Benjamin Hawkins

Benjamin Hawkins enters the coin's story as a fixer. Early in 1936, a University of Wisconsin art student, David Goode Parsons, had submitted models for a half dollar marking the centennial of Wisconsin Territory. The Bureau of the Mint judged them "poorly executed and in very high relief" — too tall to strike cleanly — and rejected them. The problem landed with the Commission of Fine Arts, the federal panel that vetted public art, and the Commission turned to a sculptor it trusted to deliver fast.

His full name was Benjamin Franklin Hawkins, and he was born in St. Louis on June 17, 1896. That St. Louis root matters, because the numismatic record usually files him simply as a "New York sculptor" — a label that comes from later in his life. By 1947 his studio was in Ossining, New York, north of the city; the move east is what attached "New York" to his name. He was, by training and trade, a Midwesterner who built a career in architectural sculpture.

The coin was the smallest thing he ever made, and nearly the least of his work. Hawkins spent his career on stone and bronze for public buildings — the figures over courthouse doors and the reliefs above small-town post offices that defined American civic art between the wars. The Wisconsin half dollar was his single brush with the U.S. coinage, which is why his name is unfamiliar even to people who own the coin.

Hawkins learned sculpture from three serious teachers, and you can read all three in the Wisconsin coin. He studied under Victor Holm, a St. Louis sculptor of monuments and memorials; Leo Lentelli, the Italian-born architectural sculptor who taught at the Art Students League; and Lee Lawrie, the most celebrated architectural sculptor in America at the time — the man behind the bronze Atlas at Rockefeller Center. That lineage is pure Beaux-Arts architectural sculpture: art made to sit on a building, legible from the street, every figure pulling its weight. It's exactly the discipline a coin demands, where a design has to read clearly at the size of a thumbnail.

The Commission gave Hawkins almost no room. Its chairman, Charles Moore, wrote to him on May 14, 1936, enclosing a copy of the Wisconsin territorial seal and asking for finished work in about three weeks. Hawkins delivered models to the Mint on June 3. The Commission approved them two days later. Cold start to approved coin in under a month.

Here is the part collectors find telling: Hawkins didn't fix Parsons' design — he replaced it. The numismatic historian Don Taxay noted that Hawkins worked not from the student's drawings but from the territorial seal itself, and that his badger was "completely different" from Parsons'. Taxay read the joint credit as a familiar move — a commission wanting to keep a local artist's name on local work. The coin that reached the public was largely Hawkins' invention. (The badger, for the record, is Wisconsin's state animal and the source of its "Badger State" nickname — a holdover from the lead miners of the 1820s who burrowed shelters into hillsides.)

What he built is a quietly dense little design. The obverse — the heads side — is a miner's forearm gripping a pickaxe over a heap of lead ore, a nod to the lead mining that first drew settlers to Wisconsin, ringed by the date July 4, 1836. The reverse — the tails side — sets the state badger on a log, with three arrows behind it for the conflict of the Black Hawk War and an olive branch for the peace that followed. Look below the badger and you'll find Hawkins' own mark: the initial H, the engraver's signature on the work that was, in truth, mostly his.

The coin is the footnote; the buildings are the body of his career. According to the standard reference on U.S. commemoratives, Hawkins' architectural and outdoor sculpture was on view at U.S. post offices, the University of Michigan, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Federal Building in St. Louis, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, and the Milwaukee War Memorial. The works documented in detail are stone and bronze for public spaces in the 1930s and early '40s:

• World War I Memorial Flagpole, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1932) — a flagpole crowned by a bronze eagle, with stylized figures cast in relief around its octagonal base, cast at the Kunst Foundry. His name is inscribed on it: "BENJAMIN HAWKINS SCULPTOR." This Wisconsin tie sits right beside the Wisconsin coin, four years apart.
• Justice figures at the U.S. Court and Custom House, St. Louis, Missouri — carved stone framing the main entrance on Market Street, installed in 1939.
• "Cape Cod Fishermen", a relief for the Hyannis, Massachusetts post office (1939), made through the Treasury's Section of Fine Arts — the program that put art in everyday federal buildings.
• "Early Traders", a bas-relief for the Penns Grove, New Jersey post office (1942), another Treasury Section commission.

That résumé is the real measure of him: a working public sculptor who could be handed a stone façade or a three-inch coin model and turn it around on a deadline.