NOVEMBER 11
1905•Saint-Gaudens Writes Roosevelt About Transforming U.S. Coinage
1834•1804 Dollar Diplomatic Sets Ordered
Saint-Gaudens Writes Roosevelt About the Coin Designs That Would Transform American Gold
◆
On November 11, 1905, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens wrote President Theodore Roosevelt about his ideas for redesigning United States gold coinage, describing concepts that included a striding figure of Liberty and an eagle. The correspondence belonged to one of the most consequential collaborations in American numismatic history—a president determined to make the nation’s money more beautiful and a great sculptor willing to challenge the conventions of the U.S. Mint.
Within two years, their work would produce the Indian Head eagle and the Saint-Gaudens double eagle. The latter, with Liberty advancing toward the viewer holding a torch and olive branch, became one of the most celebrated coins ever struck by the United States.
The November 11 letter captures the project before those famous coins existed in metal. It records a moment when artistic ideas were still being exchanged between Roosevelt and Saint-Gaudens, and when the president’s campaign to create a new American coinage was beginning to take concrete form.
Roosevelt Wanted American Coins to Be Art
Theodore Roosevelt took an unusually personal interest in the appearance of the nation’s money.
He believed the United States should produce coins and medals worthy of a great nation. Ancient Greek coinage especially impressed him because its sculptural power seemed far beyond the flat, mechanical appearance of many contemporary American coins.
Roosevelt’s concern was part of the broader American Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Public buildings, monuments, sculpture, murals, and civic spaces were increasingly treated as expressions of national identity.
Why, Roosevelt wondered, should the coins carried by millions of Americans not reflect the same artistic ambition?
To accomplish that, he turned to Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
America’s Most Celebrated Sculptor
Saint-Gaudens was among the leading sculptors in the United States.
Born in Dublin in 1848 and raised in New York, he trained as a cameo cutter before studying art in New York and Europe. His public monuments combined classical influence with a distinctly American realism and emotional force.
Among his best-known works were the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, the standing Abraham Lincoln in Chicago, the seated Adams Memorial in Washington, and the equestrian monument to General William Tecumseh Sherman in New York.
Saint-Gaudens also had experience with medals and relief sculpture—forms closely related to coin design.
Roosevelt admired his work and believed that placing a sculptor of Saint-Gaudens’s stature on the coinage project could raise American money to a new artistic level.
An important step in their collaboration came with Roosevelt’s 1905 presidential inaugural medal.
Roosevelt disliked the conventional medal proposed for the inauguration and asked Saint-Gaudens to create a replacement. The sculptor produced a powerful portrait of Roosevelt in relief.
The medal impressed the president and reinforced his belief that Saint-Gaudens should tackle the coinage itself.
Medallic art allowed Saint-Gaudens to work in sculptural relief on a small circular surface, making the inaugural medal a natural bridge between his monumental sculpture and the gold coins that followed.
Roosevelt approached the redesign with a mixture of seriousness and mischievous enthusiasm.
In correspondence with Saint-Gaudens, he famously referred to their coinage project as his “pet crime.” The phrase reflected his willingness to push against Mint convention and bureaucracy in pursuit of better art.
The president was not personally carving dies or determining technical specifications. But he was unusually involved in the artistic direction, exchanging ideas with Saint-Gaudens and using presidential influence to move the project forward.
That direct relationship between president and sculptor made the redesign exceptional in U.S. coinage history.
The November 11, 1905 Letter
The National Park Service preserves the historical context of a Saint-Gaudens letter dated November 11, 1905, in which the sculptor responded to Roosevelt about the proposed coinage.
Saint-Gaudens discussed ideas that would eventually become central to the new gold coins. Among them was a full-length Liberty in motion rather than a static bust.
He also considered the eagle as a major design element.
The importance of the letter lies not in a final approved coin drawing but in the development of the concepts. The imagery that collectors now recognize instantly was still evolving through conversation, sketches, models, and correspondence.
November 11 therefore offers a rare calendar date tied directly to the creative process behind an American masterpiece.
The idea of Liberty as a full-length figure in motion became the defining image of the Saint-Gaudens double eagle.
