The Most Exciting Change America Has Ever Seen

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

This past February, the American Numismatic Association held its annual convention at the Savannah Convention Center in Savannah, Georgia. 

PHILIP DIEHL: Good morning, good morning! / Six o’clock today! 

ROMAN MARS: From the uninitiated, “numismatics” is the fancy word for coins and the study of coins. 

KATIE THORNTON: Okay, massive room. There are dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of vendors…

ROMAN MARS: And that’s reporter and novice numismatist, Katie Thornton. 

KATIE THORNTON: This was my first time at a coin show. But right away I could tell that this convention was not necessarily catering to the merely coin curious. More than anything, this show was for collectors, mostly of U.S. coins, with each booth featuring something for which there was some kind of small but extremely avid fandom. 

GOLD RUSH GUY: These gold pieces were made with gold from the California Gold Rush… 

SCARSDALE COINS GUY: We’re specialists in what’s called “three-cent silvers” or “trimes.”

BARBER GUY: These are half dimes. Have you ever heard of half dimes? 

KATIE THORNTON: I have now… 

KATIE THORNTON: There was also a society dedicated to crushed pennies, like when the machines smushed the pennies, or as they call them, “elongateds.”

ELONGATEDS LADY: Why do we stop on pennies? You give me a foreign currency and we’ll smash it and see how lovely the design comes out…

ROMAN MARS: But Katie wasn’t on the hunt for anything quite so niche. Instead, she was in Savannah to learn about what has to be the most widely collected coin in American history. 

KATIE THORNTON: So I’m of the age where my sort of introduction to coin collecting was to state quarters. Do you have any you could show me? 

VENDOR: Oh, yeah! 

KATIE THORNTON: Of course, everyone in America knows about state quarters. Chances are you have one hiding in your couch cushion right now. 

ROMAN MARS: From 1999 until 2009, the U.S. Mint issued 56 special quarter designs, one for each state and territory and Washington, D.C. 

KATIE THORNTON: They put billions of these special quarters into circulation. On the front, you’ll see the classic profile of George Washington. But turn any of them over, and you’ll see an engraving of something that some state or territory likes about itself. The quarter from my home state of Minnesota features a loon, Kansas has a bison, and Illinois… Well, it couldn’t decide. So it has Lincoln kind of framed by the outline of the state with the Sears Tower in the background. 

ROMAN MARS: Somewhat awkwardly, two different state quarters featured the Wright brothers’ flyer, because the first modern airplane was built in Ohio, but it was flown in North Carolina. 

KATIE THORNTON: But the State Quarters series is more than just a bunch of cool designs on the back of some coins. Yeah, when they first came out, if you were like me, you probably thought, “Hey, cute, a fun little thing the government did just for the hell of it.” But that’s just not true. In reality, just beneath its shiny metal surface, the State Quarters initiative was a high-stakes government program, one in which coin collecting played a critical role. 

ROMAN MARS: Because it turns out the Mint didn’t spend all those years creating billions of new coins just for the sake of civic pride. Instead, the state quarters were developed for the express purpose of getting us to collect them and to turn a healthy profit for the U.S. government. 

KATIE THORNTON: Today, the story of how the U.S. makes money off of making money, and how it makes even more if you collect. 

ROMAN MARS: In many ways, the Mint State Quarters program is the product of a series of innovations in American currency, starting with the invention of the quarter itself, because for the first 200 years of colonial history, America didn’t even have a standard system of denomination. 

JESSE KRAFT: So the earliest coins that were used in the earliest settlements of what became the United States were literally the coins that settlers brought in their pockets. 

KATIE THORNTON: Jesse Kraft is an assistant curator at the American Numismatic Society, not the American Numismatic Association, which put on the coin show–a different numismatic group. And he focuses on American coins. 

JESSE KRAFT: The first boats that came over actually had a lot of German settlers as well. So there’s a good mix of German coins, English coins, of course, Spanish American coins… 

KATIE THORNTON: Soon, coins from all over the world made their way into the colonies: English shillings, Portuguese joes, German tallers… It was chaotic. It’s not like the exchange rate for these things was one-to-one. 

ROMAN MARS: But Kraft says there’s one thing making it easier. In those days, coins were made almost entirely of rare precious metals like gold or, more often, silver. That meant that no matter what country the coin was from, its value was determined by its metal content, how much gold or silver was in there. 

JESSE KRAFT: So each piece was weighed to check its gold weight. And because the different coins had different weights and wore down, even just a little bit of friction on a gold coin would actually affect its value. 

