JULY 8
1888•John R. Sinnock — Birthday
2026•Heritage U.S. Coin/Currency Auctions
John R. Sinnock, Designer of the Roosevelt Dime, Is Born
John Ray Sinnock was born on July 8, 1888, in Raton, New Mexico. Nearly four decades later he would become the eighth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, a position he held for the rest of his life. Sinnock’s initials remain familiar to millions of Americans through the Roosevelt dime, introduced in 1946, while his work also shaped the Franklin half dollar, commemorative coins, presidential medals, military decorations, and the daily artistic production of the Mint during an era spanning the Great Depression, World War II, and the beginning of the postwar coinage age.
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A New Mexico Birth, a Philadelphia Career
John Ray Sinnock entered the world far from the institution with which his name would eventually become inseparable.
He was born July 8, 1888, in Raton, New Mexico, a young railroad and mining community near the Colorado border. His artistic education and professional career, however, developed in Philadelphia—the historic center of American coinage.
Sinnock studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, an institution associated with what later became the University of the Arts. His ability earned him the Mifflin Scholarship for advanced study.
He later taught at the school for approximately eight years.
That background mattered. Coin and medal engraving requires more than drawing ability. The artist must understand sculpture, relief, portraiture, lettering, reduction, and the practical limitations imposed by metal striking.
Sinnock entered the Mint with precisely that combination of artistic and sculptural training.
Sinnock’s relationship with the Mint began before he became Chief Engraver.
He served on the engraving staff as an assistant medalist during the 1910s. He left the Mint in 1919 but later returned.
On August 1, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge appointed him Chief Engraver of the United States Mint.
Sinnock became the eighth person to hold the office, succeeding George T. Morgan—the artist whose name had become attached to the famous Morgan silver dollar.
The transition linked two very different generations of American coinage.
Morgan’s career had begun in the nineteenth century. Sinnock would guide Mint engraving into the middle of the twentieth.
What a Chief Engraver Actually Did
The title “Chief Engraver” can create the impression that Sinnock spent his career simply designing coins.
The job was much broader.
The engraving department was responsible for translating approved artwork into forms that could survive mass production. It prepared models, hubs, dies, medals, and other official work. The Chief Engraver supervised artists and engravers and often had to modify designs created by others so they could be struck successfully.
Sinnock therefore appears in the history of coins he did not personally design.
For example, when Felix Schlag won the 1938 competition for the Jefferson nickel, Sinnock and the Mint engraving staff helped convert the approved artwork into working coinage dies after required design revisions.
That behind-the-scenes role is easy to overlook, but it was essential to every coin leaving the presses.
Sinnock was also a prolific medallic artist.
Medal work gave Mint engravers opportunities for larger portraits, deeper relief, and more elaborate compositions than circulating coins normally permitted.
Among Sinnock’s notable works was a congressional medal honoring Thomas Alva Edison in 1928.
He also produced presidential and memorial medals, including work associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The United States Mint continues to identify Sinnock as designer and sculptor of its Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential medal, whose reverse depicts a seated figure representing a grieving nation.
These medallic portraits would prove important when Sinnock later faced the challenge of placing Roosevelt on the dime.
The Purple Heart Connection
Sinnock’s artistic legacy extends beyond coins.
He is credited with work on the modern Purple Heart decoration introduced during the George Washington bicentennial era.
The award revived the tradition of Washington’s Badge of Military Merit and incorporated Washington’s profile and coat of arms.
For many recipients and their families, this may be Sinnock’s most emotionally significant design association.
It demonstrates the unusual range of a Mint engraver’s work. The same artist responsible for coins carried in millions of pockets could also shape military and congressional medals representing service, sacrifice, invention, and national remembrance.
Sinnock’s career overlapped the great early twentieth-century era of United States commemorative coins.
He participated in multiple commemorative projects, sometimes as designer and sometimes as the Mint artist responsible for translating another artist’s concept into coinage relief.
For the 1926 Sesquicentennial of American Independence coinage, Sinnock modeled the half dollar from concepts associated with Philadelphia art patron John Frederick Lewis and created the quarter eagle design.
