OCTOBER 26
1977•American Innovation $1 Proof Set
2023•2023 Innovation $1 Proof Set
Stella Hackel Is Appointed Director of the U.S. Mint
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On October 26, 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Stella B. Hackel to become the 32nd Director of the United States Mint. Her appointment placed her at the head of the nation’s coin-producing agency during one of the most consequential periods in modern American circulating-coin history.
Within roughly two years, the Mint would prepare and begin producing the Susan B. Anthony dollar, the first circulating United States coin to portray an identifiable American woman. Hackel’s tenure also came at a time when the Mint was dealing with rising production demands, changing technology, and renewed debate over the size and usefulness of the dollar coin.
Hackel was not an engraver or coin designer. Her importance to numismatic history comes from administration: she led the institution responsible for transforming legislation and design decisions into hundreds of millions of actual coins.
From Vermont Public Service to the United States Mint
Stella Bloomberg Hackel came to Washington after a career in public service in Vermont. She had served in state government and became Vermont State Treasurer, building experience in public finance and administration before joining the federal government.
President Carter selected her to lead the Bureau of the Mint in 1977. The United States Mint’s official historical timeline records October 26 as the date of her appointment.
Hackel became the fourth woman appointed Director of the Mint, following Nellie Tayloe Ross, Eva Adams, and Mary Brooks. The succession reflected an unusual feature of twentieth-century Mint history: long before women routinely occupied many of the highest positions in federal agencies, several women had already served as the nation’s chief Mint administrator.
What a Mint Director Actually Does
The Director of the Mint does not personally design every coin or operate the presses. The office oversees a large national manufacturing and financial institution.
During Hackel’s era, the Mint was responsible for producing circulating coinage in enormous quantities, manufacturing proof and uncirculated collector products, maintaining production facilities, managing precious metals and dies, coordinating with the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve, and implementing coinage laws passed by Congress.
That last responsibility is especially important in understanding Hackel’s place in coin history. Congress can authorize a new denomination or design, but the Mint must make it practical. Designs have to be translated into dies. Planchets have to be procured. Presses have to be prepared. Production schedules have to be established. Coins must be packaged, shipped, and integrated into the banking system.
Hackel entered the office just as a major dollar-coin experiment was moving toward reality.
The United States had struggled for decades to make a circulating dollar coin successful.
Traditional silver dollars were large and heavy. The Eisenhower dollar, introduced in 1971, retained the traditional 38.1-millimeter diameter even though regular circulation pieces were made from copper-nickel clad material rather than silver.
The coin was useful in casinos and some specialized settings, but it never became a common substitute for the paper dollar in everyday transactions. Its size and weight worked against widespread public use.
Government officials increasingly considered a smaller dollar coin as a possible solution. A compact coin could be easier to carry, cheaper to use in automated equipment, and more practical for routine commerce.
The debate eventually produced legislation authorizing a small dollar honoring Susan B. Anthony.
Susan B. Anthony Enters American Coinage
Susan B. Anthony was one of the most prominent leaders of the nineteenth-century movement for women’s voting rights. Placing her portrait on a circulating dollar would make her the first identifiable American woman portrayed on a regular-issue United States circulating coin.
The Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin Act became law in October 1978, during Hackel’s tenure.
The law created a dollar dramatically smaller than the Eisenhower dollar. Instead of the traditional large silver-dollar dimensions, the new coin measured only slightly larger than a quarter.
That compact size was supposed to solve the practical problems associated with the Eisenhower dollar. It would instead create a new problem: many people found the new dollar too easy to confuse with a quarter.
Chief Sculptor-Engraver Frank Gasparro created the portrait of Susan B. Anthony used on the obverse.
The reverse retained Gasparro’s Apollo 11 eagle design from the Eisenhower dollar, showing an eagle descending toward the lunar surface with Earth in the distance. The reuse connected the new small dollar with its large predecessor while allowing the obverse to establish a completely new identity.
The coin’s eleven-sided inner border was intended to help distinguish it visually, but its round outer edge, copper-nickel color, and diameter close to that of the quarter remained problematic.
Hackel’s Mint had to convert these designs into a mass-produced circulating coin and prepare the public and financial system for a denomination unlike any dollar previously issued by the United States.
Production Begins Before the 1979 Date Arrives
One of the interesting quirks of the Susan B. Anthony dollar is that coins dated 1979 began being struck before 1979.
The Mint needed time to build inventories before the new dollar could be released nationwide. Production therefore began in December 1978.
Hackel participated in the ceremonial first-strike period as the Mint launched the new coin into production. Large quantities were struck at Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco in preparation for the public introduction.
This was not a small commemorative program. The Mint was preparing a new circulating denomination for national use, requiring production on a scale measured in hundreds of millions of pieces.
The Anthony dollar represented a milestone regardless of its later commercial difficulties.
