Farewell to the Penny
The impending death of the penny offers an opportunity to reflect on its meaning in American culture and in particular some of the implications of its imagery. Americans have debated the penny’s fate for decades, with economic rationalists pitted against those who value the penny for cultural reasons. In fact, the coin is far more expensive to produce than it is worth. The coin now being phased out, however, is but the latest iteration. The most recent change may be its most consequential. In 2010, the so-called Union Shield replaced an image of the Lincoln Memorial (Figures 1 and 2). In place of a site that is a complex symbol and has served as the backdrop for vital political demonstrations, Americans were presented with an anonymous shield.
Figure 1. The Union Shield Penny reverse (2010-present). Public Domain.
Figure 2. Lincoln Memorial Cent, reverse (1959-2008). Public Domain.
Shortly after the Union Shield penny appeared, I asked my four-year-old son for his opinion. “I like it,” he said, “because it makes me think of fighting.” Mission accomplished. That little, lovely, squeaky voice issuing from a being unguarded—but oh so vulnerable—he made me see the shield anew. The fact is, I had been tugged at, talked to, insulted, cheapened and who knows what else by the coin. Let the British pound put it in perspective. The denomination aside, the quid is weighty. Quid means “that which is, essence.” Its longest running design also had a shield, flanked by lions in a gesture whose distant ancestor is the Lion’s Gate at Mycenae, and it is topped by a crown, the crown. The weight of the coin, the way it holds in the hand, the deeply modeled relief that allows the paws of the lion to intertwine with the heraldic plume like the interpenetrating figures of the Parthenon frieze—these compensate for the way it trades on tradition. The Union Shield? There is no essence to this plastic toy, this circus poster, this computer image suscitated into a simulacrum of a coin. In Latin, quid literally translates to “what, something, anything.” Is this too much to have asked of the penny?
As a boy I was a casual collector of coins and stamps, baseball cards and stickers. They formed an iconography of sorts, an introduction to a small but vivid part of visual culture. The hairdos and firm chins of “great men,” buoyed by flowing flags and banderols, sheaves of wheat, buffalo, and Indian heads: this pageantry of American history, or, more pompously, civilization itself, may have been a load of shit, but it was grand. That I could not have put it in these terms did not prevent a tacit understand of the imagery and an attempt to assimilate it all into a personal framework of what America means. I can’t say that other children have this relationship to material and visual culture, but I certainly see a similar struggle for comprehension in my own children. I grew up with the Lincoln Memorial on the penny; my boys stare at a shield that looks like a stock image downloaded from Google. It is not that bygone pennies were more truthful than the Union Shield, but they argued for their version of things with vigor and style. If all of history, including our objects, is an unfolding argument, the shield penny was telling us something new about the U.S.
America’s least valuable coin not only bears symbols; it also bears meaning. Its cost to produce far exceeds its value, ostensibly the reason for its discontinuation. Far more pennies rest in jars and drawers than remain in circulation, an oddity in a nation of debtors, which gets right to the penny’s devaluation. While many nations, including Canada, have discontinued their smallest denominations, the penny survived long into obsolescence. Its primary value had become nostalgic. It outlived criticism that it costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year, both in production costs and because the time lost processing the coin in transactions grossly exceeds its value—economists at leading research universities have improbably calculated the value of the time of everyday handling. If they added the time-value of the debates about the penny’s fate, not to mention that of their own research, the coin would not be worth its patina. Yet for some years after 2006, support for keeping the penny actually increased, a reversal of prevailing sentiment since the early 1990’s. It turns out that Gallup measures such things.
Why a new penny just when the denomination should have been retired, in fact, as Americans debated its discontinuation. The new coin grew out of a 2005 Act that called for a new reverse side for the penny that “shall bear an image emblematic of President Lincoln's preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country.” Apparently, the Lincoln Memorial, which graced the penny from 1959-2008, no longer sufficed. A member of the great body of Americans sometimes pandered to as “the public” would be hard pressed to find a reason for the razing of Lincoln’s shrine on the penny. Some turns in history are tacit. Was this a political act or more like empty-nesters deciding to renovate their tired bathroom? We don’t know, but we do have the results. The Commission on Fine Arts (CFA), an august body of cultural arbiters in Washington, D.C., chose from among eighteen competition entries that included flags, eagles, several renditions of the U.S. Capital Building, three shields, and one with sheaves of wheat.
The CFA chose the last, with its thirteen sheaves of wheat dutifully representing the original thirteen colonies. So much for tired bathrooms. Let’s put aside the fact that the United States produces half the wheat that China does and much less than India, and that none of the original colonies is among the top wheat producing states. And we should probably put out of mind that corn and soybeans are by far the top American crops. Corn syrup, ethanol, edamame. This is the reality of American agricultural iconography: a monumental, dripping cube of tofu, preferably organic, in low relief. The salad bar at Wendy’s would be more apt than sheaves of wheat. If our committees in Washington insist on an iconography of American production or abundance, then we should consider a pill, a computer chip, a paper clip, an oil drill, a junk bond, a phone, and a few things that defy representation: human resources, logistics, construction, or, improbably, bitcoin. These are the nation’s top industries. If real production lacks sex appeal, think instead of art: what would Andy Warhol have done—or Georgia O’Keeffe, Man Ray, Faith Ringgold, Cy Twombly, Maya Lin, Laurie Anderson, Glen Ligon? An image of an escaped slave on the back of the penny anyone?
