DECEMBER 27
1904•Roosevelt Calls American Coinage “Atrociously Hideous”
2007•2008 Presidential $1 Designs Revealed
Theodore Roosevelt Declares American Coinage “Atrociously Hideous”
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On December 27, 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt sent Treasury Secretary Leslie M. Shaw a short letter that helped ignite one of the greatest artistic transformations in United States coinage. Roosevelt complained that the nation's coins were “artistically of atrocious hideousness” and asked whether a sculptor such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens could be employed to create coinage with genuine beauty—without first asking Congress for permission.
The letter was only a few sentences long. Its consequences stretched across decades.
Roosevelt's dissatisfaction eventually produced the magnificent Saint-Gaudens double eagle and Indian Head eagle of 1907. More broadly, his campaign helped usher in what collectors call the Renaissance of American Coinage, an era that ultimately gave the United States many of its most admired twentieth-century designs.
A President Looks at America's Coins
Theodore Roosevelt believed national objects should express national greatness.
Architecture, monuments, public sculpture, medals, and coins all mattered to him because they represented the United States to its own citizens and to the world.
By 1904, he was deeply dissatisfied with American circulating coinage.
Much of the nation's coinage had been designed during the nineteenth century.
The Indian Head cent dated to 1859.
The Liberty Head nickel dated to 1883.
Charles E. Barber's dime, quarter, and half dollar had entered production in 1892.
Liberty Head gold designs had even deeper roots.
The Mint's designs generally worked well in mass production.
They stacked, wore predictably, and could be struck efficiently.
But Roosevelt wanted something more ambitious.
He believed American coins should rival the finest artistic coinage of the ancient world.
Roosevelt admired ancient Greek coins, especially their sculptural quality and high relief.
Greek engravers had transformed small pieces of metal into miniature works of art.
The president wondered why a modern industrial nation could not achieve comparable beauty.
Roosevelt already knew exactly the kind of artist he wanted.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was among the most celebrated sculptors in America.
His public monuments combined classical inspiration with extraordinary naturalism and dramatic composition.
America's Leading Sculptor
Saint-Gaudens had created major works including the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston and the monument to General William Tecumseh Sherman in New York.
His reputation extended far beyond numismatics.
Roosevelt believed an artist of that stature could elevate American coinage.
Roosevelt put his frustration into writing.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary Leslie M. Shaw, he described American coinage as artistically atrocious and asked whether the administration could employ someone like Saint-Gaudens to make it beautiful.
He also asked the crucial legal question: could it be done without seeking new permission from Congress?
United States coin designs were governed by federal law.
But existing statutes allowed certain designs to be changed after they had remained in use for a specified period.
That gave the executive branch room to redesign several denominations without obtaining a separate act of Congress for each one.
The president was not merely complaining.
He was looking for a practical path around institutional obstacles.
If existing law already allowed redesign, he could use presidential influence and Treasury authority to force an artistic transformation.
There was no lengthy policy memorandum.
No commission report was attached.
Roosevelt simply stated the problem, identified the kind of artist he wanted, and asked whether the government could proceed.
That directness was characteristic of his approach.
Shaw served as Roosevelt's secretary of the Treasury from 1902 to 1907.
Because the United States Mint operated under the Treasury Department, Shaw stood between the president's artistic ambitions and the federal institution responsible for actually manufacturing coins.
The United States Mint maintained a professional engraving department.
Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber was an experienced die engraver who had designed multiple circulating denominations.
He understood the severe technical demands of mass-produced coinage.
Charles Barber and Saint-Gaudens
Barber and Saint-Gaudens represented very different approaches.
Barber's priority was practical coinage that could be produced efficiently.
Saint-Gaudens approached the problem as a sculptor seeking artistic depth, movement, and classical beauty.
Their conflicting priorities would become central to the redesign project.
The president did not want the Mint's existing artistic structure to determine the outcome.
He wanted one of America's greatest outside sculptors involved directly.
That decision challenged the traditional authority of the Mint's engraving staff.
Saint-Gaudens soon designed Roosevelt's 1905 presidential inaugural medal, working with sculptor Adolph A. Weinman.
The result greatly impressed Roosevelt.
