The main history that I remember about the coinage of the Morgan Dollar was Congress mandating the minting of a silver dollar via the so-called Bland-Allison Act in 1878. The West had a lot of silver and they wanted to sell it to the US government. I'm curious why no half-dollars (or quarters and dimes for that matter) were minted (the law only specified silver dollars). From my reading, people hated the large and heavy dollar coin. The half-dollar was popular and circulated heavily until the 1950's. From the book The History of United States Coinage, "In 1877 pattern half dollars were. issued in an unprecedented variety of designs." - President Hayes veto message: https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/february-8-1878-veto-bland-allison-act - https://www.pcgs.com/news/whatever-happened-to-the-half-dollar
The silver dollar had been the backbone of America's financial system from the beginning in 1792. Back before 1964 a bank was required to have enough bullion on hand to back paper notes, those bearing an exchange value. In 1873, Congress demonetized silver firmly establishing the monetary system to the gold standard. Known as the Crime of '73. Two years later, the Species Resumption Act was designed to make all currency, green backs included, to be backed in gold. These two acts brought about a flurry of petitioning upon Congress, not only from the silver industry but debtors and an angry public. Another significant instance came in 1917 with the Pittman Act which sent large quantities of silver to Europe following World War I. This brought about the 1921 Morgan and Peace Dollars following a seventeen year lapse in dollar production. One must remember, there were way more Morgans still circulating prior to 1917 than needed in commerce. Same thing after the final Peace dollar until 1964. So in short, the larger denomination always held precedence over fractional values.
Not really. Only with the Morgan and Peace dollars did dollars outnumber half dollars in mintage. And even then, not always.
The silver producers wanted the government to buy silver to support the market price. The Bland - Allison Act, which authorized the Morgan Dollars required massive silver purchases which had to be turned in coins. Silver dollars were the largest coin that soaked up the most silver. If you had to enact a bad, special interest group policy, it was better to strike 8 million useless half dollars a year than 16 million half dollars.
Halves weren't useless, see Barber and Walking Liberty half dollar mintages. It's very easy to find well worn (circulated) examples.
Half dollars were more useful than silver dollars, but as it is with virtually everything, you can have too many of them. You can mint them to the point where the economy can’t use them, and they end up stored in vaults just like the Morgan silver dollars. If the Bland-Alison Bill had called for half dollars or quarters, the mint capacity would have had to have been greatly increased because of the huge increases in the mintages that would been required. If we had to enact this legislation to satisfy the silver lobby, silver dollars resulted in the least amount of government excess and wasted taxpayer dollars.
