The announcement by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew that Harriet Tubman will take the place of Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill has caused some grumbling. Sen. Lamar Alexander, who like Jackson is from Tennessee, expressed grave misgivings about the swap. Donald Trump said the change was "pure political correctness."
But there's one major political figure who would be thrilled by the news: Jackson himself.
Jackson's presence on the notes of the Federal Reserve has always been a slap in the face to the seventh president, who unequivocally hated the idea of a central bank that issued paper currency. Jackson will be finally released from a kind of monetary purgatory.
Jackson's fear of paper money was legendary. He came of age in an era when most of the nation's money supply consisted of notes issued by state-chartered banks. These private currencies could, in theory, be redeemed for "hard money" – gold or silver coin – at the banks that issued them.
But in times of panic, banks often reneged on these promises.
When Jackson won the presidency in 1828, he and the president of the Bank of the United States, the aristocratic Nicholas Biddle, immediately clashed. In time, their mutual animus would spawn the so-called Bank War, a titanic clash over the fate of this institution.
Jackson never wavered in his convictions after he left the presidency. "Congress has the express power to borrow, but not to issue bills of credit, or make a paper currency," he wrote in 1841. "Ours was intended to be a hard-money government."
And yet, not so long after his death, Jackson ended up on some of the first irredeemable paper money issued by the federal government: the greenbacks, printed during and after the Civil War.
This paper initially could be exchanged for "hard money," but after Franklin D. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, Jackson was left stranded on a piece of fiat currency worth $20.
And there he remained, spinning in his grave, until now. •
Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a Bloomberg View contributor.
