The following apply to all varieties of both the dollar and the half dollar. The dates 1822-1922 refer to the centennial of birth of General (later President) Ulysses Simpson Grant, whose dissolute portrait (after a Mathew Brady photograph) adorns the obverse. The tiny letter G between those dates is actually a monogrammed LGF for Laura Gardin Fraser, the illustrious sculptor who modeled these coins. On the gold dollar this detail is very difficult to see even with a good magnifying glass-one of her few miscalculations.
Reverse depicts a small frame house at Point Pleasant, Ohio, near Cincinati, where Grant was born on April 27, 1822. Laura Gardin Fraser worked from photographs of the house taken before it was restored, showing two stands of trees omitted on the centennial medal. The log cabin label was affixed to this design by Andrew W. Mellon, then Secretary of the Treasury, who so described it in his annual report for fiscal 1922. As Slabaugh has pointed out, Mellon confused this frame house with a log cabin Grant built over 30 years later on his wife's farm near St. Louis.
We confess puzzlement over why General "Unconditional Surrender" Grant had to appear on two different commemorative coins, and why he ties for third place with Jefferson (behind Washington and Lincoln) in the number of different issues of paper currency portraying him. We can understand why Washington, "Father of His Country," has always been a favorite for currency portraiture, and why Lincoln the Liberator and Martyr followed him, and why Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, followed them. But why Grant? Grant was as controversial in his day as Richard Nixon was in his. Forced to resign his army commission after the Mexican War owing to alcoholism, which was then regarded the way heroin addiction is now, Grant succeeded at only one thing (his Civil War generalship) until the Republican Party nominated him for the presidency (solely on the basis of his war record), in which he ran in a campaign which was unrivaled for dirtiness until 1972. Once elected, Grant produced a record as one of the worst presidents of all.
He apparently could not believe that any of his sycophantic friends could either be incompetent or dishonest, yet many were both. Even after others began warning him, he could not believe that the people who gave him exorbitantly expensive gifts could have ulterior motives. Yet the record speaks for itself: Jay Gould bought off various presidential assistants in his notorious attempt to corner the gold market. Orville Babcock, Grant's private secretary, was implicated in the Whiskey Ring and the abortive attempt to annex Santo Domigo. William Belknap, his Secretary of War, was convicted of taking bribes. Grant himself offered the post of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to the notorious "Boss" Conkling (Senator Rosce Conkling, of New York), and he publicly consorted with the even more notorious robber baron Jim Fisk, "Boss" Tweed's crony, implicated (until Fisk was murdered) in wholesale buying of judges and bribery of legislatures. We are not implying that Grant was wicked, merely that he was a victim of the Peter Principle" As president, he had gone to a level where he was completely beyond his competence, and he is and was a poor choice to be honored on U.S. coins or currency.
Little is known of the behind the scenes activity as the correspondence has not survived:what is known is that the House, on October 17, 1921, passed a bill on behalf of the Ulysses S. Grant Centenary Memorial Commission authorizing the issue of 200,000 "souvenir" gold dollars, to be sold by the Committee on Banking and Currency was probably aware of the sales fiascos of the previous gold dollar souvenir.
The Centenary Commission wanted these coins to help finance the construction of memorial buildings in Georgetown and Bethel, and a five-mile highway from New Richmond to Point Pleasant, all these being Ohio locales associated with Grant's pre-war years.
As early as February 24, 1922, James Earle Fraser submitted Laura's model for the gold dollar obverse to the Centenary Commission, which promptly approved it. Less than two weeks later, her models for the half dollar were complete and approved; that for its reverse was also to be used (in greater mechanical reduction at the mint) for the gold dollar reverse. On March 3, Jamese Earle Fraser wrote to Charles Moore, Chairman of the Federal Fine Arts Commission, officially approving the designs; when Moore concurred, they went to the mint, and before March 31, the gold dollar coinage was completed.
