From Jackson to Tubman? International and Domestic Drivers of U.S. Banknote Design

• In Event: Gendered Policy in the Home and the State

Abstract

Every OECD state that still uses national banknotes has issued at least one banknote featuring a named woman at some point since 1946, with one exception: the United States. Why has the US dollar’s iconography fallen so far out of step with its international peers? The question is important because the iconography of the dollar conveys important information about the American government’s values and priorities, matters greatly for its global brand, and may have significant effects on Americans' own understanding of their country. The question is puzzling because there is strong popular support for putting a great American woman on our banknotes, as evidenced by the surge of bipartisan interest in the issue during the "Women on 20s" campaign in 2015-16. At that time, the Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew made a commitment to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 and several other women's and civil rights advocates on the back of the $5 and $10. But Lew also projected that the change would not happen until the late 2020s. Then even that long-term objective was derailed by Lew's successor Steven Mnuchin with the full support of the career professional top leadership of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Based on more than two dozen in-depth interviews with major current and former players in US currency design, including multiple interviews with the leaders of the "Women on 20s" movement, this paper explains the US' failure so far to feature a woman on its paper money. It argues that this failure is not due to US political culture’s being much more anti-gender equality than the other OECD member-states. Indeed, the US has featured famous women on different circulating coins over the years. Instead, the paper explains the outcome as an indirect consequence of the uniquely high global demand for US dollar banknotes.

The fact that the dollar is heavily used abroad tends to reduce the attractiveness of major iconographic change in the eyes of the main bureaucratic players, namely Treasury and the Fed. Whereas finance ministry and central bank bureaucrats in other countries often drive forward changes in banknote iconography, in the US they are a barrier to such changes, due to the much higher transition costs and risks of causing monetary disruption somewhere unexpected. It is admittedly the case that the design of the currency is legally a prerogative of the Secretary of the Treasury alone, so the political elites certainly have the power to override such bureaucratic concerns about international repercussions. Many of them would even like to do so. After all, as former Treasury Secretary John Connally once put it to an international group of finance ministers, “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” Yet still, the bureaucrats’ technical arguments based on the global use of the dollar are sufficient to lengthen the expected timeline for any iconographic changes, thus diminishing the perceived political payoffs from doing so. As a result, only with strong and sustained social movement pressure are the top political players likely to make such a decision. But social movement activists also need to find the sweet spot of raising the issue’s political profile without inviting criticism from the bureaucratic guardians of the currency that they are undermining the public consensus of trust in the money supply.

The possibility of a Tubman $20 has gained new life with the arrival of the new administration. Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris explicitly endorsed the idea during the presidential campaign, Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen supported Lew’s proposed money makeover while serving as Fed Chairman, and there was considerable technical work done during the last months of the Obama administration. Therefore the chess pieces are already in place for the new administration to move quickly. If revived social movement pressure causes them to prioritize the issue, it is possible to envision a woman being featured on US banknotes that are issued during a potential second Biden term.

Author

• Jacques E.C. Hymans, University of Southern California