Last Wednesday at noon, the United States Mint began selling rolls of the new semiquincentennial dollar coin, which bears the President’s portrait on one side and the Presidential Seal, with a “250” on its shield, on the other. Orders were limited to two per household for the first 24 hours. I was at my computer at 11:15 a.m., in a good blouse, and I secured both rolls, which is to say 50 coins, at $61 a roll, which is to say I have paid $122 for $50, and I would do it again, because heritage is not a discount.
There are those who say that putting a sitting President on a coin departs from our traditions. I say they have not read the debates of 1792, and I say it with affection, and with a photocopy.
When the young Republic set out to make its first coins, the Senate wrote into the bill that every coin should carry the likeness of “the President of the United States for the time being.” The Founders, in other words, wanted the President on the money. There it is. They wanted the President of the time being, and the President of the time being is the one we have now, because that is what the time being means. A lesser columnist would end the column here, and I nearly did.
I must be honest with my readers, however, because the Founders were honest with theirs. The other chamber objected. Some of its members said the President’s head on a coin smacked of monarchy, and they voted to replace it with a figure representing Liberty. The Senate agreed. The coins went out with Liberty on them and not the President.
A weaker thinker would conclude from this that the Founders rejected the President’s face on money. But follow the logic as they did. They took the President off the coin and put Liberty in exactly the place where the President would have been. They did not put Liberty somewhere else on the coin. They put her in his spot. Which can only mean that, in the Founders’ minds, Liberty was what you put where the President goes. Liberty was the President, wearing a cap. The Founders did not remove the President from the coin. They disguised him as Liberty, and they have been waiting 234 years for someone to notice.
Once this is understood, everything follows.
On Thursday morning, I emptied my coin jar onto the dining room table and went through it piece by piece. Every coin bearing a figure of Liberty, I now understand to be a portrait of the President. So is the Statue of Liberty, which I have begun referring to in conversation as “his statue.” So is the Liberty Bell, which is a portrait of the President as a bell. When my neighbor said on Friday that he values his liberty, I told him I was glad he had finally come around on the President, and he went inside.
It goes further, as heritage always does. I hold liberty dear. I carry it within me. If Liberty is the President, then the President is within me, and on Saturday morning, brushing my hair, I looked in the mirror and saw, in the plainest terms, a commemorative dollar. I did not flinch. I have since arranged my hair accordingly and asked my sister-in-law to address me, on formal occasions, as “the time being.”
I am told that 250,000 of the new coins were struck on the Fourth of July with a special mark and mixed into the rolls, and that I may have one. I have not checked. I do not need to check. In the tradition of the Founders, every coin is the special one, and every face is the same face, and that face is, for the time being, also mine.
Next week: what the Founders would have said about a 250-foot triumphal arch, and why they would have insisted on walking under it in both directions at once.