presentation on Standing Liberty Quarters

Darn! You're right!

 

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Covered that already, absolutely no documentation of any such thing. Addition of chain mail was never ordered by the mint and McNeil did it on his own in violation of orders from the mint. Not sure which edition of Cline you have, but I've two of the editions and the only references I remember Cline making to it was as a popular myth.

 

This is the error I meant to post for the Standing Liberty 25c; I mistakenly said it was struck on a steel cent; it was struck on a Mercury dime planchet (100 Greatest U.S. Error Coins a la @Fred Weinberg )

 

Ok, we have a bare breast discrepancy here!!

I have J.H. Cline's book on Standing Liberty Quarters, Fourth edition, 2007

page 32:

"In this very first design by Herman MacNeil, Miss Liberty is topless. When the original design was about to be changed to the Type II design, Secretart W.G. McAdoo states in the last paragraph of his petition (see 1st session, 65th Congress Report No. 78 on page 32), '... the artist has found that they were not true to the original design and that a great improvement can be made in the artisitic value and appearance of the coin by making the slight changes the act contemplates...'

Nothing could be further than the truth! The truth is that they wanted to cover Miss Liberty's bust, as the Congressmen's wives were opposed to the bare breasts. They call it everything else."

OK, so what is the real truth behind this? Was Cline, an acknowledged expert in Standing Liberty Quarters, wrong?

 

Sounds to me like:

On the one hand, we have written records from the time.

On the other hand, we have an author editorializing, nearly 60 years after the fact.

In fact, I wonder if he was trying to make a joke.

 

The records may not describe the actual reasoning. I would guess in 1916, the upfront discussion of exposed breasts was likely inappropriate.

 

It's hard to say what that quote would mean considering the 1916 type one was not true to the original design.In the fact they were making a petition for change does not mean they were intending to cover the breast. And there's still no documentation about any requests to cover the breast.

 

I'm going to jump in and say that you shouldn't take Cline as an expert on everything in his SLQ book.

I own and read it several times. I feel that several portions of the book are unsubstantiated opinions, including his discussion on the 'bare breast' stuff. Additionally there are alot of words and not much substance. The individual date/mintmark coin analyses are not really helpful as he mainly just focuses on MS level coins and there is little, if any, discussion about the dynamics of circulated grades and their marketplace.

I do like the section on errors, which seem to be very rare for this series, as if the Mint really focused on preventing errors, even though production quality control was not great (rampant excess die fatigue, striking pressures, etc).

Lastly, the book must not have had a professional editor just in the excessive and completely unnecessary use of exclamation marks (!). A book intended to be a scholarly work should never use exclamation marks.