The Modern Dollar Experiments

In 1979 the U.S. government released a brand-new dollar coin. Within months, Congress was holding hearings on why it had flopped.

That coin was the Susan B. Anthony dollar — the first American circulating coin to honor a real woman. It should have been a triumph. Instead it became a national punchline, jammed into the wrong slot in a thousand cash drawers because it was almost exactly the size of a quarter.

To see why the government kept pushing, follow the money. A dollar bill wears out fast — the Government Accountability Office puts its life at about 4.7 years. A coin lasts roughly thirty. And there is real profit in the gap: a dollar coin costs the Mint around 30 cents to strike but spends as a full dollar, and the Treasury keeps the difference — a windfall called seigniorage. The GAO has studied the swap seven times since 1990 and reached the same answer every time: retiring the paper dollar for a coin would net the government billions over thirty years. Canada and Britain had already pulled it off — simply by yanking their paper notes out of circulation.

But Americans love the foldable dollar. It tucks into a wallet; a fistful of coins does not. So began a thirty-year standoff: a government convinced the dollar coin made sense, and a public that flatly would not carry one.

The first attempt replaced a coin with its own problem. The Eisenhower dollar, struck since 1971, was a hefty slab of metal — big and heavy and rarely carried. So the Mint shrank it. Chief Engraver Frank Gasparro — the man whose initials sit on the Lincoln Memorial cent — designed a smaller dollar, and with the vending-machine industry pushing hard, Congress authorized it. President Carter signed it into law on October 10, 1978.

There was a fight over whose face went on it. Gasparro had sketched an allegorical Liberty in a Phrygian cap — the soft, forward-tipped hat that has stood for freedom since Roman times. But Senator William Proxmire and women's organizations pressed for a real woman, not a symbol, and they won: the suffragist Susan B. Anthony. The reverse kept the Eisenhower dollar's eagle clutching an olive branch as it lands on the moon, lifted straight from the Apollo 11 mission patch.

Then came the flaw that doomed it. At 26.5 millimeters across, the Anthony dollar was less than two millimeters wider than the 24.3-millimeter quarter — same copper-nickel color, same reeded (grooved) edge. People mixed them up constantly; buses and shops began refusing them. The Mint added an eleven-sided inner border to help the eye, but it wasn't enough. After 757,813,744 coins flooded out in 1979, demand cratered. By 1981 the Mint struck them only for collectors, then stopped.

Two decades later it tried again — and this time it fixed the color. The Sacagawea dollar of 2000 was the same size as the Anthony, but an outer layer of manganese brass gave it a warm golden glow no one could mistake for a quarter. The obverse — the heads side — shows Sacagawea, the Shoshone interpreter of the Lewis and Clark expedition, carrying her infant son on her back. Sculptor Glenna Goodacre modeled her on a young Shoshone woman, Randy'L He-dow Teton, because no portrait of Sacagawea survives. Thomas D. Rogers Sr. designed the soaring eagle on the reverse, ringed by seventeen stars — one for each state in the Union when the expedition set out in 1804.

The Mint launched it like a consumer product. It shipped $100 million in coins to Walmart and Sam's Club, and partnered with General Mills to tuck a golden dollar into roughly one in every 2,000 boxes of Cheerios in early 2000. For one season the "golden dollar" was everywhere. Then the novelty wore off, mintage fell about 90% in 2001, and from 2002 the coin was struck almost entirely for collectors. It had beaten the color problem and still lost — because the real obstacle was never the design. It was the paper dollar already in everyone's pocket.

A coin that failed in commerce can thrive in a collection — and these two are proof. They're affordable, recent, and findable, which makes them a perfect first hunt. Yet they hide some genuinely scarce prizes.

On the Anthony dollar, look to the dies. The 1979-P comes in a common Narrow Rim and a scarcer Wide Rim — on the Wide Rim, the date sits so close to the edge it nearly touches the rim. Among proofs — special coins struck from polished dies for collectors — the 1979-S and 1981-S each exist with two different mint-mark punches; the sharper, clearer "Type 2" S is the one that commands a premium, making up only about 15–20% of those proofs.

The Sacagawea dollar's treasures come from its launch. About 5,500 coins went to General Mills for the Cheerios promotion, and a small share of those carried a sharper, more detailed eagle reverse — the so-called "Cheerios dollar," whose enhanced tail feathers weren't even identified until 2005. High-grade examples now sell for thousands. There's also the "Wounded Eagle" (or "Speared Eagle"), where a die flaw left a raised gouge slicing across the bird's breast; fewer than 200 are known.

And then there are the trophies. Gasparro's secret 1971 Eisenhower prototype — the coin that started the whole shrink-the-dollar idea — is one of the great modern discoveries, hidden in a coin roll for almost four decades before one example sold for $264,000 at auction in 2022. The deeper draw, though, is the story. Hold one of these and you're holding a clean, honest record of ambition meeting human habit: a government that did the math, and a public that just kept reaching for the paper.