Change for a $20: Tubman Ousts Jackson
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on Wednesday announced the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of American currency in a century, proposing to replace the slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, and to add women and civil rights leaders to the $5 and $10 notes.

Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical based on the life of the first Treasury secretary.

But the broader remaking of the nation’s paper currency, which President Obama welcomed on Wednesday, may well have captured a historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century.

Tubman, an African-American and a Union spy during the Civil War, would bump Jackson — a white man known as much for his persecution of Native Americans as for his war heroics and advocacy for the common man — to the back of the $20, in some reduced image along with the White House. Tubman would be the first woman so honored on paper currency since Martha Washington’s portrait briefly graced the $1 silver certificate in the late 19th century.

While Hamilton would remain on the $10, and Abraham Lincoln on the $5, images of women would be added to the back of both — in keeping with Mr. Lew’s intent “to bring to life” the national monuments depicted there.

The picture of the Treasury building on the back of the $10 bill would be replaced with a depiction of a 1913 march in support of women’s right to vote that ended at the building, along with portraits of five suffrage leaders: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony, who in more recent years was on an unpopular $1 coin until minting ceased.

On the flip side of the $5 bill, the Lincoln Memorial would remain, but as the backdrop for the 1939 performance there of Marian Anderson, the African-American classical singer, after she was barred from singing at the segregated Constitution Hall nearby. Sharing space on the rear would be images of Eleanor Roosevelt, who arranged Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial performance, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1963 delivered his “I have a dream” speech from its steps.

The final redesigns will be unveiled in 2020, the centennial of the 19th Amendment establishing women’s suffrage, and will not go into wide circulation until later in the decade, starting with the new $10 note. The unexpectedly ambitious proposals reflect Mr. Lew’s tortuous attempt to expedite the process and win over critics who have lodged conflicting demands, pitting mainly women’s advocates against Hamiltonians newly empowered by the unlikely success of their hero’s story on Broadway.

Mr. Lew’s design proposals are the culmination of 10 months of often-heated public commentary that began almost immediately after he invited Americans last June to help him decide which woman from history to honor on the $10 bill. That feel-good initiative proved to be hardly as simple as he first imagined.

Immediately an online group called Women on 20s insisted that the woman to be honored — Tubman was its choice — had to go on the more common $20 note, displacing not the popular Hamilton but Jackson, whose place in history has suffered lately with attention to his record of forcibly relocating Native Americans, supporting slavery and — despite his prominence on currency — opposing a national banking system and paper money. But the $10 was next in line for redesign, based on federal officials’ assessment of counterfeiting threats.

Yet other women mobilized by the Girls’ Lounge, a networking organization for female corporate leaders, demanded that a woman go on the $10 note, as Mr. Lew first proposed, because they did not want to wait years for a new $20 bill. Within the administration, Rosie Rios, who as treasurer of the United States oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, was also pushing for a woman on the $10 bill.

But nothing so roiled the debate as the phenomenon of the musical “Hamilton.”

Weighing in for his place on the $10 bill were well-to-do theater patrons and teenagers rapping to the soundtrack, as well as the show’s creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda. When Mr. Lew and his wife caught a performance last August, the Treasury secretary hinted to Mr. Miranda that Hamilton would stay. Just this week, the show won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

By July, in fact, Mr. Lew already had decided to keep his long-ago predecessor on the $10 note, and put a vignette of suffragists on the back, with Tubman scheduled for the $20 bill and changes to the $5 note as well.

“I had a kind of ‘aha’ moment where I said we’re thinking too small,” Mr. Lew said on Wednesday.

He decided to redesign all three notes to accommodate the various views, and sooner. As for the choice of Tubman, he said that in the public comments he reviewed each night, “the pattern became clear that Harriet Tubman struck a chord with people in all parts of the country, of all ages.”

“This is a good solution,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who wrote to the secretary “strongly suggesting he not remove Hamilton” from the bill.

Mr. Lew directed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hasten the redesign of the $20 and $5 notes at the same time. Subsequent production of the $10 bill would take precedence, though Mr. Lew said all three notes could be in wallets before 2030. The final decision on release is up to the Fed.

One wild card is that Mr. Lew and President Obama have just months left in office. But Mr. Lew expressed confidence that his successors would not veto the currency makeovers.

