No matter how Eugene Dorgan wriggles and squirms to prove that we all “hate the new money,” there are millions of us out here who think it’s just dandy. The scrolls, clutter, and Victorian fussiness of the old bills is gone, and Jackson’s larger, off-center portrait is surely more dramatic. If the Treasury really wants constructive change, it should consider varied colors to differentiate the bills—like the money of almost every other country in the world. That would be real progress.
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January 2011
I very much enjoyed the article “Cents and Sensibility,” by Eugene Dorgan, in the September issue. I wholeheartedly share Mr. Dorgan’s distaste for the dull, colorless, and disappointing new $20 bill. It must represent an all-time low in aesthetic quality of paper currency. The article also discusses some of our new coins, and I agreed with most of Mr. Dorgan’s points. I was sorry to see, however, that he did not discuss the most appalling characteristic of U.S. coins, both old and new. I am quite sure that U.S. coins are unique among the currencies of major nations in the world in that none of them—not the penny, not the nickel, not the dime, not the quarter, not the half-dollar—contain any numeric designation of their value. This fact has always struck me as arrogant and non-user-friendly, especially for foreign tourists, who, in trying to figure out the value of our coins, can only find on them terms like “one cent,” “five cents,” “one dime,” or “quarter dollar.”
My mother, in her twenties during the 1920s, was a bookkeeper for the John T. Stanley Soap Factory in New York City. She often told me about those happy years “with the girls.” One circumstance persisted in her memory. There was a fad where young women would wear large, clunky galoshes with big metal clasps. But one did not close the buckles; the idea was to leave them unclasped so they would swing back and forth as you walked, making metallic noises. This was very chic. I could not help but notice that Emilie Sandsten, in the “Readers’ Album” of your February/March 2000 issue, has her overshoes unclasped. Was she trying to impress her Chinese hosts or her fellow travelers with the clink clink of the metal buckles as she strode on the Great Wall of China?
Geoffrey C. Ward is no stranger to American Heritage, where he served as editor and later as a columnist. Born in Ohio, raised in Chicago and India, he reveals in all his work a singular generosity in assessing the achievements of American leaders, artists, and scoundrels, displaying an eye for the telling eccentricity and a fascination for the razor’s edge between myth and reality. As a historian and biographer, he is best known for his exemplary two-volume study of the pre-presidential life and career of Franklin Roosevelt, Before the Trumpet (1985) and A First-Class Temperament (1989), which won the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize, respectively. Yet even if you have done yourself the ill service of neglecting his books and articles, you undoubtedly know his work. Because Geoff Ward is also the foremost writer of historical documentaries in our time. Indeed, he is an innovator of the form.
In the fullness of time, when the flaming passions that surround President Clinton have faded into flickering embers, historians will be able to write objectively about the man and his administration. However, I and my fellow cartoonists—the four on these pages are Pat Oliphant, David Levine, Barry Blitt, and Robert Grossman—have no need to wait before handing down our verdict. We who have chronicled his Presidency for the past eight years speak as one when we state our opinion: Bill Clinton was just about perfect.
Not only did Clinton have a face easy to caricature—a supreme virtue from our point of view—and not only was he outstanding in practicing those hypocrisies we have come to expect from our Chief Executives, but he didsomething that no other President has accomplished: He got caught in the Oval Office with his pants down. With this feat he made political cartoonists (generally a morose and downbeat lot) grateful to be plying their trade at this juicy historical moment.
On Lincoln’s birthday in 1976, The New York Times ran a Tiffany & Co. advertisement in which the headline ABRAHAM LINCOLN SAID MORE THAN 100 YEARS AGO was followed by a cluster of 10 quotes of identical tenor: “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich,” “You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer,” “You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for them what they can and should do for themselves.” And so forth.
Let me apologize in advance for leaving out many people’s favorites, like Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa , for example, or Buffalo Bill’s autobiography, or anything by Jack London (adventurous indeed, but it’s fiction). The choices reflect my personal taste. My fondest hope for them is that they provoke people to argue with me. I have arranged the books in chronological order.
1 The Journals of Lewis and Clark , 1809.
Certainly the closest thing we have to an American epic, and still fresh and alive.
2 Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies , 1835.
This short book is a delight, and it breathes the air of what was still known as the Great American Desert, the sea of grass extending west from the Mississippi.
3 Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast , 1840.