The Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle

Theodore Roosevelt was not a coin collector. He was something more dangerous: a man with taste and the power to act on it. In December 1904 he wrote to his Treasury secretary that American coinage was "artistically of atrocious hideousness," and he had a fix in mind — hand the job to a real artist. He later called the project his "pet crime," because he knew he was bending the Mint to his will.

The artist was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the leading American sculptor of the age. Roosevelt didn't ask for a tweak. He wanted coins that could stand next to the high-relief coins of ancient Greece — pieces struck so deeply that the figures seem to rise off the metal. Relief simply means how far the design stands up from the flat surface of the coin; high relief means it stands up a lot, which is gorgeous to look at and a nightmare to mass-produce.

The two men got their wish and paid for it. Saint-Gaudens was dying of cancer through the whole project. He never saw a finished coin in circulation — he died on August 3, 1907, months before the design reached the public. His studio assistant, Henry Hering, carried the work the rest of the way to the Mint.

Then there was the engineering problem. Saint-Gaudens' original vision was so deep that the first experimental pieces — the Ultra High Relief strikes — needed up to nine blows of the press to bring up the full detail. That's wonderful for a museum and impossible for commerce. The Mint's chief engraver, Charles E. Barber, flattened the design down so an ordinary coin could be struck in a single blow. The masterpiece you can actually hold is a compromise — but what a compromise.

The obverse — the "heads" side — shows Liberty striding straight toward you out of a burst of sunrise. She holds a torch in one hand for enlightenment and an olive branch in the other for peace, and behind her tiny rays of light fan across the field. Below her, almost hidden, is the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Nothing about it is stiff or symbolic in the dull way old coins were. She is in motion.

The reverse — the "tails" side — is a flying eagle gliding low over a rising sun, all forward energy and open wing. Saint-Gaudens designed both sides. The eagle was no accident: he had already used a soaring eagle on the inaugural medal he made for Roosevelt in 1905, and the president loved it.

One feature you have to feel rather than see: the words E PLURIBUS UNUM are stamped on the edge of the coin, not the face — a touch of old-world craft that keeps the two flat sides clean.

The earliest 1907 coins carry the date in Roman numerals — MCMVII — because Saint-Gaudens thought Arabic numbers looked cheap. By late 1907 Barber had switched the date to plain "1907" to ease production. And in a small storm that says a lot about the era, the first coins left off the motto IN GOD WE TRUST entirely: Roosevelt personally believed it was irreverent to put God's name on money men gamble and steal with. Public outcry won. Congress ordered the motto back, and it appears on the coins from 1908 onward.

Most Saint-Gaudens double eagles are common, and that's the first thing to understand. Many were struck in the millions and survived in mint condition because banks in Europe held bags of U.S. gold for decades. You can buy a nice circulated example for not much over its gold value. That's the bullion floor — the price the metal alone sets.

Above that floor, the prizes are real. The crown is the 1907 High Relief (Roman numerals): only 12,367 were made, each struck three to five times. Many show a thin "wire rim" — a fragile ridge of metal squeezed up between the dies during those repeated strikes; coins without it are called "flat rim." It is one of the most beautiful objects American industry ever produced, and collectors have wanted it since the day it appeared.

The truly rare dates are mostly from the 1920s and early 1930s — and here's the cruel twist. Coins like the 1927-D (a Denver rarity with only around 15 to 18 known) and the 1930-S were struck in fair numbers, but they never really circulated. The government simply stored them. Then came the gold recall, and the Treasury melted them by the ton. A coin's mintage can read in the hundreds of thousands while its survivors number in the dozens — because most of the run went into the furnace. That gap between "how many were made" and "how many are left" is what drives this series.

That same melting is why high grades are scarce on the later dates. A coin that sat in a Treasury vault and was destroyed never had the chance to survive in a collector's drawer. For the 1920s issues especially, condition is everything.

And then there is the 1933 double eagle — the most storied U.S. coin of all. 445,500 were struck, but by then Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102 had pulled gold out of American hands, and not one was ever officially released. Nearly all were melted. A handful walked out anyway. For decades it was illegal to own one. One example — long tied to a great collectors' tale about King Farouk of Egypt — was finally made legal to sell, and in 2002 it brought $7,590,020 at auction in New York. In 2021 that same coin, owned by shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, sold at Sotheby's for $18,872,250 — the most ever paid for a coin. As of that sale it remains the only 1933 double eagle a private citizen may legally own.