I'm talking about the 200,000,000 of them that was in bank hoards that the government slowly but surely melt down. I'm aware of when we sent millions of ounces to european countries but do the mint officials have a personal distaste for them? And is it true they are still recalling them from older banks? I'm for sure wouldnt mind for there to be more surviving morgans than there are!
The Comstock Lode and politics forced the mint to coin oceans of morgans that just sat in banks for decades. Trade dollars made things worse. Too much silver, if theres such a thing...
They wanted the silver for other things, and almost nobody wanted Morgan dollars. If more had been preserved, they'd be less valuable, and you'd want them less.
I have my theory. If you can get through my 35-screen slide show, my reasoning will be evident: http://www.moonlightmint.com/VAM_privately_made/00.htm . Here is an excerpt from screen 35: Congress passed the Pitman Act on 23 April 1918. This act mandated the melting of 270 million silver dollars. Three years later the US Mint produced 87 million silver dollars dated 1921, then 84 million more in 1922, 56 million in 1923, 36 million during 1924-1926, and 12 million from 1927-1935. Why would the US Government melt 270 million silver dollars, only to replace them with 275 million new coins within a few years ? Somebody in the government knew the enormity of the [counterfeiting] situation, and this was their method of “cleansing” the circulating coinage base.
Ridiculously interesting!! Imagine that the problem was much much larger than "2,000,000" counterfeits. What if it was tens of millions!!
In 1918 Britain needed silver for the purchase of needed war supplies (sellers didn't want paper money from a country that was on shaky ground), they also needed silver for their control of India (A country that was very pro silver). They didn't have it but we had hundreds of millions of silver dollars just sitting and taking up space in our vaults. Britain was an ally so we sold them the silver at $1 per oz (Which was above the market price at the time. But we had them over a barrel, they needed the silver quickly and the market couldn't have supplied it fast enough, but we had it already on hand.) We melted the dollars and shipped the silver to England. The law allowed for the melting of 250 million silver dollars with roughly 50 million ounces being earmarked for minor US coinage and the balance going to Britain. Why after we melted the coins did we recoin them three years later? Two reasons, One all those silver dollars in the vaults were the backing for the silver certificates in circulation. Melting the coins meant that $250 million in silver certificates had to be withdrawn from circulation, and hurt our economy. Recoining the silver dollars would allow the government to issue (spend) $250 million dollars. Second, it was a political plum for the silver mining interests. There was a provision in the Pitman Act that required the dollars to be recoined and the silver HAD to be purchased from newly mined domestic silver AND PAID FOR AT THE RATE OF $1 PER OZ. This was still well above the market price for silver, so the law REQUIRED the government to overpay private companies for the raw materials. The government would have taken a loss on the recoinage costs, but the section that sold the silver to England also included a few cents extra per oz to cover the recoinage costs. Once the dollars melted under the Pitman Act had been replaced, which happened in 1928 coinage of dollars stopped. Beginning in 1933 the government again began trying to support the silver interests and to inflate the currency buy buying silver and issuing silver certificates. At the time the certificates had to backed by SILVER DOLLARS so that was the reason for the 1934 and 1935 Peace dollars, then the law was changed to just "monitize" the silver bullion and allow it to back the certificates without the expense and storage problems of coinage. So the Peace dollar ended abd silver purchases continued to the extend of over two BILLION oz of silver which allowed for the issuance of over $2.5 billion worth of silver certificates.
How would melting down a couple hundred million silver dollars that had for the most part NEVER been in circulation cleanse the circulating coinage base? The vast majority of the Morgan dollars produced went straight from the presses to the vaults and never made it into circulation.
The EASIEST silver dollars to acquire and melt would have been all those bags of uncirculated silver dollars that were just sitting in bank vaults. This includes, among others, the bags of CC-mint and O-mint dollars in the US Treasury Department vaults. Instead of melting those, the US Treasury went to the extra effort of obtaining dollars that were in circulation because that is where the counterfeits were. The uncirculated bags of dollars had a known chain of custody from the mint to the bank, and so the US Treasury knew that those coins were good.
And it WAS the bags from the vaults that got melted. AS far as I know the Treasury never made any attempt to recover dollars from circulation for melting under Pitman. Documents from the time speak of transferring dollars from the VAULTS to the mint for melting. Plus it would have taken a lot of time to recover a couple hundred million coins form circulation, time they didn't have. Plus most of the dollar coins never entered circulation at all so all of the dollars they needed for melting were right there on hand. It would not make much sense to try and recover coins from circulation.
I thought one of the reasons for supporting Britain with the Pittman Act was due to Germany's efforts to devalue the British pound in India and thus destabilize that area of the world.
Very nice presentation, Dan. What's the government's current attitude toward vintage counterfeits? Do they even recognize them as counterfeits? Are they OK to own or sell? Cal
A conspiracy-theorist dealer at the last local show was explaining to me and my friend that all those CC-mint dollars released by the GSA in the 1970s were actually restrikes. (And that certain "never printed" blocks of certain paper-money series were actually printed and sent to Saddam or someone of that ilk.) If a government counterfeits its own currency, is it still a counterfeit?
What "vaults" were those ? The easiest vaults to access would have been the Treasury's own vaults. But a lot of bags of uncirculated silver dollars survived in US Treasury vaults. Circulated silver dollars in quantity were temporarily stored in numerous bank vaults across the country. Those would have been a little more difficult to acquire, but still accessible. It would if a lot of them were counterfeit. The last thing the US Government would want to tell people is that a lot of the silver dollars in circulation were counterfeit and that is why they were being rounded up. Doing so wouldn't exactly instill public confidence in the circulating money base.
There have not been any cases of "counterfeit" collector coins being seized in recent times that I am aware of, except maybe one instance. Bernard Von Notaus was convicted of "counterfeiting" for the attempted distribution into commerce of his "Liberty Dollar" coins. Many of those coins, which belonged to various people, were seized from a bank vault. Later, the US Treasury returned most of those coins to their various owners.