KATIE THORNTON: And if that sounds impractical, well, it often was. Imagine trying to buy a herd of sheep only to find that the precious silver coin you’d had in your satchel this whole time was too worn down to pay for it all. Complicating things further, there were never enough of these random, worn-down coins making their way into the colonies for everyone to use in the first place. So the colonists also had to use something else as money. 

JESSE KRAFT: One of the first pieces of money that was legislated as legal tender was actually corn. 

ROMAN MARS: Corn, wheat, and barley were all literally used as money, with an exchange rate just like any other currency. In 1631, for example, one bushel of corn had the same spending power as six English shillings. 

JESSE KRAFT: They even accepted corn for payment and taxes. That’s how legal it was. Like, this is money. 

KATIE THORNTON: Eventually, though, people got tired of buying their cows with a combination of random European denominations plus a bunch of bulky, loose grain. So, after the United States won its independence, its leaders finally decided that we might want to make our own standardized monetary system. 

JESSE KRAFT: You know, it was at that point that Jefferson wrote his now famous Notes on Coinage. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh yeah. So famous. 

JESSE KRAFT: You know, a very simple name, but it kind of redefined everything. 

KATIE THORNTON: Jefferson basically says, “Hey, British money is confusing. A pence is one 240th of a pound. A farthing is one 960th. Spanish money, though, uses easy common sense fractions, halves, quarters… That’s what we should do.”

ROMAN MARS: So in 1792, the U.S. Mint began making dollar coins, named for the Spanish “dólar,” as the United States base unit. 

KATIE THORNTON: Just like their Spanish predecessors, dollar coins were made of silver. And early on, the mint made gold coins, too. They were called “eagles.” That’s literally the name of the coin–silver dollars and “gold eagles.” An eagle was worth $10. 

CAROLINE TURCO: So these are half eagles, these five dollar pieces.

KATIE THORNTON: This is Caroline Turco. She is a curator at the American Numismatic Association. I ran into her at the coin show in Savannah, where she showed me these old gold coins. 

CAROLINE TURCO: So it’s based on weight, so the five dollar half-eagles here are five dollars’ worth of gold, give or take a few cents, at that time, to consider the amount of work and money it took to make it. And then the smaller ones–they’re a quarter eagle, and they are worth two and a half dollars’ worth of gold. 

ROMAN MARS: And silver coins worked pretty much the same way, which is to say the way they do today: dollars, half dollars, and of course, quarters. 

KATIE THORNTON: But beyond just standardizing the denominations, the early U.S. Mint faced another equally important numismatic task. It had to decide what our coins would look like. 

ROMAN MARS: Only, these first designs were nothing like our modern state quarters. Instead of dozens of elaborate variations, early U.S. coins only featured a small number of very simple, some would say boring, motifs, and deliberately so. That’s because the Mint used the design in part to guard against counterfeiting. By making engravings clean, simple, and consistent, you could easily spot any deviation. 

JESSE KRAFT: One of the reasons why they wanted to keep the design so similar was if they all had minor, minor differences, then a counterfeiter could create another coin with a minor difference that would just kind of be accepted. 

KATIE THORNTON: All these counterfeiting countermeasures required that the first U.S. Coins all looked pretty much the same. And thanks to our first president, they didn’t even have any real faces on them. 

CAROLINE TURCO: The first U.S. Mint–they go to George Washington and they say, “Sir, we’re going to need your bust to be made so that we can have your face on coins.” But he says, “Absolutely not,” because that is for a monarchy. And George is like, “We literally just fought a war to get rid of our monarch. How dare you try to make me into that same symbol?” And he said, “Over my dead body,” which by the way, if you’ve seen a quarter recently… Awkward. 

ROMAN MARS: But even more than the concern over counterfeiting, or Washington’s living body, it was the technology of the time that limited the design of these early coins. 

KATIE THORNTON: Engravers in the 19th century had to carve designs by hand into a tiny steel stamp called a “die,” using even tinier little chisel tools. They didn’t have electric lights, so they were doing this outside or in a window or straining their eyes in candlelight. Then they’d have to either put some metal under the die and hammer the image onto the coin to be, or stamp the design onto the coin with a press powered by human muscle, or horses, or eventually steam. Not easy. 

ROMAN MARS: The first human figure allowed on a U.S. coin was Lady Liberty. But given the technological constraints, the Mint’s engravers quickly discovered there wasn’t much you could do with her. 

KATIE THORNTON: Initially, it was mostly her head, her head in profile with flowing hair… Later, her hair was tied up with a ribbon. Eventually, they figured out how to get her whole body on there. But even so, the coin designs from year to year were pretty bland. Until finally, in 1904… 

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON: President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Hey. Our coinage is ugly.”

ROMAN MARS: He actually described the design of American coins as atrocious hideousness. 