“I don’t think somebody’s going to probably want to do that — to take the image of Harriet Tubman off of our money? To take the image of the suffragists off?” he said.

Not since 1929 has American currency undergone such a far-reaching change. That year all paper money changed, with more standard designs and smaller size to save costs.

In advance of Mr. Lew’s decision, the emotion that the Treasury initiative had prompted was reflected in a letter to the Treasury secretary on Tuesday evening. More than three dozen women including actors, feminists, corporate executives and journalists objected to preliminary news reports that he was planning to renege on putting a woman on the $10 face, calling it, if true, “a major blow to the advancement of women.”

They admonished the Treasury secretary, saying: “ Could there be a better metaphor for second-class status that continues to limit our girls?”

The signers included the actresses Ellen DeGeneres, Geena Davis and Jane Lynch; the former soccer star Abby Wambach; former Representative Gabrielle Giffords; the news media figures Katie Couric and Arianna Huffington; the feminist leader Gloria Steinem; and the photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Mr. Lew’s compromise did not satisfy the letter writers since the new note, the $10 bill, will picture women on the back. But Women on 20s released a statement “celebrating” the decision, despite Mr. Lew’s inability to say how quickly the government can accelerate a new $20 note given technological and production complexities.

Yet, as Mr. Lew said Wednesday: “I said we were going to listen. We really did listen.”

傑克遜退位！反蓄奴黑人女性首度躍上美鈔

美國財長陸伍20日迫於壓力宣布，黑奴出身的反蓄奴女鬥士海莉葉．塔布曼（Harriet Tubman）將取代第七任美國總統傑克遜，出現在新版的20元美鈔上。

雖然非裔美國人首度登上紙鈔寫下歷史新頁，但陸伍一年來廣徵民意，原本是想換掉10元美鈔上的美國開國元勳、首任財長漢彌爾頓，不過民意反彈使他的政策大轉彎。

美國紙鈔已超過一世紀沒採用女性頭像，最早出現在美鈔上的女性是美國第一位總統夫人瑪莎．華盛頓，她的肖像印在1886年的一美元銀元券（silver certificate）。

塔布曼本身是脫逃成功的黑奴，後來透過「地下鐵路」（Underground Railroad）計畫協助其他奴隸奔向自由，南北戰爭時期還為北部幾州組成的聯邦擔任間諜。

陸伍說，新版20元美鈔的推出時間未定，10元和5元美鈔的背面圖案也將重新設計，可能於女性爭取投票權屆滿100周年的2020年開始流通。

陸伍去年6月宣布的原始計畫是讓一位女性歷史人物登上10元美鈔正面，現在只能在背面置入女性爭取參政權的紀念圖案。另外，5元美鈔背面將出現林肯紀念碑前民權運動的歷史場景。

女性團體去年全力遊說白宮，希望讓女性登上流通更為廣泛的20元美鈔；漢彌爾頓的支持者也加入她們的陣營，敦促陸伍捨傑克遜而留住漢彌爾頓。

去年夏天，以漢彌爾頓為主角的百老匯音樂劇首演後備受歡迎，更升高了「挽救漢彌爾頓」運動的聲勢。

誓言要讓先人續留美鈔上的漢彌爾頓第五代玄孫道格拉斯．漢彌爾頓說：「大家使力逼財長，這是他唯一能作成的決定。」

陸伍只能表示：「我們說要傾聽民意，就真的說到作到。」陸伍原是低調的公僕，卻因此次新版美鈔更改設計一事，難得成為鎂光燈焦點。

在開放傾聽民意之前，陸伍去年3月給白宮的簡報是將民權運動領袖蘇珊．安東尼（Susan B. Anthony）的肖像放上10元美鈔。不料民意反彈甚大，陸伍7月開始思考新版鈔票的設計不侷限於10元美鈔。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/women-currency-treasury-harriet-tubman.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytstyle.com/culture/20160421/t21currency/zh-hant/

Video：Social Chatter: Tubman on the 20
The Treasury announced that instead of a woman replacing Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the much more widely circulated $20 bill.
http://nyti.ms/1Sv5Mob

延伸閱讀：Here Are the New Faces on $5, $10 and $20 Bills
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/mlk-eleanor-roosevelt-susan-anthony.html

2016-04-21．聯合晚報．A6．國際焦點．編譯季晶晶