With the news that a woman will be added to the $10 bill — not to the exclusion of founding father Alexander Hamilton, as originally feared, but in addition to him — plenty of people have wondered why the $20 bill wasn’t the one that came in for revision instead. Hamilton, as an author of the Federalist papers, the first Treasury secretary, and essentially the father of the American currency system, seems like he deserves his own bill.
Meanwhile there were calls for a woman to replace Andrew Jackson, who may be a member of President Obama’s party but is a rather controversial figure these days, and was not an especially well-regarded president in the first place. (His signal accomplishments were making America more populist, democratic, and focused on the western frontier — all questionable moves in a way, really.) So why is the ten getting changed?