CAROLINE TURCO: He was not playing around. And Theodore Roosevelt was like, “I want good stuff again.”

KATIE THORNTON: Luckily, at some point during Teddy’s tantrum, he made a specific demand. The U.S. Mint, he urged, should import a near-miraculous new device that had recently been invented in France. It was called the “Janvier reduction machine.”

JESSE KRAFT: Essentially you could sculpt a large-sized coin, sometimes two and three feet in diameter–you know, a quote unquote “coin.” And then you could put this design onto the Janvier reduction machine. And it would have this little stylus and just slowly, slowly go over the design and, at the same exact time, engrave that design onto a die, the actual size of the coin. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, it’s so cool. 

KATIE THORNTON: The Janvier machine allowed the Mint to mass produce coins with a level of detail that would have been impossible before. Suddenly Lady Liberty could do more things. 

ROMAN MARS: Starting in the early 1900s, you got Liberty walking towards a rising sun, Liberty ascending a mountain with a capital dome in the background, Liberty with a winged Phrygian cap with a beautiful column wrapped in a vining olive plant on the other side… This aesthetic revolution in U.S. currency has been termed the American Renaissance of Coins.

KATIE THORNTON: It even led to an explosion in special commemorative coin designs in the 1930s for things like the Texas Centennial and the opening of the Bay Bridge, to the point that the whole thing actually got kinda out of hand. 

CAROLINE TURCO: There is one commemorative coin that was made to have a living person on it. It was an Alabama senator. 

KATIE THORNTON: It was Alabama. Why? 

CAROLINE TURCO: Because he wanted his face on a coin. 

ROMAN MARS: But the ability to put almost anything you wanted on a coin was not enough on its own to pave the way for the state quarters program. For that to happen, U.S. coins would need to undergo one more critical transformation, this time to their metal content. 

KATIE THORNTON: Remember, up until this point, silver coins were still made of silver. They had that inherent metal value. But in the 1960s, that ended. President Lyndon Johnson got rid of all of our pretty shiny silver coins and replaced them with something called clad coins. 

ROMAN MARS: In clad coinage, a piece of low-cost, kind of ugly metal is clad in a thin layer of something a little bit prettier. It’s a much cheaper way to make a coin. So in 1965, looking for ways to save money, Johnson convinced Congress to stop putting silver in coins. Instead, he had them minted from copper and then covered in nickel. They were nicknamed “Johnson sandwiches.”

KATIE THORNTON: Jesse Kraft says that, prior to this, if a national government ever debased its currency, they would only dare to do it very gradually, changing the coin’s metal content a little at a time, over the course of decades. 

ROMAN MARS: LBJ, God bless him, just went ahead and did it all at once. 

JESSE KRAFT: In 1964, literally, all the coins are silver. 1965, none of them are silver. So it kind of created valueless coins. So it’s actually one of the most significant things that’s ever happened since perhaps the beginning of coins themselves. And no one seemed to care. 

KATIE THORNTON: And it’s true. No one really cared. Everyone just carried on as if we were all still lugging these little pieces of silver around, and continued spending and accepting U.S. coins like nothing had changed. 

ROMAN MARS: But for the Mint, everything had changed because this strange metallurgical bait and switch meant that suddenly a coin like a quarter costs way less than a quarter to make. And that discrepancy between the production cost of the coin and its face value allowed the Mint to engage in a money-making scheme beloved by governments the world over. It’s called “seigniorage.”

PHILIP DIEHL: Okay, seigniorage. It’s really a simple concept… 

KATIE THORNTON: This is Philip Diehl. These days, he’s the president of U.S. Money Reserve, a coin seller. A few decades ago, though, he was director of the U. S. Mint. And he says, to understand seniorage, you have to think of the Mint as a business–a business whose product is coins. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And like any product in business, you hope to produce it at a cost that is less than what you sell it for. 

ROMAN MARS: So the goal for the Mint is to make coins as cheaply as possible but to still sell them at their face value, so that they can turn a profit, just like any other product. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And when you do that with coins, that’s called seigniorage.

KATIE THORNTON: So seigniorage is the profit the Mint makes from selling a coin for more than it costs to produce it. Like Philip said, simple… 

ROMAN MARS: Now if you’re wondering who would be stupid enough to pay 25 cents for a coin that only costs a few cents to make, well, you are, and me too. 

KATIE THORNTON: And me. We all end up paying full face value for these coins, thanks to a chain of sale that starts with the Mint’s largest customer, the Independent Federal Reserve Bank. 

ROMAN MARS: Which, just for clarity, operates independently of the federal government. 

