By Jennifer Schuessler, Binyamin Appelbaum and Wesley Morris

New York Times

The United States is adding a few new faces to its currency. Harriet Tubman will appear on the front of a new $20 bill to be unveiled in 2020, and a pair of civil rights scenes, one featuring suffragist leaders, will appear on the backs of redesigned $5 and $10 bills, the Treasury Department said Wednesday.

The old faces will remain. Alexander Hamilton stays on the front of the $10 and Andrew Jackson moves to the back of the $20. But there will be women in American wallets for the first time in more than a century (when Martha Washington appeared) and African-Americans for the first time in the nation’s history.

Wesley Morris, a critic-at-large, Jennifer Schuessler, a culture reporter, and Binyamin Appelbaum, who covers the economy, talk about what the monetary makeover all means.

Schuessler: For all the debate over the past year about the fate of Hamilton, the top news here is really that Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20, becoming the first African-American to appear on the front of a United States bank note. The Treasury won’t release the design until 2020, but people are already sharing Photoshopped Tubman twenties online, and they feel wonderfully jolting and radical.

What do you think? Does having her on the bill make a real difference — either to how we think about our history, or how we think about our money?

Appelbaum: I think it does make a difference. There were more than 8.5 billion $20 bills in circulation last year. Our money is right up there with the Golden Arches as an instantly and globally recognizable emblem of America. And our bills are stale. The seven white men on the seven notes in general circulation were all dead by 1885. Ulysses S. Grant is the only one who lived past the end of the Civil War. More than half of American history has happened since.

Countries historically have used their currency to make sure everyone knows who’s in charge. The United Kingdom still puts the queen on every single bill, although she always has company. Putting Tubman on the $20 strikes me as a powerful and necessary realignment of our symbols and our professed values.

I guess one question on my mind is this: Do these changes go far enough? Tubman isn’t exactly a modern figure; she died in 1913. And amazingly, there’s still a Masonic pyramid on the back of the $1 bill.

Morris: Oooo, Binyamin. You mess with that pyramid, and the Illuminati will hunt you down. Stand down, man! And by “illuminati,” I mean in 100 years we might be talking about Beyoncé on all currency. Just kidding. Those meetings started happening LAST WEEK.

Harriet Tubman died in 1913 (two-paragraph New York Times obituary right here! TWO PARAGRAPHS.), but her legacy endures. Her legacy is typing a third of this conversation. But ought there be a degree of catching up? For instance, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who died in 1902, is deserving of more than the possible “Avengers” treatment Treasury apparently has planned for suffragists.

Having Tubman on cash is not simply reparative, although the idea of seeing her face and hearing her name during the months of the year that aren’t February becomes nourishment in itself. Having her on cash is to me an uncontroversial no-brainer.

But generally, yes, let’s get some more modern candidates on our moola.

Schuessler: Speaking of the “Avengers” treatment, does anyone else find the plans for the new $10 a little awkward? Hamilton will stay on the front, while the picture of the Treasury Department Building on the back will be replaced with an image of a 1913 women’s suffrage march that ended at that building, along with portraits of five suffrage leaders. There’s currently only one bill that features a group scene: the $2 bill, introduced in 1976, which shows Jefferson on the front and the signing of the Declaration of Independence on the back. This makes sense, as — in a more indirect way — does the just-announced plan to add images of Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King Jr. to the back of the $5, which has Abraham Lincoln on the front. The Treasury Building connection aside, does pairing of Hamilton with suffragists make any sense? Or does it simply reflect the strange currency politics of our moment?

Appelbaum: Oh, it’s clearly a political marriage. Jack Lew, the secretary of the Treasury, did something fairly unusual, at least by Washington standards: He changed his mind. Lew announced last year, to great fanfare, that the government would put a woman on the $10. He apparently had Susan B. Anthony in mind. (There are lots of great women in American history, but somehow Anthony is the one the government always wants to put on money.)

Well, it turned out this was the wrong moment to mess with Alexander Hamilton, who as you may have heard is currently starring on Broadway. Lew also was stung by his own peer group. Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said publicly that he was “appalled,” which is pretty much the strongest language I’ve ever heard him use about anything.

So Treasury needed another bill. Andrew Jackson actually thought the United States shouldn’t print paper money. He was also a bad president. So he gets shunted to the back of the $20, and Hamilton stays on the front of the $10 and women get the balance of the real estate.

Morris: It’s awkward! It’s also fascinating. The conceptual coups of the show reside in its placing the stress on Hamilton’s being an outsider and having that status align with the modern conversation about who “belongs” in this country. In the show, that line, “Immigrants, we get the job done” simultaneously brings down the house and electrifies it. It’s exhilaratingly punctual. This is to say that an amazing thing has happened to Hamilton thanks to the success of the show. He’s the subject of Ron Chernow’s book, but now he’s also Lin-Manuel Miranda. So to Miranda’s fans (and to Hamilton’s late-arriving partisans), removing him from the $10 bill might feel like apostasy, confirming not only how cool this guy suddenly is, but how he has been recast as nonwhite — and, consequently, how protected he is by our current identity politics.

