Dead Presidents
Tomorrow is President’s Day. That makes this President’s Week when many school have their winter holiday. My own grandkids are up at my house in Ithaca enjoying the snow during their week off. George Washington was born on February 11th, and conveniently, the only other United States president whose birthday we choose to deem worthy of celebration is Abraham Lincoln, who was north on February 12th. For many years we celebrated each of those days until someone in Washington decided to just make one official President’s Day Holiday on the third Monday in February each year. We still think of it as Washington’s Birthday, but technically it is to celebrate all president’s birthdays I suppose. It is a convenient time for a ski trip with the kids or just a long weekend by a cozy fire, but many working stiffs treat it just like any other working day except you can’t go to the bank and there is no mail delivery.
There are two other areas where dead presidents reign; stamps and currency. Stamps used to be an important hobby arena when snail mail was in vogue. I watched a movie the other night that I have seen before that starred Bill Murray and Laura Linney called Hyde Park on Hudson. It’s about the personal life of FDR in the pre-war days when he summered at his mother’s home in Hyde Park. While the story is mostly about FDR’s personal love life with Linney and other women, there is a minor subplot about the joy FDR got from stamp collecting. We are shown many different commemorative stamps with the likenesses of national leaders on them from King George to Haile Selassie. We are reminded that FDR been all around the world and had met many of the very leaders depicted on the stamps that he collected.
A similar backstory takes place in the film The King’s Speech starring Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth. In that case it involved the fact that British Royalty (as opposed to political leaders) are pictured on coin and paper currency of the realm. The primary story is about how Bertie (King George VI), father of Queen Elizabeth II, was forced to the throne by the abdication of his brother, King Edward VIII (a.k.a. The Duke of Windsor or, as born, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor). That story makes the issue of who is on the currency all the more interesting. In 1936 when Edward mounted the throne, the Royal Mint cast a set of six Edward VIII Sovereigns for a trial set. Since Edward chose not to remain King, the coins were never minted and released, but the trial sets became some of the rarest and most coveted collector coins ever cast. In the movie, the subject comes into play when Geoffrey Rush, playing the elocution instructor Lionel Logue, makes a bet with Bertie of a shilling. The King obviously does not carry money with him, but, in fact, it is the image of George VI that appeared on the shilling coins of 1938 when the let was made.
History tells us that when coins first appeared as a medium for trading value about seven centuries before Christ, it was in Asia Minor and the coins bore either images of symbols or gods. It only took 150 years for man to decide that he was the master of his own fate and that those with the power to do so could and should place their images on the coins that were passing among all those in organized society that “counted”. The first guy who dared to put his mug on a coin was a guy named Tissaphernes (c. 445-395 BC), who was a Persian nobleman. I guess it was a successful PR program because other Persian sovereigns followed him down that path. Alexander the Great (323 BC) has the distinction of being the first monarch to have his image put on a coin posthumously. It was cast in honor of his conquest of India and hence showed him with a set of elephant tusks on his head. The bet was hedged by placing the Greek god Zeus, the father of the gods, on the reverse side. Caesar went on to use the technique to bolster his popularity, giving rise to the commentary in the gospel which states that we should “Render unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. That reference certainly gives rise to the concept of filthy lucre.
We very quickly default to the notion that there are things of nature that are generally very worldly, like money, and things that are of grace and thus more spiritual. The world spends most of its time focused on money and survival and then spends Sunday (or Saturday in Islam) as a day set aside for both rest and reverence to grace. What a strange juxtaposition. Survival is necessary for grace. Maslow formulated this as his hierarchy of needs and said that we cannot get to the life of the mind and soul unless we have met our fundamental and rudimentary needs as animals. Therefore, it has always beens man’s quest that he surmount the needs of the mundane and transcends to the higher plane of enlightenment. One demands we do the other and then denigrates the first for its pedestrian ways.
We tend to refer to money in ways that make us seem to not care so much about its substance. It’s moola, dough, bread, tender, chips and so many other things. My favorite expressions are folding green and dead presidents. If all you want in life is dead presidents that can’t be a good place to be. Currently, dead presidents occupy only the following places on our money in the U.S.:
– $100 bill – Benjamin Franklin – not a president
– $50 bill – Ulysses S. Grant (18th president)
– $20 bill – Andrew Jackson (7th president), soon to be replaced by Harriet Tubman (a.k.a. Araminta “Minty” Ross) – not a president
– $10 bill – Alexander Hamilton (First Secretary of the Treasury) – not a president
– $5 bill – Abraham Lincoln (16th president)
– $1 bill – George Washington (1st president)
– $0.50 – John F. Kennedy (35th president)
– $0.25 – George Washington (1st president)
– $0.10 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt (32nd president)
– $0.05 – Thomas Jefferson (3rd president)
– $0.01 – Abraham Lincoln (16th president)
As you can tell, the trend is against having too many revered presidents on our currency. The highest and most valuable bill goes to a noted scientist, Ben Franklin. Freedom fighter Harriet Tubman is headed for the most common denomination (at least from ATM’s) of the $20 bill, with Hamilton occupying the ten dollar bill. The outlier in all this is Grant on the $50 since I can’t remember anyone ever speaking very favorably of Grant as a president though he gets some kudos for his role in the War Between the States. In the case of the JFK half dollar, I hate to say it, but that was a result of the nature of his untimely demise more than his specific policy initiatives. Civil rights and the great society were not enough to cause anyone to ever suggest LNJ’s face on a coin or bill. I personally would rather see people like Franklin, Hamilton and Tubman on currency and to specifically NOT honor our leaders in this way since history is the only true measure of who deserves to get on currency for posterity sake. It does occur to me that if disinflation ever takes hold and we end up with some negative currency needed like the -$100 bill, DOnald Trump might be the perfect candidate for that honor.
We are all taught that money is dirty as it passes through so many hands. Could this ever be a bigger deal than during a pandemic? I think it is best at this moment of history to we should just leave dead president dead and move on to the other great achievers in our midst.