Focus: History, Politics, Art

How does the Lincoln penny speak to Roosevelt’s view of women and nationhood?

Competing Americas

To your right, you will find the first iteration of the US cent—wild Liberty with an unbroken chain of connection of the new nation on the obverse. Below that is the cent most of us now recognize—the profile of Abraham Lincoln. 

If we remove ourselves from history, we might decide that replacing idealized Liberty with a specific American president signals the time period’s rejection of women. The truth is much more complicated than that. The change addresses yearning for unity as well as yearnings for hierarchy. It addresses scales of political risk, and it also brings into focus an anxiety about how the country was seen by others, and how it saw itself. It would be tempting to say we are past those questions now, but perhaps they are closer to us than we would like to believe, and perhaps how, and why, they were treated as they were can also illuminate our future. 

Liberatory Money

It is hard for us to grapple with the excitement over the Lincoln penny. Many formerly enslaved people wanted the Lincoln coins, and some people believed that placing Lincoln on the coin acknowledged the 13th-15th Amendments and the freedom from slavery that many believed Lincoln supported. The New York Times notes that Black Americans thought of the pennies as “emancipation money.” The depiction of Lincoln comes from a photograph by Charles Eliot Norton, which captures him in a pose he used when talking to children. The Russian immigrant artist, Victor D. Brenner, designed the coin from this photograph.

From this perspective, Lincoln—who actually, regardless of reason—helped free all formerly enslaved people is perhaps more representative of US history than Lady Liberty (take a look at this post if you want to learn more about the controversy over the earliest, post-Constitution coins to emerge from the US Mint). After all, Liberty changes from the earliest coins where she has wild hair and an indomitable expression, to becoming more traditionally female, with a clear hairstyle that morphs into a diadem and a slight double chin. The wild principle ages into matronhood, and all the while, the promise of “liberty for all” does not become a reality.

In a forthcoming post we will discuss the depiction of Liberty from 1859 to 1908, where a caucasian Liberty wears a male Indian headdress. The depictions of Liberty, then, might have begun as aspirational, but she was mired in either a more refined, delicate, “respectable” view of women, or she showed the racist bias of the artists who created her without knowing or caring about the iconography of Indian headdresses or the appropriateness of her wearing one. Interestingly, it could be argued that this post-Civil War vision of Liberty is not forward-looking, but reactionary. She harkens back to 17th and 18th century views of America (see image to the right). Within this framework, Lincoln’s achievements and sacrifice did produce and begin to rectify one of the central compromises of the Constitution. 

It is worth noting that Teddy Roosevelt himself, while holding some Progressive views, remained a staunch racist. Nevertheless, he pushed for the coin, suggested the artist who created it, and the coin’s popularity soared. The New York Times declares on October 21, 1909 that the Lincoln penny is on track to have 70,000,000 of them minted within three and a half months. While early on there were speculative runs on the coin, which might account for some of its desirability, that the Philadelphia mint only stamped Lincoln pennies for three months attests to the coin’s wild popularity.

“Colonel Roosevelt told me that he was convinced by this record that woman suffrage would be of advantage to our country … and that he had definitely decided to incorporate a suffrage plank in the platform,” Judge Ben Lindsay, June 12, 1912

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Money and Nationhood

When we think about context, we embed an event or issue within the larger actions of the time period. Coins and other cultural artifacts help us cut through the “noise” of the present and take another look at what is going on in a time period. Using this perspective, let’s take a look at Teddy Roosevelt’s choice to change the image on the humble US penny from a representative image of Liberty to Abraham Lincoln. 

As documented across a wide variety of sources, TR decided to focus on the penny for pragmatic reasons: changing higher denominations would have required the approval of Congress. Towards the end of the 19th century there had been various condemnations of US coinage as being behind or less than European coinage. It’s tempting to make this the precipitating cause for Roosevelt’s choice, but there was an additional reason: the President wanted American coins to show growing American preeminence. 

From a contemporary perspective, we can certainly critique the choice of removing the personification of Liberty as a woman and moving to—for the first time on the penny—the representation of an actual person, albeit an iconic president. Female Liberty drops off at the same time as suffragettes pushed for women’s ability to vote. Is this in some way a commentary on TR’s view of women? Surprisingly, Teddy Roosevelt was much more of a supporter than one might guess. But before we get to that, let’s turn to the choice of Lincoln.

Lincoln was born in 1809, and there had been a concerted desire to acknowledge his centenary. He was also extraordinarily popular, and, while it might be tempting to believe that the South would have pushed back against placing Lincoln on the coin, some historians theorize that the country was less divided in part because of the Spanish-American War, which resulted in more unity against a common enemy. 

Teddy Roosevelt—Rugged Individualist—and Supporter of Women

What we see in the Lincoln penny and in Teddy Roosevelt himself is similar to what we have seen in other coins. How and where do ideals of liberty clash with actions? Within himself, Roosevelt held many contradictions. Most of us think of Teddy Roosevelt as an adventurer—a hunter, a commander, a President intent upon creating national parks and preserving land. While he was these things, at an early age he was prone to asthma attacks and was weak, allowing him time to be an avid reader and thinker, who wrote his senior thesis at Harvard advocating for the equal rights of women, meaning in part that they should not change their names upon marriage.

While he came to believe women should vote, publicly taking this position in 1912, he also saw the function of women as primarily helping the nation via their positions as mothers who would raise Americans, regardless of where the women came from. In his career, he met with poor working women including garment workers—some of whom were Turkish Jews who spoke no English—and supported their right to strike. Some commented then, and continue to comment now, that this was self-interest, but to side himself with women immigrants who wanted to create a union and to do so publicly suggests a multi-sided President who could not be easily pigeonholed. 

As Gary Gerstle puts it, “Roosevelt at times accepted the need for a modified conception of masculinity that accorded with the female reformers' emphasis on cooperation, service, and social welfare, qualities that other men of Roosevelt's time derided as fatal to men's ‘rugged individualism.’” By the time we reach 1912, Roosevelt’s vision has enlarged enough that he calls for women’s suffrage.

The choice of Americas becomes a choice between inclusion and exclusion, between an exclusivity that Roosevelt disliked and an inclusivity he could not quite bring himself to fully embrace. The president who removes female Liberty from the penny, goes on to support suffrage for women, beginning, in part, women’s full political participation dreamed of by their great-great grandmothers who fought in and supported the American Revolution. At the same time he saw women primarily as mothers who would rear the next generation of Americans. Likewise, while he invites Booker T. Washington to dine with him and his family at the White House, an act immediately condemned by most in the South, he retained limiting racist beliefs and never gave the Black regiments involved in the Battle of San Juan Hill their due, effectively erasing their participation.

Both blind and visionary, Teddy Roosevelt and the Lincoln penny show the force of competing political currents and the power of evolving ideas. Perhaps most importantly, they caution us against easy categories of “good” or “bad” presidents.