U.S. to get two new nickels | CNN

[Ediacara]

U.S. to get two new nickels
Jefferson still on front, but new designs to show handclasp, Lewis and Clark keelboat on back.
November 6, 2003: 12:18 PM EST
By Gordon T. Anderson, CNN/Money contributing writer


The first new nickel


The second new nickel

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - In April of this year, the U.S. Mint announced that it would redesign the five-cent coin, with a new nickel to be released in 2004. Today, the Mint unveiled designs for not one new nickel, but two.

The new designs constitute the first change in the look of the nickel since the current version was introduced in 1938. That familiar edition depicts Thomas Jefferson on its front, with an image of his Monticello estate on the back.

Like their predecessor, the new nickels will honor the nation's third president. As now, the fronts will display a likeness of Jefferson. The backs will be different.

The first of the new coins is due to be in circulation next spring.

More at CNN

[stevedeshazer]

1. So my Congress

passed an $87 BILLION appropriations bill for Halliburton with almost NO debate...and all I get are two new nickels?

on edit: The top one shows presumably an American (white) hand shaking a native hand. That sure worked out for the natives, didn't it?

[htuttle]

3. Yup, 2 new nickels...

'Plugged' and 'Wooden'.

How much debate could they possibly have had on a bill when only 6 senators were present and voting? (I'm STILL steamed about this -- only SIX senators voted on that. 94% of the Senate wasn't there).

[Ediacara]

4. how could that pass with only 6 total votes?

Isn't there a quorum rule?

[htuttle]

5. Only if someone actually calls for quorum

And it's clear that none of the 6 did.

I'm almost as angry at Byrd on this (he was the single NO vote).

He knows he COULD HAVE called for quorum. Hell, he COULD HAVE demanded a roll call vote. No doubt, the democratic leadership determined that this was the most tactically effective way to proceed, but it's still a disgrace on all of them, even the SINGLE democrat who showed up and voted no.

[radfringe]

18. If I had two nickles

then I could rub them together....

[Richardo]

6. Probably two white hands - American and French.

That's who we bought the Louisiana Territory from.

And, BTW, let's forego the tiresome argument about the rights (or lack thereof) of anybody to buy and sell that land, which we all know was occupied by other human beings. It happened. It happened 200 years ago. Too late to do anything productive about it now.

[htuttle]

8. Ehem...

I could argue, that there have been OTHER cases where an oppressed culture's claim to a piece of land was FAR, FAR older than 200 years (more like a few thousand?), and THEY have been given their 'homeland' back, but that would be a big digression.

So forget I said this...

Carry on.

[Ediacara]

9. I think it's European and Native American

The top image is the Jefferson Peace Medal. It was given by the Jefferson Administration to Native nations that the US made treaties with.

Notice the peace pipe overlies the axe.

[sybylla]

14. Yeah, but notice the military uniform

Neither Lewis nor Clark nor anyone in their contingent wore a military uniform. I'm more likely to buy that they are the hands representing the French gov't and the US gov't.

Still, I think it is the dumbest thing to do right now. We gotta ask our neighbors for help, live off of loans and then we go around spending money on stupidity? What will we tell the children?

on edit: that is not a peace pipe but a clay pipe used by europeans and early settlers. Peace pipes are traditionally made chunkier, of native stone, and adorned with natural elements like feathers and beads.

[demdave]

15. If you are going to disagree, at least listen to the arguement.

from Dinoboy. If you read the article it clearly states, as Dinoboy attempted to tell you, "The image on the back will depict the Jefferson Peace Medal, a medallion that was presented to Native American chiefs during treaty signings and other ceremonies. It features clasped hands and a peace pipe overlapping a hatchet. "

Using a link preovided in the article, you get the background on this medal.......In the United States, the use of peace medals began with George Washington's administration and continued into the 1880s. These original peace medals were made by hand; later they were made by the United States Mint. All medals were roughly the same style. The image of the current president was on the obverse or face of the medal with his name and date of inauguration. The reverse side displayed two hands clasped in friendship and a tomahawk crossed by a peace pipe as a symbol of peace. Usually the handshake showed one military cuff and one bare wrist. The Jefferson peace Medal shows the American Indian wrist adorned with an ornate bracelet -- perhaps to indicate a very important chief.

[sybylla]

26. Fine, but it's not a Native American peace pipe.

It may be symbolic of peace pipes, but it is not an accurate depiction of a peace pipe, regardless of what the treasury says.

[Ediacara]

27. then yell at the treasury!

not DUers

[Ediacara]

16. The first one isn't commemerating Lewis and Clark!

The top one is the Jefferson Peace Medal, which has NOTHING TO DO WITH LEWIS AND CLARK.

