John R. Sinnock: the engraver behind the dime in your pocket

In 1946 the United States put a new dime into circulation, and a rumor went with it: that a Soviet agent had signed American money.

The dime honored Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dead the year before. Under the cut of his neck, just left of the date, sat two small letters — JS. They were the initials of the man who cut the design: John Ray Sinnock, the Mint's Chief Engraver. But the Cold War was starting, the Second Red Scare was on, and a story spread that the "JS" was a hidden tribute to Joseph Stalin, slipped onto the coinage by a communist inside the Mint. A later version even claimed it was a secret deal struck at the Yalta Conference. The Treasury issued press releases knocking it down. The rumor kept going into the 1950s anyway.

It was never true. But it captures the odd place Sinnock occupied — a quiet government craftsman whose work reached every pocket in America at the exact moment the country was at its most suspicious of hidden hands.

Sinnock was born on July 8, 1888, in Raton, New Mexico, a railroad town in the high desert. He trained at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, won the A.W. Mifflin Award for study abroad, and taught art for about ten years — at his old school and at Western Reserve University — before he committed to metal. In 1917 he joined the Philadelphia Mint as assistant engraver and medalist. Eight years later, in 1925, he succeeded the legendary George T. Morgan as the Mint's eighth Chief Engraver. The job: take a sculptor's clay model and turn it into the hardened steel dies — the stamps that press a design into a blank — that strike coins by the million.

A Mint engraver's work is mostly invisible. The good ones make a portrait read clearly on a surface the size of a fingernail, in relief — the raised height of the design above the field — so shallow it can survive a billion trips through cash registers. Sinnock spent twenty-two years at it: dies, repairs, and a long run of medals, including the annual Assay Commission medals and military awards. Almost none of that carried a name.

The work that did carry his name kept attracting the same argument: who actually made it?

It started early. For the 1926 Sesquicentennial — the 150th anniversary of independence — Sinnock modeled a half dollar and a gold quarter eagle. The Sesquicentennial Commission, unhappy with his own designs, had hired the artist John Frederick Lewis to supply sketches; Sinnock worked them up without crediting Lewis. That stayed hidden for forty years, until the numismatic historian Don Taxay exposed it in his 1967 history of U.S. commemoratives, calling it "the Mint's final, deliberate misattribution of the artist who designed the half dollar." The coins themselves were struck in extremely shallow relief at the Commission's insistence — so shallow they struck up poorly and wore fast, which is exactly why a sharp, high-grade survivor today is genuinely scarce.

There was a second case. In 1932 the Army revived the Purple Heart, and the design concept came from Army heraldic specialist Elizabeth Will; Sinnock was the sculptor chosen to model it. He is often called the medal's "designer." The more precise truth is that he gave Will's design its three-dimensional form — a distinction that has blurred ever since.

Then came the dime, and the biggest fight of all. After it appeared, the sculptor Selma Burke — a Black artist who had won a 1943 competition to portray Roosevelt and met the president for forty-five minutes in 1944, sketching his profile on a brown paper bag — said the dime looked unmistakably like her bronze plaque, unveiled in Washington's Recorder of Deeds Building in September 1945. Some agreed, including Roosevelt's son James. Sinnock denied it flatly. He said his portrait was "a composite of two studies that he made from life in 1933 and 1934," supported by photographs and the counsel of relief sculptors; the Mint pointed to presidential-medal work he had reused for years before Burke's plaque. The Mint never credited Burke. The Smithsonian American Art Museum later did. Burke argued her case until she died in 1994, and the record has never settled it — Sinnock is the official designer, Burke's influence remains plausible but unproven.

Sinnock's final great design he never got to finish. In 1947, Mint Director Nellie Tayloe Ross — a devoted admirer of Benjamin Franklin — set him to a new half dollar. He built the obverse from his own earlier Franklin medal, itself based on a bust by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Then, in May 1947, he died, before the reverse was done. His successor as Chief Engraver, Gilroy Roberts, completed it.

When the Franklin half dollar went on sale on April 30, 1948, the Commission of Fine Arts was unimpressed. The little eagle on the reverse — required only because the Coinage Act of 1873 demanded an eagle on any coin above a dime — they called "so small as to be insignificant." And they worried that showing the famous crack in the Liberty Bell "might lead to puns and to statements derogatory to United States coinage." Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder overruled them. The coin ran until 1963.