The half dollar carried conjoined portraits of George Washington and sitting President Calvin Coolidge on the obverse and the Liberty Bell on the reverse.
The gold quarter eagle featured Liberty holding a torch and scroll, with Independence Hall on the reverse.
These projects foreshadowed two subjects that would later become central to Sinnock’s most famous regular coinage: portraiture and the Liberty Bell.
Sinnock also contributed to the 1918 Illinois Centennial half dollar before becoming Chief Engraver.
The coin’s obverse, by George T. Morgan, features Abraham Lincoln. The reverse, credited by the United States Mint to John R. Sinnock, adapts imagery from the Illinois state seal.
That coin provides an interesting link between Sinnock and his eventual predecessor.
Morgan designed the obverse; Sinnock designed the reverse. Seven years later, Sinnock would succeed Morgan as Chief Engraver.
For collectors, such connections make Mint history visible through the coins themselves.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Dies in 1945
The defining assignment of Sinnock’s career began after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945.
Roosevelt had led the United States through the Great Depression and most of World War II. He had also been closely identified with efforts to combat polio, a disease he had lived with since 1921.
Public efforts to fight polio became associated with the March of Dimes.
That connection made the dime an especially fitting denomination for a Roosevelt memorial.
The existing Winged Liberty Head—or “Mercury”—dime had been introduced in 1916. Because the design had been in use for more than the statutory 25-year period, Treasury could replace it without obtaining a new act of Congress specifically authorizing the change.
As Chief Engraver, Sinnock received responsibility for the new coin.
The obverse features Roosevelt facing left. LIBERTY appears along the left rim, IN GOD WE TRUST below the portrait, and the date to the right.
Near the base of Roosevelt’s neck are the initials:
JS.
They stand for John Sinnock.
The reverse depicts a torch representing liberty, flanked by an olive branch representing peace and an oak branch representing strength and independence. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and ONE DIME complete the design.
The Roosevelt dime entered circulation in 1946 and has remained one of America’s most enduring coin types.
Sinnock’s Roosevelt portrait has also been the subject of a long-running numismatic debate.
Selma Burke, an African American sculptor, created a celebrated relief portrait of Roosevelt after meeting him during the war years. Burke later believed that elements of the dime portrait reflected her work.
The Mint attributed the coin to Sinnock, whose earlier Roosevelt medallic work provided a documented foundation for his portrait.
Modern discussions of the issue should distinguish documented authorship from claims of artistic influence. Sinnock is the official designer of the Roosevelt dime, while Burke’s important Roosevelt portrait and her statements about the dime remain part of the broader historical conversation surrounding the design.
The debate illustrates how even extremely familiar coins can contain unresolved questions about artistic process and influence.
The Strange Cold War Rumor About “JS”
Sinnock’s initials generated one of the oddest legends in American coinage.
During the early Cold War, rumors circulated that the letters JS on the Roosevelt dime secretly honored Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
The claim was false.
JS simply represented John Sinnock, the coin’s designer.
The rumor nevertheless shows how politically charged the postwar period had become. A tiny artist’s signature on a ten-cent piece could be transformed by suspicion into supposed evidence of communist influence.
For numismatists, it is also a reminder that coins accumulate stories after they enter circulation—some factual, some exaggerated, and some completely invented.
Sinnock’s next great circulating-coin project originated with Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross.
Ross admired Benjamin Franklin and wanted him represented on a regular United States coin.
The Walking Liberty half dollar had been introduced in 1916 and was old enough to be replaced without special congressional legislation.
Sinnock began developing the new half dollar.
For Franklin’s portrait, he drew upon earlier medallic studies. For the reverse, he adapted a Liberty Bell design related to his earlier commemorative work.
The result became the Franklin half dollar.
The obverse presents Franklin in right-facing profile with LIBERTY above and IN GOD WE TRUST below.
The reverse centers the Liberty Bell.
A small eagle appears beside it, satisfying the legal expectation that the half dollar carry an eagle. E PLURIBUS UNUM appears on the other side of the bell.