PHILIP DIEHL: The Federal Reserve–they pay us the face value of the coin. And then those coins are distributed to the regional Federal Reserve banks. And the regional Federal Reserve Banks then take orders from the banking system in the United States, and the coins are delivered to the banks. 

KATIE THORNTON: Let me translate, at the risk of making this part a little too simple. The Mint makes coins–again, let’s say quarters–as cheaply as it can. The banks then buy those quarters at face value from the Mint. Businesses buy quarters at face value from banks. And when we get change from the cash registers at those businesses, we get those quarters. So everyone in that sequence–banks, businesses, people–pay 25 cents for something that the Mint originally made for much, much less. 

ROMAN MARS: Once a quarter gets old and worn out, the U.S. government can end up buying it back and recycling the metal. But that can take a long time. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And that coin might’ve circulated for 30 years. And so for us, the Mint, that coin is basically like a 30-year long-term loan, interest-free. 

KATIE THORNTON: So, in the end, the only one turning a profit is the U.S. government. But the truth is this approach only worked well for a little while. 

ROMAN MARS: When the U.S. first started making significant seigniorage off of coins in the 1960s, it was a good bet. The difference between the production cost and the sales price ensured that the Mint made about four and a half cents off of every nickel, nine and a half cents off of a dime, and 24 cents off of every quarter. Even the penny made a little bit of money. But as the price of metals like copper rose, so did the cost of making coins. As early as 1974, the cost of making the penny was already approaching its face value. 

KATIE THORNTON: So the Mint futzed with the metal ratios again, just trying to make this thing for even cheaper. They upped the zinc and lowered the copper, which again worked at first, but not for long. So when Philip Diehl became the director of the U.S. Mint in 1994, one of his main goals was to stop and ideally reverse this decline. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And so, when I was director of the Mint 30 years ago, I was the first Mint director to recommend the elimination of the penny. And it was long overdue then. 

KATIE THORNTON: Unfortunately, Philip did not have the necessary sway to kill the penny. America would have to wait for someone else to make that one happen. 

ROMAN MARS: But there was another more exciting idea to boost seigniorage that was being bounced around the Mint at the same time, a scheme to increase the sales of one of their biggest earners: the quarter. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And after a couple years, I started thinking about whether or not it was possible. And I became convinced we could do it. 

KATIE THORNTON: At that time, in the mid-90s, every quarter, thanks to its high face value, was still netting the Mint about 22 cents in seigniorage. And every year, some of those quarters would fall out of circulation. People lost them, accidentally threw them out, or put them in coin jars in the car, which meant, every year, the banks had to ask the Mint for more quarters to replace all those missing coins, make up the gap, and ensure that the country didn’t run out of change. 

ROMAN MARS: That, of course, was good for the U.S. government because selling more quarters to the banks generated more seigniorage for the Mint. But what if there was a way to get people to take even more quarters out of circulation every year? Well, one way was to convince people to start collecting them. 

KATIE THORNTON: Only, the Mint couldn’t just rely on hardcore collectors, like the ones I met at the convention, to get the job done. The idea was to take billions of dollars’ worth of quarters out of circulation. If it was ever going to do that, the Mint would somehow have to convince ordinary people–people who rarely even thought about quarters–to start collecting them, too. 

ROMAN MARS: And what better way to encourage ordinary Americans to start collecting quarters than by issuing a bunch of special designs, say, 50 of them?

PHILIP DIEHL: And so I’m sort of famous there for having created the 50 State Quarters Program. 

ROMAN MARS: Sneaky? Perhaps. Elaborate? Sure. Profitable? Definitely. 

KATIE THORNTON: The idea had been circling among coin fans for years. Canada’s Mint had already done something similar, and it made money. But Philip couldn’t just order the Mint to make a bunch of new designs. After all, the Mint, by this point, had been stamping quarters with the same design of George Washington in profile since 1932. Making lots of new designs required lots more resources. To make the State Quarters Program happen, the Mint needed an advocate in Washington. So Philip went to a congressman from Delaware, named Mike Castle, and laid out his idea. 

PHILIP DIEHL: I said, “Now, this has tremendous education potential. Each one of the 50 states will have designs emblematic of the state. People in the state and students will become excited about it.”

KATIE THORNTON: Philip told him there was no way they could do all these coins in one year. He was thinking they’d roll them out five a year for a decade. But he didn’t just want to release them alphabetically. 

PHILIP DIEHL: That’s boring. We’re not teaching anybody anything.

ROMAN MARS: Instead, Philip suggested to the congressman from Delaware that they release the coins in the order that the states ratified the Constitution. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And it just so happened that Delaware is the first state. And I knew that I could sell him on that with that line. And man, he bought. And he became such a champion of that. And I needed a champion. 

