Above we have a very short video of a hand stamping the face of freedom fighter and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, aka Araminta Ross, over the stony mug of Andrew Jackson, aka Old Hickory, “Indian Killer,” and slaveholding seventh president of the United States who presided over the Indian Removal Act that inaugurated the Trail of Tears with a speech to Congress in which he concluded the only alternative to forcing native people off their land might be “utter annihilation.”
Hero to America Firsters, Jackson has featured on the U.S. twenty-dollar bill since 1928. Ironically, he was bestowed this honor under Calvin Coolidge, a progressive Republican president when it came to Civil Rights, who in 1924 signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting all Indigenous people dual tribal and U.S. citizenship.
Anyway, you’ll recall that in 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced “the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of the American currency in a century,” as The New York Times reported, “proposing to replace the slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman.”
Furthermore, Lew planned to add historic feminist and Civil Rights figures to the five and ten dollar bills, an idea that did not come to fruition. But as we awaited the replacement of Jackson with Tubman, well… you know what happened. Andrew Jackson again became a figurehead of American racism and violence, and the brutal new administration walked back the new twenty. So designer Dano Wall decided to take matters into his own hands with the creation of the 3D-printed Tubman stamp. As he shows in the short clip above, the transformed bills still spend when loaded into vending and smart card machines.
Of course you might never do such a thing (maybe you just want to print Harriet Tubman faces on plain paper at home?), but you could, if you downloaded the print files from Thingiverse and made your own Tubman stamp. Wall refers to an extensive argument for the legality of making Tubman twenties. It perhaps holds water, though the Treasury Department may see things differently. In the British Museum “Curator’s Corner” video above, numismatist Tom Hockenhull shows us a precedent for defacing currency from shortly before World War I, when British suffragists used a hammer and die to stamp “Votes for Women” over the face of Edward VII.
The “deliberate targeting of the king,” writes the British Museum Blog, “could be likened to iconoclasm, a direct assault on the male authority figures that were perceived to be upholding the laws of the country.” It’s a practice supposedly derived from an even earlier act of vandalism in which anarchists stamped “Vive l’Anarchie” on coins. The process would have been difficult and time-consuming, “probably carried out by a single person using just one set of individual alphabet stamps.” Thus it is unlikely that many of these coins were made, though historians have no idea how many.
But the symbolic protest did not stand alone. The defaced currency spread the message of a broad egalitarian movement. The ease of making Tubman twenties could spread a contemporary message even farther.
via Kottke
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Hi, Josh,
You might want to check out King’s ‘revisionist’ history on Andy. He was not at all the monster the Rothchilds portray him to be.
Just another day at the old smear factory (publishing houses and media).
-JACKSON Andrew The Great-his heroic patriotic story — Mike S King 2018 179pp
NjW
Looks like this site has developed a hard on for publishing anti-white SJW cuckold trash and being yet another vector of “America last” Democrat/cultural marxist/globalist propaganda.
Wow, you sound paranoid. There’s nothing in this post or on this site that is remotely “anti-white,” whatever that means. But if what we do here isn’t your thing, you’ve got other options, bud. You’re welcome to go elsewhere.
so while we are on revisionist history, did the Indian Removal Act of Congress (passed by a wide margin in the Senate and a narrow margin in the House) authorize President Jackson to avoid the “utter annihilation” of the Native American’s east of the Mississippi River. Sacrificing the many to save the few, avoid a constitutional crisis, and comply with Supreme court precident on states rights and tribal sovreignty?
Before he was president, Jackson was a land speculator who profited from the expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee. The removal was, first and foremost, a land grab. He was not a disinterested adjudicator of a dispute between natives and settlers. He was a settler himself with a considerable financial stake in taking others’ land. Greed was the motivation for “Indian Removal” and it was justified by dehumanizing indigenous people, which led to millions of deaths over the next few decades and the seizure of nearly all native land by the end of the century.
This doesn’t make Jackson especially unique. He was a representative of the country’s ruling interests and values at the time, and for decades before and after, though there was plenty of opposition. The discussion about keeping him on the currency today is not about “revisionist” history in some Stalinist sense. History is revised and rewritten all the time according to new evidence or new interpretations. But no one is erasing Andrew Jackson from texts or museums. It is about choosing who the country celebrates and memorializes as representative of its current values.