Reflections on Adding Harriet Tubman to the 20 Dollar Bill

by Nathaniel Bates, February 7, 2021

     Often in weddings it is said that parents do not lose a son.  They gain a daughter.  But when the son has a contradictory heritage and marries a good woman anyhow, there are somber thoughts about the matter.  Andrew Jackson and Harriet Tubman will be “married” on the 20 dollar bill and the two strains of American populism, one racially inclusive while the other mainly focusing on class, will be married on the ultimate altar that Americans all seem to honor: the 20 dollar bill.  Slavoc Zizek’s iconic marriage of Bernie Sanders with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the old white populist man and the young woman of color finally joined in common struggle may be one interpretation of both Jackson and Tubman on the dollar bill.

     No, the above paragraph is not a deep reflection.  It was intentionally superficial and trite because the truth is much deeper, and much sadder.  The truth is one told of a requiem for a Jacksonian populism that could have been but wasn’t.  The Jacksonian tradition that could have been would have started where it was, the enfranchisement of non-propertied white men.  Yet it would have expanded to a broader social justice movement.  It would have included Black People, Native Americans, Women, and Working Class people in a movement for an actual future.  It would have taken Harriet Tubman and linked her arm in arm with Eugene Debs, sung to the music of Bob Dylan and recited with the poetry of Walt Whitman and perhaps even the transcendental verse of Thoreau and Dickenson.  In an alternative history, Jackson would have remained the Hero of New Orleans and would never have become the censor of mails or the remover of Cherokees. 

     This is not the past that was, in spite of the best efforts of Herbert Aptheker and Arthur Schlesinger to make Jackson part of a broader progressive, even revolutionary history.  Jacksonianism was in part progressive.  It had a left wing for sure.  The Working Men’s Party was the left wing of the Jacksonian era, sometimes even critical of Jackson himself.  The Southern slave owners could probably be considered its right wing, albeit with complexities around the fact that most of them considered themselves capitalists and not aristocrats, at least until positive good pro-slavery ideology questioned the contradictions of “white democracy” in favor of resolving them with undemocratic yearnings for a total slave society (Fitzhugh, Cannibals All).

Jackson and Jacksonianism should not be fully equated.  The latter could conceivably include abolitionists, labor rights activists, and reform advocates.  Yet, the fact remains that the two are linked in the historical imagination to such an extent that the dark aspect of Jackson’s legacy, very dark indeed, are what he is associated with today.  When a politician is called “Jacksonian,” it is almost never a compliment.  It is also almost never accurate.  Donald Trump certainly represents the darker legacy of American history, but he has always been a Hamiltonian in his views on Power.  At no point would Jackson’s defense of the common man against financial interests ever have appealed to Donald Trump.  And when a politician is called “populist,” the association is almost never with the Farmer’s Alliance and its multiracial coalition of farmers and workers for reform of monopoly capitalism.  Rather, the association is with demagogues like Trump, in spite of the fact that Trump has never been a populist and has always aligned with Big Business.

     The reckoning around Jackson had to happen.  There was no avoiding it.  Too much pain and abuse in the African American and Native American communities that cry up to Heaven demand it.  My sadness is around the failure to acknowledge by self-serving elites, those themselves so implicated in the racist heritage of our society, that the Cherokee removal could never have happened without the authoritarian elitist militarism of their favorite son Hamilton and his Imperial Executive Branch, or the decidedly anti-Jackson elitism of Calhoun and the anti-democratic Positive Good school.  Jackson reflected the cruelty of his age as much as he enhanced it.  I agree that his statue needed removal from the Oval Office, and that Trump’s faux-Jacksonianism only delayed matters.  The Jacksonian heritage that never was—well, never was, simply put.  But the division of working people into separate cultures and separate folk heroes, Jackson in one corner and Harriet Tubman in the other corner, is one that stands side by side with the unity of Wall Street elites around their own true vision of the 20 dollar bill: that it is small potatoes compared to their favorite bills and that only little people fight over 20 dollar bills.  I wonder how many of them care about either the pain or abuse on the Cherokee Reservation or the pain and desperation of Jacksonian West Virginia?

