The Eisenhower Dollar

1971–1978

The Eisenhower dollar was the last of the big American dollar coins, and its size was at once its dignity and its undoing. It was a genuine cartwheel — the diameter and heft of the old silver dollars that had vanished from circulation — struck in base metal at a moment when Americans had already stopped carrying dollar coins at all. It set out to honor a president and a moon landing on a single piece, and it did so on a coin too heavy and too broad for an ordinary pocket.

That contradiction runs through the whole series. The coin was designed to feel substantial, a deliberate throwback to the era of hard silver money, just as the country was moving decisively toward paper and plastic for its everyday dollars. A large dollar coin was exactly what the public had already shown it did not want, and the Eisenhower gave them a very large one.

The result is a coin that never truly circulated in most of the country and found its real home in an unlikely place: the casinos of Nevada, where a heavy dollar was not a burden but a requirement. The Eisenhower dollar is the story of a coin whose size was its entire character — the source of its grandeur, its impracticality, and the single niche in which it actually worked.

Two deaths and a landing

The coin was born of two events six weeks apart in 1969. In March of that year Dwight Eisenhower died; in July, Apollo 11 landed men on the Moon. A proposal quickly took shape to commemorate both on a new dollar — the general and president on one side, the lunar triumph on the other — and Congress took up a bill to do exactly that.

The design carried the pairing through. Frank Gasparro's obverse gave the coin Eisenhower's profile, while the reverse adapted the insignia of the Apollo 11 mission itself: a bald eagle descending toward the Moon, an olive branch in its talons, the earth in the distance behind it. Two of the defining images of mid-century America — the soldier-statesman and the moon landing — ended up on opposite faces of the same coin, a piece meant to gather a whole era into twenty grams of metal. The trouble was that the metal came to rather more than twenty grams.

The general on the curb

The obverse had a longer history than the 1969 bill suggests. Gasparro, the Mint's chief engraver, had first drawn Eisenhower from life more than two decades earlier. On a June afternoon in 1945, standing in the crowd along a New York avenue as the victorious general rode past in a homecoming parade, Gasparro sketched the face that had impressed him, and carried the drawing back to the Philadelphia Mint.

He kept it for twenty-six years. When the commission finally came to design an Eisenhower dollar, the engraver reached back to that wartime sketch of a younger, triumphant Eisenhower rather than the elderly former president of 1969. The portrait on the coin is thus a memory of a specific afternoon at the close of the Second World War — a design that had been waiting, in a drawer, for a quarter of a century before the country needed it.

The last cartwheel

Everything that mattered about the Eisenhower dollar followed from its dimensions. The Mint made it the full size of the historic silver dollar — the same broad diameter, the same substantial weight — as a deliberate gesture toward the vanished era of hard money. On a display shelf or in a presentation case it was magnificent; in a trouser pocket or a cash drawer it was simply too much coin.

That bulk was fatal to any hope of everyday circulation. By the 1970s Americans conducted their small business in paper dollars and light change, and a coin that weighed down a pocket and could not be carried in any quantity had no place in that routine. People who received an Eisenhower dollar tended to set it aside rather than spend it, treating it as a keepsake or a curiosity rather than as money. A dollar coin has to be convenient to survive as currency, and the Eisenhower was, above all else, inconvenient — the last American attempt to make the old full-size dollar work in a modern economy, and a demonstration of why it could not.

The silver question

The coin also arrived in the middle of an argument about metal. The silver that had defined the historic dollar was gone from circulating coinage, removed in the 1960s as its price rose, and Congress had to decide what an Eisenhower dollar should be made of. The resolution was a split: coins struck for circulation would be copper-nickel clad, carrying no precious metal, while special versions for collectors would be struck in a forty-percent silver clad.

Those collector coins became a small institution of their own, remembered by the packaging the Mint sold them in — the uncirculated silver pieces in their blue envelopes, the proofs in their brown boxes, "blue Ikes" and "brown Ikes" in the shorthand collectors still use. The enabling law itself came down to the wire: President Nixon signed it late on the final day of 1970, with little time to spare before a pocket veto would have killed the bill. The dollar that looked back to the age of silver was, for everyone who actually spent it, a base-metal coin.

The coin the casinos wanted

If the Eisenhower dollar failed to circulate across most of the country, it thrived in one corner of it. When silver coins left circulation in the 1960s, the casinos of Nevada lost the silver dollars their slot machines and gaming tables ran on, and they wanted a replacement — a substantial dollar-sized coin that machines could accept and pay out and that players would handle like the old cartwheels. The gaming industry became, in practice, the real constituency lobbying for a new dollar coin.

The Eisenhower suited that purpose exactly. Its heft, useless in a pocket, was an asset in a slot machine, where weight and size help a mechanism sort genuine coins from slugs, and its dollar value matched the play. For years the Eisenhower dollar circulated more briskly across Nevada gaming floors, replacing the private tokens casinos had been forced to mint, than it did in the ordinary commerce of the rest of the nation. The very quality that doomed it everywhere else made it welcome there.

Bicentennial and other quirks

The series carried a few distinctions that bear noting. For the nation's two-hundredth birthday the reverse was temporarily replaced: the Apollo eagle gave way to a design pairing the Liberty Bell with the Moon, the work of Dennis R. Williams, an art student still in his early twenties and by most accounts the youngest person ever to design a United States coin. These Bicentennial dollars carry the dual date 1776–1976, and because they were struck across two calendar years, no Eisenhower dollar bears the single date 1975 at all.

Other quirks marked the run. The dollars of 1973 were struck only for inclusion in the Mint's annual sets, none released for general circulation, making that year an anomaly in the series. And the forty-percent-silver surcharge was directed by law to help fund Eisenhower College in Seneca Falls, New York — a detail with an unhappy coda, since the college closed only a few years into the 1980s regardless of the coins struck in its support. For a short-lived denomination, the Eisenhower dollar accumulated a surprising number of footnotes.

Why it matters

The Eisenhower dollar matters as the last stand of the full-size dollar coin, and as the clearest lesson in why that coin could no longer work. It was made deliberately large, in homage to the silver dollars of the past, at the precise moment the country had committed to paper for its everyday dollars — and its size, meant to lend it dignity, instead guaranteed that no one would carry it. A coin can be handsome and substantial and still be useless as money if it is simply too much to hold.

Its afterlife proves the point. The Eisenhower dollar circulated where its bulk was an advantage rather than a burden — in the slot machines of Nevada — and almost nowhere else, and when the government next tried to make a dollar coin succeed, it drew the obvious conclusion and made the coin small. That next attempt would fail too, for the opposite reason, and its story belongs to the Anthony dollar. But the lesson the Eisenhower taught was unambiguous: the age of the big dollar was over, and no amount of grandeur could bring it back.