The Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle

1907–1933

Somewhere behind bulletproof glass, under armed guard, sits a single twenty-dollar gold coin. It has a face value of twenty dollars. It last sold for nearly nineteen million. And for most of the last century, if you had owned it, the United States government would have sent men to take it from you — because nearly every one of its kind was supposed to have been melted into anonymous bars of gold and erased from history.

How a piece of pocket money became the most valuable coin on Earth, hunted by federal agents and fought over all the way to the Supreme Court, is a story that begins not with a criminal, but with a president who was embarrassed by his own country's money.

A president's pet crime

That president was Theodore Roosevelt. In 1904, he sat down and wrote a letter that would change American coinage forever, complaining that the coins in every citizen's pocket were of an atrocious hideousness.

Roosevelt had fallen in love with the coins of ancient Greece — high, sculptural, alive — and he wanted American money to stand beside them in a museum, not shame the nation. He knew this was a fight with the entrenched engravers at the Mint, and he relished it. He called the whole project his "pet crime" — his own gleeful phrase for deliberately going around the Mint's bureaucracy to force beauty onto the coinage.

A dying man's masterpiece

For his artist, Roosevelt chose the greatest American sculptor of the age: Augustus Saint-Gaudens. But what almost no one knew at the time was that Saint-Gaudens was dying. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and he took on the most important commission of his life — remaking the coinage of a nation — knowing his time was running out. He poured himself into it anyway, working through his illness to design a ten-dollar eagle and, above all, the great twenty-dollar double eagle.

And what he created was breathtaking. On the front, Liberty herself strides out of the coin — not a stiff profile, but a full figure in motion, a torch raised in one hand for enlightenment, an olive branch in the other for peace, the Capitol tiny at her feet and the rays of a rising sun blazing behind her. On the back, a great eagle soars low across that same sunrise.

It wasn't a picture stamped on metal. It was a sculpture you could hold. To this day, ask a room full of collectors to name the most beautiful coin America ever made, and most will name this one without hesitation.

Nine blows of the press

But beauty and machinery went to war. Saint-Gaudens had designed Liberty in extraordinarily high relief — the figures standing dramatically up off the surface, the way they would on a real sculpture. The problem was brutal: an ordinary coining press strikes a blank once. Saint-Gaudens's masterpiece needed to be struck as many as nine separate times, the gold reheated between each blow, just to force the metal up into every fold of the gown and every feather of the eagle.

Each coin took enormous effort, and only a tiny handful of those first magnificent ultra-high-relief pieces could ever be made. They were, in a sense, the closest thing to a hand-made coin the modern Mint ever produced.

Saint-Gaudens never lived to see the fight resolved. He died in the summer of 1907, his masterpiece still tangled in arguments over relief, never holding a finished coin in his hand. Roosevelt, impatient and grieving the delay, ordered the coin finished and out the door within weeks. The Mint's veteran engraver — the same establishment craftsman Saint-Gaudens had clashed with — flattened the relief down to something a single press stroke could manage. The artist's grand vision was compromised to fit the limits of a machine. And yet even in that lowered form, it was so beautiful it stayed in production for twenty-six years.

Roman numerals and a missing motto

Two details from those early coins are worth pausing on. Saint-Gaudens, the classicist, dated the first ones in Roman numerals — MCMVII instead of 1907. Ordinary Americans found it baffling, and within the year the date was switched to plain numbers.

And more revealing: the coin came out with no "In God We Trust" on it at all. That was deliberate — and it was Roosevelt's doing. The president genuinely believed it was close to sacrilege to stamp the name of God on money that would be used for gambling, for greed, for every grubby transaction under the sun. The public was outraged. Congress overruled the president and passed a law forcing the motto back onto the coin. Roosevelt lost that fight to the people he governed.

1933

For a quarter of a century, the double eagle did its quiet work as the largest regular gold coin in American life. And then came 1933 — and the coin walked straight into one of the strangest chapters in American history.

That year, in the depths of the Great Depression, banks were collapsing and terrified Americans were pulling their gold out of the system, threatening to drain the country dry. So the new president — Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore's distant cousin — took drastic action. He issued an executive order pulling the nation off the gold standard and commanding Americans to turn in their gold coins for paper money. Private citizens were, in effect, forbidden to hoard gold.

And here is the haunting part. That very year, the Philadelphia Mint had already struck nearly half a million 1933 double eagles — gleaming, finished, perfect. They were never released. Not a single one was officially issued into circulation.

