Where Half The Morgans Went

Pittman's act was a master stroke, and I could not admire him more for it. First, it alleviated two serious problems - Great Britain's silver crisis, and the uncounted millions of Morgans taking up space in storage because so few ever actually circulated (Morgans in the first place having been a political creation to hook up silver mining interests).

Second, it provided for the US Government to purchase an equal amount of domestic silver to replace it, at a price greater than current market. And Pittman's home state of Nevada was still a major silver producer....the combined mintage of 1921 Morgans and all Peace dollars rather neatly fills that mandate.

The elegance of that move may have been equaled since, but it hasn't been exceeded.

For the record, Q. David's estimate of 15% remaining still amounts to almost 80 million Morgans.

Right here teaching it, my friend.

Dave you've read this I suppose:



What a book! This was Van Ryzin's thesis or part of it.

The era's cartoons are just priceless!

Thanks rynegold! I know what I'll be reading on my trip up to Virginia City now.

Don't worry rynegold, I will start a thread and post pics of VC and the Carson City mint when I go incuding their stunning cc coin colletion and cc coin press #1 for all who have never been to live vicariously through them

Here are some pictures of what came up from the Gairsoppa

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ipwreck.html

I had heard that trainloads of mutilated Morgans were what was exported, but I could find no pictures of the coins or the refining process in the UK. What came up from the ship were lots of ingots, appearing to be about 5-10 kg each.

A swimming pool sized ingot...what a concept...

It also created a problem as well though because all those dollar coins were backing for the silver certificates in circulation so melting them down required the removal of something like 270 million dollars worth of currency from circulation. Of course the economic slowdown this would normally cause helped to moderate the economic boom being created by the wartime economy.



Even better, that greater than market price was paid by the British not the Americans. Under the terms of the Pittman Act the British paid $1 per ouce for the silver, which was well above the market price, plus they also had to pay an additional amount per ounce to cover the expense of coining all of the new silver back into dollar coins.

Actually the recoinage of the Pittman act ended with the 1928 Peace dollars. The 1934 and 35 coins were the result of another act by the government. Another mandatory silver purchase act to support the silver interests, and it boost the governments silver stockpile. Only part of that purchase act went to silver dollars though, but it did swell the governments silver holdings by over 2 billion ounces.



The Pittman Act silver was melted and formed into bars here, it was not shipped in coin form. And considering the act melted nearly half of all the Morgans that had been coined theyweren't selected mutilated ones, just whatever bags happened to be closest to the door of the vault.

I can't Remer who said it, probably SD, but they said morgans would be equivalent to ASE's today without pittman. But even with 10% more being held back I'm sure the landscape would be analogous to the plot of Back to the Future 2.

Gyrene, Ken hoppel the chief coiner likes to tell people to touch the planchet before it goes into the press to "imprint your dna" into the coin forever. Not sure if that's true or not though. Did you touch yours? And what pattern did you get?