Don’t mess with my money!

I know, I’m not American — but I have a special relationship to American money. Some of it, anyway.

You’ll notice that’s Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 U.S. bill. Yup, that’s my name — Grant — on the $50.

My full name, for the record, is Grant Andrew Hamilton. And who’s that on the American $10 bill? Why that’s Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of the Treasury! That only leaves — oh, my goodness! Look at the twenty! Andrew Jackson, hello there!

Yes, I’m apparently named after the $50, the $20 and the $10 American bills. I suppose that’s better than being named after Canadian money. (Looks like I’d have been called “William Elizabeth Macdonald.” Shudder.)

Anyway, my never-fail, gimme-a-$50 ice-breaker might be going down the tubes. There’s a movement afoot to turf old Ulysses S. off of the bill! Say it ain’t so!

You seem like a swell guy (and happy 187^th birthday this week!). Your plainspoken dignity helped define what America wanted from its Midwesterners. Your beard—well-kempt, but vital and robust—was perhaps the Platonic ideal of 19^th-century Federal facial hair. You weren’t nearly as awful to black and American Indian people as a lot of your contemporaries—or as your critics urged you to be. And, heck, you saved the Union on the battlefield and, as president, saved it all over again by keeping postwar tension from boiling over into Civil War II.

So grant Grant all of that. But as the face of the $50? It’s time for Grant to go.

As the architect and face of the Union victory, Grant was the obvious popular choice when he ran to succeed the train wreck known as the Andrew Johnson administration. As a steward of the economy, however, the 18^th U.S. president was a disaster in ways that are eerily familiar today. On Grant’s watch, a housing bubble, a tech bubble (of a railroad-y, 19^th-century sort), market manipulation, government corruption, cronyism, overleveraged lenders, and the sudden popularity of new, unregulated financial instruments turned a postwar boom into a deep depression that makes the Great Depression seem full of itself.

They even note that his negative influence extended to language: “The word Grantism was coined to describe systematic corruption and greed.” Ai-yi-yi!

Still, I say there’s no good reason to only have positive people on the currency. What is this, Utopia? People learn more from their mistakes than from their successes — and the same should go for nations. Leave Grant alone!