Featured The Morgan melt down: Pittman Act 1918

I was talking with a guy the other day and we were making rough guesses at what the actual population of a given Morgan date and MM, (standard business strikes), would still be in existence today. Basically rough guesses at the percentages left anywhere in existence. What's left that hasn't been buried, melted or lost forever.

I remembered reading something in the Red Book about some act that made them melt down a bunch of Morgans at some point in time. So I read it and it says the Pittman Act of 1918 caused 270,232,722 Morgans to be melted down.

I added up all the mintage figures and came up with a little over 570 million total minted, up to 1904. Which is key because the 1921s wouldn't have been in existence when the melt down went into effect.

So you take into account the 270+ million melted down in 1918 and we can note that, at maximum only about 300 million pre-1921 Morgans could possibly exist today. They melted 47% of them!

BTW, if anyone's curious, that would be 15,916,707 pounds of Morgans! Or, 7,958 tons. About 318 modern day truck loads. That's 208,889,894 troy ounces of pure silver. About 2.3 billion dollars worth of silver by todays price. All melted for bullion. (We'll never know the cost of manufacturing, transporting and melting it all again.)

Anyway....... I was wondering if anybody had any info on what were the bulk of the coins that hit the melting pots and where was all this done? Were they melting at all the mints? Was it even done at the mints? It's probably safe to assume that some years took a huge hit and bore the brunt of the melting while other years may have (for the most part) escaped unscathed. Does anybody even have a remote idea? Were worn coins targeted or did it even matter?

I ask strictly out of curiosity because it sure makes things interesting. An 1893-O for example had a mintage of 300,000. From there, we don't really know if 5% or 62% of those could have been melted. Just from this act. Not even taking into account how many of them have been lost or destroyed around the world.

 

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From what I understand, there are no records of which specific coins were melted. I believe I was told that the government basically gathered up what they could find, and melted them.

 

Interesting, thanks for the info

 

Interesting thread Vess. I've always wondered this myself but its probably impossible to actually figure out how many of a given year/mm were melted. The 1887-S for example had a mintage of 1,771,000. Of those, who knows if there may have been half of those melted. We may never know.

 

Interesting....It would help if there was only one melting facility and we knew where it was located.

 

I don't have it in front of me, But the Red Book Guide to Morgan Dollars by Q David Bowers touched upon some of this, I know that some dates were released from the treasury vaults in great numbers, some were nearly nonexistent, he mentioned that something huge like 85% of the mintage of one of the CC dates was in the basement of the treasury, and that until a few bags were found, one semi common New Orleans date used to be a huge rarity, comparable to the 93-S.

Philadelphia allegedly coined 12,000 Silver dollars in 1895, wouldn't be surprised if those 12 bags were in the wrong place at the wrong time and got melted.

 

You could speculate that since Senator Pittman was from Nevada and that the Carson City Mint was the US Assay Facility at the time, most of the melted coins may have been CC or S minted.
Just a thought.

 

That's an interesting thought. The thing is, the total CC mintage figure stands around only 13 million total to begin with. Even if they had melted every CC Morgan ever made, it would account for less than 5% of the total coins melted by this act. That being said, many CC populations could have been devastated by this.

I wonder if the later years might have taken a bad hit, such as the 1900s to 1904s? Just because of the likelihood that many of them still could have been sitting around in bags in 1918. More so than say 1880's examples. Which you would think they would have had more of a chance (more time) for most of them getting spread out into circulation and gone by the time this went on.

All speculation. Who knows? When you're dealing with a number that large, they could have rounded up huge circulated bags full of everything from the banks. Including bags from the mints. Hard to imagine what we're left with.

 

I'd imagine that they grabbed whatever was easiest and melted that, probably without any real concern as to date or mint mark.

 

I agree with that.

from "Banking Principles And Practice"

The occasion of the Pittman Act was explained in Volume I, Chapter I, as the sudden and pressing need for a great quantity of specie to pay the adverse trade balance with India during the war, and the desire to conserve the gold supply for reserve purposes. There were other incidental purposes, such as the stabilization of the price of silver and the encouragement of its production.