Allegorical female figures such as Liberty had appeared on American coins since the eighteenth century, and other women had appeared on commemorative issues. But Susan B. Anthony was a specific historical American woman placed on a regular circulating United States coin.
That distinction gave the coin cultural significance beyond its denomination.
It also meant that Hackel, herself one of the relatively small number of women who had headed the Mint, was leading the agency when another barrier in American coinage was broken.
The Susan B. Anthony dollar entered public circulation in July 1979.
The government hoped Americans would embrace the smaller coin, but the response was disappointing. Its dimensions were too close to the quarter, and the two coins shared the same general color and metallic appearance.
Consumers frequently confused them. Cashiers had difficulty distinguishing them quickly. Many Americans simply preferred the familiar one-dollar bill.
The Mint had produced enormous inventories in anticipation of demand that did not materialize. Production dropped sharply after the initial years, and the coin disappeared from regular annual production after 1981.
That commercial failure does not erase its historical importance. Instead, the experience became a lesson that influenced later American dollar-coin design.
Lessons That Reached the Sacagawea Dollar
When the United States tried another small circulating dollar two decades later, officials addressed one of the Anthony dollar’s most obvious weaknesses.
The Sacagawea dollar, introduced in 2000, retained a small diameter but used a distinctive golden color and different visual character to separate it more clearly from the quarter.
Even then, the paper dollar remained dominant in everyday American commerce. But the design choices showed that the Mint had learned from the Anthony experiment.
The Susan B. Anthony dollar therefore became part of a longer history of attempts to persuade Americans to use dollar coins—a history extending from large silver dollars through Eisenhower, Anthony, Sacagawea, Presidential dollars, and Native American dollars.
Hackel’s appointment also belongs to the institutional history of the Mint itself.
Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman to serve as Director of the Mint in 1933 and remained in office for twenty years. Eva Adams led the Mint during the 1960s coin shortage and the introduction of clad coinage. Mary Brooks served during the 1970s and oversaw the Bicentennial coinage program.
Hackel followed these influential predecessors.
Her tenure was shorter, but it intersected with a landmark change in the dollar denomination. The Mint under Hackel had to manage the difficult transition from the large Eisenhower dollar to the compact Anthony dollar while maintaining the rest of the nation’s circulating-coin production.
A Period of Enormous Coin Production
The late 1970s were an industrially demanding period for the Mint.
American commerce required billions of cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars. On top of those regular demands, the Mint was preparing an entirely new dollar coin and building inventories before release.
Coin collecting was also firmly established as a mass hobby. Proof sets, uncirculated sets, and new issues attracted public attention, meaning the Mint served both the everyday monetary system and a large collector market.
The Director had to balance these responsibilities while dealing with Congress, Treasury officials, Mint facilities, employees, suppliers, and the Federal Reserve distribution system.
That administrative perspective helps explain why a Mint Director’s appointment deserves a place in a day-by-day history of American coinage. Coins do not emerge from design sketches alone. They require an institution capable of manufacturing them on a national scale.
Collectors today often view the Susan B. Anthony dollar very differently from consumers who rejected it in 1979.
Its short original production run, unusual size, historical subject, varieties, proof issues, and role as the first circulating U.S. coin depicting an identifiable American woman give the series a clear identity.
Some varieties have become particularly well known, including the 1979-P Wide Rim or Near Date dollar and the 1981-S Type 2 proof.
The denomination also returned unexpectedly in 1999 when dwindling government inventories required another production run before the Sacagawea dollar could be introduced.
Thus a coin once criticized as an unsuccessful experiment remained relevant enough to be produced again nearly two decades later.
Administration Is Part of Numismatic History
Coin history naturally focuses on objects: rare dates, famous designs, mintages, errors, precious metals, and spectacular auction prices.
But the history of the United States Mint is also the history of people who managed a federal manufacturing agency.
Directors make decisions within legal and political constraints. They oversee transitions between coin types, respond to shortages, manage facilities, coordinate new programs, and represent the Mint to the public.
Hackel’s appointment on October 26, 1977 is significant because it placed her in office immediately before one of those transitions.
Within a year Congress would authorize the Anthony dollar. Within fourteen months the Mint would begin striking it. By the summer of 1979, Americans would be handling the new coin.
October 26, 1977 was not a coin-release date. No new denomination entered circulation that day, and no famous rarity was struck.
Instead, it was an institutional milestone: the appointment of the person who would lead the United States Mint during the creation and launch of a historically important new dollar coin.
Stella Hackel became the 32nd Director of the Mint and the fourth woman appointed to the office. Her tenure coincided with the transformation of the American dollar coin from the oversized Eisenhower format to the small Susan B. Anthony dollar.
The Anthony dollar would struggle in circulation, but it broke an important representational barrier and taught lessons that shaped later small-dollar programs.
That makes Hackel’s appointment more than a biographical footnote. It marks the beginning of a Mint administration that would oversee one of the boldest—and most debated—experiments in modern United States circulating coinage.
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