John R. Sinnock

John Ray Sinnock was born on July 8, 1888, in Raton, New Mexico — a railroad town near the Colorado line, about as far from the marble studios of the art world as a boy with a gift for sculpting could be. He found his way east to Philadelphia, the home of the United States Mint, and enrolled at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. He earned his degree in Normal Art Instruction in 1913, and won the school's A. W. Mifflin award — a prize that sent him to study abroad.

In 1917, the Philadelphia Mint hired him as assistant engraver and medalist. His boss was the legend of the building: George T. Morgan, the veteran Chief Engraver behind the famous Morgan silver dollar. It was the apprenticeship that shaped everything after. One of Sinnock's first coin jobs was the reverse — the tails side — of the 1918 Illinois Centennial half dollar, while Morgan handled the obverse, the heads side. The student was learning from the master, one coin at a time.

When Morgan died in 1925, Sinnock took his chair. He became the eighth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint — the official in charge of how the nation's money looked — and held the post until his own death in 1947. For roughly ten of those years he also taught, working as an art instructor at his old school and at Western Reserve University. He was, in the most literal sense, a working artist on the federal payroll.

Sinnock was a medalist first: a sculptor of low-relief portraits meant to read clearly at the size of a coin. That discipline shows in his work — clean profiles, calm surfaces, lettering that sits comfortably rather than shouting. For decades he cut the Mint's annual Assay Commission medals, and he sculpted two of the most recognizable awards in American life: the Purple Heart and the second, still-current form of the Distinguished Service Cross. A careful note here, because it matters to how we read him: he modeled the Purple Heart, but he did not design it — that credit belongs to Army heraldic specialist Elizabeth Will. Sinnock turned her design into the sculpted medal. The line between designing and sculpting would shadow his whole career.

His signature working habit was to reuse a design he trusted rather than start from a blank slate. The Liberty Bell that anchors the Franklin half dollar's reverse was not invented for it — Sinnock had already modeled a Liberty Bell two decades earlier, for the 1926 Sesquicentennial half dollar marking 150 years of American independence. His Franklin portrait, likewise, grew from a 1933 medal of his own, which leaned in turn on the famous Houdon bust of Franklin sculpted from life. Sinnock built new coins out of work he already had in hand.

But that habit has a sharper edge. The Liberty Bell on the Sesquicentennial half — and so the one on the Franklin half that descended from it — was itself based on a sketch by John Frederick Lewis, a Philadelphia attorney and numismatist. Sinnock took the design credit, and Lewis's hand in it stayed unknown for some forty years. Keep that in mind, because the one famous controversy of Sinnock's career is not an isolated accusation. It is the same question asked a second time.

The Roosevelt dime was first struck on January 19, 1946, and released into circulation on January 30 — what would have been Franklin Roosevelt's 64th birthday. Down at the cutoff of Roosevelt's neck, Sinnock signed it the way engravers do: two small initials, "JS."

The timing was unfortunate. In 1946 the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union was curdling into the Cold War, and a rumor caught fire: the "JS" stood not for John Sinnock but for Joseph Stalin — supposedly slipped onto America's money by a communist sympathizer inside the Mint. The Treasury Department issued formal denials. The story spread anyway, and lingered into the 1950s. There was never a shred of evidence for it. The initials are still on the dime today, exactly where Sinnock put them. It is a perfect piece of Cold War folklore — and a reminder of how much fear a coin can carry.

The second question is harder, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a tidy one. In 1943, the African-American sculptor Selma Burke won a national competition to model Roosevelt for a bronze relief — the Four Freedoms plaque later dedicated at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C. She insisted on sculpting the president from life, and he sat for her. When the Roosevelt dime appeared three years later, Burke maintained — for the rest of her life, until 1995 — that Sinnock's portrait was drawn from her work without credit.

She was not alone in believing it. Roosevelt's son James said Burke's work influenced the dime, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library has echoed that view. Sinnock's answer was that his profile was his own, "a composite of two studies that he made from life in 1933 and 1934."

Here is the verdict collectors should hear plainly: the historical record does not resolve it. The Mint's official record names Sinnock as the designer; Burke's supporters dispute it; the surviving evidence proves neither side. And after the Lewis episode — a documented case of Sinnock taking sole credit for a design that wasn't entirely his — the suspicion is not unreasonable, only unproven. The dispute is real. The answer is lost. That uncertainty is part of the dime's story now, and a good page should hand it to you whole rather than pick a winner the facts don't support.