Look, the US Mint says it's a Peace Pipe and I am simply retelling the Mint's history of the Jefferson Peace Medal and what's on it.

If you want to argue, argue with them!

EDIT: Spelling and clarity.

[northzax]

17. actually, top secret documents

have revealed that we will use these nickels to pay our 'donation' to Iraq's reconstruction. See, they'll learn that the US government always makes good deals with brown people.

[BringEmOn]

49. Department of the Interior

owes the Indians BILLIONS...and this is all we get?

[Q]

2. Great...this will give Americans two nickles to rub together...

...it'll be better than having a job.

[StaggerLee]

10. Yes sir-

"Brother can you spare two nickels?"
:(

[DivinBreuvage]

30. A Depression-Era Joke Brought Up To Date...

George W. Bush applies to Alan Greenspan for the loan of a quarter so he can call a friend.

Greenspan gives him two quarters and says, "Here's 50 cents. Call all your friends."

Ha Ha Ha!

Françoise

[tom_paine]

7. I'm glad -- Imperial Amerika SHOULD have new money

Let's make a clean break from the Old American Republic, eh?

[libertad]

12. This is crazy! We are having "financial problems" and we are

redesigning our money??? That is like becoming unemployed and deciding to spend your life savings remodeling your house.

[Must_B_Free]

13. Psychological 'priming'

these small progressive changes are needed to teach us to let go of our attachment to the way things used to be so we can accept the new world order.

We would not stomach a drastic change. It's like boiling a frog.

[Art_from_Ark]

34. Nothing particularly sinister here

The reverse (tails) of the cent was changed in 1959, replacing Victor Brenner's wheat stalks with Frang Gasparro's depiction of the Lincoln Memorial. The new reverses of the Jefferson nickel refer to one of the major events of the Jefferson administration-- so using these themes to replace the 65-year-old Monticello design is no big deal.

Coin designs have been changed from time to time! Pick up a copy of "Guide Book to United States Coins" (the "Red Book") by R.S.Yeoman to get an understanding for the designs which have graced American coinage since 1793, and before.

[tom_paine]

43. Not sinister...just fitting is all

New money for a new nation. I agree, though I would gladly take the odl money and the old nation.

[Sick of Bullshit]

32. Not necessarily

My coin collecting friend tells me that redesigning coins actually earns money for the government in the form of higher sales of collector versions of both the outgoing and incoming designs. And it costs next to nothing to create a new design and stamp out these coins. So really, it sounds like a clever way of painlessly enhancing revenue.

[hatrack]

11. Oh, was there another tax cut?

I hadn't yet heard the details of the plan targeted at the middle class.

[Kitsune]

19. Why are we putting expansionism on our money?

Because that's what the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark are about, essentially...the Jeffersonian need to expand westward in order to keep America a nation of rural farmers because only through land ownership can someone be independant and therefore have small-r 'republican virtue.'

Wow, my U.S. History Through 1877 course IS teaching me something.

But, yeah...expansionist imagery on our money...why?

Of course, I'm probably taking this all way too seriously, but still... >.< Three years of B*sh has made me paranoid. >_<

[JM]

20. So apparently the Bush Admin

has settled with Ken Lay and will get 2 new nickels from his crime.

Later,
JM

[Media_Lies_Daily]

21. It cost the taxpayers $32 million for the new $20 bill...

...how much will it cost us for the nickels?

[demdave]

22. How much did counterfeiting the old $20 bills cost?

Or would you like to go back to exchanging sea shells or giant rings of rock?

While the only reason for the nickle change is for appearances, the 20 was changed for security reasons. I have no problem with that.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

24. I have a problem spending that kind of money when we have quite...

...a few higher priority needs. Pardon me for expressing my opinion along those lines.

And we have the word of exactly who in regards to the counterfeiting of the older $20 dollar bills?

[demdave]

25. The "who" would be anybody with access to a color printer.

The new 20 have numerous elements that make it more difficult to get a passable copy this way. Enormous amounts of time, energy and money is spent tracking down people who simply color copy money and try to pass it. I see the change as a savings. I believe paper money has a life span of only a few years, on average. So it should, in fact, save money in the near future.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

31. We'll see, won't we?

[Art_from_Ark]

36. Actually, merely using a color printer wouldn't work

since a) the ink would smear, and b) the "paper" used for US currency is not "paper" in the strictest sense but is actually a type of linen that is made to resemble paper. It has a special "feel" to it that, by law, is not given to any other paper in the US, and it is also embedded with colored fibers that cannot be reproduced by color copiers.

