The Coin That Put a Living President on America's Money

In 1926, Philadelphia threw a party for the country's 150th birthday. The Sesquicentennial International Exposition — "sesquicentennial" simply means a 150th anniversary — sprawled across South Philadelphia to mark a century and a half since the Declaration of Independence was signed a few miles away. Like most expositions of the age, it needed money, and Congress had a familiar tool to raise it.

By an act of March 3, 1925, Congress authorized two commemorative coins to help fund the fair: up to one million silver half dollars and 200,000 gold quarter eagles ($2.50 pieces). The organizers could buy them from the Mint at face value and resell them at a premium — the half dollar went out at $1, double its spending power. The profit was meant to flow back to the exposition.

It did not go as planned. The fair drew millions of visitors but ran a deep deficit, and the coins sold badly. Of the roughly one million half dollars struck at the Philadelphia Mint in May and June 1926, the great majority came back unsold. The Mint melted 859,408 of them. What survived — about 141,120 coins — is the entire population that exists today.

The obverse — the heads side — carries two presidents facing right, one behind the other in what numismatists call a jugate (overlapping) portrait: George Washington, the first president, and Calvin Coolidge, the president in 1926. That made it the first United States coin to depict a living person, and it remains famous as the only U.S. coin to show a president during his own lifetime. (Living people were later kept off circulating coinage by long-standing Mint custom; the Sesquicentennial sits as the standout exception.)

The reverse — the tails side — shows the Liberty Bell, complete with its famous crack and the foundry name "Pass and Stow" cast into the metal, a nod to the Philadelphia firm that recast the bell in 1753.

The credit line is a small mystery. The dies were engraved by John R. Sinnock, the Mint's chief engraver, but he worked from sketches by Philadelphia artist and collector John Frederick Lewis — a contribution that went largely unacknowledged for decades. The real problem, though, was depth. At the exposition commission's insistence, both coins were struck in unusually shallow relief. Relief is how far a design rises off the field; a flat, low-relief coin looks weak the moment it leaves the press and wears to mush almost on contact.

There is only one date and one mint — the 1926 Philadelphia issue — so building a "set" of this coin means chasing condition, not varieties. And condition is exactly where it gets hard.

The shallow relief that hurt sales in 1926 is the collector's whole story today. Because the design barely rose off the field, even freshly minted coins often look softly struck, and the high points wore down fast. That makes a sharp, gem example — a coin grading MS-65 or finer, with full original mint luster and almost no marks — genuinely tough. Many survivors exist in lower mint-state grades; truly high grades are scarce, and the issue is regularly cited as one of the hardest classic commemoratives to find in MS-66 and above. A few coins also carry beautiful natural toning, which collectors prize on top of grade.

The arithmetic is the appeal. America melted six of every seven coins it struck, so a low-cost half dollar from a 150th-birthday celebration is, in high grade, a real rarity hiding behind an ordinary face value.