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Pittman dollars not all melted in 1918....

19 posts in this topic

...several million were "squished."

 

Treasury was so eager to get the silver to British India that the first ten or twenty million were flattened with ingot rollers at the Philadelphia Mint. (Imagine an elongated cent, but bigger.)

 

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I'm surprised a few of these squished silver dollars didn't survive---or did they?

 

I any event, they would be easy enough to create some using a roller and a few common date silver dollars.

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Perhaps they were waffled. doh!

 

So, is there any record that large amounts of Aunt Jemima's Syrup was shipped overseas?

 

Chris

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Melted or "squished" so far as collectors are concerned it would amount to the same thing.

 

As for some of these "squished" coins getting out and going to collectors, that would have been unlikely. Today Morgan dollars are among the most popular of U.S., but back in 1918 most collectors regared them as "junk." More of them existed than anyone could have wanted back in the day.

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New research suggests that the total melted was over 299 million.

 

Yep, it's only time that makes them "special."

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how many morgan dollars total where struck for circulation?/

 

 

Here is an interesting stat for the Morgan dollar coinage from 1878 to 1904. These data are taken from Van Allen & Mallis' Comprehensive Catalog and Encyclopedia of Morgan and Peace Dollars , page 4, Table 1-1.

 

Total coinage 1878 to 1904 568,288,865

 

Number of dollars in circulation 73,584,336

 

Number of dollars held to back silver certificates 454,864,708

 

Number of dollars held in excess of silver certificates in circulation 39,779,821

 

In other words by the time the "prime run" of Morgan dollars that ran from 1878 to 1904 ended, only about 7% of the mintage was in circulation.

 

You can add the 1921 Morgan dollar mintage of 86,730,000 to the 1878 to 1904 total.

 

 

To show these coins' status as collectors' items for the common dates, I'll relate this story.

 

Back when I lived in New Jersey in the early 1970s an old coin dealer told me that back in the early 1960s he used to get bags of Morgan dollars from the bank and go through them looking for better dates. He didn't bother to take the excess (common dates) back to the bank, but sold them off at the shows for slightly under face value as a gimmick.

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One comment - the 1921 Morgans were struck as replacements under the Pittman Act. If you're "counting coins" silver dollar mintage stops in 1904; Pittman replacements made from 1921-1928, and additional new coinage 1934-35.

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how many morgan dollars total where struck for circulation?/

 

 

Here is an interesting stat for the Morgan dollar coinage from 1878 to 1904. These data are taken from Van Allen & Mallis' Comprehensive Catalog and Encyclopedia of Morgan and Peace Dollars , page 4, Table 1-1.

 

Total coinage 1878 to 1904 568,288,865

 

Number of dollars in circulation 73,584,336

 

Number of dollars held to back silver certificates 454,864,708

 

Number of dollars held in excess of silver certificates in circulation 39,779,821

 

In other words by the time the "prime run" of Morgan dollars that ran from 1878 to 1904 ended, only about 7% of the mintage was in circulation.

 

You can add the 1921 Morgan dollar mintage of 86,730,000 to the 1878 to 1904 total.

 

 

To show these coins' status as collectors' items for the common dates, I'll relate this story.

 

Back when I lived in New Jersey in the early 1970s an old coin dealer told me that back in the early 1960s he used to get bags of Morgan dollars from the bank and go through them looking for better dates. He didn't bother to take the excess (common dates) back to the bank, but sold them off at the shows for slightly under face value as a gimmick.

 

Bill, your stats raise a couple of interesting questions for me. We know that the Pittman Act authorized the melting of up to $350 million in silver dollars and that just shy of $300 million were actually melted and/or "squished". That would have left about $150 million held in reserves to back the silver certificates.

 

Does anyone know the total dollar amount of silver certificates that were in circulation? $150 million seems like it might be a small number to me. Were there other sources used to back the silver certificates?

 

Chris

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Not every piece of U.S. paper money was a silver certificate. There are gold notes, National Bank notes, legal tender notes that were backed by nothing and after 1918 Federal Reserve Bank notes.

 

Also circulating money is only part of the money supply today and for a very long time the vast majority of the money supply is nothing but bookkeeping entries or computer records. When you write a check banks trade those funds via electronics from account to account, and there is not physical money involved.

 

Now that I've given you a heart attack about your national monetary system, I hope that I've answered the question.

 

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Some silver dollars were reserved as backing for silver certificates, and others were considered “free” in that they could be used without affecting certificates. There was also the complexity of the circulating money supply being composed of multiple types of “money.”

 

The Treasury was pretty good at finding numbers to support what they wanted to do. When they wanted to send silver dollars to China in 1919, they transferred them from the subtreasuries to Federal Reserve Banks, then the FRB banks sold them to banks in Shanghai, and pocketed the profit. This appears to have been outside the Pittman Act, and done to “protect US subsidiary coinage.” (This accounts for the extra 29 million dollars mentioned above.)

 

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Not every piece of U.S. paper money was a silver certificate. There are gold notes, National Bank notes, legal tender notes that were backed by nothing and after 1918 Federal Reserve Bank notes.

 

Also circulating money is only part of the money supply today and for a very long time the vast majority of the money supply is nothing but bookkeeping entries or computer records. When you write a check banks trade those funds via electronics from account to account, and there is not physical money involved.

 

Now that I've given you a heart attack about your national monetary system, I hope that I've answered the question.

 

Geez, Bill, I didn't know you were using a computer back in 1918. :roflmao:

 

Thanks!

 

Chris

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Geez, Bill, I didn't know you were using a computer back in 1918.

 

 

You didn't have computers, but you had little guys sitting on stools wearing green eyeshades doing the same thing. It was all done with bookkeeping entries. Computers only made it faster with less drudgery. The Communist playwright, Elmer Rice, wrote about them in “Mister Zero.”

 

The percentage of currency that is physical money has been low for a long time. Money is built upon trust and the willingness of the people and the legal system to give it buying power.

 

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The guys who did the calculations were called "Computers" - they computed the totals.

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By the way, just on the off-chance that someone may be interested, fairly detailed information about the currency in circulation is available in the Annual Reports of the Comptroller of the Currency (which are usually contained within the same volume as the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury).

 

There are a number of years of these Annual Reports available on the Internet through Google Books (as well as all - or almost all - of the Mint Annual Reports from the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century).

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Chris,

According to the statistics, there would have been 415,084,887 silver certificates in circulation at the time, as it states there were $454,864,708 held to back the silver certificates of which this number was $39,779,821 in excess of the silver certificates in circulation at the time. Am I missing something?

Jim

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