John R. Sinnock: the engraver behind the dime in your pocket

In 1946, the United States put a freshly designed dime into circulation — and a rumor spread that a Soviet agent had signed it.

The dime honored Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had died the year before. Down near the cutoff of his neck sat two small letters: JS. They were the initials of the man who designed the coin — John Ray Sinnock, the Mint's chief engraver. But the Cold War was just beginning. Americans were looking for communists everywhere. And so a story took hold that the "JS" was a hidden signature from Joseph Stalin, smuggled onto American money by a spy inside the U.S. Mint.

It was nonsense. The rumor was so persistent the Mint had to keep swatting it down into the 1950s. But it tells you something about the strange position Sinnock occupied: a quiet government craftsman whose work landed in every pocket in America, at the exact moment the country was at its most paranoid.

Sinnock was born on July 8, 1888, in Raton, New Mexico — a railroad town in the high desert. He trained at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, won the A.W. Mifflin Award for study abroad, and spent about a decade teaching art before he turned to metal full time. In 1917 he joined the Philadelphia Mint as an assistant engraver and medalist. Eight years later, in 1925, he became its eighth Chief Engraver — the person responsible for turning a sculptor's clay model into the hardened steel dies (the stamps that press a design into a coin blank) that strike millions of coins.

A Mint engraver's job is mostly invisible. The good ones make a portrait look effortless on a surface the size of a fingernail, in relief so shallow it can still survive a billion trips through a cash register. Sinnock spent twenty-two years at it. Most of that work — the dies, the medals, the endless technical fixes — left no signature at all.

The work that did carry his name attracted argument.

His first big commemorative came in 1926, for the 150th anniversary of American independence: a half dollar and a gold quarter eagle, both struck in extremely shallow relief — so shallow the design can be hard to read, which made high-grade survivors genuinely scarce. For decades Sinnock got full credit. Then, forty years later, the numismatic writer Don Taxay uncovered that the half dollar had been worked up from a sketch by the artist John Frederick Lewis — adapted by Sinnock without crediting Lewis.

The bigger fight was over the dime. After it appeared, the sculptor Selma Burke — an African American artist who had modeled a bronze relief of Roosevelt unveiled in Washington in 1945 — said Sinnock's portrait looked unmistakably like her own. Some agreed, including one of Roosevelt's sons. Sinnock denied it flatly. He said his portrait was "a composite of two studies that he made from life in 1933 and 1934," backed by photographs and the advice of two relief sculptors. The Mint never credited Burke; the Smithsonian American Art Museum later did. The truth is genuinely disputed — and a century on, it's still argued over.

His last great design, the Franklin half dollar, he never got to finish. Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross, a devoted Franklin admirer, had set him to it in 1947. He died that May, before the reverse was done; his successor, Gilroy Roberts, completed it. When it launched in 1948, the Commission of Fine Arts grumbled that the little eagle on the back — added only because federal law required an eagle on coins above a dime — was "insignificant," and fretted that showing the crack in the Liberty Bell invited cheap jokes. The Treasury overruled them. The coin ran until 1963.