If I told you that a sitting United States president
once threatened to physically decapitate a Treasury
employee over the font on a $10 coin, you'd probably
think I was setting up a ridiculous joke. Right,
like some kind of historical sitcom pitch. Exactly.
But back in 1907, the creation of a brand new
$10 gold piece triggered exactly that kind of
historic, fiercely personal, bureaucratic bloodbath.
Welcome to another deep dive. Glad to be here
for this one. Today we are immersing ourselves
in a comprehensive Wikipedia article on the Indian
head eagle which is a $10 gold piece minted between
1907 and 1933. And I want to set the expectations
early for you listening. Our mission today is
absolutely not just some dry paint -by -numbers
numismatic history lesson. No, not in the slightest.
What we're really looking at is a borderline
absurd case study of what happens when high art,
massive presidential ego, and, well, stubborn
bureaucratic engineering violently collide. OK,
let's unpack this. Because the stakes here are
so much higher than just designing some pocket
change, we are talking about fundamentally altering
the physical representation of the United States
economy. Yeah to really grasp those stakes I
want you to imagine stepping into a moody dimly
lit early 20th century minting floor. Oh setting
the scene I like it. Picture the smell of hot
metal you know the deafening rhythmic slamming
of heavy industrial presses the sheer heat of
the furnaces that is our backdrop. Now by the
year 1904 United States coinage had essentially
been stuck in a massive creative rut. Right they
hadn't changed anything in a long time. Exactly
the designs like the Liberty Head had been circulating
unchanged for over 25 years so they were highly
functional but artistically they were just tired.
And then President Theodore Roosevelt looks at
the money circulating in his country and just
decides it entirely lacks artistic merit. He
basically thinks the coins are objectively ugly.
Which is such a Roosevelt thing to do. And a
famously headstrong president deciding his country's
money isn't pretty enough, that sets off a chain
reaction that nobody at the U .S. Mint was remotely
prepared to handle. That is the initial spark.
Because Roosevelt decides he isn't just going
to complain about it, he's going to act as the
de facto art director for the United States Treasury.
I mean, can you imagine the president micromanaging
the Mint today? It would be chaos. But he writes
a formal letter to Treasury Secretary Leslie
Mordier -Shaw with his grievances, and then he
does something largely unprecedented. He brings
in an outside contractor. Right. He hires the
renowned private sculptor Augustus Saint -Gaudens
to completely redesign the nation's gold pieces.
Actually, I want to clarify the terminology here
for a second, just so we have a baseline. When
we say gold pieces and eagles, what are we actually
talking about in terms of everyday money at the
time? Oh, good clarification. The eagle was basically
the base unit of denomination. for U .S. gold
currency. So an eagle was a $10 gold piece. Okay,
got it. Meaning, a quarter eagle was $2 .50,
a half eagle was $5, and a double eagle was $20.
And Roosevelt tasked St. Gaudens with redesigning
all of them, from the quarter eagle all the way
up to the double eagle. Which immediately creates
this explosive workplace dynamic. Yeah. Because
now you have this famous avant -garde outsider,
St. Gaudens, walking directly into the territory
of the Mint's chief engraver, a man named Charles
E. Barber. Yeah, and Barber is a government man.
He is a com - man through and through. Right,
he's been running the aesthetic and mechanical
side of the mint for decades at this point. And
Barbara is intensely hostile to this intrusion.
I mean, he views St. Gaudens not as a visionary,
but as this disruptive nuisance who doesn't understand
the first thing about manufacturing actual currency.
The animosity between these two is just palpable
in the historical record. It gets intensely petty.
Oh, incredibly petty. There is this surviving
letter from St. Gaudens to his brother. where
he explicitly refers to Barber as an SOAB. Ha,
you can fill in the blanks on that acronym. Yeah,
and he notes in the letter that President Roosevelt
actually threatened to cut Barber's head off
if the engraver didn't cooperate. What's fascinating
here is that this conflict goes way deeper than
just bruised egos. It is fundamentally a clash
over the very definition of value. How do you
mean? Well, to someone like Chief Engraver Barber,
a coin's value lies entirely in its utility,
its reliability, and its standardization. Like
it has to function as a physical object. Exactly.
It needs to stack perfectly in a banker's vault.