The Grant Centenary Commission had requested that 5,000 of the 10,000 gold dollars show a special mark. Since there was no historically significant numeral or emblem available which tied in directly with Grant, an incused star was chosen. (They might have had in mind the General's uniform stars, though this was never mentioned as a possible meaning.) As soon as the coins showed up for public sale, in April, people began remembering the special marks on the Alabama and Missouri half dollars, and adverse criticism cited the venality of this procedure. However, both batches of gold dollars sold out, the "star" coins at $3.50 each, the "plain" at $3 each. In the meantime, the Mint completed the first batch of 100,000 half dollars. Much to the Centenary Commission's surprise, this contained a bonus: 5,000 of the coins had an incused star similar to that on the dollars. From April 1922 to the end of the year, the Commission offered the half dollars at $1 apiece, star or no star; as sales lagged, they lowered the price of the remaining 29,000 odd halves in December 1922 to 75c each for the "plain" variety (in lots of 10 or more) and raised the "star" coins to $1.50 each. Sales of both were stopped as of January 1, 1923, and the Commission returned the unsold coins to the mint for re-melting.
At least four matte or sandblast proof half dollars with star are known to exist. One of these was in the J.R. Sinnock estate. A second was offered by the late Charles E. Green of Chicago during the 1950s; this is believed to be the coin later in the R. E. Cox collection. One of these two went to Herbert Tobias, who still had it in recent years. The fourth is in a private collection. Four matte or sandblast proof half dollars without star are reported, but we have not examined any.
Matte proof gold dollars with stars are rumored to exist but we have not examined any. Sharpness on all the matte proofs is considerably greater than on even the uncirculated half dollars illustrated herein, notably on Grant's hair, beard, uniform, and the reverse leaves, roof and siding. In addition, these coins will show neither the die striations nor any mint frost. Counterfeits have been offered as matte proofs, but they are so much inferior in detail sharpness as to rule out acceptance. The same remark holds for chemically treated coins.
Trial pieces of the gold dollars exist in white metal and brass; owing to Treasury Department policy (which cites a mythical law mentioned in the Dr. Judd book on patterns), we have not kept any record of location of these. The same remark holds for the obverse trial pieces of the half dollar in copper, white metal and brass, and for the white metal trials of the reverse die.
Many specimens of the Grant Plain half dollar survive in barely or marginally uncirculated state, others in lower grades; evidently some were kept as pocket pieces or spent. Gem specimens are not easy to locate, however. The gold dollars are more often found in choice mint state, and there is not much difference between them in scarcity reckoned in terms of numbers offered. We are unable to understand the pricing practice which pretends that the "plain" is much rarer than the "star" in the gold dollars.
About 1935, a Bronx dentist purchased several hundred Grant "plain" half dollar and punched stars into them to simulate the rarer issue, which was then the highest priced of all commemorative silver coins ($65 as against $3.50 for the "plain"). Even in recent years, these coins (and possibly others made by different parties for the same reason) have been showing up to plague collectors. Illustrations of the genuine and the faked stars will show more clearly than words the differences.
Many collectors have heard that the test of a genuine Grant "star" half dollar is "die breaks at chin and tie." This is a misconception: what actually happened was that very early in the life of the obverse die found on almost all genuine Grant "star" coins, it clashed against a reverse without a blank planchet between them, and (as the illustration of the genuine clearly shows) impressions from the spaces between clumps of leaves appear between chin and G and in field just right of tie; and at tops of F DO there are clash marks from the very top of the trees. On some specimens these are less obvious than on that here from Grant "plain" coins. Nor have they been reported on any ordinary Grant "plain" halves. (It is possible that cast counterfeits may exist, made from genuine Grant "star" coins; but these can be detected in the same ways as other casts-weight, specific gravity and microscopic surface texture.)
Two varieties of reverse of the genuine Grant "star" are known. It is uncertain if this means two reverse dies. In what we take to be the first reverse (or reverse state), there is little or no spacing between leaves in the areas indicated by arrows on the illustration. In what we take to be the second. "Variety II," the reverse die has obviously been much repolished, probably to remove clash marks. This process has left plain openings among the leaves, in the four areas indicated by arrows. Lettering in E PLURIBUS UNUM has been much thinned out, and the top of L is lower than the tops of P-U; the upper stroke of E appears longer than the two lower strokes; and the thinning out of these letters produces other subtler differences apparent on inspections.
Little is known of the behind the scenes activity as the correspondence has not survived:what is known is that the House, on October 17, 1921, passed a bill on behalf of the Ulysses S. Grant Centenary Memorial Commission authorizing the issue of 200,000 "souvenir" gold dollars, to be sold by the Committee on Banking and Currency was probably aware of the sales fiascos of the previous gold dollar souvenir.