Dollars Commemorative
Coin Collection – The Age of Abuse (1934–1954): Commemoratives Out of Control
As fundraisers, commemorative coins were pretty straightforward. If you were a member of a group trying to raise money, you could go to Congress with an idea for a commemorative coin. If Congress felt that your proposal had merit, it would approve a law directing the U.S. Mint to make the coins on your group’s behalf. You could then presell the coins by subscription, take delivery of the coins, and begin marketing them to the general public, or sell the entire batch to a single dealer or distributor, who would, in turn, sell them to the public. Your group’s profit would be the difference between what the U.S. Mint charged you (usually face value) and what you sold the coin for. If, for example you sold a commemorative half dollar for $1, your profit would be 50¢ on each coin.
However, if your group could convince Congress to do any of the following, you could vastly increase your profits:
Allow coins to be made at all three mints (Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco), creating three different coins to sell to collectors, potentially tripling your earnings.
Continue making your commemorative coin year after year, increasing your profit potential dramatically.
Create rarities by reducing the mintages to low levels, thus being able to charge more for the coins and increasing your profits dramatically. You could also create a rarity, and then sell the entire mintage to a single buyer, locking in a nice profit and leaving all the work to someone else. If the single buyer wanted, he could raise the price to whatever level the public would pay.
These scenarios actually took place, beginning with some of the 1934 commemorative issues. The abuses and manipulations led to a public outcry that stifled commemorative coin production for many years. Only in recent years has the commemorative spigot been opened again. The U.S. Mint now keeps a wary eye on the balance between creating enough commemorative coins and producing too many.
The following are some of the more interesting commemorative coins from the period between 1934 and 1954:
Oregon Trail half dollar: Wait a minute — wasn’t this coin listed in the preceding section? Sure it was. We list this coin again here because it illustrates the abuses that entered the system. The anniversary year was 1926, yet the Oregon Trail Memorial Association received permission to have coins made two years later in 1928, and then again in 1933, 1934, 1936, 1937, 1938, and even as late as 1939. Come on. How much money did this group need? And 13 years after the first ones were struck? All the later issues have very low mintages and almost all were bought up by speculators or sold at inflated prices.
Texas centennial half dollar: Struck from 1934 to 1938, the mintages declined steadily each year, and most of the coins went to speculators.
Arkansas centennial half dollar: Technically, a state can only have one centennial celebration, but Arkansas milked it for all it was worth, issuing half dollars from 1935 to 1939. Even worse, the back of one of the 1936 issues shows the head of Senator Joseph Robinson, a violation of the tradition forbidding the image of a living person from appearing on a U.S. coin.
San Diego half dollar: Ron stuck this one in because this is the teeming metropolis where he lives. Besides, the promoter tried to double the price of the 1936 version from $1.50 to $3 in just one year, so this coin fits the pattern of abuses of this time period.
By 1939, the U.S. government had received so many complaints from dealers and collectors about the abuses in the commemorative coin program that it halted the production of all old and new commemorative coins. It wasn’t until 1946 that the program was revived, when half dollars commemorating Iowa’s statehood and Booker T. Washington were issued. The Iowa coin was made for only one year. The Booker T. Washington Half Dollar was made every year until 1951, when it morphed into the Booker T. Washington/George Washington Carver coin. This lasted until 1954, when the commemorative program was effectively laid to rest for nearly 30 years.
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