Q. David Bowers
Rapid Coinage of Dollars
The Numismatist, October 1921, printed this article:
"Government Saving Money by Coining Silver Dollars Only:The Philadelphia Mint is cutting down the interest-bearing debt of the United States $5 million a month. All of that comes about because of the concentration of the work of the three United States mints on the coinage of silver dollars to replace 350 million dollars that were melted down during the war to sell to the English as bullion.
"When all those dollars were melted the United States had to call in all the silver certificates-the $1, $2 and $5 'bills,' to speakin common lingo-representing the dollars that were deposited in the vaults of the mints. Under the law of the land the Treasury must hold a silver dollar for each dollar silver certificate issued. So with the melting of the silver dollars the silver certificates had to be recalled. To cover that loss in currency, the government issued short-term certificates of indebtedness bearing 2% interest. The silver dollars now being coined allow for the issuance of new silver certificates which are being used in calling in those certificates of indebtedness.
"There are three mints-Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco. The Philadelphia Mint is equal in output to those in Denver and San Francisco combined.
"Last April all three plants were started on the making of the silver dollars. They were put on 24-hour working days for six days of the week. Two shifts of 12 hours each are now working in the Philadelphia Mint. Until a few weeks ago there were three shifts of eight hours each. But when Freas Styer succeeded Adam Joyce as superintendent of the Mint the third shift was put to work counting the money in the vaults in the making of an audit due to the change in administration.
"In the four months since April 20 million silver dollars have been coined. There remains on hand to be pressed into coin of the land 30 million ounces of silver, which will make approximately 35 million silver dollars.
"Robert Clark, superintendent of coinage in the Philadelphia Mint, says that the greatest production in the history of the plant is now being obtained. The daily average in production for the last month has been 260,000 silver dollars. In some days it has run as high as 275,000. That rate will be maintained until the present supply of silver is exhausted, and then the Mint for a time will go back to the coining of the smallest coins. It will take probably two years, according to Mr. Clark, to coin all of the 350 million silver dollars that will be needed to replace those melted down for England.-Philadelphia Public Ledger. "
The above explains the small mintages of subsidiary silver and minor coins dated 1921, and the absence of any dated 1922.The Denver Mint ran out of dies for 1922-D cents, but could obtain no more, using the lost dies until they were so worn that the D mintmark could not be seen; the rest of the year had to be devoted exclusively to silver dollars.
The new silver certificates mentioned above are the Series of 1923.
The Year 1921 in History
The events of the years from 1905 through 1920 (during which time no silver dollars were coined) would fill many pages but will not be recounted here, except for a few comments.
The decade after 1904 was one of great prosperity. Businesses flourished, the airplane was developed considerably, the automobile came into its own as a popular means of transportation, and interurban railways linked most cities. By 1914 America was riding a crest.
Events in Europe in August in 1914 ignited the World War, into which the United States would be drawn several years later. By the end of 1920 prosperity had waned, economic conditions were unfavorable following the war, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction pervaded the country. Economic recession swept America, and hardships were experienced throughout the country. On August 16, 1921 the Labor Department reported the number of unemployed to be 5,735,000. By September there were nearly 20 million business failures. Agricultural prices fell with the recession. Cotton prices dropped to 11 cents per pound from 42 cents (the high in 1919), corn dropped to 42 cents down from a high of $2.00 two years earlier, and wheat plummeted to $1, down from $3.50.
On March 4, 1921, Republican Warren G. Harding (who in the election of November 2, 1920 had trampled his opponent, Democrat James M. Cox) was inaugurated president, with Calvin Coolidge as vice president. The Harding administration would prove to be one of the most ineffective in the history of the executive branch.
On May 19, 1921, Harding signed legislation limiting yearly immigration to 3% of the number of a given nationality recorded in the 1910 federal census, with a total of all immigrants not to exceed 357,000; this was done to counter the widespread notion that large-scale immigration was a prime cause of unemployment. During the preceding year on January 16, 1920, the Volstead Act, the national law enacting prohibition, had taken effect, giving rise to cadres of bootleggers who smuggled liquor from foreign countries, especially Canada. Countless thousands of druggists obtained licenses to sell alcohol for "medicinal purposes," prompting one songwriter to compose The Drugstore Cabaret.
Great government expense and effort were spent during the 1920s to enforce prohibition, and by 1930 an estimated 500,000 people had been arrested for liquor-related violations. Prohibition would be repealed in 1933 allowing American citizens to once again consume alcohol if they wished to. Repeal came about, in part, to stimulate the economy and make use of the great stores of grain sitting idle in silos all over the country, and to give farmers a source of income again.
General William ("Billy") Mitchell, in a controversial test in the ocean off the Virginia coast, staged a demonstration of air power and sunk the German battleship Osifriesland, which eventually changed the strategy of naval warfare. Work began on the U.S.S. Jupiter, an 11,000 ton collier ship, to convert it to an aircraft carrier; with the work completed in 1922, the ship was recommissioned as the U.S.S. Langley.
A congressional committee heard George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute tell of the dozens of commercial uses for peanuts, which were becoming an increasingly important commercial crop in the South. General Motors produced several makes of automobiles and controlled about 12% of the market.
In Pittsburgh, pioneer radio station KDKA, which had begun broadcasting in autumn 1920, saw its first full year of operation. Among popular songs and melodies of the year 1921 were Kitten on the Keys, Blue Moon, Look for the Silver Lining, Down in Chinatown, There'll Be Some Changes Made, I'm Nobody's Baby, All By Myself, Ain't We Got Fun, The Sheik of Araby, and My Mammy.
Recessionary times reduced demand for nearly all products, including coins. Mintages of various denominations were generally low, creating several issues that would become numismatically scarce, including the 1921 and 1921-D Mercury dimes, the 1921 Liberty Walking half dollars from the three mints, and the 1921 double eagle. By 1921 (in comparison to 1904-the last "Year in History" discussed here) design changes had been effected in many United States denominations. Designs in use were the Lincoln cent (since 1909), Indian or "Buffalo" nickel (since 1913), Liberty Head or "Mercury" dime (since 1916), Standing Liberty quarter (since 1916), Liberty Walking half dollar (since 1916), Peace silver dollar (first minted in 1921), Indian quarter eagle (since 1908), Indian half eagle (since 1908), Indian eagle (since 1907), and Saint-Gaudens double eagle (since 1907).
Numerous commemorative coins had been produced in the interim, most notably an illustrious set of silver and gold issues for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco. In 1921, commemorative half dollars included the Alabama and Pilgrim issues. The collecting of commemoratives was a small but important branch of numismatics. Elsewhere in the hobby, date and mintmark collecting had achieved fairly wide popularity, especially after 1909, when it was realized that the 1909-S V.D.B. cent was worth many times the price of its mintmarkless Philadelphia counterpart. Still, by 1921 there were no albums or folders available, and collecting was done mainly by serious numismatists, not by the general public. Few reference books were available to help with pricing coins, and as before, collectors had to rely upon dealers' price lists and auction prices realized. A catalogue of values issued by Scott in 1913 was by 1921 essentially obsolete. Silver dollars were not popularly collected, and few people cared what mintmark varieties were available in the Morgan or earlier series. Among those few who did collect Morgan dollars by varieties were Will Neil, a Kansas collector, and Howard R. Newcomb, of Detroit. Probably the number of people interested in putting together a set of Morgan dollars by date and mintmark was fewer than 50 to 100. Proofs were a bit more popular, as they had been in the nineteenth century, and probably several hundred people or more desired to gather Proofs of the Philadelphia Mint. The director of the Mint was Raymond T. Baker, who served from March 1917 to March 1922.