Which political party would most Americans today suspect of removing a Native American from U.S. currency and replacing it with a white male Founding Father? If you guessed Republican, you’d be wrong. Progressive Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in collusion with the Democratic 75th Congress of the United States, removed the Indian Head (also known as the Buffalo) nickel from circulation in 1938 and created the Jefferson nickel, which we know today. Today the left wishes to portray itself as the crusader for historically disadvantaged groups, but that ignores its true heritage: the great progressive champion did exactly the opposite.
This was not the first redesigning of the nickel. The Indian Head was designed to replace the Liberty Head nickel, featuring the left-facing Goddess of Liberty, (1883-1913) in an effort to make the coinage more beautiful. This movement was largely driven by Teddy Roosevelt, who in 1904 noted that the art on American coinage had much room for improvement. Teddy, of course, was a Republican. Another Republican, William Howard Taft, commissioned sculptor James Earle Fraser to design what would eventually become the Indian Head nickel.
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Fraser, who was born in Minnesota, spent time in the Dakotas, and was aware of the history of Native Americans being pushed further West, created a design that included a Native American head on the front and a bison on the tails side. In a 1947 radio interview, Fraser said that the design came from his desire “to do something totally American — a coin that could not be mistaken for any other country’s coin. It occurred to me that the buffalo…was 100 percent American, and that our North American Indian fitted into the picture perfectly,” he said.
The Indian Head nickel went into circulation on March 4, 1913 for a minimum of 25 years during which the design could not be replaced without congressional approval.
By 1938, that 25-year period had expired, the world was drawing closer to World War II, FDR was in office, and both the House and Senate were controlled by the Democrats. Congress created an open competition where people could make design submissions for the new nickel, and the idea of showcasing Thomas Jefferson was looked upon favorably in anticipation of 1943, the bicentennial of his birth. Accordingly, the Felix Schlag design featuring Jefferson on the front and Monticello on the back went into circulation in 1938 and continues to the present.
What are the takeaway lessons from this episode? The most obvious is that the identity politics that the left of today loves to play are not always so simple. It took the efforts of two Republican presidents to put a Native American on U.S. currency; that design was replaced at the earliest opportunity with an image of a white, male, slaveholding Southerner — by the progressive hero of the 20th century, no less.
Roosevelt in 1943 claimed Jefferson as his intellectual hero and believed that advancing Americans’ knowledge of the Founders was important to our identity as a nation. FDR was convinced that Americans in a war against fascism and tyranny should look back to the men who launched the American Revolution to remind themselves of the liberty and just government for which this country was born.
Today, such sentiments would almost certainly be described as inherently Republican. Perhaps Ben Affleck would even call them “racist” and “gross.” But it is worth noting that the father of the progressive movement thought there were valuable lessons to be learned from America’s founding.
This is not to say that the Indian Head nickel was a mistake or that the Jefferson nickel was better. It is important to note, however, that the former was designed not to remedy some perceived lack of diversity or to make a symbolic gesture to satisfy historically disadvantaged groups. It was designed to be specifically American. And as Roosevelt understood, there is nothing wrong with that.
