In 1916, when her 25-year term was up, the coin designers of the Wilson administration produced a new design, again a profile bust wearing the Liberty cap.
But this cap had wings—wings like those of Hermes or Roman Mercury, the icon of the new electricity. And “Liberty” was on the coin rather than on the cap. Within a few years this Liberty was universally transgendered to Mercury, and everyone still calls this coin the Mercury dime. When he/she was replaced in 1946 with a profile bust of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, just deceased, looking at the word “Liberty,” it seems to have occurred to no one but Roosevelt-haters that something might be amiss.
wThe first U.S. half-dollar (1794) had featured a flowing-hair Liberty. In 1796, her bust was draped, and from 1807 to 1839 her hair was bound. From 1839 to 1891 Liberty was robed and seated. Charles Barber designed the new bust with a wreathed Liberty cap that ran from 1892 to 1916; but it was Adolph Weinman who designed the stunning replacement, Liberty in profile, striding toward the sunrise, robed and wearing a Liberty cap that had no wings.
Perhaps that widely admired 1916 design is one reason why, when the Mint replaced her with another dead white male CEO, it was Benjamin Franklin, a man who had never been President of the United States. Franklin’s highest executive offices had been membership in various executive Committees of the old Continental Congress, and President of the executive council of Pennsylvania. Franklin may not be as venerable as Liberty, but in the U.S. he can represent republican government almost as well.
Franklin, the most democratic of the Founders, remains beloved; but after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, officials felt obliged to put him on a circulating coin, and in 1964 Kennedy replaced Franklin on the fifty-cent piece.
In 1964, there was only one circulating coin of the United States that did not have a dead President on it—the dollar. Struck in silver since 1795 and also in gold between 1849 and 1889, with Liberty always on the obverse, her aspect also grew more modest and less radical over time; but draped, bound, and diademed, Liberty persisted.
On the so-called “Peace” dollar she looked more youthful, freer of the usual restraints. But when the Peace replaced the “Morgan” dollar in 1921, Liberty’s Phrygian bonnet was minimized, and the name “Liberty” was relegated to the rim of the coin as it had been on the first cent, rather than written on the ever more constraining headdress of the goddess of republics. It was hard to know she was Liberty.
Then in 1971, President Nixon, in the third year of his first term, replaced her with President Eisenhower, recently deceased, with whom Nixon had served as Vice-President. Sometimes called the Bicentennial dollar, its issue dates of 1971-1978 overlapped the 1976 bicentennial of the American revolution, making 1976 a year when every single circulating coin of the United States had the name “Liberty” on it, but not the goddess herself. “Liberty” had become a motto, like “In God We Trust,” or possibly the invocation of a ghost. Instead of Liberty, the obverse of every U.S. coin featured a dead, white, male President.
There followed, in 1978, the effort to issue a new dollar, a smaller one with no silver so as to reflect inflation and the demands of vending-machine makers. Feminists organized and pulled for suffragist Susan B. Anthony, later for the Indian (Lemhi Shoshone) guide Sacajawea. Dollars were struck for both these notable women; but inflation had severely limited the uses for a dollar coin, and it was rarely seen or used. Dollars struck after 2006 with portraits of past Presidents on the obverse and the Statue of Liberty on the reverse have not improved the situation. Liberty does still appear on some Mint-issued legal tender coins, but they are gold collector’s items; the general public does not see or use them. This one has even run into criticism by representing Liberty as Afro-American.
A more serious issue is that now no coin users and very few coin fanciers seem to understand that Liberty cannot be represented by any chief executive, male or female. Liberty, an iconographic descendant of Athena and Roma, was—is—a woman fully as remarkable as Susan B. Anthony, having the added advantages of having a longer history and of being perhaps the most compelling of all republican symbols, or, as we now call them, “memes.”
Chief executives, especially live ones, are memes of monarchy. Except in England, Sweden, and some other tamed and trammeled monarchies, they can also be memes of elective dictatorship, lawless despotism, unapologetic tyranny, and legislatures that are impotent or nonexistent. Switzerland has no chief executive in its history besides Napoleon, and puts the mythical William Tell on its coins. In France, Liberty was called up by a new République to replace Louis XVI on its coins in 1792, and a resurgent République to replace Louis-Philippe I in 1848, Napoleon III in 1870, and Marshal Pétain in 1945. In Italy, Liberty replaced Mussolini’s king, Victor Emmanuel III in 1946, after the Fascists lost the war. In Spain, the dead Generalissimo Francisco Franco no longer dictates and is no longer on Spain’s coins.
After losing World War One, Germany, though fearful of rule by many and still calling itself a “Reich” (royal dominion or realm, in English) deposed Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918 and became a republic. This “Weimar Republic” risked only the least radical republican memes on its coins, like sheaves of wheat, eagles, Goethe and Martin Luther. After fifteen years of those, they got President Hindenburg and after he died Führer Hitler, each of them still living when they went on Germany’s coins.
The United States of America, founded as a constitutional republic and becoming, since that founding, an increasingly democratic republic, has much to do to understand the complexity of its constitutional system. It needs explanations as repetitive and simple as television commercials, and it needs its memes to be both constantly visible and regularly explained. John Adams defined a republic as a state ruled by law and not persons, and whose law is made by more than one person at a time. He would not have been pleased to see his face is now on a Presidential Dollar (though perhaps his wife Abigail would have liked being on the “First Spouse” gold piece, minted in 2009).
Today’s Republicans, who no longer have any idea what a republic is, have put Donald Trump on four annual (unofficial) medals and would probably put Donald Trump on a legal tender Presidential Dollar without even waiting until he’s dead.
William R. Everdell
9 Garden Place
Brooklyn, NY 11201-4501
wreverdell@gmail.com