KATIE THORNTON: The Mint needed the Treasury’s approval. And the Treasury at the time did not like the idea. Too many things could go wrong. They wanted a study done. 

PHILIP DIEHL: Everybody in Washington knows that studies are designed to kill proposals–always. 

KATIE THORNTON: So the Treasury ran some numbers. Philip and his colleagues did, too: how much seigniorage each quarter would net the government, and also how many additional quarters they would get to sell to the banks due to people collecting them and taking them out of circulation. 

PHILIP DIEHL: We’d looked at what’s going to be the incremental increase in demand for quarters from people who want to pull them out of circulation and collect them. And the models came up with a range of 2.6 billion to 3.5 billion. 

ROMAN MARS: In other words, the amount of quarters people took out and kept in their private collection would generate the government at least $2.6 billion in profit. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And the Treasury ended up recommending the program. And man, was the Deputy Secretary– I was at that meeting. And the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury was hot when his handpicked committee made that recommendation. 

ROMAN MARS: Congress gave the Mint the go-ahead in late 1997. And just over a year later, in 1999, the state quarters went live. 

KERMIT THE FROG: Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here, announcing the new 50 state quarters from the United States Mint! 

PHILIP DIEHL: We employed Kermit the Frog. I wanted Kermit because he was the perfect spokesfrog for our product because the appeal was so broad. 

KERMIT THE FROG: Each quarter tells something about the state it represents. This one’s New Jersey!

KATIE THORNTON: It was the first time in decades that there was any significant change made to a U.S. coin. And it was exciting. 

PHILIP DIEHL: Incredible buzz. 

KERMIT THE FROG: 50 state quarters from the United States Mint, the most exciting change America’s ever seen! 

KATIE THORNTON: Philip and his team had done their research. They knew people loved the treasure hunt aspect of collecting. So they worked that into the program. 

ROMAN MARS: All U.S. coins have mint marks, little letters on the front indicating at which mint the coin was made. So they made sure every state quarter bore one of two mint marks, “P” for the Philadelphia Mint or “D” for Denver, so people would have twice as many coins to collect. 

KATIE THORNTON: The states especially loved it. Governors got their constituents involved, submitting design concepts and voting on their favorites. 

PHILIP DIEHL: And that was a brilliant marketing move because you got all this free, earned publicity as each state’s coin was coming up for production. And people would anxiously await the coin’s release. 

KATIE THORNTON: That is true. If you were around when the state quarters first debuted, like I was, you will remember this. They were like the weather. Everyone talked about them all the time. Everyone. 

PHILIP DIEHL: Kids loved it. Their parents loved it. We figured teenagers wouldn’t care a bit. I mean, you know, we were competing with computer games. You know, how can coins compete with that? Hugely successful with teenagers, too. In fact, I remember standing in lines of music concerts or restaurants and being around teenagers and young 20-year-olds who’d be talking about the quarters. 

ROMAN MARS: And at times it seemed like almost everyone collected them or at least would hold on to a few of their favorites. To this day, I am loath to part with a Connecticut quarter. I mean, have you seen this thing? It is gorgeous. 

KATIE THORNTON: Soon, the private market was cashing in on it too, selling all sorts of accessories. 

COIN COLLECTION ALBUM AD: Are you, like me and my family, collecting the new U.S. quarters? Problem is, where do you put them? It’s the U.S.A. Coin Collection Album. You’ll receive this unique map, which features a face to hold each quarter… 

WOODEN FRAME AD: Now, you can have the perfect way to proudly display your collection with the America’s 50 State Quarters Wooden Frame… 

STATE FACTS BOOK AD: Due to overwhelming demand for these quarters, this is a limited offer for a limited time. You must act now. But wait! Order within the next 10 minutes and we’ll include a special bonus, our 50 State Facts Book, filled with exciting information about each state. Call now…

KATIE THORNTON: As planned, the coins rolled out five a year for 10 years. They made nearly 35 billion of these quarters. 

ROMAN MARS: Sadly, a stack of 35 billion quarters is not tall enough to reach the moon. We checked. Sorry, you’re just going to have to imagine a lot of quarters. 

KATIE THORNTON: The program was so popular that, after a decade of releases, the Mint extended the run an extra year and added the territories. 

ROMAN MARS: By the end, so many quarters had gone out of circulation that the banking system had to purchase more than twice as many quarters as it had in the 10 years before the initiative. That increase in demand netted the Mint, by conservative estimates, $2.6 billion, just as Philip’s team had originally predicted. 

KATIE THORNTON: Am I understanding correctly that that was from the seigniorage alone? 