Instead of Jackson, white working class males would be better served to have Eugene Debs as their folk hero, a folk hero who did see labor as one whole global entity and who opposed militarism.  Having said that, Debs was no more representative of a “true” Jacksonianism for representing the good side of Jackson than Trump represents “true” Jacksonianism for representing its bad side.  It is like parsing between the right and left Hegelians who were the “true” Hegelians.  The fact is that Hegel and Jackson represented an era that is gone now and any requiem for the revolutionary potential that Jackson or Marx may have had has to be balanced with the crimes of Cherokee removal—or Stalin’s Ukrainian famines—done in their names.  What can be done, and what must be done, is to find a form of populism that empowers workers in an age that is neither agrarian like Jackson’s nor industrial like that of Marx.  It is an age far less democratic in its economic structure than either age, even if it is seemingly more open along social lines.  The new conversation must include listening beyond our own ethnic and social groupings.  Yes, the next labor action will include both Black Lives Matter supporters and Trump voters.  The conversation will then get even more painful but it will at least hopefully have the bright side of actually bearing fruit for the next great unifying social movement.

     For the nation to move forward, the painful conversation around race had to be made.   But, a note of caution must ensue.  If we follow the winds of Twitter Wokeness to its blissful tomorrow, removing every vestige of the past, we are following the footsteps similar to those of nineteenth century progressivists and futurists who cast the restraints of the past to the wind and followed the “common man” in every fashion.  These too were deeply anti-traditional.  And these were the very people who would have uncritically seen Jackson himself as embodying the Common Man.  When Jackson reportedly said, “John Marshall made law, now let him enforce it” they would have celebrated Old Hickory’s defiance of aristocratic restraint on monocratic democracy.  Never mind the fact that those swept away by History were in fact not wealthy aristocrats but Native Americans who today demand justice for the actions commenced by Jackson and his successors in the White House. 

     The requiem I am making is a requiem for the populism that could have been.  If that sad requiem were made some time in the future, would it be an ironic requiem for a Twitter Populism that itself was tone deaf to its own complicity in structures of injustice?  We forget that Big Tech is controlled by white men of wealth, who are daily worshipped by the business press and at one time not too long ago the rightwing press, who are being called upon to adjudicate what is free speech and what is hate speech.  One wonders what the New Left or even the Old Left would have thought of summoning Capitalists to mediate their social struggles.  These men seem to be more than happy to have the halo of the new populism put on them, just as Jackson was happy to be seen as the Hero of New Orleans.  The end cannot be certain, but it probably is not good.  Cancel culture mainly cancels people with some form of social disability, hardly a movement that will unify working people, create a national income for all, or bring the next general strike.  History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.  But if repeated long enough it finally repeats itself as the cliff that unreflective souls walk off when they decide its lessons are no longer worth learning.

     My requiem for the populism that never was ends with the original villain of Jacksonians, John Quincy Adams.  He was the President that the Jacksonians “canceled” when his aristocratic pretentions were out of step with the age.   He is the one whom those who see history as teleological would see as the most out of step with the march of progress, the “wokeness” of Jackson’s time.  And yet it was Adams who survives, much more than Jackson, as a moral voice for freedom against slavery and for a moral authority that we want to believe about ourselves.  Adams was the one whose transcendental belief in Higher Law still inspires even those who would not share his religious convictions.  The lesson learned from Adams is a lesson rarely learned, that today’s villain may become tomorrow’s hero.  And yes, today’s hero may look very different in the future.  Faddish pandering is never a way to truly make a moral stand in history.  My requiem for the populism that never happened ends with realizing that its central villain of that populism, the “aristocratic” John Quincy Adams, was a true hero after all.  He would never have approved of the populism that never was, as he was too much an aristocrat.  But he was still a hero after all, someone that our age could perhaps suffer a bit more to look up to.  If higher law is idealism out of step with material reality, an opiate of the masses, then we could do a lot worse for our opiates.

     It is my hope that Harriet Tubman can inspire what Jackson could not, a unified people.  It is my hope that white men could see in her the folk hero they want to see in themselves.  Like Jackson, she opposed aristocratic privilege.  Unlike Jackson, she wanted to include all of us.  I do not see her as anything but a unifying figure.  White men too can see in her bravery and heroism: a reflection of the deepest desire so many white men have always had, the desire to do right, to be right, and most of all to have Redemption.  The future of Jackson and Tubman on the 20 dollar bill together may yet fulfill Zizek’s vision of a unifying working class populism.  Probably not, however, as the sad reality of Removal and Manifest Destiny weigh too heavily.  More than anything it will be a reminder that the Wall Street billionaires care little about 20 dollar bills.  Their bills are the larger ones.  And yes, with the power of a touch on a screen these elites may try to “cancel” working people as being outmoded in the age of their future.  This populism of the coming age may well require that John Quincy Adams, villain of the old populism, come in with his moral heroism to show us what to do.  After the requiem ends for the populism of the past, the next great populist struggle will be the one of the future, the only one that plays out on the abstract, virtual stage.  This one I hope we win.