On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that a portrait of Harriet Tubman will grace future $20 bills starting in 2030. It's a fitting, and long overdue tribute to a genuine hero of American history who helped end the gravest evil this nation ever perpetrated.
But the department also announced that the man currently on the bill — perhaps America's worst president and the only one guilty of perpetrating a mass act of ethnic cleansing — will still be on there: Andrew Jackson. This is unacceptable. Jackson was a disaster of a human being on every possible level, and should not be commemorated positively by any branch of American government. And as a slave owner, putting him on the other side of Tubman's bill is particularly disgraceful.
After generations of pro-Jackson historians left out Jackson's role in American Indian removal — the forced, bloody transfer of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the South — a recent reevaluation has rightfully put that crime at the core of his legacy.
Read Full Article »