Every Dollar Tells a Story

Hollywood is spinning box office gold by turning the Declaration of Independence into a plot device. In “National Treasure,” the nation’s No. 1 movie for the last three weeks, Nicolas Cage plays an archeologist-historian on a quest for “the most spectacular treasure in history.” This fortune, he’s told, was hidden by the United States’ founders, who left clues “right before our eyes.... The unfinished pyramid, the all-seeing eye....”

Those clues, of course, are the symbols of the Great Seal of the United States, reproduced on the back of the $1 bill. The dollar bill is ubiquitous, familiar beyond notice, yet few Americans understand the meanings of its words and images. In fact, instead of pieces of gold, the treasures they signify are the nation’s core values and ideals.

The Great Seal was commissioned by the first Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, just a few hours after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. The final version, which combined elements of all previous designs, was approved on June 20, 1782. On one side a bald eagle grasps a bundle of arrows in its left talon and an olive branch in the other. A scroll in its beak reads E Pluribus Unum, Latin for out of many, one. The reverse side displays a pyramid, a symbol of duration and everlasting life, with 13 steps, for the original 13 colonies. The pyramid is purposefully unfinished, capped with the eye of providence and the words Annuit Coeptis: “It [providence] looks favorably on our undertakings.” Below it, a scroll reads Novus Ordo Seclorum, announcing a “new order of the ages.” (The eye and pyramid have Masonic overtones, but just how strong a connection there is between Freemasonry, the founders and the seal is a matter of speculation.)

The decision to put the Great Seal on the dollar bill was made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. The seal was brought to the president’s attention by then-Secretary of Agriculture and future Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who surmised that Roosevelt would be intrigued by the seal’s implication that the U.S. was continually evolving, that it was continually being redefined by new immigrants, cultures and races. Roosevelt, Wallace later recalled, was “first struck by the representation of the ‘All-Seeing Eye,’ a Masonic representation of the Great Architect of the Universe. Next he was impressed with the idea that the foundation for the new order of the ages had been laid in 1776 but that it would be completed only under the eye of the Great Architect.”

The U.S. dollar, of course, has a mythic power regardless of the symbols printed on it, not just for Americans who spend so much of their time and energy pursuing and spending it, but also for the foreigners and immigrants, past, present and future, lured across oceans and borders by the chance to earn it.

Today, minority populations, fed by immigration, make up more than one-fourth of the nation; by 2050, non-Anglos -- newcomers and those long settled here -- will have grown to 47.2% of the population. They already outpace Anglos in terms of population and income growth. So forget the gold; the treasure signified by the dollar bill is far richer. It multiplies as the founders hoped it would: in the benefits of an unfinished nation, grounded in an ever-evolving democracy that inspires and embraces new peoples and cultures -- a new order; out of many, one; still finishing the top of the pyramid.