New "Liberty" Coin and "Trump Dollars"
These stories are from the E-Sylum weekly email of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society.
LIBERTY PORTRAIT RECOMMENDATION DRAWS CRITICISM
(Excerpted from Coin World article by editor Bill Gibbs)
The recent decision by members of both the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the Commission of Fine Arts to recommend a portrait of an African American woman as the Liberty figure for the 2017 American Liberty silver medal and gold coin has been polarizing, to put it mildly. A lot of collectors are not at all supportive; many of them loathe the idea — and they have not been shy in their comments at Coin World’s Facebook page and in their email to me.
(E-Sylum summary here:
http://www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esy...
(Personally, I like the girl. The stars are a bit much. It reminded me of Howard Roark's comment on Peter Keating's first professional home, so classical that it had Eagles of Empire at the entrances. "Get those ducks off the door.")
LIBERTY DOLLAR CREATOR VON NOTHAUS ISSUES "TRUMP DOLLARS"
Our old friend Bernard von NotHaus of "Liberty Dollar" fame is at it again. An April 1, 2016 CoinWeek article by Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez discusses the new "Trump Dollar" coins. -Editor
"The pointed language matches the perturbed tone of the presidential candidate the coins honor; the copper, silver, and gold rounds invite coin collectors, metals investors, and Trump backers to express their disfavor of fiat money and political dogma by purchasing these bullion-based collector pieces, which are available in uncirculated and proof formats."
Summary article from E-Sylum here:
http://www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esy...
Original CoinWeek article here:
http://www.coinweek.com/coins/branded...
LIBERTY PORTRAIT RECOMMENDATION DRAWS CRITICISM
(Excerpted from Coin World article by editor Bill Gibbs)
The recent decision by members of both the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee and the Commission of Fine Arts to recommend a portrait of an African American woman as the Liberty figure for the 2017 American Liberty silver medal and gold coin has been polarizing, to put it mildly. A lot of collectors are not at all supportive; many of them loathe the idea — and they have not been shy in their comments at Coin World’s Facebook page and in their email to me.
(E-Sylum summary here:
http://www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esy...
(Personally, I like the girl. The stars are a bit much. It reminded me of Howard Roark's comment on Peter Keating's first professional home, so classical that it had Eagles of Empire at the entrances. "Get those ducks off the door.")
LIBERTY DOLLAR CREATOR VON NOTHAUS ISSUES "TRUMP DOLLARS"
Our old friend Bernard von NotHaus of "Liberty Dollar" fame is at it again. An April 1, 2016 CoinWeek article by Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez discusses the new "Trump Dollar" coins. -Editor
"The pointed language matches the perturbed tone of the presidential candidate the coins honor; the copper, silver, and gold rounds invite coin collectors, metals investors, and Trump backers to express their disfavor of fiat money and political dogma by purchasing these bullion-based collector pieces, which are available in uncirculated and proof formats."
Summary article from E-Sylum here:
http://www.coinbooks.org/club_nbs_esy...
Original CoinWeek article here:
http://www.coinweek.com/coins/branded...
Didn't Ron Paul have a gold coin.
We already have "disfavor of fiat money", it's called bitcoin.
Now, how about using a pic of that black woman who became a millionaire
-I think it was in the 1890s and was is you MM who gave us the story?
The Trump dollar coin- a sort of anti-political correctness best left to adolescents.
I look to Maggie L. Walker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie_..., nominally born a slave and the first woman (of any race) to charter a bank.
That said, we have always had "generic" Liberties on our coins, even when the portraits were based on real people. The Morgan Dollar and the Buffalo Nickel are examples of that. The story about Sarah Longacre on the Small Cent is likely a myth: it was just Athena from the "New Style" Tetradrachms with her helmet transformed into a Chippewa war bonnet. So, your complaint about "political correctness" is really irrelevant, unless you think that the US Mint was bowing to political pressure from the millions of Graeco-Americans in the Antebellum Era...
The Morgan Dollar was forced on the Treasury by silver mining interests in the US Senate. The coins were struck far in excess of need which is why fully one-third of them are uncirculated today.
The first 1804 dollars were "novodels" 'new-made' coins of dubious legality. They then were copied twice by workers at the Mint with friends outside.
The five 1912 Liberty Nickels were made at the Mint by an employee.
Today, you can find "rare" "error" coins for thousands of dollars that were made at the Mint and smuggled out in recent years, dollar coins on quarter planchets and that sort of thing.
For the 1876 Centennial, an enthusiastic collector named Montroville Dickson made copies of colonial and early Republic coins. They are highly prized today and confuse the markets for actual colonial and Confederation issues. New collectors see one for a fraction of the expected price and think that they are getting the real deal. When I worked the "Readers Ask" desk at Coin World I got calls from people who found a rare coin in their grandfather's desk…
Then, there was Dr. William Sheldon, an MD and PhD, whose godfather was William James. Sheldon invented the "ectomorph - mesomorph - endomorph" physical typology of personality. He also invented the 70-point scale common in US numismatics (Good is 4, … Very Fine is 20…) And he stole coins from the American Numismatic Society, substituting his lower-grade examples for their better coins. (Getting them back to the ANS took over a decade of court battles with people swearing under oath that they never entered the building, only to have the log show otherwise.) And to build his inventory of body types, he took "nude" pictures of college freshmen, perhaps only in their underwear, against a grid. Among those were Diane Sawyer, Warren Beatty, and Hillary Rodham.
April Fools? Like Christmas in July, it never ends…