Abraham Wolfe Davidson

Abraham Wolfe Davidson was born in 1903 in Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement — the region (now in Belarus) where Jews were legally confined under the Tsars. He grew up amid rising persecution and the chaos of war, revolution, and famine. In 1922, a brother smuggled Davidson and his mother out of the country to join family already settled in Greenville, South Carolina.

He arrived with a talent already taking shape. He had studied at the Vitebsk art school as a teenager, and in the mid-1920s he studied sculpture in New York — by most accounts at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, the city's leading academy for architectural sculptors. He nearly didn't survive the decade: he fell seriously ill from the delayed effects of the famine he'd lived through back home.

What he wanted was a Southern education and a life as an artist. In 1934 he struck an unusual bargain with Clemson College in upstate South Carolina: he would sculpt a statue of the school's founder, Thomas Green Clemson, in exchange for room, board, and tuition. He enrolled as a special student, finished the statue in 1936 — it still stands in front of Tillman Hall — and in doing so made himself, in the words of one account, "Columbia's and Clemson's talented, adopted son." That standing is exactly what would save his coin.

Davidson was a sculptor, painter, and teacher far more than a coin man. He spent the heart of his career — roughly two decades from 1948 — running the art department at Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, and kept growing as an artist even late in life: in 1953 he studied at Black Mountain College in North Carolina under the ceramicist Peter Voulkos. His busts and statues live mostly in collections across South Carolina and Georgia. The Columbia half dollar is the only US coin he ever designed.

He got the job in 1936 because he was local and admired. South Carolina was marking 150 years since Columbia became the state capital, and the Sesquicentennial Commission picked the 32-year-old sculptor down the road at Clemson. Then came the gauntlet every commemorative had to run: the federal Commission of Fine Arts — the board that signed off on US coin designs — reviewed his plaster models and rejected them. They called the work "unsatisfactory" and said it "lacked artistic merit," and recommended replacing him with a more experienced medallist.

The committee refused to drop their man. The compromise that followed is the heart of his coin's story. Davidson reworked his models under the eye of Lee Lawrie — a sculptor-member of the Fine Arts Commission, and one of the most accomplished architectural sculptors in America. Under Lawrie's guidance the figure of Justice was made less "slumpy" and the palmetto leaves idealized. The revised models were approved on July 22, 1936. The design that reached pockets was his — pushed across the line by a master's hand.

The obverse — the heads side — shows Lady Justice with sword and scales, framed by Columbia's old and new state houses. The reverse — the tails side — carries a palmetto tree ringed by thirteen stars, with bound arrows at its base and a broken oak branch below, a nod to the British naval defeat at Fort Moultrie in 1776. One detail tells you everything about how the project went: Davidson's initials never appear on the coin.