... and according to wikipedia, they paid britain with the melted silver. Between 1920 and 1933, the mint took the same amount of silver from the mines to replace all the silver that had been melted, and coined silver dollars.

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittman_Act
http://chestofbooks.com/finance/ban...s-And-Practice-2/The-Pittman-Act-Of-1918.html

 

It's an interesting question. Sometimes I feel the same way about some of the modern gold commemorative coins, particularly from the 1980s. Websites like APMEX sell them in bulk as bullion coins and it seems likely that over a period of years this will cut into the population of collectible coins.

 

After the Treasury stopped the distribution of silver dollars in exchange for silver certificates in 1963 one of the things that turned up in an inventory of what remained in the vaults included over 75% of the entire mintage of the 1884 CC dollar. All in Mint State. Until that time it had been one of the keys to the Morgan dollars.

1921 and 1928. The coining of the 1921 morgans and then the Peace dollars was to replace the coins melted by the Pittman Act. That's why the coinage of Peace dollars stopped in 1928, they had reached the number of coins melted. (the 1934 and 35 coins were the result of another silver purchase act.)

As to the O mint coin there are two candidates, Untill the great run on the Treasury in the early 1960's the 1903-O was THE key coin for the Morgans with only 6 MS coins known and even a circulated pieces was rare. Many major collections either lacked the issue or they were quite proud if they managed to have a circulated one. Then BAGS of them in MS started coming out of the vaults. The price PLUMMETED from over $1500 (remember that's in 1960 dollars. $1500 would buy a decent new car.) to $15. It has since recovered somewhat but is still nowhere close to its early 60's price. The other possibility would be the 1898-O dollars which were also considered to be one of the top coins. A LOT of bags of that one were released and today it is a common.

 

coins make a great investment

 

Just think how cheap Morgans would be if they hadn't melted almost half of them.

I think a lot of the melted Morgans were reincarnated as 1921 Morgans and Peace dollars. Only for some more to be remelted in the eighties!

 

Yeah, all the multitudes of previously unknown, MS hoards popping up all the time really makes coin buying a risky business.


BTW, thanks to others who have provided some great info in this thread.

 

Ah HA!

Thanks Conder!

I knew I was at least close on those figures, I forgot that it was the 1903-O that was the previously known rarity.

$1,500 in 1960? Wonder what a 1916 SLQ was worth in 1960....

 

Interesting stuff. If they had only taught this in history class, it would've been much easier to stay awake. By the way, I also read that many of the 1904 & earlier Morgans were used to make the 1921's.

 

Here's an interesting article about the transition to Peace Dollars. Surprisingly, 96% of what was melted by the Pittman Act went to the British! Meaning almost all of the 1921s and Peace dollars were produced using newly mined silver.

It says the lady that was the model for the Peace dollar lived until 1990.

http://www.us-coin-values-advisor.com/Peace-dollar-values.html

 

Great thread Vess, and thanks for the info, Condor.

I too have at times wished for answers to many of the questions posed here about the survival rate of Morgans. I have often heard the figure "10%" quoted as the estimated number still around today, but who knows for sure? No records were kept in 1980 when silver spiked and many more thousands of Morgans were melted. Could any have been sent to the smelter last year when silver prices crested $20?

I seem to recall reading that the 1903-O Morgan was THE chase coin of Morgans for many, many years. That changed after the Redfield hoard was uncovered. If I'm not mistaken, Redfield had amassed thousands of 1903-Os, and the discovery and release of them by Paramount to the public caused the bottom to fall out of the price.

 

Rubin I think your referencing another post where said coins were not a good investment or something similar:secret:. Some coins have been bad investments in fact, but most especially keys have done quite well.

On a different note, Condor knows things that I think few people know. You must be a history professor, have a really good memory, and/or have a lot of time on your hand.:thumb: