https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/tubman-beat-out-sanger-on-the-20-bill-thats-a-big-dealHarriet Tubman will replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill in 2020, and that’s a good thing, given the circumstances.
According to the Associated Press:
The $20 bill will be redesigned with Tubman's portrait on the front, marking two historic milestones, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced Wednesday. Tubman will become the first African-American on U.S. paper money and the first woman to be depicted on currency in 100 years.
The leader of the Underground Railroad will replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president and a slave owner, who will be pushed to the back of the bill.
However, not everyone thinks this was a prudent decision decision. When asked about the decision on Fox News, former Presidential Candidate and Donald Trump supporter Ben Carson suggested Tubman could have been honored on another piece of paper currency.
While a heavy and healthy skepticism of change for its own sake is always necessary—especially with the brand of change typically peddled by the Obama Administration—conservatives ought to be equally as slow to spew venom at the decision, given the nature of the historical figures and competing narratives involved.
Firstly, those on the right ought to truly measure Old Hickory’s conservative street cred. This is where it becomes more important to study history than political hagiography. Yes, he was a valiant war hero who defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans, but victories in the name of this country do not necessarily a conservative president make. As James Poulos writes in The Federalist:
“[Jackson] has been associated almost since the beginning with a string of classically un-conservative features. He was the kind of nationalist who cannot help but concentrate centralized power. He did not respect the rule of law. He seemed to have no moral sense of guilt. His presidency broke the Founders’ political lineage. He was too much of a cult figure. Careful deliberation suggests we should do without him on the $20.”
If a populist political figure came in nowadays to run for President with the promises of unilateral rule by executive order, government centralization and a spoils system of federal appointments, principled conservatives would be up in arms and uniformly opposed to such a message. One would hope, at least.
However, despite all possible valid critiques of the decision to remove our 7th President from the $20, we also need to look at the current facts and climate around the situation itself. Given the most-widely accepted narratives of Jackson’s presidency on both sides of the aisle and the mounting pressure to feature a woman on currency that actually gets used outside of East Coast subway systems, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which Jackson would stay put. The question of the change was really not ‘if’ someone would replace him, but ‘who’ would do so.
Now, let’s talk about the real face-off for the Treasury Department’s prime, green real-estate: Sanger vs. Tubman.
Leading up to the Administration’s decision, a group calling itself Women on 20’s, included her in a list of 15 nominees to replace Jackson, describing her as such:
One of 11 children in a working class family, Margaret Sanger grew up in the time of the Comstock Act, a federal law that defined contraceptives as obscene and criminalized their use and dissemination. While working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side of New York City and caring for women who suffered from botched illegal abortions, Sanger decided to fight for legal access to contraceptives for women so they could decide if and when to have children in order to lead healthier, more empowered lives. “Birth control,” she called it.
One sparkling op-ed at the New York Times lauded the idea of putting the Planned Parenthood foundress on the note, saying that she “didn’t just introduce the idea of birth control into our culture at large, she freed women from indenture to their bodies.”
This is all praise for the very same Margaret Sanger who once wrote that:
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
Not to mention Sanger’s affinity for the Ku Klux Klan is more than a little problematic.
Regardless, now her legacy lives on in the organization she founded, which we currently know as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which now performs over 300,000 abortions per year. Of all abortions performed in the United States, 30 percent of are performed on black women, 40 percent of black pregnancies end in termination, and in Sanger’s former home of New York City, more black infants are aborted than born, according to government statistics.
On the one hand, we have a champion of human dignity, one who truly understood that unjust laws that directly conflict with basic human dignity are not laws at all, (or as St. Augustine of Hippo put it, “Lex iniutsa non est lex”). Tubman’s efforts, along with those of several others, worked to correct a grave injustice and an affront to the natural law which has persisted in American jurisprudence for nearly a century. Tubman brought innumerable former slaves to freedom and risked her life to do so. That’s an American hero if there ever were one.
So, in contrast between the two a clear path emerges for conservatives. Rather than attack the decision overall, this is an opportunity to acknowledge a huge symbolic, cultural victory. The most pro-abortion administration in American history chose Tubman over Sanger. Human dignity won out over the mechanisms of eugenics, death and the obfuscation of basic human biology, and a centralized government-loving Democrat President will be coming off the $20, to boot. If conservatives hold that freedom, small government and human dignity are critical tenets of our ideology and worldview, then, given the alternatives, we can certainly hail this as a victory for all three.