It strengthened the president's conviction that Saint-Gaudens was the right artist to reshape American coinage.
Roosevelt and Saint-Gaudens exchanged correspondence and ideas during the following years.
The president's enthusiasm was unusually personal.
He was not simply approving designs presented through normal bureaucratic channels.
He actively pushed the artistic direction of the project.
Ancient Greek coins inspired Roosevelt partly because of their sculptural relief.
He wanted American coins with depth and presence rather than designs flattened primarily for manufacturing convenience.
That ambition would soon collide with the realities of modern coin presses.
The sculptor explored ideas for the cent and gold denominations.
His studies included powerful versions of Liberty and the American eagle.
Some concepts migrated from one denomination to another as the project evolved.
Saint-Gaudens' $10 gold piece became one of the most unusual American coins of its era.
Its obverse shows Liberty wearing a Native American feathered headdress.
The reverse features a standing eagle.
The $20 design became Saint-Gaudens' masterpiece.
Liberty strides forward holding a torch and olive branch.
Behind her rise rays of the sun and the U.S. Capitol.
The reverse shows an eagle flying above a rising sun.
Saint-Gaudens approached the double eagle as a sculptor.
The earliest versions used exceptionally high relief.
They were visually spectacular but extremely difficult to manufacture with ordinary production methods.
The Ultra High Relief Experiment
The Mint produced a tiny number of experimental Ultra High Relief double eagles in 1907.
Multiple blows from a medal press were needed to bring up the full design.
That made the format impractical for mass circulation.
The production difficulties did not diminish the president's enthusiasm.
He believed the artistic achievement justified pushing the Mint beyond its normal limits.
The conflict between beauty and manufacturability became one of the defining stories of the 1907 coinage.
For the double eagle to become a practical circulating coin, the relief had to be reduced.
The design went through multiple stages before a version suitable for high-speed production emerged.
Even reduced, the finished coin retained extraordinary visual power.
The artist completed the project while suffering from cancer.
His assistants, including Henry Hering, helped carry designs through technical stages.
Saint-Gaudens died on August 3, 1907, before seeing the full long-term impact of his coinage.
The first year of Saint-Gaudens double eagle production produced several distinct versions.
Ultra High Relief and High Relief pieces became legendary rarities.
The practical low-relief version finally allowed regular production on a large scale.
The Saint-Gaudens double eagle is routinely cited among the greatest United States coin designs.
Its reputation rests on the same goal Roosevelt expressed in his December 1904 letter: creating coinage with genuine beauty.
Regular Saint-Gaudens double eagle production ended amid the monetary changes of the Great Depression.
Yet the design never disappeared from American numismatic memory.
Collectors continued to regard it as a high point of federal coin art.
When the United States introduced the American Gold Eagle bullion coin in 1986, Saint-Gaudens' striding Liberty was chosen for the obverse.
A design born from Roosevelt's 1904 dissatisfaction therefore returned to modern U.S. coinage nearly eighty years later.
Roosevelt's Influence Extended Beyond Saint-Gaudens
The broader artistic transformation did not stop with the two Saint-Gaudens gold coins.
The idea that American circulating coinage should employ major sculptors and stronger artistic designs gained momentum.
Over the following decade, nearly every major denomination changed.
In 1909, Victor David Brenner's Lincoln cent replaced the Indian Head cent.
The new coin introduced the first regular U.S. circulating portrait of an identifiable historical person.
It marked another dramatic departure from nineteenth-century convention.
The Buffalo nickel followed in 1913.
James Earle Fraser created a distinctly American composition featuring a Native American portrait and an American bison.
The coin became another landmark of early twentieth-century numismatic art.
Three more major designs arrived in 1916.
Adolph A. Weinman's Winged Liberty Head dime—popularly called the Mercury dime—replaced Barber's dime.
Hermon A. MacNeil's Standing Liberty quarter replaced the Barber quarter.
Weinman's Walking Liberty half dollar replaced the Barber half.
Collectors often group these transformations under the term Renaissance of American Coinage.
The period produced a remarkable concentration of designs that remain famous more than a century later.
Roosevelt did not personally design them, and not every later redesign resulted directly from his December 27 letter.
But his intervention helped establish the artistic momentum.
