The History of the Franklin Half Dollar

Here is a coin that shouldn't quite make sense. Nearly every face on American money belongs to a president — Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Kennedy. This one honors a man who was never president, never wanted to be, and who in his own writing seemed almost embarrassed by the idea of his face on a monument at all.

He was a printer, a scientist, a diplomat and a wit, arguably the most famous American alive in his lifetime, and the only Founding Father to sign all four of the documents that made the United States. And here is the detail that makes the coin feel less like an oddity and more like destiny: a century and a half before his face went onto this half dollar, that same man had a hand in designing the first coins the country ever made.

This is the story of the Franklin half dollar, and of Benjamin Franklin, who helped put a nation's money in order twice, a hundred and sixty years apart.

The money he made first

Most people have no idea this part is true. In 1776, as the colonies declared independence, the Continental Congress needed money, and by long tradition Benjamin Franklin took a hand in designing it.

The result was the Continental Currency dollar, and it carried what look unmistakably like his fingerprints — not a portrait, but ideas. On the front, a sun shining down on a sundial, with the Latin word Fugio, "I fly," and beneath it a plain instruction that could only have come from the author of Poor Richard's Almanack: Mind Your Business. Put them together and you have a small sermon struck in metal. Time flies, so tend to your work.

On the back, thirteen linked chain rings, one for each colony, encircling three words: We Are One.

Fugio, 1787

Eleven years later that same design was reborn as the Fugio cent. The sundial, the motto, the thirteen linked rings, the plea for unity — all of it carried over.

The Fugio is often called the first coin authorized by the United States, though the claim depends on how you count: the 1792 half disme has its own case as the first struck under the Constitution. Either way, the symmetry holds. The earliest official American coinage was, in effect, Franklin's coinage, carrying his wit and his argument for union rather than anyone's face.

A hundred and sixty years later, the nation would put Franklin himself on a coin, closing a loop that had been open since the founding.

The woman who willed it into being

The Franklin half exists because one person wanted it to.

Her name was Nellie Tayloe Ross, and she was a genuine pioneer — the first woman to serve as governor of a U.S. state, and then the first woman to serve as Director of the United States Mint, a post she held for two decades. Ross admired Franklin deeply, and she wanted him on a coin.

She had seen a Franklin portrait that her chief engraver, John R. Sinnock, had modeled for a medal back in the 1930s, and she directed him to turn it into a half dollar.

Why not the penny

There was a real debate about which coin should carry him. Some urged Ross to put Franklin on the cent, because he was so bound up with the saying "a penny saved is twopence clear" — the original of the line we now mangle into "a penny saved is a penny earned."

But the cent belonged to Lincoln, and Ross would not displace him. The half dollar it would be, replacing the Walking Liberty design that had run since 1916.

A face modeled from life

The portrait reaches back to a face captured from life. It draws on a bust of Franklin by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon — the same master whose life mask of Washington gave us the face on the quarter.

Houdon sculpted Franklin during the old man's years as America's envoy to France, where he was a genuine celebrity, recognized in the streets of Paris. So the Franklin on the half dollar is the real Franklin, modeled by an artist who sat in a room with him.

The bell, the crack, and the little eagle

On the reverse went the Liberty Bell, and with it some genuine controversy.

The Commission of Fine Arts, the body that reviews coin designs, looked at Sinnock's work and disliked two things. First, the eagle. By law a half dollar had to bear one, but Sinnock's is a tiny, almost apologetic bird tucked off to the side of the great bell, so small it reads as an afterthought. The Commission thought it feeble.

Second, and stranger, they objected to the crack. Sinnock had rendered the Liberty Bell exactly as it is, famous fracture and all, and the Commission worried in all seriousness that a cracked bell on the nation's money would invite ridicule — that critics would have a field day with "cracked" American currency.

The Mint overruled them and kept the crack. History has been kind to that decision. The cracked bell is now one of the best-loved reverses in American coinage.

The initials and the Cold War ghost

The controversy the public actually seized on was something else, and anyone who knows the Roosevelt dime will recognize it immediately.

At the base of Franklin's shoulder sit the designer's initials, JRS, for John R. Sinnock. This was 1948, the opening of the Cold War, with the country gripped by fear of hidden communists. A rumor spread — exactly as it had on Sinnock's dime two years earlier — that the initials were a coded tribute to Joseph Stalin, planted by a Soviet sympathizer inside the Mint.

