The Great War & the Roaring Twenties

In April 1917, after three years of staying out, the United States entered the First World War. Two million American soldiers crossed the Atlantic. When the guns finally stopped on November 11, 1918, the country that came home was different — bigger, richer, and suddenly the most powerful economy on earth.

Europe had bled itself white. America had not. While the old powers rebuilt from rubble, the U.S. economy roared. Between 1922 and 1929, real output grew by roughly 40 percent. By the end of the decade, American factories were turning out close to 5 million cars a year, and radios — barely a curiosity in 1922 — were selling by the hundreds of thousands.

This was the Roaring Twenties: jazz, skyscrapers, the assembly line, and a brand-new idea called buying on credit. By the mid-1920s most Americans bought their furniture, phonographs, and washing machines on installment plans. It felt like the future had arrived early.

The boom was real, but it was uneven. In the late 1920s the richest 1 percent of Americans took home nearly a quarter of all income, while most families earned less than $2,000 a year — what economists then called barely enough for the basics. The confidence was genuine. So was the fragility underneath it. In October 1929, the stock market would find that out.

The war reached straight into America's coin drawers. In 1918, Congress passed the Pittman Act — a wartime law that let the Treasury melt silver dollars and sell the metal to Britain, which desperately needed silver to back its banknotes in India. The melt was enormous: more than 270 million silver dollars went into the furnace, most of them Morgan dollars, nearly half of every Morgan ever struck.

But the Act came with a catch. For every dollar melted, the Treasury had to strike a new one later. That obligation is why the silver dollar suddenly came roaring back in 1921 — and why the moment was perfect to retire the old Morgan design and put up something new.

Numismatists (coin people) had been lobbying for a coin to mark the end of the war. They got their wish. The Commission of Fine Arts ran an invitation-only design competition, and a 34-year-old Italian immigrant sculptor, Anthony de Francisci, won the $1,500 prize. His model for Liberty was his own wife, Teresa. The result was the Peace Dollar — the first regular U.S. coin to carry the word PEACE.

It nearly launched as a scandal. De Francisci's reverse — the back, or "tails" side — first showed an eagle clutching a broken sword. Pre-release publicity drew an angry editorial in the New York Herald: in the old language of war, handing over a broken sword meant surrender, not peace. Letters poured in. Mint Chief Engraver George T. Morgan was sent to fix it, painstakingly removing the sword from the master hub (the steel master a coin's dies are made from) under magnification, just days before the first coins were struck. An olive branch took its place.

All of this happened against a quieter, deeper backdrop: this era sat at the end of the "Renaissance of American Coinage." Between 1907 and 1921, nearly every U.S. coin was redesigned by leading sculptors — the Buffalo nickel, the Mercury dime, the Standing Liberty quarter, the Walking Liberty half. The Peace Dollar was the last great coin of that wave. American money had never looked so much like art.

Pull a fistful of American change from 1925 and you are holding the whole story at once. Almost every coin in your palm is brand new — and almost every one is a small bronze, silver, or gold sculpture.

Start with the smallest. The Lincoln cent had landed in 1909, Victor David Brenner's Lincoln on the front and two wheat ears on the back — the first time a real person, not an allegory, appeared on a circulating U.S. coin. Next to it sits the Buffalo nickel, James Earle Fraser's Native American head and American bison, struck since 1913. Then a run of silver from a single burst of genius: Adolph A. Weinman designed both the Mercury dime (1916) and the Walking Liberty half dollar (1916), and Hermon A. MacNeil the Standing Liberty quarter (1916) — Liberty with a shield and an olive branch, ready to defend, hoping for peace. (The quarter and half here ride out the rest of the Renaissance era; in 1917–1929 they were simply the silver in your pocket.) That trio had replaced the long-serving Barber dime, quarter, and half of Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber, who died in February 1917, right as this era opened.

The gold told the same story one denomination up. President Theodore Roosevelt had launched the redesign wave by handing the work to sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose double eagle ($20) and Indian Head eagle ($10) — struck from 1907 until the gold itself was recalled in 1933 — are still called the most beautiful coins America ever made. Beneath them came the strangest experiment in the drawer: Bela Lyon Pratt's Indian Head quarter eagle ($2.50) and half eagle ($5), struck through 1929, with the design carved into the surface rather than raised above it — the only U.S. coins ever made that way, so the design sat below the rim and resisted wear.