PHILIP DIEHL: Yes. Those circulating quarters were in huge demand and were taken out of circulation. And that’s where that $2.6 billion comes from. 

KATIE THORNTON: That money went back into the Treasury’s general fund, which went to lowering the tax burden and paying down the national debt. It was a huge victory. And it turned a whole generation onto the magic of coins, including Caroline Turco.

CAROLINE TURCO: I remember, like, when the state quarters came out, I was interested for the very first time. And, you know, here in this show–this is my sixth show–and I’ve never seen the U.S. Mint this busy. Never. 

KATIE THORNTON: In the past year, coins have been in the headlines. The U.S. finally stopped producing the penny, R.I.P. We have new coin designs that honor the U.S.’s 250th, coins whose images paint a very specific and perhaps overly generous view of early American history with designs of pilgrims and the Mayflower. But these coins will be around for a long time and–love them or hate them–they are probably going to get some folks hooked on coin collecting. That’s good for the Mint. But they’re not the only ones who want to see the hobby live on. 

ROMAN MARS: Every year, the ANA, who puts on the coin show, encourages collectors to do the apparent opposite of what the Mint intended and put some of the more unusual coins back into circulation. But really, it’s just their own way of piquing people’s interest. If you ever come across an old Standing Liberty Quarter or a wheat penny, there’s a good chance you have a collector to thank for it. At which point, you get to decide, what’s this coin worth to you? 

KATIE THORNTON: Ultimately, the State Quarters Program did something similar, just on a much bigger scale. It got so many of us feeling sentimental about these little hunks of copper and nickel, not just the coin nerds. I didn’t have a set of state quarters, but my neighbor did. He had a book and everything. And when I found a state quarter, I’d gasp, put it in my pocket, and run over to Andy’s house to see if he had Wisconsin yet. He always had Wisconsin. He always had whatever I found. But together, we took plenty of quarters out of circulation. The state quarters turned us all into numismatists. It put the collecting bug in all of us, at least a little bit. 

So when I was in Savannah, I bought a coin, minted just a stone’s throw away from beautiful uptown Oakland, California. 

HARRY: It’s an “S.” San Francisco. Mint quarter. So it’s never been in circulation… 

KATIE THORNTON: I’ve learned in the coin world that when people say it’s in “mint condition,” they mean it literally. Like, someone got this from the Mint, and it never made the rounds. This one was made in 1951. That means it’s almost all silver, and it has this really nice bright sheen. But if you just glanced at this coin casually, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t think anything of it. I wouldn’t have, just a few months ago. 

KATIE THORNTON: I think I’d like to get this never circulated one from 1951… 

KATIE THORNTON: I got this quarter for $20. That’s $4 over the intrinsic value–$19.75 over the face value. But I’m not planning on holding on to it for long. Call me a sucker, but I think this coin–this little piece of history–deserves to be out in the wild. 

HARRY: And you’re gonna put it in circulation?

KATIE THORNTON: I’m thinking I might, just to think about somebody picking it up down the line. 

HARRY: Absolutely, that’s cool.

KATIE THORNTON: Okay, let’s do it. 

HARRY: All right. 

KATIE THORNTON: Funny question, but do you take cash? 

ROMAN MARS: When we return, the story of one state quarter that might not have been worth it. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Katie Thornton. Hey, Katie. 

KATIE THORNTON: Hey, Roman. 

ROMAN MARS: So we talked about how the State Quarters Program works and how they made money for the government. But I hear you have a story about the design of the quarters. 

KATIE THORNTON: Yes. I have a story of an adventure or maybe a misadventure in state quarter design. But before we get there, I want to just look at all the quarter designs really quick. I’ll send you a link that has all of the special quarters. 

ROMAN MARS: Yes, okay, I see them all arrayed in front of me, all 50. 

KATIE THORNTON: 56. Don’t forget D.C. and the territories. We’ve got them all. So, if you open them up, I mean, do any stick out to you? 

ROMAN MARS: Let’s see, I like the bison on Kansas quite a bit. 

KATIE THORNTON: I like the bison. One strong image. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. Yeah. It’s clear that the ones that work the best are kind of trying to put together one cohesive image. Like, Florida has a ship and the space shuttle and some palm trees and stuff. And it just looks like a weird patchwork of clip art, you know? And that is not doing it for me. 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, I agree. And I think it sort of makes me think about flag design a little bit, in that you want to sort of strive for cleanness and simplicity, sort of, like, communicating a clear message in as few images as you can. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I think that there’s some similarities. I think the differences are that quarters are meant to be enjoyed looking at up close. Engraving is a real fine detailed art form. So yeah, I’m open to these being much more complicated. I do like them to have a kind of cohesive composition and feel to them. I think that’s the main thing. But there’s just something about them that’s just lovely. 

