Boo! Hiss! Don’t Demote Hamilton!

The first-rate musical “Hamilton,” based on the life of Alexander Hamilton, moves to Broadway next month. Meanwhile, this week, the Treasury Department announced that it was going to redesign the $10 bill to feature a woman, keeping Hamilton on the currency, but presumably in a less prominent position. I agree with the response to the news of Ron Chernow, who wrote the biography upon which the musical is based. The New York Times reports: ‘Chernow said he was all for featuring a woman on American currency — he suggested Harriet Tubman or Eleanor Roosevelt or Susan B. Anthony — and said “I am pro-Hamilton, not anti-women, in this controversy.” But he said the $20 bill was the right place for a change. “The figure whose time has come for a reappraisal is really Andrew Jackson,” he said. “Hamilton was a passionate abolitionist; Andrew Jackson had hundreds of slaves in the course of his life, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Native Americans during the infamous Trail of Tears — that’s really the figure who should be reconsidered. Hamilton’s niche in the pantheon should be secure.”’

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