The main reason why the designs were changed is that the technology for engraving them had essentially been unchanged since the Civil War era, giving counterfeiters lots of time to bone up on their skills.

[MadHound]

44. Having worked with offet printers, computers, and high end color copiers

These new security changes can be fairly easily duplicated by all manner of high end equipment. All that these security changes do is take counterfeiting out of the price range of "mom and pop" operations and force it to be undertaken by criminals who can afford the big bucks. So any criminal who is going into counterfeiting is going to print much larger quantities to recoup their investment. So do we really save money in the end? On the one hand we had thousands of relatively small time operations printing out small runs of counterfeits. Now we will have hundreds of big time criminals cranking out vastly larger runs of bogus bills. It will be interesting to see the stats on this in a few years.

[MrMonk]

23. Are they *shiny* new nickels?

[SoCalDem]

28. Crisis...solved.. Americans will now have 2 nickels to rub together

whew!! :)

[DivinBreuvage]

29. Personally, I'm glad they've been giving the currency a facelift

if you compare US currency with the currency of other nations, ours often comes off looking like junk. True, I'd rather the minting of this pretty new money symbolized our accomplishment in realizing the dream of the Revolution and establishing the freest and most democratic republic in the history of humankind, but I guess you have to take what you can get these days.

I've often though that if I were President I would use the currency as the Roman emperors did: to commemorate the signal accomplishments of my administration. But since numerous reasons conspire to ensure that I'll never be President I'll pass the idea on to the closest thing this country has ever had to an Emperor of the Nero or Commodus (or most fittingly, perhaps, the Didius Iulianus) stripe:

Obverse: profile of the emperor (Ebriosus Ignavus) crowned with laurel. On the reverse, a woman in a burqa sitting and weeping beneath a palm tree. Beside her stands an armed American soldier. The caption reads: Babylonia Capta SC (Iraq Captured. With the Approval of the Senate.)

One final note: the link DinoBoy posted explains how this change may actually help the government turn a profit:

"The reason: seigniorage, a numismatic term that means the difference between the cost of producing a coin and its retail price. That spread in this case is about two and a half cents on each nickel minted.

"If a design change encourages people to hoard old Monticello nickels and/or collect the new ones, said McPike, the Mint might be forced to produce a higher-than-average number of pieces. Thus, it would make more money."

Françoise

[Art_from_Ark]

33. Roman emperors and US coinage

Interestingly, in the beginning of federal coinage in the US (early 1790s) there were many who wanted the coins to feature an effigy of the current President. However, George Washington was dead set against imitating the coinage of the Roman emperors (and European monarchs), and instead prevailed on the Mint to honor the country's newly-won freedom on our first coins in the form of a woman representing the Goddess of Liberty (who, in some cases, showed more than a passing resemblence to the female figure on French revolution-era coins). Thus, Miss Liberty became a standard feature on coin of the realm from 1793 until 1947, when the last Liberty (the Walking Liberty half dollar) entered her final year of production, to be replaced by the Benjamin Franklin half dollar the following year and completing the process, begun in 1909, of replacing allegorical figures on coins with portraits of dead men.

[DivinBreuvage]

37. Thanks for this interesting post, Art...

It seems sinisterly appropriate, somehow, that the Goddess of Liberty disappeared from the coinage after the end of WWII.

Françoise

[Art_from_Ark]

38. Two Goddesses of Liberty were axed in the immediate post-war era

The other was the Winged Liberty dime (usually mistakenly called the "Mercury" dime but which is actually representing freedom of thought), who was born in the days leading up to US involvement in World War I, and who died in 1945, just after the end of the Second World War.

One interesting aspect of the Winged Liberty dime is that the reverse features a fasces, like the kind adopted by Mussolini a few years after the dime's introduction.

[DivinBreuvage]

51. No wonder they had to kill her off...

if she represented Freedom of Thought. I suppose it's possible that we may see the fasces make a reappearance on the currency one day soon, though I don't suppose too many people have a great deal of respect for the Italian version of the product. And the swastika, though much sexier, is just not done by well-bred folk. These days.

Art, do you happen to know why they decided to strip the coins of allegorical figures? I'm curious if they had a specific reason for doing so or if they just felt it was time for a change.

Françoise

[Art_from_Ark]

53. The first two presidential coins, the Lincoln cent

and the Washington quarter, started out as circulating commemoratives, in 1909 and 1932, respectively. Once these men got their faces on the coins, it was very difficult to take them off, because of the esteem with which they were held by the general population (excluding the South in the case of Lincoln).

