The Roosevelt Dime: The Coin That Quietly Lost Its Silver

By the early 1960s the United States had a quiet panic on its hands. Silver was getting expensive — expensive enough that the metal in a dime was creeping toward the value of the dime itself. When that happens, ordinary people stop spending their coins and start hoarding them. Coins vanish from circulation, and a country can't run on money that won't move.

So Congress acted. The Coinage Act of 1965, signed into law on July 23, 1965, pulled silver out of the dime and the quarter entirely. The Roosevelt dime — already America's workhorse ten-cent piece since 1946 — became the test case. From 1965 on, the silver dime was gone, replaced by a "clad" coin: a copper core wrapped in a copper-nickel skin that looks like silver but costs almost nothing.

This is the coin in your pocket today. The face stayed exactly the same — Franklin Roosevelt still gazes left, the torch still burns on the back — but the body underneath was swapped out. Collectors draw the line right here, calling everything from 1965 onward the clad Roosevelt dime, a distinct type from the silver dimes of 1946–1964 that share its design.

The Mint was nervous that people would hoard the new coins too, just to have a keepsake of the change. So for three years — 1965, 1966, and 1967 — it stripped the mint marks off entirely, hoping featureless coins would seem less collectible. (A mint mark is the little letter — D for Denver, S for San Francisco — that says which factory struck the coin.) The marks came back in 1968, and the collecting world has been hunting them ever since.

The dime first appeared on January 30, 1946 — what would have been Franklin Roosevelt's 64th birthday, less than a year after his death. The timing was deliberate and personal. Roosevelt had lived with paralysis from polio since 1921, and he had helped launch the March of Dimes, the campaign that asked Americans to mail in spare dimes to fund the fight against the disease. Putting his face on the dime was a nation saying thank you in its own small currency.

The official designer was John Ray Sinnock, the Mint's Chief Engraver. The obverse — the heads side — carries Roosevelt's left-facing portrait, with LIBERTY arcing overhead and IN GOD WE TRUST below his chin. The reverse — the tails side — holds a torch for liberty, flanked by an olive branch for peace and an oak branch for strength. Sinnock signed his work with a small JS by the neck.

Those two letters started a strange rumor. In the Cold War chill of 1946, some Americans decided JS stood for Joseph Stalin — proof, they whispered, of communist infiltration at the Mint. The Mint had to issue press releases to kill the story. The initials were simply John Sinnock's.

There is a second, more serious question that has never fully closed. The sculptor Selma Burke, a Black artist, carved a bronze relief of Roosevelt in 1944, unveiled in Washington in 1945. She insisted to her death that Sinnock's dime profile was lifted from her work — "I'm so mad at that man," she said in a 1994 interview. The Mint maintains Sinnock drew on his own earlier Roosevelt medal, begun in 1936. The Smithsonian American Art Museum splits the difference, crediting Burke's sculpture as having "inspired" the dime. The honest verdict is that it remains disputed: a great story, genuinely unresolved, and worth knowing on both sides.

For a coin most people ignore, the clad Roosevelt dime hides some of the most valuable mistakes in American money. Nearly all of them come down to a missing letter.

The crown jewel is the 1975 No-S proof dime. Proof coins are specially polished collector strikes, made at San Francisco and meant to carry an S mint mark. On a tiny number of 1975 proofs, a worker forgot to punch the S into the die. Only two are known to exist. One sold for $506,250 in October 2024 — for a dime. It is one of the great modern rarities, and it is so famous that ordinary 1975 dimes from your change jar get checked hopefully and disappointed daily: a normal 1975 business-strike dime is worth ten cents.

The same blunder created lesser legends — No-S proof dimes of 1968, 1970, and 1983, each scarce and valuable, though none touch the 1975. Then there is the 1982 No-P dime, a circulation coin from Philadelphia that went out without its mint mark when a single die was missed. Unlike the proof rarities, this one slipped into pockets, so a sharp eye can still find one — strong-strike examples run from roughly $50 upward into the hundreds in top grades.

The other prize is not an error at all. In 1996, to mark the dime's 50th anniversary, the Mint struck a special dime at West Point — the first U.S. dime ever to carry the W mint mark. The 1996-W was given away only inside that year's Uncirculated Mint Sets, never released into circulation, and its mintage makes it the lowest-mintage business-strike dime of the entire Roosevelt series.

Why are high grades scarce for such a common coin? Because almost nobody saved them well. Billions of clad dimes were made to be spent — bag-handled, jostled, scratched before they ever cooled. A pristine, fully struck example with sharp torch lines (collectors prize the "Full Torch" or "Full Bands" detail) survived against the odds, and that scarcity-at-the-top is exactly what turns a ten-cent coin into a collectible.