Schuessler: Exactly. Am I crazy to think that the show has effectively turned Hamilton — a white man born in the Dutch West Indies — into our nonwhite founder, or our least-white founder, in a Bill Clinton “first black president” kind of way? It has certainly made Hamilton, an unabashed elitist, into a populist hero, embraced by people who (like me) probably didn’t quite notice until the last year that he was even on our currency. But is it important that the people on our money, and in our history books, are likable and relatable (to use two good 18th-century words)?

Appelbaum: I’d like to admire the people on our currency, but it’s unlikely that “we,” in the sense of all Americans, are going to agree about any given historical figure. The eurozone has skirted this problem by putting bridges on its bank notes. And they’re not even actual bridges: just archetypes of different styles: Classical on the five euro note, Romanesque on the 10 euro note, and so forth. Putting presidents on currency is also a kind of safe harbor. Those are the 43 people who have actually won a national popularity contest.

Tubman now joins the shorter list of nonpresidents who have been selected as “representative Americans,” alongside Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.

Morris: Jenny, I can tell you a story that’s worse than never looking at my money. On Saturdays, I go to the same ATM to withdraw cash for the week. I prefer that particular set of machines because it gives out $10s and $50s, and getting them feels, I don’t know, special. Well, last weekend it gave me a $100 bill that, in the shallow pockets of my sweats, might have as well have been a one, since the money was quickly gone. That’s a little story about why I hate “athleisure.” It’s also a story about why I hate cash.

But this Harriet Tubman news will make me reconsider. For one thing, she’s super-“representative.” For another, $20 bills are the favorite denomination of most ATMs, and I predict I’ll feel scrupulous in spending it. How do I pay for a family-pack of toilet paper with a Tubman? Who knows, my savings game might go through the roof.

And even if who’s on what money doesn’t matter to most people, it definitely matters to rebellious rappers, who’ll have to adjust their rhymes to take in what it means to have a great black woman stacked among what “dead presidents” are still standing (Sorry, Jackson).

Schuessler: Speaking of national popularity contests, it’s interesting — if surely coincidental — that “Hamilton”-mania has helped delay putting a woman on the front of a bill, just at the moment when we may elect an actual woman president. If Hillary Clinton wins the White House, how many decades will it be before she’s on the money? (And don’t you want to still be alive for those arguments?)

Appelbaum: So there’s a legal hurdle: To quote “Hamilton,” you have to be “super dead” before you’re eligible to be portrayed on American currency.

There’s also the Mount Rushmore problem. The bar is always lower for initial membership. Once the lineup is full, each decision is doubled: Every addition also requires a subtraction.

Which raises an important question: Does Hamilton deserve to keep his spot?

Schuessler: Oh man! I’m wary of answering that before I take a course in self-defense. And I’ll leave responding to your sick burn of Jackson as a “bad president” to professional historians and political scientists, who have often ranked him in the top 10 — well ahead of Ulysses S. Grant, our man on the $50. Sticking just to the founders, I’d venture that Hamilton has as good a claim as anyone after Washington and Jefferson (especially as played by Daveed Diggs). But the changes also raise another question: Should we introduce lots more people on currency?

Appelbaum: The United Kingdom rotates the faces on its currency every few years, so it can honor a range of great Britains. Jane Austen is due for a turn on the 10-pound note starting next year. The British chancellor, God save him, tweeted that the choice showed “sense and sensibility.” Bad jokes aside, they’re on to something. Rotating the honor would allow recognition for a broader group of notable Americans, and it would take the pressure off each decision.

Morris: That’s been my whole problem with the stress of this conversation ever since it heated up last summer: the pressure. Just flip these suckers. That would temper the pernicious exasperation of White Male Threat. You can depict white guys and everybody else, opening our currency to a galaxy of history, as opposed to this limiting Rushmore approach we’ve got now — sorry, no space for you! Yes, Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson will be on the back of the $5 bill. But I’m interested in fronts. Why not have stints for folks like Ida B. Wells, Clara Barton, Charles R. Drew, Marian Anderson, Jackie Cochran, Cesar Chavez, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Nelly Bly, August Wilson, Amelia Earhart, Richard Pryor and James Wong Howe: Americans who helped make America great before it was deemed in need of being made great again.

Schuessler: I’d personally like to see some writers on our currency. Just sticking to the 18th- and 19th-century lit-major classics, what about Phillis Wheatley, or Emily Dickinson, or Walt Whitman, who after all wrote a lot about the color green?

Appelbaum: You’ll love the new Austen note, which features the “Pride and Prejudice” line, “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading.”

Schuessler: So true, my dear Jane! After, of course, the enjoyment of listening to the “Hamilton” album.

© 2016 The New York Times Company