It needs to not shatter the minting presses.
And it needs to hold exactly $10 worth of gold
without wearing down. So to Barber, it's just
a tool. This is exactly like a visionary CEO
hiring a famously eccentric avant -garde artist
to completely redesign the company's vital accounting
software. That is such a perfect parallel. And
then telling the frustrated IT department they'll
all be fired if they complain about the code
breaking. Right, because to Roosevelt and Saint
-Gaudens, a coin's value isn't just mechanical.
It is deeply symbolic. It is an expression of
national identity and classical beauty. Because
Roosevelt was obsessed with the high -relief
coins of the ancient Greeks, wasn't he? He was.
He wanted the United States to have currency
that riddled antiquity. They were actively trying
to manufacture this majestic heritage for a relatively
young nation. But the irony is that Roosevelt's
grand vision ends up forcing the artist into
some incredibly bizarre compromises. Oh, the
compromises are wild. Having established this
massive tension between art and utility, the
project moves into the actual design phase. And
this is where Saint -Gaudens realizes that having
the president of the United States as your personal
patron is a massive double -edged sword. Because
the president simply cannot stop meddling. Exactly.
So Saint -Gaudens had this beautiful classical
head of Liberty that he originally intended for
the one cent coin. Right, it was based on an
unused model he had designed for a victory monument
in New York City. Yeah, it was very elegant.
But Roosevelt steps in, looks at it, and insists
that a male Native American feather headdress,
like a full war bonnet, be added to this female
classical Liberty's head. And his reasoning for
this? He thought the headdress was, quote, distinctly
American. Which is just a purely aesthetic, deeply
anachronistic choice that ignores all cultural
context completely. It makes no sense. And the
contemporary critics absolutely tore it apart.
Oh, they destroyed it. Numismatic historians
and art critics at the time completely panned
the decision. They called the design absurd and
incongruous. And you can completely see why.
They correctly pointed out that a classical female
figure would never wear a male warrior's war
bonnet. Right. It's historically nonsensical.
Can you imagine the uproar today if a politician
forced a famous artist to just mash together
two completely unrelated cultural symbols on
the national currency purely because they thought
it looked cool? It would be a relentless media
circus today, but it shows how Roosevelt's interference
compromised the artistic integrity of the project.
Yeah, it really did. It reminds you how often
brilliant creative endeavors are derailed by
executive meddling. The person with the ultimate
authority isn't always the person with the most
refined taste. The reverse of the coin is fascinating
too. It features this majestic standing eagle
on a sheaf of arrows with an olive branch. Right.
A very striking image. But the inspiration for
that didn't come from American wildlife. It actually
came from an ancient Egyptian coin of Ptolemy
I. Wait, really? An Egyptian coin? Yeah. St.
Gaudens actually had a book with an illustration
of this ancient coin, and he lent that exact
book to the president to get his approval. That
is wild. It really highlights that constant push
and pull on American identity, trying to project
rugged American uniqueness on the front with
the headdress while explicitly borrowing the
visual language of ancient empires on the back.
So eventually the design is finalized. culturally
mashed up feathered headdress and all, but a
drawing isn't a coin. Now they actually have
to manufacture the thing. And this is where the
rubber meets the road. Yeah. This beautiful high
-relief art crashes head first into the unforgiving
physical physics of minting presses. This is
where Barber, our aggrieved bureaucrat, is somewhat
vindicated. And, you know, we have to acknowledge
the tragic human element here, too. Right. Because
Saint -Gaudens is actively dying of cancer during
this entire stressful process. Yeah. He actually
passes away in August 1907 before ever seeing
the final coins hit mass circulation. It's really
sad. It is. But before he dies, he submits his
final models to the mint. And because he is primarily
a sculptor who works on monuments and metals,
his models are in high relief. Meaning they have
deep, dramatic. sweeping curves. Which is an
absolute engineering nightmare for a mass production
facility. Wait, I want to pause here because
I think it's easy to just say engineering nightmare
and move on, but what is the actual physical
problem? Like, why does a deep curve on a piece
of metal break a machine? Okay, think of it this
way. A standard coin press is designed to strike
a flat piece of cold metal, which is called a
planchette, exactly once in a fraction of a second.
Just boom and it's done. Exactly. That single
strike uses immense treasure to instantly stamp
the design, and then the machine spits it out.
