Hello, Sacajawea . . .. . . and goodbye, George Washington?

George Washington has been getting out and about lately, appearing in print and TV ads in a variety of guises (my favorite: aerobics instructor), to plug the new dollar coin that bears an image of Sacajawea, the guide for Lewis and Clark. Ever the gentleman, especially where the fair sex is concerned, the Father of His Country has been giving the young lady a hand. Is this a harmless expansion of the American pantheon, adding a new face to Washington, Lincoln, Uncle Sam, and the Thanksgiving turkey? Or is it the prelude to a sly iconectomy, replacing a dead white male with a dead red female?

The last (and only other) time the Mint put the face of a historical female figure on a regular-issue coin, it was a disaster. Everything about the Susan B. Anthony dollar, first struck in 1979, was wrong. The coin was the same color and nearly the same size as the quarter, confusing the sight-challenged. The design on the back, an eagle landing on the Moon, had nothing to do with the design on the front. Ms. Anthony herself, big-nosed and jut-jawed, looked, except for her prim and homely hairdo, like a cigar-store Indian.

The coins accumulated, unused, in banks, and the Mint lost heart. They struck 750 million of them in the first year; by 1981, they were striking fewer than ten million. Then they gave up.

This time the Mint was determined to do a better job. The Sacajawea dollar is the color of a bright brass doorknob. Since we don't know what Sacajawea looked like, the Mint felt free to invent a pleasing image of her. Most important, they gave the coin a clever publicity blitz-whence the Washington ads.

America has been putting Indians on its coins for over two hundred years. The first was a rather stiff standing brave on the pre-Constitution copper coins of the State of Massachusetts. In 1854, an allegorical lady wearing an Indian headdress appeared on the gold dollar. For the next 84 years, Indians jostled in our pockets on one coin or another. Some of them were ethnographically accurate: The Indian head on the Buffalo nickel (1913-1938) is a composite portrait of three actual Indian models, named Iron Tail, Two Moons, and John Big Tree. The bison on the reverse is a portrait too, of Black Diamond, who lived for many years in the Bronx Zoo, and after his death was served as steaks at Delmonico's. Other monetary Indians were idealized images of liberty, wearing Indian gear. The young woman on the Indian Head cent (1859-1909) was based on a statue of Venus in a Philadelphia museum.

Putting Indians on our coins has always been a romantic gesture-a consolation prize for losing the continent. The Massachusetts Indian appeared a century after the tribes of New England were crushed. Liberty could safely don bonnets in the 1850s because Tecumseh, the last Indian who had been a real threat to the country, had been killed decades earlier. The Buffalo nickel memorialized braves and bison 23 years after the official closing of the frontier. Actual Indians might not like being figures of nostalgia, but that is the persona they wear in the inner theater of the American mind.

The Sacajawea dollar continues this tradition. It could, indeed, be called the Stephen Ambrose dollar: It was his best-selling book, Undaunted Courage-a perfect combination of eco-tourism and summer-vacation patriotism-that sparked the renewed interest in Lewis and Clark. Add traditional Indian chic, disguised as latter-day political correctness, and the Mint has a clear winner.

Sacajawea makes a fine coin. The real question is, What will happen to the dollar bill? Washington's pocket billboard has powerful enemies, and-appropriately enough for a story involving currency-their motives are economic. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has long hated making dollar bills. They circulate so rapidly, and wear out so fast, that they must be constantly reprinted, at considerable expense. The copper industry, meanwhile, has been scheming to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin ever since the cent piece became almost entirely zinc, with a copper wash, in 1982. Together, they are willing to shred the First President in order to balance their books.

How important is it that Washington be on the nation's unit of exchange? When Washington died, Henry Lee famously called him "first in the hearts of his countrymen." That is no longer as vividly true as it was when Lee said it. But after five years of writing, talking, and filming a PBS documentary about George Washington, I have found that it is not completely untrue either. People may not know, in great detail, why they like Washington, but they do. When we were shooting in Newburgh, N.Y., the struggling Hudson River city where Washington's army had its last encampment of the Revolution, we looked for what is called vox pop-man-in-the-street interviews. A young black man outside a barbershop told me, "Of course we got to think highly of him because [without him] we wouldn't be here right now as free Americans. In my book, he was a good man by nature." John F. Kennedy Jr. didn't call his magazine Tom or Abe. At the depth of the recent unpleasantness, The New Yorker ran a cherry-tree cartoon. Young George to father: "It depends what you mean by 'chop.'" But even such a tough, seemingly unkillable feeling has to be sustained. The image on the bill that everyone sees every day, and that magazines and political cartoons use as shorthand for economic news, is a continuous, unconscious bit of reinforcement.

Not that the image on the dollar bill is an ideal one. It is based on the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait, which was also flooded into American schools at the bicentennial, in 1932, of Washington's birth. The trouble with Stuart is that he caught Washington in his sixties, in the stress of his second term (the Whiskey Rebellion had just been suppressed, and the howl over Jay's Treaty had begun); his current set of dentures were especially painful to him. Washington was old and tired, and looks it. Stuart, a testy sort, was not enamored of his subject. The Washington portrait became a breadwinner for the artist, which he often copied for money (he got so proficient that he could turn out two of them in two hours). Washington's age and Stuart's attitude combine to make a rather bleak and forbidding image. John Trumbull's depiction of him after the Battle of Trenton, or Charles Willson Peale's portrait at age 40, show him in full vigor, and with more sympathy. Perhaps if the Bureau of Engraving and Printing swells Washington's head to gargantuan size, as it is doing with the heads of all the other dead guys on the money, they will pick a nicer-looking head to expand.

Yet the Stuart image has itself become an icon of an icon. Grant Wood, no stranger to icons, wittily played off its status in his 1939 painting Parson Weems' Fable. In it, Mason Locke Weems, who first wrote the cherry-tree story, is pointing, like a tour guide, to the famous scene. Atop the body of young George, anxiously holding the incriminating hatchet, Wood has clapped the gray head from Stuart's portrait.

The success of the plot against George Washington is not entirely up to the plotters, for their scheme depends on people using the Sacajawea coin. Despite its attractive features, I have seen ominous signs, at least in New York, that it is not catching on. I only get it as change in the subways, where ticket sellers can be instructed to pass it out. The reason is not far to seek. If you find yourself, as you often do, with six or seven loose dollars, six or seven dollar coins weigh down the pocket, and clog the purse. Bills are simply more convenient. Traditionalists wish our latest monetary Indian well. But they also want to keep George Washington first in the wallets of his countrymen.