Then comes the dollar, and with it the hinge of the whole era. The Morgan dollar — George T. Morgan's design of 1878 — had been retired in 1904, but the Pittman Act's replacement quota dragged it back for one more year in 1921. The very same year, the Peace dollar took its place. So 1921 is the rare year two different silver dollars were born and buried: the old century's coin and the new one, struck side by side. Morgan, by then the Mint's Chief Engraver, signed off on both.

And around all of it swirled the commemoratives — special half dollars (and a handful of gold pieces) marking anniversaries and causes. The 1920s were their golden age and their undoing, and the full sweep is striking once you lay it out. The wave had a famous prologue: the 1915 Panama-Pacific set for San Francisco's world's fair — a half dollar and quarter eagle by Barber, a gold dollar by Charles Keck, and Robert Ingersoll Aitken's monumental $50 gold pieces, struck in both round and octagonal forms, the largest U.S. coins ever issued. The McKinley Birthplace gold dollar (1916–1917), by Barber and Morgan, followed.

Then the decade itself: the Illinois Centennial half of 1918 (Morgan and his assistant John R. Sinnock); the Maine (1920) and Pilgrim (1920–1921) halves, the latter by Cyrus E. Dallin; and in 1921 a small flood — the Alabama, the Missouri (by Aitken, with its notorious "2★4" variety), and Anthony de Francisci's own Maine sculpting from local sketches. Laura Gardin Fraser — the first woman to design a U.S. coin — was everywhere: the 1922 Grant Memorial half and gold dollar (each with a tiny extra star to manufacture a "rarity"), and the 1925 Fort Vancouver half. Chester Beach designed the 1923 Monroe Doctrine, the 1925 Lexington-Concord, and the 1928 Hawaiian halves; George T. Morgan the 1924 Huguenot-Walloon; Jo Mora the 1925 California Diamond Jubilee; Charles Keck the 1927 Vermont; and Gutzon Borglum — later of Mount Rushmore — the 1925 Stone Mountain half. The 1926 Sesquicentennial half and quarter eagle (Sinnock, from John Frederick Lewis's sketches) and the Oregon Trail Memorial half — Laura Gardin Fraser with her husband James Earle Fraser, the most beautiful of them all — closed the decade out. The same denominations you spent on bread were also being struck as miniature monuments. That is the thread of this era: a confident, modern country that had just won a war and gotten rich, putting peace, pride, and ambition into metal, all at once.

This era hands collectors two very different stories, and both are irresistible.

The first is the Peace Dollar — a coin that wears its history on its face. The 1921 issue is the prize. It was struck in high relief (the design standing tall off the surface, like a low sculpture), which looked magnificent but wore out the dies fast. So in early 1922 the Mint flattened the relief, making 1921 a near one-year design and the one date every Peace Dollar collector wants. Owning a 1921 means owning the first, boldest version of the war's most hopeful coin.

The second story is messier, and that's the fun of it. The 1920s were the golden age — and the breaking point — of American commemoratives (special-issue coins marking an anniversary or cause). The era produced beautiful ones: the Pilgrim Tercentenary, the Lexington-Concord, the Oregon Trail. But it also produced a racket. Congress handed distribution to private committees who set prices and gamed supply. Promoters invented "rarities" by splitting tiny mintages across mints and adding pointless varieties — an extra star on the Grant half and gold dollar, a "2X2" on the Alabama, a "2★4" on the Missouri — so a collector who thought they were "complete" suddenly wasn't. The Stone Mountain half of 1925 was openly a fundraiser for a Confederate monument; of the 2.3 million-plus struck, around a million went unsold and were melted. The 1928 Hawaiian half went the other way — a tiny issue that became the scarcest and most coveted of all the classic commemoratives.

The cynicism eventually poisoned the well. The abuses of the 1920s and 1930s so disgusted Congress that the whole commemorative program was shut down in 1954 and stayed dead for nearly thirty years. For a collector, that makes these coins doubly fascinating: they're gorgeous and they're artifacts of a hobby learning, the hard way, how it could be exploited.