Brother, Would You
Take a Dollar Coin … Please? By
Tom Zeller Jr.
Tags: collecting, culture, News, numismatics,
u.s. mint
New dollar coins are coming. Are you
excited? (Photo: A.P.)
Maybe three is a charm.
On Thursday, the dollar coin will see its third
iteration in a generation go into circulation.
These will feature United States presidents —
four
issued per year, from now through 2016, from Washington
to Nixon (yes, Nixon).
Now, as The
Associated Press reports this morning, despite
the fact that eliminating the paper dollar in favor
of a much more durable dollar coin would save hundreds
of millions of dollars each year in printing costs,
there is no plan to scrap the bill.
That comes from years of accumulated wisdom on the
part of legislators and treasury officials.
Readers of a certain age will remember when Susan
B. Anthony first hit town — the coin, that is,
not the 19th-century feminist. That was 1979 —
and the hope was that the smaller dollar coin would
gain popularity where its immediate predecessor, the
Eisenhower dollar, which was minted between 1971 and
1978, had failed to gain traction.
It wasn’t to be. Despite the fact that the Susan
B. Anthony was minted for three consecutive years
(and again in 1999), the coin was, for the most part,
regarded as a sad aberration among consumers.
Just a month after the coin’s introduction,
the magazine Forbes was already hinting at trouble.
From the Aug. 6, 1979, issue:
The public’s
vote won’t be in for a while but banks and
retailers are showing reservations, presumably because
the coin’s size — slightly larger than
a quarter — could lead to expensive confusion
in handling. One department store cashier in Washington,
D.C., where the Susan B. was first circulated, says
flatly: “I reject it on the grounds that it
is not paper and it’s got an old woman on
it.”
Despite the writing on the wall, in
September of that year, a Treasury Department task force
floated the idea of letting the Susan B. Anthony coin
and the ill-fated $2 bill replace the $1 bill. Wrote
The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 1979:
If the Fed appears to be bucking
the buck issue, Congress isn’t. Reps. Frank
Annunzio (D-Ill.) and Thomas B. Evans Jr. (R-Del.)
said they will introduce legislation to prohibit regulators
from dumping the paper dollar without congressional
approval. And Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) has introduced
a bill to stop minting and distribution of the Anthony
dollar, which he termed “just short of a national
disgrace.”
It has also been called the “Carter
quarter” by detractors objecting to its similarity
to the 25-cent piece and the feeling that a dollar
today won’t buy much more than a quarter did
a few years ago.
The irony of replacing the $1 bill
with a pair of losers, the Anthony coin and the $2
bill, was not lost on Lewis, who said, “The
administration has done some things that have left
many other citizens and me amazed, perplexed and befuddled.
But surely, even they must have heard the old adage:
‘Two wrongs don’t make a right.’”
The
Shoshone Indian guide Sacagawea debuted on a new
dollar coin in 2000. The coins are rarely seen beyond
vending machines and casinos, although they enjoy wide
circulation in Ecuador, which adopted the dollar as
its currency six years ago. Indeed, according to PBS’s
Frontline, roughly half of the 1 billion Sacagawea dollar
coins in circulation have been shipped to the South
American country. (They’ve also been a
target of South American counterfeiters, it seems.)
In any case, purveyors of the new presidential
coins — the result of the Presidential $1 Coin
Act of 2005, which is aimed at improving the circulation
of the dollar coin — are hoping to emulate the
success of another recent coin program. Keeping a bit
more under-the-radar, they reason, is key.
Rather than a high-profile ad campaign
like the one used to introduce the Sacagawea dollar,
the Mint is trying a more grass-roots approach. The
agency is talking to the Federal Reserve, banks and
vending machine operators to stir up interest in the
new dollar coin.
Supporters of the new presidential
dollar coin point to the success of the 50-state quarter
program. Begun in 1999, this program has introduced
millions of people to coin collecting for the first
time.
An Associated
Press-Ipsos poll found that about 75 percent of
those surveyed opposed any elimination of the dollar
bill, while consumers seem to be split 50-50 on the
idea of having both dollar coins and dollar bills co-circulating.