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Walking Liberty Set Tough Enough to be Fun

from NUMISMATIC NEWS February 11, 2003
Written by Paul M. Green

     There are not many coins of the United States which really deserve to have their design used a second time, but few could question the decision to use A.A. Weinman's Walking Liberty half dollar again for the obverse of the silver American Eagle. The design is simply that good, a timeless American classic, and a collection of half dollars that is at least as interesting and impressive as the design.
     The Walking Liberty half dollar's burst onto the scene in 1916 was not an isolated event. In fact, there you could say that A.A. Weinman had perhaps the best coin designing year of any American in history, for in 1916 both his Mercury dime and Walking Liberty half dollar appeared.
     It was ironic that the Weinman designs were selected in a design competition held to replace the Barber designs on the dime, quarter and half dollar. The Barber design had been chosen after a design competition back in the early 1890s that had been dubbed a "wretched failure." Artists had refused to submit designs without changes in the competition's setup, and then works submitted to an open competition were viewed as not satisfactory by officials. Barber's designs were used basically because he was already on the payroll as chief engraver and all attempts at a real competition had failed.
     In another irony of the time, by 1916 Charles Barber was an aging and not always very helpful chief engraver being asked to help in the process of removing his own designs. Barber had a track record of being hostile to outside artists designing the coins he felt should be designed by him. With three new designs in one year, it could have gotten unpleasant.
     Three new coin designs in any single year are bound to have some problems, but based on what records exist, Barber appears to have been on something perilously close to his best behavior. He may simply have been too old and tired to fight, or perhaps even he recognized that the three winning designs were excellent.
     It is also possible that Barber, having been around for decades, recognized that fighting and stalling would do no good - the Mint director was delighted with the new designs. In his report he had described the half dollar as "a fulllength Liberty, the fold of the stars and stripes flying to the breeze as a background, progressing in full stride toward the dawn of a new day, carrying branches of laurel and oak symbolical of civil and military glory. The hand of the figure is outstretched in bestowal of the spirit of liberty. The reverse of the half dollar shows an eagle perched high upon a mountain crag, his wings unfolded, fearless in spirit and conscious of his power. Springing from a rift in the rock is a sapling of mountain pine, symbolical of America."
     For one reason or another, the Walking Liberty half dollar design was able to to move through the process with little trouble. In 1916 the first Walking Liberty halves were produced with mintages of 608,000 at Philadelphia, 1,014,400 at Denver and 508,000 pieces at San Francisco.
     The mintages seem low today, given that about 7.7 million Kennedy halves were struck in 2002 and almost none of those were for circulation - more than five million for Mint bag and roll sales and more than two million for the annual mint sets.
     In 1916 the half dollar circulated, but it was a more significant sum of money. Plus, mintages had been trending low in years prior to 1916. From 1913 through 1915 there were eight different Barber half dollars, and six of the eight had mintages under one million pieces. The 1916-S at 508,000 was the low-mintage date for the first year of Walking Liberty half dollar, but since 1913 there had been three dates with mintages not only lower than 508,000 but lower than 200,000, or less than one-half the total of the 1916-S. Moreover, the 1913-D Barber half had a mintage of 534,000, a mere 26,000 pieces more than the 1916-S, so at the time the mintages would not have seemed unusually low to a half dollar collector.

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