H.L. Mencken once observed that it would have been worth losing the Civil War in order not to have Ulysses S. Grant as president. The reputation of Grant’s presidency, 1869-77, has improved since Mencken’s day, but apparently not enough.
Now there’s a bill introduced in Congress to replace his picture on the $50 bill, a fixture since 1913, with a portrait of Ronald Reagan.
The proposal comes from Patrick T. McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, who said that “President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century,” and that in polls of presidential scholars, Reagan consistently outranks Grant, so “President Reagan deserves a place of honor on our nation’s currency.”
To be sure, Grant’s military career as commander of Union forces in the Civil War is much more distinguished than his political career, which was marked by corruption. But Grant was personally honest, and he tried to institute a more peaceful Indian policy while attempting to preserve the rights of newly freed slaves in the South. He came down hard on one domestic terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan.
Besides that, the portraits on our currency do not reflect the rankings of presidents, since neither Alexander Hamilton ($10) or Benjamin Franklin ($100) was ever president. The $2 bill (Thomas Jefferson) is so rarely circulated that store clerks look askance when you use one.
And for that matter, when was the last time you actually used a $50 bill? In my case, I got one at the bank just before a trip to the barber, because I wanted to use it to show her now I wanted my beard trimmed.
As for specie, the half-dollar (John F. Kennedy) and the dollar coin may circulate even less than the $2 bill. The dollar coin once featured Dwight D. Eisenhower, then Susan B. Anthony, then Sacajawea (from imagination, since no contemporary portraits are known of the young Shoshone woman who helped guide the Lewis and Clark expedition).
And Reagan will get on a coin. In 2007, the U.S. Mint began the “Presidential Dollar Coin Program,” starting with George Washington. After a three-month run, it was John Adams, and so on through the presidents at four per year. Reagan’s turn comes in 2016,
That’s not enough for some boosters, though, especially since the centennial of Reagan’s birth (Feb. 6. 1911) is imminent. We should expect to hear a lot more from Grover Norquist and his Reagan Legacy Project, which wants every state, and indeed every American county, to name a “significant public landmark” after Reagan.
For my county, whose economy was devastated during the Reagan years as it lost population, I proposed re-naming an old limestone quarry — it curtailed production during Reagan’s tenure, with the loss of a couple of dozen good union jobs — as “the Reagan Pit.”
As for Colorado in general, the state has two neighboring 14ers with nearly identical names: Mt. Wilson, 14,019, and Wilson Peak, 14,186. Neither is named for President Woodrow Wilson; both are named for A.D. Wilson, a topographer with the 1874 Hayden expedition. But if Norquist or one of his acolytes inquires, we could just say that one of them is named for Ronald Wilson Reagan.
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