The third of our current circulating denominations to be redesigned, the Buffalo nickel, was scrapped immediately after its 25-year legally mandated life had been reached. According to noted numismatic scholar Walter Breen,

"As soon as the Act of Sept. 25, 1890 permitted, Treasury officials announced a competition for a new design to replace the Buffalo nickel. Evidently authorities already wished to rid us of personified Liberty in any form as quickly as possible, substituting a series of presidential portraits to go along with the set on the then current stamps."

(from "Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of US and Colonial Coins", 1988. p.260)

By the way, here are some images of the Winged Liberty dime:

[gristy]

54. That liberty dime is a beautiful coin

Nice image of it.

[Art_from_Ark]

59. Indeed, they *are* beautiful coins

I have been fascinated with them ever since I received a couple of them from the "tooth fairy" when I was in first grade. When my friend came over one day to show me the perfect condition coin his grandmother had given him, I was hooked.

But I never had any idea of the meaning of the reverse until I read Breen's account:

"Beyond doubt, the reverse device had something to do with the USA's impending entry into WW I: the Roman fasces, before its infamous association with Mussolini's Blackshirts. This consists of the executioner's axe bound within a group of rods. Commonly interpreted as "the power of life or death", in practice it means the power to kill or make one's victim wish (s)he were dead; in ancient Roman law, it connoted the power to kill mercifully by the blade, or mercilessly by the rods. (Designer) Weinmann's symbolic message in this design (surrounded by greenery, like the iron fist in the velvet glove) was clearly an updated 'Don't tread on me': something like 'The USA can instantly punish with any penalty up to and including death; therefore beware, enemies of liberty!' One wonders how many young collectors even thought of these connotations, especially after the war."

(from "Walter Breen's Complete Encyclopedia of US and Colonial Coins", 1988. p.326)

[UpInArms]

35. Wheeee!!!!! maybe we can rub them together

and really make some money!!!

is this like the Iraqis getting new currency???

This is wonderful news!!!!

/sarcasm now on permanently

[mw]

39. They're softening the ground for future coin changes:

Like Reagan on a coin.

[Ediacara]

40. naw....

More like stopping the production of the 1c and mass production of $1 coins, and an end to production of $1 notes.

[Bake]

41. I'm surprised they haven't tried to put Reagan on currency yet!

I'm sure they figured the nickel was far too cheap for St. Ronnie; they'll want to put him on the $50 or $100 bill.

Bake

[Philostopher]

42. I'm on the same page, Bake.

I was afraid to open this thread -- I keep waiting for it. I fear as soon as they drop the pennies over the old boy's eyes, every postage stamp we get for the next decade will have that jovial, empty face on it.

[Ediacara]

45. reagan - not dead yet

PLUS, after his death, there would be a waiting period of 10 years MINIMUM.

And don't think that there wouldn't be protests.... You thought 13 million against the Iraq war was a big protest? Wait til you see the Reagan $2 coin protests!

[Art_from_Ark]

58. There's no official waiting period for coins

You may be thinking about the waiting period for private citizens to be honored on a stamp, which I believe is 10 years from the time of their death.

In the case of coins, however, FDR, Kennedy, and Eisenhower were all put on circulating coins within two years of their death (4 months in the case of Kennedy). It is worth noting that Lincoln and Eisenhower both made their coinage appearance during Republican administrations (in 1909 and 1971, respectively), while Jefferson, FDR and Kennedy all made their debuts during Democratic administrations (1938, 1946, and 1964).

Another item to note is that so far, 5 LIVING people have been depicted as themselves (rather than as an allegorical figure) on US coins. They are 1) Governor Thomas Kilby of Alabama (1921 Alabama commemorative half dollar); 2) President Calvin Coolidge (1926 Sesquicentennial half dollar); Senator Joseph Robinson (1936 Arkansas centennial half dollar); Senator Carter Glass (1936 Lynchburg, VA commemorative half dollar); and Eunice Shriver (1995 Special Olympics commemorative dollar).

[lumpy]

46. Jeez, just what I've ben pining for,

new nickles. My dreams have been answered, now if they'd just issue some new pennies.....

[stevedeshazer]

48. Just wait until Bush's 2nd term n/t

[Kolesar]

47. ... and the millionaires get a $93,000 tax cut eom

[ElsewheresDaughter]

50. why not we have clintons surplus to spend....

i need new nickels like another rectum

[BuckeFushe]

52. So, does this mean we'll have TWO nickles to rub together?

n/t

[gristy]

55. Exposed!

Ya didn't read the thread. Now did you???? :P
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=203497#203519

[BuckeFushe]

56. Sorry

my bad, too many posts for my feeble olde brain.:shrug:

[Jose Diablo]

57. Are they made of wood? nt