The bell’s famous crack is plainly visible.
The United States Mint’s 1948 announcement credited the late John R. Sinnock with giving Ross’s idea sculptural form. The Mint explained that he used a composite study of Franklin’s face derived from multiple portraits and adapted the Liberty Bell from an earlier model.
But Sinnock did not live to see the coin enter circulation.
Sinnock Dies Before the Franklin Half Is Released
John R. Sinnock died on May 14, 1947.
He was 58 years old.
His death left the Franklin half dollar unfinished as a production coin. Assistant Engraver Gilroy Roberts completed the work necessary to bring the design into coinage.
The new half dollar was introduced in 1948.
Thus one of Sinnock’s two most famous circulating designs appeared after his death.
His initials, JRS, remained on the Franklin obverse.
The 1948 Franklin half dollar marked a symbolic transition in American coinage.
The Walking Liberty half dollar had been the last regular circulating United States coin with an allegorical figure of Liberty on its obverse.
When Franklin replaced her, every regular circulating denomination now carried a historical person rather than an allegorical Liberty portrait.
Lincoln was on the cent. Jefferson was on the nickel. Roosevelt was on the dime. Washington was on the quarter. Franklin now occupied the half dollar.
Sinnock therefore played a direct role in the final stage of a major twentieth-century transformation in American coin design.
Sinnock’s Liberty Bell design also had a life beyond the 1948–1963 Franklin series.
The bell had already appeared in his earlier commemorative work, and its use on the Franklin half made it one of the most recognizable reverse motifs of the mid-twentieth century.
When the Franklin half was replaced by the Kennedy half dollar in 1964, Sinnock’s regular circulating design ended after only sixteen years.
Yet the series became a collector favorite, particularly because of the challenge of finding sharply struck examples with fully defined horizontal lines across the Liberty Bell.
Collectors today refer to such coins as Full Bell Lines, or FBL.
Sinnock and the Artists Who Followed Him
Sinnock also influenced the next generation of Mint engravers.
Frank Gasparro joined the Mint in 1942 and worked under Sinnock. Gasparro later became Chief Engraver himself and designed or helped create some of the most familiar American coins of the second half of the twentieth century, including the Lincoln Memorial cent reverse, Kennedy half dollar reverse, and Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Gilroy Roberts, who completed the Franklin half after Sinnock’s death, became Chief Engraver in 1948 and later designed the Kennedy half dollar obverse.
Seen this way, Sinnock stands at the center of an artistic lineage connecting the classic early twentieth-century Mint with the coinage still familiar to modern Americans.
There is a paradox in successful circulating coin design.
The more widely a coin circulates, the less often people think about the person who created it.
Billions of Roosevelt dimes have been struck since 1946. They have passed through vending machines, cash registers, banks, parking meters, jars, drawers, and collectors’ albums.
Most people who have handled them have never heard the name John R. Sinnock.
Yet his initials have been present all along.
That is perhaps the ultimate fate of a successful coin artist: the artwork becomes so thoroughly integrated into daily life that it no longer feels designed at all.
John Ray Sinnock’s birthday provides an opportunity to look beyond a single coin and see the human career behind familiar American designs.
He began as a trained sculptor and teacher, worked his way through the Mint’s medallic and engraving departments, succeeded George T. Morgan as Chief Engraver, and spent more than two decades directing the artistic work of the nation’s coin factory.
His Roosevelt dime became one of the longest-lived designs in American circulating coinage.
His Franklin half dollar helped complete the twentieth-century transition from allegorical Liberty designs to portraits of historical Americans.
His commemoratives and medals extended his work far beyond pocket change.
And his influence continued through engravers such as Gilroy Roberts and Frank Gasparro.
Every Roosevelt dime carrying the tiny letters JS is therefore more than ten cents.
It is a surviving signature from an artist born in Raton, New Mexico, on July 8, 1888.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
2026 — Heritage U.S. Coin/Currency Auctions — Heritage U.S. coin and currency Select auctions were active July 8.