I was a little concerned about paying property taxes with thousands of ones that had been stamped with FreeKeene.com. Actually, not all of them were stamped because it was just too much work, but at least 1500 of them were. I was concerned because I thought there was a chance the bank would pull that many stamped bills from circulation. I guess they didn’t because this week an editorial popped up in the Keene Sentinel all about them. Thanks to the Sentinel editorial staff for the story:
Some dollar bills circulating around here these days have two extra messages on them. Yes, there’s the traditional “In God we trust,” and the often puzzling “Annuit coeptis” and “Novus ordo seclorum.” But increasingly, on the front and back of dollar bills, we’ve been seeing advertising messages in blue ink reading: “Pro-Liberty Talk Radio www.FreeTalkLive.com” and “Keene’s #1 Blog for News, Opinion, & Activism www.FreeKeene.com.”
Now there’s an original method of self-promotion.
From time to time people do find stray messages written on the currency. There’s an outfit on the Web called “Where’s George” that attempts to follow dollar bills as they travel about. But, for some reason, currency advertising is unusual. When’s the last time you found “Drink Diet Pepsi” or “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” on the money in your wallet? Such promotions would probably seem a little tacky.
Not that it’s against the law to write on money, although the government doesn’t encourage the practice. The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing says only that it’s better to leave bank notes pristine. The U.S. Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the currency, cites Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code, which prohibits defacements that “render such item(s) unfit to be reissued.”
That wouldn’t apply to advertising on currency, the whole point of which must be to spread a message, not stifle it.
Incidentally, the Secret Service was established in 1865, just three years after the first U.S. dollar bill was issued by Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase. For want of a better idea, Chase put his own face on it.
In 1869, his portrait was replaced by George Washington’s. By that time, Chase had gone on to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Chase was born in Cornish, and moved to Keene with his mother when he was about 10 years old. He briefly went to school in Keene, moved to Ohio, and, it is said, later taught school in Roxbury at about the time he attended Dartmouth College. According to one account, he also used to sit in a tavern in his spare time, maybe on Roxbury Street in Keene, and teach other children to read. Today, the E. F. Lane Hotel, on Main Street just around the corner from Roxbury Street, honors his memory with the Chase Tavern.
An earlier posthumous honor for Chase came in 1877, when the Chase National Bank was named after him. It later became the Chase Manhattan Bank and more recently evolved into JPMorganChase, whose consumer banking division is called simply Chase. And that’s where some of those “Free Keene” bills will no doubt end up. Small world.
