What was the motivation for launching the Susan B. Anthony dollar?
I think it reflected the fact that there had not been a successful new denomination coin in a couple of generations, and there was a feeling that the nation’s coinage system was being outdated by the inflationary period of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Even though there was the Kennedy half-dollar, it didn’t circulate because the coin was too big for people to carry around in their pockets. Then the Treasury department and Congress repeated the same mistake in 1971 with the Eisenhower dollar, which was the same size as the large silver dollars of the 19th century. What was the problem with the Susan B. Anthony? When Congress began getting serious in 1995 about launching a new dollar coin, I wanted to make certain that we’d at least learn the lessons of the Susan B. Anthony. So I went back and looked at the research that was done in the mid-‘70s—research that the Treasury department presumably relied upon. Number one, it said the coin had to be smaller in size. They got that part right. But it als
