The U.S. Treasury recently announced a major makeover of our paper currency. 

Gone from the $20 bill is the visage of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, to be replaced by Harriet Tubman, the noted African-American “conductor” of the Underground Railroad who helped slaves escape from the South to the North during the Civil War. 

On the back of the $10 bill, opposite Alexander Hamilton, will be Susan B. Anthony along with Sojourner Truth and other important feminist figures who pioneered women’s rights. 

On the $5 bill, opposite Abraham Lincoln, will be the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson, representing civil rights leadership. 

In many ways, these changes should be celebrated as long overdue bows to minorities, in particular women and blacks. The currency reform speaks to the progress we have made as a nation in terms of diversity and equality and a reminder of our obligation to continue combatting racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination that still exist. 

Still, there is something a bit tacky about the way in which, in order to make room for a more inclusive pantheon of national heroes, we feel we have to remove—and beat up on—earlier members of that pantheon. 

The Founding Fathers were just that: the men who created the nation that arguably is the single largest, most prosperous, successful experiment in mass democracy in the million years humans have been on the planet—not a minor achievement. 

While at times we have been guilty of overglorifying or sanitizing our past, failing to examine the founders warts and all, more recently we have been focusing mostly on the warts, rewriting history to make it politically correct even if historically inaccurate. 

About the latter, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger once said, “It may be too bad that dead white European males (DWEM) have played so large a role in shaping our culture, but that’s the way it is.” As much as we might wish to expunge DWEMs from the national narrative, we do so at the risk of distorting reality.

No founder has gone from reverence to disgrace in our public discourse more seamlessly than Andrew Jackson. From Schlesinger’s 1945 “The Age of Jackson” to Princeton historian Sean Wilentz’s 2005 “The Rise of American Democracy,” Jackson generally had been portrayed as the champion of “the common man” and a pivotal figure in the story of American mass democracy. Wilentz called Jackson’s presidential victory in 1828 “the culmination of more than 30 years of American democracy development.” The recent decision to remove Jackson from our currency—more precisely, to relegate him to the back of the $20 bill—was the culmination of a decade-long trashing of his reputation due to his having been a slave owner and having been associated with the brutal Trail of Tears relocation of Native Americn tribes to Western territories. 

Alexander Hamilton almost suffered the same fate as Jackson. He was about to be removed from the $10 bill. It did not matter that Hamilton was the original Horatio Alger — born out of wedlock in the West Indies, orphaned and impoverished before immigrating to America, becoming George Washington’s chief military aide during the Revolutionary War, a co-author of the Federalist Papers and, ultimately, the country’s first secretary of the Treasury, credited with launching the national economy. As Ron Chernow noted in “Alexander Hamilton,” his widely praised biography, Hamilton “is the foremost figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably has a much deeper impact than many who did.”  

Hamilton’s sin was that, fearing anarchy, he pushed at the Constitutional Convention for a strong chief executive bordering on monarchy. Even worse in the eyes of some, he was an adulterer who mistreated his wife and left her penniless when he was killed in a misguided duel with Aaron Burr. 

In her April 20 op-ed in The New York Times, Cokie Roberts, calling Hamilton a “lying philanderer,” urged that his wife, Eliza, replace him on the $10 bill or, at the very least, he be bumped to the back of the money, trading places with the suffragettes. Hamilton will remain on the front of the $10 bill, not so much because of his enormous accomplishments but, more likely, owing to the popularity of the current Broadway rap musical “Hamilton,” whose special appeal, in the words of the director, is the black and Hispanic cast playing “the dead white men.” 

This is now what passes for serious evaluation of who are the leading American icons deserving space on our currency.

I am not dismissing the criticisms of men such as Jackson and Hamilton. Slavery was pure evil, and misogyny is a close second. But how far should we go in ignoring the positive qualities and compensating contributions of such people, smearing their reputations and wiping them from our national consciousness? They were flawed, as we all are; at least they could claim to be creatures of their time, when such behavior was more accepted even if not acceptable by our standards. 

Should we also demand a renaming of Lindbergh Boulevard, the Ford Foundation and other such entities, given their association with vicious anti-Semitism? Where does this end?

On the other hand, how far should we go in exaggerating the greatness of folks like Harriet Tubman in order to justify their addition to our currency? 

Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, among the country’s leading social studies educators, published an article in The Journal of American History (March 2008) based on a survey of 2,000 high schoolers who were asked to list “the ten most famous Americans” other than presidents and their wives. Wineburg found Tubman ranked third, largely due to generations of kids assigned textbooks about her that are “as much the stuff of legend as documented fact.” (Rosa Parks was ranked second. Wineburg writes that at least five other black women mounted a bus protest before she did but that “to speak of them would undermine the tale of a browbeaten seamstress” who helped end segregation and Jim Crow.) 

The point is not that Tubman and Parks are undeserving of iconic national status. To the contrary, they were truly courageous, important figures in the American story. But so were Jackson and Hamilton. We should not be determining who rates hero worship on our currency based on PC impulses to destroy or elevate various individuals representing different categorical groups. Identity politics should have no place in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. 

In the next round of currency reform, what founding father might be sacrificed to make room for someone more in synch with contemporary sensibilities? Maybe it will be George Washington, the slave owner, who will be forced to the back of the buck or off the buck altogether. These days, you can’t be sure.