But if the design has deep, dramatic cavities,
high relief, that cold metal has to physically
flow deeply into the die to fill out all the
details of the artwork. And cold metal naturally
resists flowing. Very much so. So to force it
into those deep grooves, you can't just strike
it once. You have to strike it multiple times.
Oh, wow. And between each of those strikes, you
have to take the coin out, heat it up in a furnace,
to soften the metal, which is a process called
annealing, and then put it back in the press.
So what normally takes a fraction of a second
per coin suddenly turns into a multi -hour ordeal
for a single piece of money? Precisely. Barber
immediately complains, pointing out that this
simply isn't coin relief. You cannot produce
millions of these for national commerce if each
one requires a bespoke, artisanal forging process.
That makes total sense from his perspective.
Plus, St. Gaudens used Roman numerals for the
date MCMVA for 1907. And Barbara points out that
there is physically no room left on the die to
add more Roman numerals for future years without
entirely redesigning the tool. Right, because
MCME takes up more space. Exactly. But President
Roosevelt doesn't care about the physics of cold
metal. He throws an absolute fit when he hears
about the delays. Of course he does. He demands
that the new Eagles be in active production by
September 1st. No excuses. And here's where it
gets really interesting. The acting Mint director
and the Treasury secretary, George Corteau, are
so terrified of the president's rage, that they
act in total desperation to buy themselves time.
What do they do? Corteau secretly orders 500
pieces to be struck. The famous wire rim pieces.
Hold on though. If Barbara just proved that the
standard coin presses literally couldn't handle
the high relief without breaking, how did Corteau
manage to magically strike 500 of them in secret?
Did he use a different machine? He did. He bypassed
the standard coin presses entirely. He took the
dyes to a slow, high -pressure metal press. Ah,
I see. Yeah, these machines were meant for striking
commemorative metals, not circulating currency.
It was agonizingly slow work. A numismatic historian
explicitly described this act as an insurance
policy against presidential rage. That is exactly
what it was. They used a completely impractical
machine to slowly forge 500 special coins just
so they could hand something shiny to Roosevelt
and say, look, Mr. President, we did it. Production
has started. You have the highest levels of the
Treasury Department sweating bullets, running
a secret side operation purely to manage the
temper of the commander -in -chief. It's unbelievable.
But this raises an important question, one that
gets to the heart of what currency actually is.
Because handing the president a shiny object
doesn't solve the macroeconomic problem. No,
it doesn't. Barber eventually has to step in
and alter the design anyway. He has to significantly
lower the relief and add a proper rim around
the edge. And that rim is crucial. Because without
a proper raised rim, the extreme pressure of
the high release strike forced the gold to squirt
out horizontally past the edges of the die. Like
pressing down too hard on a waffle iron? Yes.
The batter has nowhere to go, so it just oozes
out the sides. That is the exact mechanism. On
a coin, this creates a razor thin edge of excess
gold called a fin. And this fin was incredibly
fragile, right? Extremely. If you put that coin
in your pocket, the fin would flake right off.
Now remember, this is a $10 gold piece. Its value
is tied directly to its physical weight in gold.
Oh, right. So if it flakes... If pieces of it
are breaking off in people's pockets, the coin
becomes underweight. Bankers will literally reject
it. It loses its legal trade value. Wow. So...
If a coin is too beautiful to function in commerce,
if its very artistry destroys its utility as
money, it has failed its primary mission. Barbara
had to save the coin from its own beauty. The
art was actively fighting the medium. But Barbara
does fix it. The engineering problems are solved.
The relief is lowered. The rim is added. The
waffle batter finning is stopped. Right. They
finally get it working. And finally, in November
1907, the new Indian head eagles hit the pockets
of everyday Americans. Barber solved the physical
utility of the coin. It could finally stack,
it could circulate, and it held its weight. But
by focusing so intensely on fixing the physical
object, they completely overkicked the cultural
utility of the coin. Yeah, they really did. Because
when Americans finally got this beautiful new
money in their hands, they realized something
crucial was missing. The motto. The motto, in
God we trust, is completely noticeably missing
from this new $10 gold piece. And this was not
an oversight. Roosevelt intentionally omitted
it. It's a fascinating philosophical clash. On
one hand, you have Roosevelt's perspective. He
viewed money as a fundamentally a secular tool
of commerce. Right. Money is used to buy worldly
goods, pay off debts, and frankly, fun illicit
activities. He argued that stamping God's name
on something used in a saloon or a gambling hall
actually degraded religion. It was sacrilege
to him. And St. Godin's eagerly agreed to leave
it off, mostly because he just hated clutter
text ruining his clean artistic composition.
