Felix Schlag

Felix Oscar Schlag was not, on paper, the man you would pick to design an American coin. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on September 4, 1891. He fought in the German army in the First World War. He trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He didn't set foot in the United States until 1929 — nine years before the contest that would put his work in every American pocket.

What he had was a sculptor's eye and a hard immigrant's decade behind him. Numismatic accounts describe his early American years in the trade: work styling automobiles, then sculpture commissions after he settled near Chicago. By the late 1930s he was a working artist in the middle of the Depression, scraping together public-art jobs — exactly the kind of person a thousand-dollar prize and a national competition could change overnight.

In early 1938 the Treasury announced one. Thomas Jefferson's 200th birthday was coming in 1943, and the Mint wanted a new five-cent coin to mark it — Jefferson on the front, his home Monticello on the back. It was thrown open to the public. Around 390 artists entered. Schlag was one of them.

He won.

On April 21, 1938 — four days after the panel sat down with the entries — Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman to hold the job, and three sculptor-judges chose Schlag's design over all the rest. The prize was $1,000, real money in 1938. An immigrant nine years off the boat had just been handed the nation's nickel.

Here is the part collectors love, because winning the contest was not the end of it. The design Schlag submitted is not the design that became the coin.

For Jefferson's portrait — the obverse, the heads side — Schlag worked from a famous marble bust of Jefferson by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, the one in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. That part survived. It's the reverse — the tails side — where the trouble started.

Schlag's original Monticello was modern. He drew Jefferson's house at a three-quarter angle, seen from the corner, with a tree beside it and lettering in a clean, contemporary style. It had movement. Officials hated all three things. They wanted the building shown straight on, head-on and symmetrical, the lettering formal and traditional, and the tree gone.

So Schlag went back and redrew it to order. The oblique view became the flat, front-facing Monticello that millions of Americans would carry for the next sixty-plus years. The redesigned dies — a die is the hardened steel stamp that strikes the image into the blank metal — went into production in October 1938, and the coin reached circulation on November 15, 1938.

Not everyone thought the Mint improved it. The art historian Cornelius Vermeule, surveying American coinage, judged the revision a loss — he wrote that "official taste eliminated this interesting, even exciting, view, and substituted the mausoleum of Roman profile." It is one of the sharpest verdicts ever passed on a circulating U.S. coin, and it is aimed not at Schlag but at the committee that overruled him.

Then came the strangest part of the whole story. Schlag's initials never made it onto the coin. Every other working designer signed their work somewhere on the metal — a tiny monogram tucked into the design. Schlag's "FS" simply wasn't there, left off through some mix of misunderstanding and oversight in the 1938 scramble. It stayed missing for 28 years. Only in 1966 did the Mint finally add "FS" beneath Jefferson's bust — and strike two special proof coins for the elderly designer to keep. He had been the most-circulated anonymous artist in America for nearly three decades.