Coin History

Teddy Roosevelt Thought American Coins Were Ugly, So He Did Something About It

He called the project his pet crime. It produced a coin so ambitious the Mint could barely strike it, and a design that still sits in dealer cases today.

Two days after Christmas in 1904, the President of the United States sat down and wrote his Treasury Secretary a note about how bad our money looked.

Read that second sentence again, because the whole story is hiding in it. Roosevelt was not asking whether the coins could be improved. That was assumed. He was asking how far he could get before anyone in Congress noticed. He later took to calling the effort his pet crime.

What came out the other end is the coin that most people in this business admit is the most beautiful thing the United States Mint has ever produced.

01 / The GrievanceHe had just seen what coins could look like

Roosevelt had recently gotten a look at ancient Greek coinage, and it ruined him. Or it at least opened his eyes to the world of possibilities. Those coins were struck in deep relief, with figures that stood up off the surface like small sculptures. Then he looked at the change in his own pocket, which was flat, cautious, and engraved rather than sculpted.

The obstacle was not artistic. It was more institutional and procedural. Coin designs were the territory of the Mint's own engraving department, run by Chief Engraver Charles Barber, who had designed the dime, quarter and half dollar then in circulation and did not consider them hideous in the slightest. Bringing in an outsider would prove to be a fight. Roosevelt went looking for one anyway, and Shaw found him the money to do it out of the Mint's own funds rather than a Congressional appropriation.

02 / The AccompliceThe best sculptor in America wanted nothing to do with the Mint

Augustus Saint-Gaudens was the obvious choice and the difficult one. He had already made the Shaw Memorial in Boston and the Sherman Monument at the corner of Central Park, and he had designed Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural medal. He was, by common agreement, the finest sculptor in the country.

He had tangled with Barber over a medal for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and he loathed the US Mint. Roosevelt's pitch was essentially that he would handle Barber personally, which is the sort of promise a president can actually keep.

Saint-Gaudens agreed in early 1905 and submitted sketches by that November, becoming the first artist from outside the US Mint to design United States circulating coinage. Nobody knew at the time but Saint-Gaudens had been diagnosed with cancer and was working against a clock that only he knew.

03 / The Fight With PhysicsNine blows from a 172 ton press, for one coin

The design he produced for the twenty dollar gold piece was Liberty striding forward out of the sunrise with a torch in one hand and an olive branch in the other, adapted from the Victory figure on his own Sherman Monument. On the reverse, an eagle in flight over the sun's rays. Both were modeled in the round, like sculpture, because that was the entire point.

Then it went to the US Mint, where it met a press. A BIG press.

Saint-Gaudens' assistant Henry Hering was there in February 1907 for the first trial. A gold planchet went into the die, the hydraulic press came down at something like 172 tons, and the coin came out showing about half the detail. So they struck it again. And again. On the ninth blow, the design finally stood up the way the artist had modeled it.

Those Ultra High Relief pieces are magnificent and roughly two dozen exist today. They were also impractical as money, because a mint is a factory and the country needed these produced by the thousands and millions.

The most beautiful coin America ever made was, from the Mint's point of view, a manufacturing failure. Both of those things are true at once.

So the relief came down a step, and the Mint tried again. This version, the famous MCMVII High Relief, still needed multiple strikes on a press with the coin annealed each time, and it ran roughly twelve minutes per coin. Philadelphia worked overtime on several presses at once and produced 12,367 of them by year end, which was enough to satisfy the president and nowhere near enough to run an economy on.

Barber lowered the relief to something a single strike could handle, and the Roman numerals gave way to ordinary Arabic ones because the public found MCMVII baffling. Practicality won, as it always does. The design that went into mass production is a flattened compromise, and it is still the best-looking coin in American history.

04 / What It CostThe artist never saw one

Saint-Gaudens died on August 3, 1907, before a single coin bearing his design entered circulation. Hering finished the work.

There was one more fight left. The coin went out with no IN GOD WE TRUST on it, which was legal, since the 1890 statute listing required inscriptions did not include the motto for this denomination. Roosevelt considered putting the phrase on money to be closer to irreverence than piety. The public and Congress disagreed loudly, and in 1908 the motto was legislated back onto the coin. Collectors have been sorting these into No Motto and With Motto ever since.

The stars around Liberty went from 46 to 48 in 1912, when New Mexico and Arizona joined. Beyond that, the design ran untouched for a quarter century.

05 / The Ending1933, and the most expensive coin on earth

The last year of production was 1933. That spring a different Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard, and the double eagles struck that year were never legally released. They were ordered melted, apart from two sent to the Smithsonian.

A handful escaped anyway. One of them, after a run through King Farouk of Egypt, a Secret Service sting, and a federal lawsuit, became the only 1933 double eagle that can be legally owned. It sold in 2002 for 7.6 million dollars and again in June 2021 for 18.9 million dollars, which made it the most valuable coin ever sold at auction.

A twenty dollar coin. Roughly one ounce of gold. Eighteen point nine million dollars, almost none of which has anything to do with the melt value.

06 / Why This Is Not Just HistoryYou can hold the design tonight

Here is the part that surprises people. Roosevelt's pet crime did not end in 1933.

When the US Mint launched the American Gold Eagle in 1986 and needed an obverse, it did not commission a new one. It reached back seventy nine years and put Saint-Gaudens' striding Liberty on the front of the coin, where she has been ever since. Every Gold Eagle sold in the last four decades carries a design a talented sculptor made for a president who thought the money was ugly.

And in 2009, the US Mint finally did the thing it could not do in 1907. Modern presses struck an Ultra High Relief double eagle at full depth, on a thick 27 millimeter planchet of one ounce .9999 gold, dated MMIX in Roman numerals, exactly as Saint-Gaudens intended. It took a century and better machinery, but the coin he actually designed eventually got made.

The original circulation coins are still out there too, and they are not museum pieces. A common date Saint-Gaudens double eagle is a real thing you can buy from a real dealer.

• Gross weight: 33.431 grams, 90 percent gold and 10 percent copper
• Gold content: 0.9675 troy ounces
• Diameter: 34.1 mm, noticeably wider than a modern one ounce Eagle
• Edge: lettered E PLURIBUS UNUM, not reeded
• Face value: 20 dollars, which bought a very good suit in 1907

Roosevelt got his Greek coin. It took a two year fight with his own Mint, it became the last thing Saint-Gaudens ever created, and the version that reached the public was a compromise of the compromise.

It still outlived the president, the artist, the gold standard, and the denomination itself. Not a bad return on a note written the week after Christmas.

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