KATIE THORNTON: I agree. But Roman, I wanted to tell you about one person who I interviewed who really did not like the design of one of these quarters, Missouri. 

ROMAN MARS: Missouri, okay. Okay, let me pull up Missouri and see if I can get a gander of Missouri. 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, for those of us who are not familiar with the design of the Missouri State Quarter, will you give us a little description? 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, sure, it has the gateway arch there. And it has trees, so there’s sort of an anachronistic combination of the arch and trees, and what looks like a depiction of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So it looks like that’s kind of their claim to fame with this quarter, the beginning of the Lewis and Clark expedition. 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, right. So it’s sort of, like, a handful of different things that are iconically Missouri. It’s definitely not hideous. But the person who was really upset about this coin design was the artist who submitted the original design concept. His name is Paul Jackson, and he’s a well-known watercolor painter in Columbia, Missouri. And here’s how he describes that coin. 

PAUL JACKSON: My original design was sort of an elegant symbol. It had two people in a canoe. And it had the arch, you know, sort of fading into the mist in the background. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that sounds like in the spirit of what we’re looking at. So what is the problem? What did they change that he doesn’t like? 

KATIE THORNTON: Well, yeah, I mean, the overall design concept stayed the same. But Paul says the devil is in the details. Like, take the arch, for example. 

PAUL JACKSON: In the U.S. Mint’s version, it looks like it’s crossing the river from Illinois to Missouri. And it’s shaped like a McDonald’s french fry bent over. It’s very misshapen. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I mean, it looks like an arch. But maybe it’s not a factually accurate arch. I can understand this is, like, the issue with depicting things on coins. But does he have other issues with the design? 

KATIE THORNTON: Yes, he certainly does. 

PAUL JACKSON: Instead of two guys in a canoe, it had three, Larry, Moe, and Curly. They’re going downhill, upriver, and the arch crosses the river from Illinois to Missouri, plus the trees are made of broccoli. 

KATIE THORNTON: “Plus the trees are made of broccoli.”

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so he doesn’t like the way the trees are drawn, which– When you say that they look like broccoli, they do look like broccoli. I can see what he’s talking about. So, how did these changes get included into the final design based off of his original painting? 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, so Paul submitted his original design for the Missouri State Quarter contest to the First Lady’s office, which was running the competition, back in 2001. He had collected coins as a kid, and he thought his design would be a cool way to honor the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So he was really stoked when he won. And for a while, not much happened; he says he didn’t hear anything. But then in the spring of the following year, he got a message. 

PAUL JACKSON: I got the first email from someone in Georgia saying, “What do you think about what the U.S. Mint did to your state quarter design?” And at that point, I had no idea. I didn’t know what the U.S. Mint had done to my state quarter design. 

KATIE THORNTON: The Mint’s design looked kind of like Paul’s. But Paul and others thought it was just really ugly. 

PAUL JACKSON: There was clearly something wrong. They dumbed it down to the point where it was unacceptable. It was just unusable. And they misspelled the word “bicentennial.”

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] Well, they must have fixed that, right? 

KATIE THORNTON: I would hope so, but they did eventually just get rid of that word altogether. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, good. Did they offer any explanation as to why the design changed and what the redesign process was like? 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, you know, Paul says he didn’t get much from them. The Mint said it was “uncoinable.” And they said that Paul didn’t understand “metal flow” and things like this. And I guess multiple private mints who make special tokens and things like that reached out to him. And they were like, “Oh, this is coinable. We would love to make it.”

ROMAN MARS: Huh. 

KATIE THORNTON: But Paul says, from the Mint, they just sort of sprung these design changes on him. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. Paul doesn’t seem like he was a person that was going to let this go. 

KATIE THORNTON: No, he was not going to let this go. He was not going down without a fight. 

PAUL JACKSON: So I gathered a few of my supporters and went to protest. And so I put out the call on AOL and invited anybody who was upset about it to join me at the state capitol. And about 50 people showed up. They all had little signs, “The U.S. Mint lied, “They’ve stolen state pride,” and things like that. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, I love this scene so much, but did the protests actually accomplish anything? 

KATIE THORNTON: Well, it would have been a dud because what Paul didn’t realize was that the state legislature wasn’t actually in session at the time. But one thing that Paul did at this protest was he took about 20 quarters–just normal quarters because, at this point, the Missouri state quarter hadn’t actually come out yet. They’d just been publicizing the design. And he printed up some round stickers with his Missouri quarter design on it. And he stuck it on the tail side of these 20 or so quarters. 