The same phantom, the same paranoia, chasing the same engraver across two different coins. And just as false the second time. There was no plot, only a man's ordinary initials in the ordinary place. Some have suggested Sinnock added his middle initial precisely to distinguish himself after the "JS" on the dime first drew the whisper. The Mint dismissed it, and the coins kept coming.

The engraver who never saw it

There is a poignant footnote to Sinnock himself. He finished his designs for the Franklin half only weeks before his death in 1947. He never saw the coin enter circulation.

His successor, Gilroy Roberts, completed the work and shepherded it out. That name should sound familiar, because sixteen years later Roberts would cut the obverse portrait for the Kennedy half dollar that replaced this coin, with Frank Gasparro modeling its reverse.

One engraver's death handed the series to the next, and that next engraver ended up bookending the whole thing himself.

Silver, without an asterisk

Now to the substance, because in one respect the Franklin is the simplest silver coin in the American series.

Every Franklin half dollar, from 1948 through 1963, is ninety percent silver. There is no exception, no transition year, no "check the date" asterisk of the kind that haunts the dime, the quarter and the Kennedy half. The entire run is silver, first year to last.

Each coin carries roughly a third of a troy ounce of fine silver, and that figure is identical on every date and every mint mark in the series. For anyone working through a jar of old coins, the rule is beautifully short: if it's a Franklin, it's silver.

Full Bell Lines

Collectors prize one detail above all others, and it lives on that controversial bell.

Look closely at the horizontal lines running across the bottom of the Liberty Bell. On a coin struck with full force from a fresh die, those lines are complete and cleanly separated. The hobby calls it Full Bell Lines, and it is the Franklin's equivalent of Full Bands on a Mercury dime or Full Steps on a Jefferson nickel — that narrow margin of a perfect strike that separates an ordinary coin from a prized one.

Because the bell sits at a high point of the design, those lines were often struck weakly, which is exactly why the designation means something. The two major grading services each apply their own published standard for it, so the label is worth reading alongside the service that assigned it.

Mint marks and a short run

The series ran only sixteen years, and its mint marks tell a small story of their own. Philadelphia struck Franklins for the entire run with no mint mark. Denver struck them throughout, marked D. San Francisco struck them marked S only in the early years, beginning with 1949-S and ending in 1954 — among them 1953-S, a date that has become quietly notorious among specialists hunting a fully struck bell.

Proof coinage had been suspended during the war and resumed in 1950, so proof Franklins exist for most but not all of the series.

There are varieties worth knowing, too. The best known is the 1955 "Bugs Bunny," where a clash between the dies left marks across Franklin's mouth that give the impression of buck teeth — an accident of manufacture that collectors have chased ever since.

Sixteen years, then November 1963

The coin's life was cut short, and not by the ordinary rule.

A design normally runs twenty-five years before it can be changed without an act of Congress. But when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, a grieving country wanted him on a coin immediately, and the half dollar was chosen. Congress acted, and after only sixteen years the Franklin half was retired to make room for the Kennedy half dollar.

The last word

Here is where Benjamin Franklin gets the quiet final word, because he would very likely have approved of stepping aside.

Franklin was uneasy about the cult of the individual, about turning celebrated men into monuments. He was a republican to his core, suspicious of anything that carried the scent of vanity or monarchy. In his own writing he made light of grand memorials and the glorification of great men, and he consistently preferred usefulness to pomp.

This was a man who, when he helped design America's first money, put no face on it at all — only a sundial, a piece of homely advice, and a plea for unity. He chose "Mind Your Business" over any portrait, including his own.

So there is something fitting, and gently ironic, in the whole arc. The Founding Father least comfortable with self-glorification spent sixteen years on the nation's half dollar and then yielded it, without fuss, to a fallen president the country needed to mourn. Franklin, one suspects, would have tipped his hat and told them to get on with it.

Look again at the coin: the plain, bold profile of a man in his spectacles, and on the reverse a cracked bell beside a little eagle the critics wanted gone. It carries the face of the only Founding Father to sign the Declaration, the treaty with France, the peace with Britain and the Constitution. It is silver from its first year to its last. It survived a Cold War ghost story and a fight over a crack that everyone now loves.

And it belongs to the same man who, a hundred and sixty years earlier, helped design the first coins the United States ever made — telling his countrymen to mind their business, and reminding them that for all their differences, they were one.