One lasting consequence was the greater willingness to involve prominent sculptors from outside the Mint's permanent engraving staff.
Saint-Gaudens, Brenner, Fraser, Weinman, and MacNeil brought different artistic traditions into federal coinage.
The results changed the visual identity of American money.
The redesign era also revealed an unavoidable truth about coin art.
A coin must be both beautiful and manufacturable.
It has to survive millions of strikes, automatic handling, stacking, counting, circulation, and wear.
Although Barber is often cast as the villain in popular retellings, many of his technical concerns were real.
Saint-Gaudens' extreme relief could not be used efficiently for ordinary mass production.
The final coins required compromises between sculptural ambition and Mint engineering.
That Tension Still Exists
Modern coin designers face the same fundamental challenge.
Computer modeling and modern presses have changed the tools, but relief, metal flow, die life, legibility, and production speed remain important.
Roosevelt's project dramatized that tension on an unprecedented scale.
Few American presidents have involved themselves so directly in coin design.
Roosevelt treated coinage as part of the nation's public art.
He corresponded with artists, pressed Treasury officials, challenged Mint conventions, and personally evaluated designs.
That interest made sense from Roosevelt's perspective.
Monuments stand in particular cities.
Paintings hang in museums.
Coins travel everywhere.
A successful coin design places art into the hands of ordinary citizens.
Roosevelt's question about avoiding congressional permission was not incidental.
It was the mechanism that made rapid executive action possible.
If every redesign required separate legislation, the project could have stalled before it began.
The December 27 letter is a reminder that major institutional changes sometimes begin informally.
Roosevelt did not unveil a finished plan.
He asked a question.
Could the government hire a great artist and make its money beautiful?
Within three years, Saint-Gaudens' gold coins were becoming reality.
The $10 eagle and $20 double eagle bore little resemblance to the conservative designs they replaced.
They demonstrated that American circulating coinage could function as serious sculpture.
Roosevelt could not have known in 1904 how influential the project would become.
The Saint-Gaudens double eagle would eventually rank among the most famous coins in the world.
Its 1933 issue would become the center of one of numismatics' greatest legal and collecting sagas.
The reuse of Saint-Gaudens' Liberty on modern American Gold Eagles gave the design a second life.
Millions of modern bullion coins now carry imagery whose origins trace back to Roosevelt's demand for more beautiful national coinage.
Collectors Can Trace the Transformation
A type set makes the artistic shift easy to see.
Place a Liberty Head double eagle beside a Saint-Gaudens double eagle.
Place a Barber half dollar beside a Walking Liberty half.
Place a Liberty Head nickel beside a Buffalo nickel.
The visual transformation is unmistakable.
Historical precision matters.
It would be an exaggeration to claim that Roosevelt personally caused every celebrated coin of the 1907–1916 era.
Different laws, officials, competitions, artists, and Mint personnel shaped each series.
But Roosevelt helped change expectations about what American coinage could be.
Coins always had artistic elements.
Roosevelt insisted that artistry should be a central concern rather than a secondary one.
His intervention elevated the national conversation about coin design.
Roosevelt is remembered for conservation, trust-busting, foreign policy, the Panama Canal, and the Square Deal.
For numismatists, he has another legacy.
He was the president who looked at America's coins and decided they were not good enough.
On December 27, 1904, Theodore Roosevelt wrote Treasury Secretary Leslie M. Shaw and condemned the artistic quality of United States coinage.
He asked whether an artist such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens could be brought in to create coins with beauty without requiring new congressional permission.
The surviving letter, preserved through the Library of Congress collection and documented by the Theodore Roosevelt Center, provides an exact starting point for one of the most important artistic campaigns in American numismatic history.
Roosevelt and Saint-Gaudens would go on to create the Indian Head eagle and the Saint-Gaudens double eagle, culminating in the extraordinary 1907 gold coinage.
The broader redesign movement helped usher American money away from the visual conventions of the nineteenth century and toward the Lincoln cent, Buffalo nickel, Mercury dime, Standing Liberty quarter, and Walking Liberty half dollar.
The December 27 letter was tiny compared with the coins and monuments Saint-Gaudens created.
But its question was enormous: why shouldn't American money be beautiful?
The answer changed United States coinage.
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