Half Dollars

Ya, I like Franklins, but there is no arguing the Walking Liberties are goregous coins!

 

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Who is the BEP?

 

Adolph Weinman designed both the walking liberty halves and Mercury dimes, both beautiful coins. Actually, I love all the old coins.

 

The $500 and $1000 bills were last printed in 1944 and last circulated by the Federal Reserve in 1969.

 

If the Kennedy half had been chosen for the State and now Parks coins they would have been largely ignored - much like the presidential dollar coins.

 

Yes the Modern Commemorative set would be about three hundred coins and still nobody would be collecting them.

 

I also strongly suspect that the increase in usage of credit cards and debit cards has been a contributor to the lack of usage of halves...

 

Not Franklin halfs, Franklin bills, It's all about the green !!!

 

Silver is still going for $20 an ounce.

 

I'm going to say this: Buying power. You could get a whole lot more for fifty cents in the 60s than you can get now.

 

And we have the real winner for this time, back in the Seventies and Eighties it was mostly because vending machines and phones slots and the slug detectors were too small.
Edit that debit cards actually are making all coins obsolete.

 

Amen to that I couldn't agree more first off I'm tired of all the current presidential coinage none of its changed since before I was born and I'm nearly 40 and second it's all ugly I've always thought so even when I collected coins as a kid the only presidential coins I collected then were Lincoln cents I also collected buffaloes Indian cents liberty nickels and anything earlier i could buy bring back the walking liberty halves the st gaudens $20 the seated liberty etc or something similar

 

the bep stopped making 500, 1000, 5000, and 10,000 dollar bills in 1945 and they were phased out in 1969. some 500s and 1000s were made in the '50s with the date "1934-C" but none of these were released

 

I was a paper boy from about 1963-5 and began collecting then. Old those old coins were still in circulation. I didn't know how well off I was.

 

I think the Kennedy half is a beautiful coin. Also, people don't choose to use a coin or not based on quality of artistic design alone. There's many reasons that added up such that the half dollar does not circulate today. It started in 1964.

1) So many people hoarded the first Kennedy half that even though hundreds of millions were minted, it was still not enough to meet initial demand. But this demand was not for use as a coin, but to keep as a memento of the slain President.

2) Beginning in 1965 silver was removed from circulating coins and replaced with non-silver clad coins. The Mint was under pressure to crank these clad coins out because people were hoarding the silver and ultimately resulted in a coin shortage. But the Mint kept 40% silver in the Kennedy half. Why? The Mint director must have known that any silver would be hoarded and not circulated. And that's what happened. Once the initial frenzy about the Kennedy half subsided, the half still did not circulate because it was the only coin to contain silver and so people still hoarded the silver. I can't believe the Mint would be so dumb as to not notice this, so I think there is another reason. And that reason is that the Mint simply did not have the machinery necessary to strike a non-silver clad half. Striking a half made of copper-nickel required far more pressure than the quarter since the half is a larger coin, and the Mint simply did not have the capacity to do it. So rather than completely discontinue the half only a year after it started, they continued to use 40% silver so that they could fully strike the coin on machinery they had. It wasn't until 1971 that the Mint had the ability to strike large Cu-Ni coins, like the Ike dollar and clad Kennedy half. So silver was finally taken out of the half in 1971.

3) People got used to using the quarter instead of the half. The result of both (1) and (2) above was that people used quarters as the workhorse of circulation and the half gradually fell out of favor. Look at the mintages from 1965 to 1969. Fewer halves were being minted because they were no longer needed. In 1970, you could only get them in mint sets. So by 1971, when clad halves finally became available, people were simply used to quarters. Once the public gets out of the habit of something, it's hard to go back. Quarters have been in dominant use instead.

So why do they keep making the half? It seems to be a money maker for the mint, as least as special collectibles. No longer made for circulation, the half has become a permanent commemorative coin, it seems. The Mint offers special silver proofs and will even issue a special set for 2014, all with popular demand. So many people do like the coin, but not as a circulating coin.

 

the BEP is the Beareau of Engraving and Printing. they produce all of the paper money in circulation

 

I've covered this before. The mint was not "dumb", they wanted to get rid of silver completely and if they had their way there wouldn't have been any 40% silver halves. The 40% silver halves were a political bribe. The mint wanted to get rid of all the silver and the coinage act of 1965 would have done that, but in the Senate they needed the support of the western silver producing states for passage. So they reached a compromise. If the western states would support the bill they would leave the half dollar, the largest current circulating coin, as 40% silver and they would strike 45 million new silver dollars to replace those the Treasury had been handing out and to guarantee a supply for the western states where the dollar coin had been traditionally most used. With out this compromise the western states were adamantly opposed to the clad coinage.

So they got their 40% silver half and dollar coin and they voted for the Act and it became Law. Then by Presidential order the silver dollar was scrapped. And after five years of no circulation and rising silver prices that made even the 40% silver half a money loser they managed to scrap it and switch to the clad half in 1971.

 

Good answer Condor.

Do you know of any good articles or publications that covers this issue?

 

I don't know where to start so all I will add is: What a great fiction writer!

 

You'll find a good portion of it in A Guidebook of Peace Dollars by Roger Burdette. I've seen articles about it in Coin World and Coins Magazine in the past. There may be some in the coin world almanac in the sections where they discuss the coin shortages of the early 60's, the 1964 date freeze, the coinage act of 1965, and silver history.

And caleb, dramatized maybe, but not fiction, or at least not much, I am writing from memory and not checking references.