Instead of a conventional head or seated allegorical figure, Liberty strides forward from the rays of the rising sun. She holds a torch in her right hand and an olive branch in her left.
The United States Capitol appears in the background.
The composition conveys movement, confidence, enlightenment, and peace. Liberty does not merely pose; she advances.
That sense of motion was unusual for American coinage and helped give the finished twenty-dollar piece its monumental character despite its small size.
Saint-Gaudens also gave the American eagle new visual power.
On the double eagle reverse, a bald eagle flies above the rays of the rising sun. The bird is shown in motion across the field rather than as a static heraldic emblem.
The ten-dollar eagle took a different approach. Its reverse presents a standing bald eagle viewed from the side, perched on a bundle of arrows with an olive branch.
Both treatments moved away from the rigid heraldic compositions common on earlier U.S. coins.
Saint-Gaudens treated the national bird as a living sculptural subject.
Roosevelt Looked to Ancient Greek Coins
One of Roosevelt’s strongest inspirations was ancient Greek coinage.
Ancient coins often featured bold relief and sculptural modeling that gave their designs remarkable depth. Roosevelt believed modern American coins had become too flat and conventional by comparison.
Saint-Gaudens shared the president’s admiration for high-relief classical art.
The problem was technical. A coin can be modeled like a small sculpture, but it still has to be mass-produced. Extremely high relief requires more metal flow and often multiple strikes, making it difficult to manufacture at normal production speeds.
This tension between art and industrial practicality would become one of the central challenges of the new double eagle.
The double eagle was the largest regular U.S. gold denomination, with a face value of twenty dollars.
Since 1850, it had served as an important vehicle for converting enormous quantities of American gold into standardized federal coinage. By the early twentieth century, the Liberty Head double eagle designed by James B. Longacre had been in production for more than half a century.
Its replacement offered Saint-Gaudens a broad canvas by coin standards.
The large diameter allowed him to create one of the most ambitious relief designs in U.S. Mint history.
Saint-Gaudens’s artistic ambitions reached their fullest expression in the experimental Ultra High Relief double eagles of 1907.
These extraordinary pieces required repeated blows from the press to bring up the design. Their depth and sculptural quality are closer to medals than ordinary circulation coins.
They demonstrated what Saint-Gaudens and Roosevelt wanted aesthetically—but also why such a design could not be produced efficiently for mass circulation.
The Mint subsequently reduced the relief.
Even in its practical production form, however, the Saint-Gaudens double eagle retained far more sculptural energy than the coin it replaced.
Saint-Gaudens also redesigned the ten-dollar gold eagle.
The obverse depicts Liberty wearing a feathered headdress, a combination of classical Liberty imagery and an American Indian motif. The reverse shows the standing eagle.
The design is traditionally called the Indian Head eagle, although the obverse figure is Liberty rather than a portrait of a specific Native American person.
The coin debuted in 1907 and continued, with interruptions, through 1933.
Together, the eagle and double eagle transformed the appearance of America’s two largest circulating gold denominations.
Saint-Gaudens Was Dying
The coinage project unfolded under tragic circumstances.
Saint-Gaudens was suffering from cancer. His health deteriorated as work on the designs continued, forcing assistants to play an increasingly important role in translating and completing his models.
He died on August 3, 1907.
That meant he did not live to see the full circulation history or long-term reputation of the coins that bear his artistic legacy.
The November 1905 correspondence is therefore especially poignant. Less than two years remained in his life, yet the concepts he was discussing would influence American coinage for more than a century.
Roosevelt and Saint-Gaudens initially omitted “IN GOD WE TRUST” from the new double eagle.
Roosevelt believed placing the divine name on coins was irreverent because money could be used for immoral purposes. The omission provoked public and congressional criticism.
Congress required restoration of the motto, and in 1908 it was added to the double eagle.
This created two major early design varieties: the 1907 and early 1908 coins without the motto and later 1908–1933 pieces with it.
The controversy illustrates how coin design can become a national political issue. A small inscription on a gold piece carried questions of religion, law, symbolism, and presidential authority.
The Saint-Gaudens double eagle was struck from 1907 through 1933, though production varied greatly by year and mint.
Many coins never circulated widely. Gold pieces often served in bank reserves, international payments, and Treasury holdings.
