1/14/17

How the dollar got its face.

The U.S. Mint has just announced a new series of $100 gold coins to be struck with various images of Lady Liberty. The first one, due out in April, shows Liberty as an African American woman with hair in braids and a crown of stars. She's gorgeous.

$100 Gold Piece

But as you can imagine, not everyone is thrilled.  The Twitter outrage came from both the right and the left.  Lady Liberty is white, dammit!

Actually, she's not. There's a long tradition of putting Native Americans on our coins. Some of them are even men.  You probably know a few of these...

But when it all started, Lady Liberty was the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.

Seriously.

At the time of the American Revolution, there wasn't a great deal of British coinage available, so the colonies supplemented their currency with things like the Maria Theresa Austrian taler and the Spanish real de a echo or Spanish dollar. The Spanish dollar, whose name was derived from the Austrian coin, was worth eight reales  and gave us the piratical term, "pieces of eight".  Here's what it looked like.

Real de a ocho

The taler got a lot of mileage in Europe and elsewhere and was recognized as legal tender long after the Empress died.  In fact, the date of her death, 1780, remained on the coin until its final demise in 1961.  It was a very popular coin!  You can still buy them from the Austrian mint, but they're no longer legal currency.

Maria Theresa Taler

When the new American republic began to design coins, they looked no further than the popular taler for their design. And there's old Maria Theresa, sitting on our earliest coinage, Hapsburg nose and all.  This is a one cent piece from 1792, the first year the new country minted coins.

One Cent Piece

Below is a 1796 dollar.  The design is already evolving, but the draped bust remains identical to the taler.

Silver Dollar

So Lady Liberty started out as an autocratic European empress and has evolved over the years to reflect changing tastes and artistic impressions, including a fair number as a Native American.  The new $100 gold coin is just another step in that evolution, but in this case a return to one that more reflects American history.  I look forward to the Hispanic and Indian designs. Can a transgender Lady Liberty be far behind?