Instead, nearly fifteen tons of gold coins were loaded into more than a thousand canvas bags and sealed away behind three steel doors in a Mint vault, and there they waited to be destroyed. As far as the United States government was concerned, the 1933 double eagle was never legally born. It existed, and it didn't exist. And soon, almost all of them were melted back into featureless bars — a nearly complete run of the most beautiful coin in the country, unmade.

The jeweler on the corner

But a few escaped. And to understand how, you have to meet a man named Israel Switt — a jeweler and scrap-gold dealer with a shop in South Philadelphia, just blocks from the Mint. Switt had connections inside that building, and in the chaos of 1933, it appears a small number of double eagles slipped quietly out the door and into his hands — almost certainly traded out by a Mint cashier who had access to the coins that were supposed to be doomed.

Switt was no stranger to trouble. He was once arrested carrying a suitcase full of gold coins to the Mint for melting; the coins were confiscated, and he was never even compensated. He had every reason to resent the government, and every opportunity to become the quiet source from which nearly all the surviving 1933 double eagles would eventually flow.

When Uncle Sam realized coins had escaped, the Secret Service went hunting. Agents tracked the 1933 double eagles one by one, seizing them wherever they surfaced — from dealers, from collectors — and handing the owners nothing but the coin's twenty-dollar face value. In the government's view, to hold one was to hold stolen property — a position the federal courts would ultimately uphold. Several were recovered and quietly destroyed.

The king's coin

But one got away in spectacular fashion. It made its way across the ocean to King Farouk of Egypt — a voracious, eccentric collector of everything from coins to questionable art. In 1944, Farouk's people actually applied to the U.S. government for a license to export the coin, and through a bureaucratic blunder, a clerk who didn't understand what he was signing granted it. By the time American officials realized their mistake and demanded the coin back, it was gone — sitting in the palace of a foreign king, legally exported, beyond their reach.

When Farouk was overthrown in a 1952 revolution and his fabulous collections were auctioned off, the U.S. government asked for the coin to be pulled and returned. It was withdrawn from the sale — and then it simply vanished. For over forty years, the Farouk double eagle disappeared from the face of the earth.

It resurfaced in 1996, when a British dealer was caught in a sting operation in a New York hotel room, the coin in his possession. What followed was years of legal war — but in the end, the government struck an extraordinary deal. This one coin, the Farouk specimen, would be declared the single 1933 double eagle that could be legally, privately owned — its ownership "monetized" by the government issuing it after the fact.

In 2002 it sold for over seven and a half million dollars. And in 2021, that same coin crossed the auction block again and sold for nearly nineteen million — the most valuable coin ever sold.

Ten more in a safe deposit box

The story wasn't over. In 2003, the elderly daughter of Israel Switt, a woman named Joan Langbord, opened an old family safe deposit box and found ten more 1933 double eagles — a hidden fortune from her father's shadowy past.

The family did something remarkable: they voluntarily handed the coins to the government for authentication, then sued to get them back, arguing they'd been acquired legally in that window when a Mint cashier could trade them. The government authenticated the coins — and then refused to give them back, declaring them stolen property. The Langbord family fought for years. In 2016 a federal appeals court, sitting en banc, ruled the coins had been government property all along; in 2017 the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

The government kept all ten. They sit today in the vaults at Fort Knox — recovered ghosts, held for a public that will never see them. Only two 1933 double eagles are on public view anywhere: the pair the Mint sent to the Smithsonian in 1934, the year the rest were ordered melted.

Why it matters

And that is where the two Roosevelts' coin finally rests. One Roosevelt commissioned it out of a love of beauty. The other, decades later, condemned nearly the entire final year of it to the melting pot. A dying sculptor gave his last strength to design it and never saw it finished. A Philadelphia jeweler smuggled a handful into legend. A deposed king made one disappear for forty years. And a family's attic discovery ended in the highest court in the land.

But the design itself never truly died. In 1986, when America launched its Gold Eagle bullion coin, it reached back nearly eighty years and placed Saint-Gaudens's striding Liberty right back on the front, where she remains today — walking, still, toward the rising sun.

That is the Saint-Gaudens double eagle. A president's pet crime. An artist's final masterpiece, finished by other hands. And a single forbidden coin that turned twenty dollars in gold into the most coveted, most litigated, most beautiful object in all of American money.