters of the Grand Old Party's frontrunner Donald Trump, seven 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.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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