After the United States abandoned routine domestic gold-coin circulation during the Great Depression, enormous quantities of earlier gold coins were melted.
Surviving Saint-Gaudens double eagles became prized numismatic objects.
The 1933 double eagle, in particular, became one of the most famous and valuable coins in the world because nearly the entire mintage was melted and only a tiny number escaped destruction.
The Design Returns on the American Gold Eagle
Saint-Gaudens’s Liberty gained a new life in 1986.
When the United States introduced the American Gold Eagle bullion coin, the Mint selected the Saint-Gaudens double eagle obverse as the foundation for the new design.
That decision placed Liberty back on American gold almost eighty years after the original coin debuted.
In 2009, the Mint went even further by producing an Ultra High Relief double eagle tribute based on Saint-Gaudens’s original artistic vision, using modern technology to achieve relief that had been impractical for mass coinage in 1907.
The 2009 issue demonstrated how technological progress could finally realize aspects of the design that early Mint machinery had struggled to produce.
The Roosevelt–Saint-Gaudens collaboration helped accelerate a broader transformation of American coinage.
In the years that followed, prominent sculptors created the Lincoln cent, Buffalo nickel, Mercury dime, Standing Liberty quarter, and Walking Liberty half dollar.
The period from 1907 through 1916 became one of the most artistically celebrated decades in U.S. coin history.
Saint-Gaudens did not design all of those coins, but his work helped establish a new standard and demonstrated that federal coinage could be treated as serious sculpture.
Most presidents have little direct involvement in the details of coin design.
Roosevelt was different.
His personality, artistic interests, and willingness to challenge established procedures gave the Saint-Gaudens project unusual momentum. He wanted Americans to encounter art in everyday civic life, and coins offered one of the broadest possible audiences.
Gold eagles and double eagles were not everyday pocket change for most Americans, but they were national objects produced in enormous quantities and carried the authority of the United States.
Roosevelt saw that as an opportunity.
The Artist Versus the Mint
The project also exposed a recurring tension in coin design: artists naturally want freedom, depth, and visual impact, while a mint must produce durable coins efficiently and consistently.
Saint-Gaudens’s high-relief models pushed the limits of production. Mint officials had to adapt them to machinery, stacking requirements, striking pressure, and large-scale output.
Chief Engraver Charles Barber, often portrayed as Saint-Gaudens’s artistic opponent, had legitimate technical responsibilities even when disagreements became personal or bureaucratic.
The finished double eagle was therefore not simply a sculpture reduced to coin size. It was the result of negotiation between artistic vision and industrial manufacture.
Collectors usually encounter the Saint-Gaudens story through finished coins: a 1907 High Relief double eagle, a common-date 1920s twenty, or a modern American Gold Eagle.
The November 11, 1905 letter takes the story backward to the design process.
At that moment, there was no famous Saint-Gaudens twenty-dollar gold piece yet. There were ideas, conversations, sketches, and ambitions.
That makes the date valuable for a historical calendar. It captures creativity before it hardened into metal.
The letter also reminds us that coin designs do not appear fully formed. They emerge through correspondence, models, revisions, technical compromises, political decisions, and personal relationships.
November 11, 1905 marks a documented step in the collaboration that produced what many collectors consider America’s most beautiful coin.
Saint-Gaudens was corresponding directly with President Theodore Roosevelt about a new national coinage. The sculptor was thinking about Liberty in motion and the American eagle. Roosevelt was encouraging him to pursue a more ambitious artistic standard than the Mint had traditionally accepted.
Two years later, those ideas would become gold.
The Indian Head eagle and Saint-Gaudens double eagle transformed American coin design. The double eagle’s Liberty would eventually return on the American Gold Eagle, ensuring that the imagery conceived during the Roosevelt era remained part of U.S. coinage well into the twenty-first century.
A letter written on November 11 did not strike a single coin.
But it helped shape millions of them.
ALSO ON THIS DAY
1834 — 1804 Dollar Diplomatic Sets Ordered — Secretary of State John Forsyth requested presentation coin sets for the King of Siam and Sultan of Muscat, initiating the diplomatic-set project that produced the Class I 1804 dollars.