Q. David Bowers
The Half Dollar Design
Upon learning that the enabling act for the Statue of Liberty half dollar stated that the subject matter would be "the contributions of immigrants to America," J. Carter Brown, chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, wrote to James C. Muff, March 28, 1985, stating: "In view of the difficulty of representing such a broad concept on such a small coin, it was suggested that one element symbolic of this contribution-perhaps Liberty's torch-be used as the basis of the design. However, this suggestion was not heeded.
An in-house competition was held in the Engraving Department at the Mint. The staff created numerous sketches for the half dollar and silver dollar, while they suggested that Elizabeth Jones alone make sketches for the $5 gold.
For the half dollar, designs by Edgar Z. Steever IV and Sherl Joseph Winter were chosen by Secretary of the Treasury James A. Baker III. Steever created the obverse, and Winter produced the reverse. The obverse, according to a Treasury Department news release, "focuses on the growing New York skyline of about 1913, with the Statue's uplifting gesture welcoming an in-bound liner. The scene is set against the sun rising in the east to convey the start of a different life in the New World."
"I was happy that aesthetically the subtleties ... were retained as well as these considerations:
"(1) The gesture of the statue.
"(2) The raised disk of sun on a concave basin (the sun is purposely eccentric and not round).
"(3) The rays have a slight inward curve. Their area is not on center, which implies largeness of scale and movement not too static.
"(4) In the early ideas I had more 'fuss' in the background, such as more incoming ships and seagulls and flags. These were reduced to one ship. The design of the ship was derived from plans in the Scientific American at that date, built in Philadelphia (sister ships St. Paul and St. Louis) the first American ship bringing immigrants past the Statue of Liberty after dedication. This substantiation I also provided to Washington Headquarters. The scene is of a later date (shows the Woolworth Bldg., a landmark in 1913), and the same skyline was used on the reverse. Sherl J. Winter and I agreed to use the same one. The same ship also sailed by the statue in 1913.
"(5) The original ideas showed 'vignetting' of the statue and water and thus hard to define area edges for 'proofing.' Head-quarters suggested that I make a border-to-border exergue instead, and that was successfully incorporated.
"Footnotes, annotations, and communications involving my searching in libraries, museums, art reading, census and immigration dates and lists and site visits were numerous and rewarding, but are now of only anecdotal interest .... "
Sherl J. Winter Discusses the Reverse
The reverse was sculpted by Sherl J. Winter from a concept supplied by Mint Headquarters, which was "derived from a photograph of immigrants at Ellis Island, waiting to go to New York," according to a Treasury Department news release. Shown was an immigrant family of four people standing on a pier at Ellis Island, baggage at their feet, with a skyline view of New York City in the background across New York harbor.
Sherl J. Winter described the background of his design: (Interview with the author, February 15, 1990) "In designing coins and medals all of us at the Mint usually read whatever we could find on the subject, and then we went through the print and picture file at the library. We used as much research material as we could find. Once that was done for the Statue of Liberty coin, I made a number of sketches-quite a few of them-to try to get ideas that were in my head, down on paper. The usual procedure is that you make a lot of sketches and then submit two or three to Washington for consideration. The one that was picked showed immigrants on a wharf. I recall that a couple of other sketches showed the main building on Ellis Island, but these were not selected. One of these just showed the building and some lettering. They usually pick out complicated designs, not simple ones. A lot of times they make their own changes in Washington. They will take your design and then ask you to take this out and put that in. Before you know it, they have designed it. However, my design of immigrants on the wharf was accepted just as I submitted it, although my first choice was the building, a simpler design. Everyone at the Mint thought my building design was better than my wharf design; but at Headquarters in Washington, where they have the final say, they didn't feel that way."