Typical artist move. Yeah, exactly. But on the
other hand, you have the American public who
view their currency as a reflection of their
core national values. They saw the omission as
a secular attack. And they reacted quickly. By
November 7th. mere days after the coins hit circulation.
Newspapers are aggressively attacking the decision.
They are calling it a godless coin. The public
is furious. Now, I want to be clear here for
you listening. We aren't taking sides on this
historical religious debate. Whether money should
be secular or religious is outside our scope.
We are simply imparting what the historical sources
report. Exactly. And regardless of where you
stand on that debate between secular utility
and religious expression, the sheer scale of
the backlash is undeniable. It really shows us
in real time how a nation's money serves as a
lightning rod for national identity. It's not
just purchasing power. It is a bill for the values
of the society using it. When you drastically
alter that billboard, you provoke a visceral
reaction. Think about how notoriously difficult
it is to get Congress to agree on anything today.
But back in early 1908, the pressure from the
public was so intense that Congress moved with
incredible speed. They did. They explicitly passed
a bill legally mandating the return of the motto
to the gold coins. So, Charles Barber, our favorite
beleaguered bureaucrat, has to alter the dies
all over again. He adds the motto back in, placing
it to the left of the eagle's breast on the reverse.
And almost out of spite, he makes other minor
tweaks while he has the tools open. Oh, of course
he does. He shifts the design slightly, exposing
a little more of the letter U. in the word UNUM,
just to make sure his mechanical preferences
were fully implemented. For the collectors out
there, this frantic era of alterations creates
some fascinating variations that are highly sought
after today. Absolutely. For instance, there
are the no -modo coins struck at the Denver Mint
in 1908, known as the 1908D. On those, the demint
mark is placed above the leaves near the eagle's
feet. But once Congress forced them to add the
model later that same year, Barbara moved the
mint mark to the left of the arrow to balance
the design. There's also a great piece of trivia
about the edge of the coin itself. Yeah. Tell
about the stars. So if you picture a modern quarter,
it has ridges or reeds on the edge. The Indian
head eagle didn't have reeds. It had raised stars
running along the rim. Which was an aesthetic
choice, but also a crucial security feature.
Edge designs, whether reeds or stars, were implemented
to prevent clipping. which was the illegal practice
of shaving tiny amounts of gold off the smooth
edge of a coin before spending it. Exactly. Originally,
there were 46 stars around the edge to represent
the 46 states in the union, but in 1912, New
Mexico and Arizona joined the United States.
Meaning the mint couldn't just change the face
of the coin. Nope. They had to completely re
-engineer the edge collar, the heavy steel ring
that surrounds the coin during the strike, to
fit 48 stars instead. It's just one mechanical
headache after another. The coin essentially
functions as a living, physical document of American
history at that point. It records the shifting
of borders, the arguments over religion, and
the limits of industrial technology. It really
does. It survives its turbulent birth, it survives
the religious scandal, and it becomes a reliable,
everyday part of American commerce. But we have
to look at how this story concludes. Right. We
are moving from the coin's chaotic creation to
its sudden dramatic death. The context of this
object is about to violently shift from a medium
of everyday exchange to a modern multimillion
dollar collector's item. And that shift is driven
entirely by global macroeconomic forces and sweeping
government decrees. Production is humming along
nicely until World War One breaks out. During
the war, gold basically stops circulating normally.
It flows heavily back from Europe to the United
States to pay for war materials. Yeah. And gold
coins begin to command a premium over paper money.
So the mint basically stops mass producing the
$10 Eagles after 1916. They only mint them sporadically
in a few specific years, like 1920, 1926, 1930,
and finally 1932 and 1933. And 1933 is the fatal
blow for the entire concept of circulating gold
currency in America. Yes, it is. In 1933, another
president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is staring
down the barrel of the Great Depression. The
banking system is collapsing and people are hoarding
gold. So to stabilize the economy and centralize
the nation's gold reserves, FDR issues Executive
Order 6102. Which is a huge deal. Oh, massive.
