Abraham Wolfe Davidson

Abraham Wolfe Davidson was born in 1903 in Vitebsk, a town in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement — the strip of land (now in Belarus) where the Tsars legally confined their Jewish subjects. He grew up into the worst years a child could be handed there: war, revolution, and famine. His father disappeared in the upheaval and never came back. The family went hungry.

What he had was his hands. As a boy he modeled clay and cut stone, and in 1919 a sympathetic army officer got him a place — briefly — at the government art school in Vitebsk. In 1922 a brother smuggled Davidson and his mother out of the country. They crossed the Atlantic on the liner Homeric and joined family already settled in Greenville, South Carolina.

The new country nearly finished what the old one started. In his twenties Davidson fell gravely ill with nephritis — a kidney disease — and was unable to work for years. He recovered, kept sculpting, and in 1934 made the bargain that shaped his life: he offered to carve a statue of Clemson College's founder, Thomas Green Clemson, in exchange for room, board, and tuition. The college took the deal. He enrolled as a special student, finished the statue in 1936 — it still stands at Clemson, recast in bronze by his own hand in 1966 — and in the process became, as one account puts it, "Columbia's and Clemson's talented, adopted son." That local standing is exactly what would later save his coin.

Davidson was a sculptor, painter, and teacher first; a coin designer almost by accident. He taught a weekly art class at Greenville High School through the early 1940s, then ran the art department at Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, for eighteen years until he retired in 1966. He never stopped studying his own craft — in 1953, in his fifties, he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina to work under the ceramic sculptor Peter Voulkos. The Columbia half dollar is the only US coin he ever designed, and he drafted an entire unpublished autobiography that survives in the Clemson archives. The coin is barely a footnote in his own telling of his life.

He got the commission in 1936 because he was nearby and admired. South Carolina was marking 150 years since Columbia became the state capital, and the Sesquicentennial Commission handed the design to the 32-year-old sculptor down the road at Clemson. Then came the gauntlet every US commemorative had to pass: the federal Commission of Fine Arts — the board that vetted American coin designs — got his plaster models that May and did not like them. Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross flagged "visible defects." The Commission called the work "unsatisfactory" and lacking "artistic merit," and its chairman, Charles Moore, suggested hiring an experienced medalist instead.

South Carolina's committee refused to drop their man. The compromise that followed is the heart of the coin's story. Davidson reworked his models under the eye of Lee Lawrie — a sitting member of the Fine Arts Commission and one of the finest architectural sculptors in America. Under Lawrie's hand the figure of Justice was made less "slumpy" and the palmetto leaves idealized. The revised design was recommended on July 22, 1936, and approved by Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. The coin that reached collectors was Davidson's — pushed across the line by a master.

The obverse — the heads side — shows Lady Justice holding sword and scales, standing (unusually, without a blindfold) between South Carolina's two capitols: the Old State House of 1790 and the New State House completed in 1903. The reverse — the tails side — carries the palmetto tree, the state's emblem, ringed by thirteen stars for the thirteen colonies, with arrows tied at its base and a broken oak branch below — a nod to the British naval defeat at Fort Moultrie in 1776, where a fort of soft palmetto logs swallowed cannon fire instead of shattering. One detail says everything about how the project went: Davidson's initials never appear on the coin.