An Internet campaign to replace President Andrew Jackson with a woman on the $20 bill has gone viral, drawing over 513,000 hits on a website dedicated to making the change by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.
Women On $20s, headed by Barbara Ortiz Howard and Susan Ades Stone, has drawn celebrity endorsements from actresses Padma Lakshmi and Susan Sarandon, is running an online ballot to choose just which woman would best replace Old Hickory, and states, "a woman's place is on the money."
In an
interview with The National Journal, Ortiz Howard said, "I had to point out that other countries — New Zealand, Australia, India, Israel, England, Dominican Republic — they all have women on the currency and they also have leaders who are women."
The campaign is a grassroots, web-based effort without political input or involvement so far. Stone told the National Journal that they intentionally avoided seeking support from Congress on the issue because, "we did not want to politicize this. That was important to us. We wanted to keep this as more of a national conversation about valuing women and respecting the women who have shaped this country and have not really gotten enough credit for what they've done. And we thought that if we started getting a lot of political chatter, it would overshadow that."
Instead, the group's website offered up a string of 15 initial candidates to replace Jackson, including women's liberation advocate Betty Friedan, former slave and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, women's suffrage activist Susan B. Anthony, civil rights icon Rosa Parks, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton and others, and asked supporters to vote. To date, 188,000 have voted, the National Journal notes.
In a recent
Rasmussen poll, 45 percent agreed with the change to the $20 bill while 34 percent disagreed. Of those in favor, 30 percent chose Roosevelt, 23 percent opted for Tubman, 18 percent for Anthony and 12 percent for Pocahontas, while four percent voted for former secretary of state and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Jackson replaced former President Grover Cleveland on the $20 bill in 1929, but has fallen out of favor with many because of his support for Indian relocation policies which resulted in the Trail of Tears,
New York Magazine notes.
Coins featuring women, notably the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin in 1979 and the Sacagawea dollar coin in 2000, were "flops," the National Journal notes.
Once the votes are all in and narrowed to a single woman candidate, the organizers plan to petition the White House. However, the ultimate decision, since 1862, has been up to the
Department of the Treasury, the department states.
President Barack Obama has stated that he believes replacing Jackson on the $20 bill is "a pretty good idea."
Watch the video here.
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