PAUL JACKSON: And the next morning, I was dead asleep and got a phone call from somebody at the Kansas City Star. And this reporter said, “How does it feel to be under Secret Service investigation for defacing money?” And the first word out of my mouth was “awesome.”

KATIE THORNTON: That’s how you felt? 

PAUL JACKSON: Yep, because I knew at that moment we had gotten traction. So I printed 250,000 more stickers. And I put them on the back of 250,000 quarters. 

ROMAN MARS: Whoa! Really?

KATIE THORNTON: I mean, that’s Paul’s telling of it. That’s more than $60,000 in quarters. 

ROMAN MARS: Yo! 

KATIE THORNTON: He said sometimes they would just go to the bank and get rolls of quarters and sticker them up and then return them to the bank. 

ROMAN MARS: Amazing! 

KATIE THORNTON: There’s quite a lot of dedication here. But he didn’t just return them all to the bank. He would also use them to sort of continue his protest, to bring his protest to a broader sphere. 

PAUL JACKSON: So we took the show on the road and went to D.C. and spent nothing but rolls of stickered quarters for gas, food, and lodging the entire way. 

ROMAN MARS: That is amazing. That is amazing. I love that the coin collector types put things into circulation to make a point. It’s so cool.

KATIE THORNTON: Totally. I agree. I had to double down and clarify this with him. “Hold on. Nothing but quarters? You paid for your hotel room in quarters not once, but every night? And gas…”

ROMAN MARS: Wow. 

KATIE THORNTON: And also, they didn’t just do that. When they got to D.C., they rolled this giant four-foot diameter foam quarter with his design from the White House to the U.S. Mint. And the press did love this. 

NPR: An artist from Columbia, Missouri, is upset that the U.S. Mint has rejected his design for the state quarter. He’s protesting by putting stickers with his design on the back of real quarters. Today he’ll be handing out those sticker-covered quarters in front of the U.S. Treasury building here in Washington… 

ROMAN MARS: This is such a [BLEEP] NPR story. 

KATIE THORNTON: Just the straight read. I love it. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, it’s just a fat slow pitch down the middle for NPR.

KATIE THORNTON: And for us. Here we are. 

ROMAN MARS: But he mentions that the Secret Service was investigating him. So this is a question of defacing money. Is this something that he could actually get in trouble for? 

KATIE THORNTON: Well, okay, so he says he went to the Secret Service headquarters. 

PAUL JACKSON: We tried to turn ourselves in. And apparently the Secret Service doesn’t listen to NPR or something. But they said, “We don’t have any record of you. Get out of our building.”

ROMAN MARS: I love it. He’s like, “Arrest me!” I love that he’s just trying to provoke them to have something happen just so he can kick up enough dust to make this a thing. 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, I think he’s got a real sense of story and drama. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. 

KATIE THORNTON: But ultimately–the type of defacing money that he was doing–it’s not illegal. He’s not trying to profit from it. So, you know, it was just legally not an issue. 

ROMAN MARS: And so did any of this… I mean, you showed me the final quarter, so I know Paul didn’t get most of his original design back on the quarter. But did his protests ultimately have any influence on the design process? 

KATIE THORNTON: Yeah, I mean, it was this whole hubbub. And so the Mint did keep offering redesigns, but Paul just was never really happy with what they did. And the whole thing left a bit of a bitter taste in his mouth. 

PAUL JACKSON: I divested of my coin collection during this entire process because I learned that basically I was the savings account for the U.S. Mint. They anticipate that you will take sets of those state quarters out of circulation. 

ROMAN MARS: Plus the $60,000 worth of quarters that he bought to add his painting to the backup… So he created even more seigniorage opportunities for the federal government through the Quarter Program without even probably intending. 

KATIE THORNTON: Right, yeah, there’s definitely a big irony here. And also, just throughout this whole saga, he made the Missouri State Quarter and those stickered quarters really hot commodities. People definitely took them out of circulation. And that’s a win for the Mint. 

ROMAN MARS: So, whether it’s artist approved or not, the quarters did their job, at least in the eyes of the Mint. 

KATIE THORNTON: Totally. Though Paul doesn’t really think it’s quite so black and white because I asked him about that. I asked them who won, him or the Mint. 

PAUL JACKSON: Oh, I totally won. Are you kidding? I had a blast, and they created more opportunities for me than they cost me. 

ROMAN MARS: I really am just part of the Paul fan club at this point. What a guy?

KATIE THORNTON: What a guy? Thank you, Paul. Thank you for your diligent effort fighting for your coin. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, Katie Thornton, thank you so much for this. I had a great time making this episode with you. 

KATIE THORNTON: Thanks so much, Roman. Me too. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Katie Thornton and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.