Felix Schlag

Felix Oscar Schlag was not, on paper, the man you would pick to design an American coin. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on September 4, 1891, to Karl and Teresa Schlag. He fought in the German army in the First World War. He trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He did not set foot in the United States until 1929 — nine years before the contest that would put his work in every American pocket.

What he had was a sculptor's eye and a hard immigrant's decade behind him. By his own trade's accounts, his early American years were spent styling automobiles before he turned back to sculpture. What the record shows clearly is the work the Depression handed him: New Deal commissions for public buildings, including sculpture for a post office in White Hall, Illinois, and schools in Champaign and Bloom Township. By the late 1930s he was a working artist scraping together public-art jobs in the middle of the worst economy the country had seen — exactly the kind of person a thousand-dollar prize and a national competition could change overnight.

In late January 1938 the Treasury gave him one. Thomas Jefferson's 200th birthday was coming in 1943, and the Mint wanted a new five-cent coin to mark it — Jefferson on the front, his home Monticello on the back. The contest was thrown open to the public, with a $1,000 prize and an April 15 deadline. Roughly 390 artists entered. Schlag was one of them.

He won. On a panel led by Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross — the first woman ever to run the U.S. Mint — and three sculptor-judges, his entry beat the field. Henry Kreis took second, Wheeler Williams third. An immigrant nine years off the boat had just been handed the nation's nickel, and a thousand dollars in the middle of the Depression to go with it.

Here is the part collectors love, because winning the contest was not the end of it. The design Schlag submitted is not the design that became the coin.

For Jefferson's portrait — the obverse, the heads side — Schlag worked from a famous marble bust of Jefferson by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, the one in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. That part survived. It was the reverse — the tails side — where the trouble started.

Schlag's original Monticello was modern. He drew Jefferson's house at a three-quarter angle, seen from the corner, with a tree beside it and lettering in a clean, contemporary style. Officials objected to all three. They wanted the building shown straight on, symmetrical and formal; they wanted the lettering traditional; and they wanted the tree gone — reportedly because someone on the review took it for a palm tree, a thing Jefferson could never have grown in Virginia.

So Schlag went back and redrew it to order. By mid-June 1938 the oblique view had become the flat, front-facing Monticello that millions of Americans would carry for the next sixty-plus years. The revised art went to the Commission of Fine Arts in July and won the approval of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Production of the dies — a die is the hardened steel stamp that presses the image into the blank metal — began on October 3, 1938, and the coin reached circulation on November 15.

Not everyone thought the Mint improved it. The art historian Cornelius Vermeule, surveying American coinage, judged the revision a loss. He wrote that "official taste eliminated this interesting, even exciting, view, and substituted the mausoleum of Roman profile and blurred forms that masquerades as the building on the finished coin." It is one of the sharpest verdicts ever passed on a circulating U.S. coin — and it is aimed not at Schlag but at the committee that overruled him.

Then came the strangest twist. Schlag's initials never made it onto the coin. Nearly every working designer signs the metal somewhere, a tiny monogram tucked into the design. Schlag's "FS" simply was not there — left off through some mix of misunderstanding and oversight in the 1938 scramble. It stayed missing for 28 years. Only in 1966 did the Mint finally add "FS" beneath the cut of Jefferson's bust — and strike two special proof nickels carrying the new initials to present to the elderly designer. For nearly three decades he had been the most-circulated anonymous artist in America.

Schlag's nickel did one more thing he never planned. When the United States entered the Second World War, nickel metal was needed for armor plating, so from 1942 to 1945 the five-cent coin was struck in a wartime alloy — 56% copper, 35% silver, 9% manganese — with no nickel in it at all.

To tell the silver coins apart at a glance, the Mint stamped an oversized mintmark high above the dome of Schlag's Monticello, bigger than any mintmark before it. And on the 1942 Philadelphia issue, that mark was a "P" — the first time in 150 years, since the Mint opened in 1792, that any U.S. coin carried the Philadelphia mintmark. Schlag's quiet building became the canvas for one of the most-collected oddities in American coinage, and the war nickels remain a favorite first set for new collectors precisely because of that big letter over the roof.