How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.
The Lincoln cent is one of the last circulating examples of President Theodore Roosevelt’s direct efforts to extend his era’s aesthetic aspirations to the art of American coinage. Brenner’s penny, with its crisply articulated profile of the sixteenth president, based on an 1864 photograph by Mathew Brady, was the first American coin to depict a historical figure. It replaced James Barton Longacre’s comparatively primitive Indian Head design of 1859—of which the numismatist Cornelius Vermeule (the father of the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule) said, “Great art the coin was not.”
The penny became the most widespread example of the transformation of American numismatics in the early twentieth century. “I think the state of our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness,” Roosevelt wrote in 1904 to his treasury secretary, Leslie Mortier Shaw. “Would it be possible, without asking permission of Congress, to employ a man like Saint-Gaudens to give us a coinage that would have some beauty?” A year later, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Dublin-born pioneer of the American Beaux-Arts, working with Adolph A. Weinman, designed the medal for Roosevelt’s second inauguration and established a unique working relationship with the president. “I am very, very proud at having Saint-Gaudens connected in any way with my administration,” the president wrote to the cosmopolitan artist Francis D. Millet, who had suggested the commission and was pushing for an overhaul of American coinage. Roosevelt called the medal “the most satisfactory thing imaginable.” Now in his first full term, the president set his sights on the one-cent piece and gold coinage, to which changes could be made with less legislative oversight compared to other denominations. “I suppose I shall be impeached for it in Congress,” he wrote to Saint-Gaudens, who had been running up against the mint’s uninspiring designs for decades, “but I shall regard that as a very cheap payment.”