Treasury Secretary Jack Lew rebuffed the sustained criticism his agency has received for the decision to revamp the $10 bill Wednesday, charging that the public has been wrong to worry about the status of Alexander Hamilton, whose portrait currently adorns the bill.
“People should never have been worried that we were going to do anything to erase that memory,” Lew said in an interview on Bloomberg TV ahead of his scheduled travel to Shanghai, China, for the G-20 meeting of finance ministers.
Lew provoked an uproar last summer when he announced that the $10 bill would be redesigned to feature a woman.
The Treasury intended for the redesign process to include comments from the public about which woman should be portrayed on the new bill. But since the announcement, the decision has mostly been criticized for the perceived snub to Hamilton, with many suggesting that Andrew Jackson should have been removed from the $20 bill instead.
Hamilton has also been in the news in a positive light because of the huge success of the Broadway play “Hamilton,” a musical biography of the first Treasury secretary.
“I’ve always been a big fan of Alexander Hamilton,” Lew said Wednesday in self-defense, touting Hamilton’s “incomparable legacy” and noting that he has seen and enjoyed the play.
Lew added that “pretty soon we’ll have something to announce.”
No timeline has been given for the Treasury to announce which American woman will be on the $10 bill. Even after a selection is made, it will be years before the design is finalized. The new note will not enter into circulation until after 2020.
Lew has previously suggested that Hamilton might stay on the $10 alongside a woman or that the Treasury might print two versions of the bill, one with a woman and one with Hamilton.
