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Why Do We Put Pictures of Dead People On Our Money?
Once we hit QE XXVIII or Bitcoin takes off this may be moot, but I think we can do better with our currency. Why do we act like U.S. Grant and Ben Franklin are some sort of leader-gods out of ancient times? Frankly, I think most of the folks pictured on our coins and bills would be offended by the idea, (save FDR, who would probably argue he should be on a $500 bill).
How about we trade in our Hamiltons, Jacksons, and Franklins for money that pictures our ideals? I’m in no way suggesting that I want to replace dead Americans with made-up architectural renderings on monopoly money like they did with the Euro, but I’d ask that we go back to an earlier age where stylized versions of lady liberty graced the dollar. Wouldn’t this be a better message for our children? In a healthy republic leaders are not meant to be a modern aristocracy; they are supposed to be citizens who take a few years out of their business to work in government and then return home.
Changing symbolic pictures will obviously not eliminate the Weatherization Czar or cut off NPR’s funding, but I’m tired of accepting the other side’s premise on every issue. Instead of playing the “you have JFK on a coin so we want a Reagan toll way” game, we should deny the premise of the cult of personality. We are a republic of citizens governed by laws that are written by people, not a monarchy of subjects ruled by kings supposedly ordained by God. Why don’t we act like it?
(In no way is this an indictment of our properly named and economically priced three-tiered Ricochet membership system. Coolidge memberships start at about what an oil change at Jiffy Lube would run you. Wait until six thousand miles and pick up a Coolidge!)
Published in General
Better dead people than living people. Dead people are unlikely to say or do anything embarrassing. ;-)
What about Jimmy Carter?
I wonder what will happen if we got the two Bushes on money. If Bill Clinton gets on won’t it get confusing? How will people distinction between bills? I wonder if Clinton will be on the 3 dollar bill.
John,
Be franc with us. How much did you pay to have this put on the back of the note? Or did you just introduce a bug into the printing software?
He’s not dead yet – he is just pining for the fjords.
Let’s use the same criteria as the Post Office. Then our money would look like this:
Sorry, I had to get something done for work and lost track of comments…….
Now that I have caught up, I see that it is like herding cats around here. We are not replacing dead politicians with dead musicians, dead scientists, scientific achievements, other dead politicians, ants, North American mammals, John Wayne or any other of the many suggestions. We are going with lady liberty and lady liberty alone. She is nice looking and sends the right message.
Just kidding, thanks for the thoughts and fun. It’s a rare place where you can find the majority of people can name who is on the currency, much less have an interesting conversation about it.
But we will be using a drawing of her wearing pleated pants, I presume.
Well, obviously pleated pants. Randy, to show I am a man of compromise I’m even willing to fit in your commercialization of the money idea. Lady Liberty in pleated pants with a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt. There, perfect.
You know what I’d like to see on money? Pictures of more money.
In all seriousness, the biggest problem with putting new images on our currency would be that our lawmakers would use it as a political opportunity for showboating and rewarding their friends.
This has already happened a few times with the state-specific themes on the back of quarters, where some activist group has lobbied to have their state’s image represent some politically correct site/historical event/person that nobody else in the state really cares about.
Clearly, I should be on the twenty-dollar bill.
Hank Rhody is absolutely spot on about the faces as an anti-counterfeiting measure. It’s an honor of sorts to those depicted but practical considerations in large part explain the presence of the visages. I’d wager a stack of Franklin portraits that folks know him best for his presence on the c note than his role in the nation’s founding.
These days, whenever there’s a proposal for changing the faces on the currency, there are big fights between special interests. Feminists were able to get women placed on the little used dollar coin. These women are forgettable.
The EU has no people on their currency. It’s pretty boring artwork. It probably keeps the conflicts down.
I don’t know why we should draw that line. Recently Lebron James caused a minor kerfuffle when he touched one of the english royal family. That is the kind of royal treatment of national leaders you are trying to avoid. Putting the face of an influential, dead president, on our money is not an issue.
We have had scientific ideas on our currency before, with the “Educational Series” of silver certificates issued in the late 1800s. I’m an occasional collector, and I’ve always thought these are some of the most beautiful ones we’ve printed. Among other old bills, the scene of the landing of the Pilgrims is probably my favorite (Various versions of this have appeared. This one has Columbus on the left side). And among our current currency (hah), the prettiest is clearly the reverse of the $2, showing the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
On printed currency, our frequent habit of using Founding Fathers and dead presidents actually goes back to the early days, in the mid-1800s, but it was in the early 20th century that it seems to have gotten so stereotyped. I’m happy with ending this, or at least putting the variety of older themes back into rotation, as long as we make the currency beautiful again.
Take a look at some of the variety shown here. Martha Washington is on some of these, as well as a buffalo, the Education Series notes, and…well, some of them have no obvious symbolism at all. They’re just pretty scenes of American life, like the (presumably pioneer) family outside of their house, with a dog.
And contrast any of these with the modernistic, linear, blank, dull, ugly bills we’re stuck with today, for anything larger than a $2. Find a way to incorporate your anti-counterfeiting measures with beauty, Mint!
If today’s anti-counterfeiting measures are mostly invisible — watermarks, etc. — shouldn’t it be possible to create custom currency? The Fed could print new bills to order over the Internet. You could design your own $20, within certain parameters, e.g. by uploading a digital photo to customize the portrait. It would certainly make using cash a little more interesting.
I think the string of “Why not put _______ on instead?” is a good answer as to why we put dead presidents/founding fathers on the money. They’re pretty much the one thing we can agree on.
If we put a Lady Liberty on the money, we’d constantly have to change her. (France is constantly cycling through their equivalent, Marianne, with much public grousing.) We’d have to go one politically correct step further and have a black Lady Liberty, and Hispanic Lady Liberty, a one-eyed lesbian Lady Liberty, a half-Eskimo, half-Melanesian austistic Wiccan Lady Liberty…
We couldn’t just have a bald eagle on a coin; we’d have to have every cotton-pickin’ state bird and state flower and state tree and state ice cream flavor and state carnival ride. Our money would change every hour on the hour. It would be worse than those awful state quarters that became territorial quarters that are now national park quarters which will eventually become “lands at Disney parks and Six Flags” quarters.
If we picked great authors or musicians, for example, that is much too subjective. Margaret Mitchell wrote one of the most beloved and best-selling novels in American history, but putting her on a bill would be deemed offensive to blacks. But putting Toni Morrison on a bill would mostly be a sop to political correctness and intellectual snobs. Musicians with the biggest cultural impact – think Miles Davis, James Brown, Madonna, Kurt Cobain – are also often the most controversial. And would money with art by Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe be received well in Nebraska? Would money with western scenes by Remington or Russell be received well in San Francisco or New York?
So… dead presidents it is.
This discussion rather reminds me of this collection of currency
http://lileks.com/money/index.html
It seems putting heroes of the country’s past is pretty commonplace world wide.
I like our currency the way it is. Whenever I’m in Europe or Asia I always miss the dollar’s simplicity.