He orders the recall of all gold coins, gold
bullion, and gold certificates. Everyday Americans
are legally forced to turn in their gold to the
Federal Reserve in exchange for paper money.
This single sweeping order. ends the $10 Eagle
Series entirely, a denomination that had been
running continuously in the United States since
1795. The government just scoops them all out
of bank vaults and private hands and ruthlessly
melts them down into featureless gold bars to
back the treasury. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, this government destruction creates
a fascinating paradox of rarity. Take the 1920s
eagle, which was minted in San Francisco. It
had a healthy mintage of over 126 ,000 coins.
But today, it is considered a major numismatic
rarity. Why is that? Because in 1920, Europe
was still financially devastated from World War
I and wasn't importing American gold. So almost
all of those 126 ,000 coins just sat in treasury
vaults in the US. Oh, I see where this is going.
Yeah, when FDR's melting order came down in 1933,
they're right there waiting to be destroyed.
Almost the entire batch was wiped out in one
go. And then there is a 1933 Eagle, which is
the ultimate ghost coin of this series. The Mint
produced 312 ,500 of them that year. But because
FDR's order came down right as they were being
struck, virtually the entire mintage was melted
before it ever legally left the Mint facility.
Only a tiny handful managed to escape, right?
Yeah. Likely smuggled out by employees. Exactly.
So what does this all mean for the legacy of
the coin? Well, the numbers today are staggering.
In 2004, one of those surviving 1933 Eagles,
a coin originally meant to buy maybe a nice pair
of leather boots or a week's worth of groceries,
sold at auction for $718 ,750. Wow. And it gets
even crazier. Remember those rounded rim pieces
from 1907 that Barber fixed after the Waffle
Iron Fitting disaster? The insurance policy coins?
Not the wire rim ones, but the slightly adjusted
ones after. They made about 32 ,000 of them.
But then a new mint director, Frank Leach, decided
the design still wasn't quite right and ordered
almost all of them melted, saving only about
50 specimens for museums and treasury officials.
One of those surviving specimens, which had stayed
tucked away in Frank Leach's own family for a
century, sold at auction in 2011 for $2 ,185
,000. That is just it's the ultimate unintended
consequence. The government's relentless attempts
to erase these objects from existence, whether
through quality control in 1907 or macro economic
policy in 1933, is exactly what made them priceless
historical artifacts today. It is just awe inspiring.
I mean, an object explicitly designed to be jingled
in a pocket to be worn down by dirty hands and
cash registers becomes a two million dollar museum
piece purely because the government tried to
destroy it. It really makes you think about the
stuff we carry around today. It does, to bring
it all together. The journey of the Indian head
eagle is one of the most chaotic product launches
in American history. Yeah, without a doubt. It
was born from a president's demand for classical
high art. corrupted by his own bizarre cultural
meddling, delayed by the unforgiving physics
of industrial metal presses, embroiled in a massive
national religious scandal over a missing motto,
and ultimately permanently erased from commerce
by another president's emergency decree. It is
a profoundly dramatic life cycle for a small
piece of metal. And it changes how you look at
the mundane world. The next time you pull a standard
quarter out of your pocket, or you look at the
perfectly sanitized digital interface you use
to tap and pay for your coffee, I want you to
look closely at it. Take a second to appreciate
the boring, predictable standardization. Exactly.
Because behind every tiny design detail, behind
every font choice, missing word, or ridged edge,
it is highly likely that someone somewhere, fought
a bitter, intensely personal battle over it.
The mundane things we use effortlessly every
day are very often the survivors of hidden historical
wars. Which leaves us with a fascinating thought
to consider as we wrap up this deep dive. Lay
it on us. We just explored how a presidential
order in 1933 to recall and destroy physical
currency accidentally minted million dollar historical
artifacts out of pocket change. So I pose this
to you listening, if our government were to suddenly
mandate the recall and total destruction of all
physical currency tomorrow, just wipe it out
entirely in favor of a digital grid, what every
day completely overlooked object from your life
right now would future generations put behind
protective glass and consider our era's most
beautiful, priceless artifact.