The proposed wheat penny—trite, old fashioned, and bane of celiac sufferers in an age of wheat intolerance—passed right through the system because, as it turned out, it was also Fascist. It soon came to light that it closely resembled the German Pfennig that circulated in the 1930s. The choice then fell to the Citizens Coinage Advising Committee (CCAC), a group of citizen experts formed by Congress in 2003 to “advise the Secretary of the Treasury on any theme or design proposals relating to circulating coinage.” They chose the Union Shield. The choice was thus made by a group of artists, historians, numismatists, curators, journalists, and financiers, among other professionals. By contrast, the CFA had not taken the shield seriously. The parent in me wonders what a group of young boys or girls would have chosen. The art historian in me has other ideas.
A symbol of a specific historical event deeply tied to national identity was supplanted by a generic emblem of war. It is not that the Union Shield bears the full weight of these changes, but it is part of a larger context of social imagery.
“If all of history, including our objects, is an unfolding argument, the shield penny was telling us something new about the U.S.”
Following the provision of the 2005 Act that the design should be emblematic of Lincoln’s preservation of the union, the image of the shield seems to represent Lincoln’s defense of the nation through the Civil War. In fact, a small shield appeared on the verso of the so-called Indian Head penny until 1909, when the Lincoln Penny replaced it (Figure 3). But more recent events have overwritten this association. Given the fact that the nation was at war in Iraq in the years when the penny was proposed, accepted, and minted, Operation Desert Shield, one of the initiatives of the First Iraq War, is a socially available reference. The 2006 insurgency by al-Qaeda against Americans took the same name. The shield, in other words, has been part of the rhetorical strategy of the American war in Iraq. Americans who tuned into virtually any television news station in these years encountered the shield in name and imagery. In the same years, dozens of Desert Shield icons turned up on patches, bandanas, commemoratives, and—thank goodness for capitalism!—Zippo lighters. What does this mean for the shield on the penny?
Figure 3. The “Indian Head” Penny and reverse (1859-1909). Public Domain.
With its monetary value pushed into the debtors’ column, its meaning is now bound up in its ability to put imagery in the hands of millions of people, whether or not they “read” it like my son does. In purely iconographic terms a shield replaced a building. In more cultural terms, war replaced memory. One of America’s best-known buildings, an open shrine for a martyred president and a stage set for the Gettysburg Address, which is inscribed on its inner walls, succumbed to a generic symbol. To be sure, the shield has its own important history, but it is one less rooted in specific place and time than what it replaced. One cannot visit a shield or gather as a community in its shadow. Nor is it a royal seal, which is rooted in familial and historical events. The Union Shield refers to something more rootless, an abstract idea of defense rather than a specific episode in American history.
Millions of Americans climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and look over the Washington Mall while standing at the feet of Lincoln. One person interviewed in 2010 about the change in the penny recalled visiting the memorial as a high school student: “I stood right by that column on the corner and looked out over this beautiful expanse and decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I'll miss seeing it on the penny.” This is just to point out the embodied potential of the old image of the Lincoln Memorial.
Not that the history of imagery on the penny is innocent. The Indian Head (1859-1909) presided over the most murderous decades of destruction of the Native Americans by an increasingly imperialist nation. This gave way to the “wheatie” (1909-1959), a celebration of agricultural bounty in those decades when industrialization transformed a rural and agricultural population into a predominantly urban and industrial one (Figure 4). The penny, as with many coins and national imagery in general, has persistently offered up a doublespeak of images.
Figure 4. The “Wheat Penny” reverse (1909–1958). Public Domain.
The Union Shield is no different. Beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision to place the shield on the penny took place in 2008, just as the nation tumbled into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, in the wake of the election of the first African American president, and the devaluation of the currency itself. In replacing the Lincoln Memorial, the shield drew attention away from the racial roots of American unity and identity just as the election of the first Black president brought race to the fore. And it thrust a symbol of war into public view as that new president had to make difficult military decisions with decreasing economic clout. It is not that the Union Shield was aimed consciously at this nexus of issues and events, but it cannot escape from them.
At the same time, the resonance of the Lincoln Memorial itself was undergoing dramatic change. On August 28, 2010, Glenn Beck staged his “Restoring Honor” rally there, appropriating for the Tea Party the site where Marian Anderson sang in 1939 after the D.A.R. barred her from Washington’s Constitution Hall; where Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I have a dream” speech in 1963; where the Million Man March took place in 1995 (Figure 5). Beck thrust himself onto the symbolic stage of Lincoln’s memorial with what then seemed like a fringe group of conservative radicals associated with racially charged protests. The shield was marched onto the stage of the penny, bumping aside the Lincoln Memorial. The timing would seem eerie, if it were not revolting.
Figure 5. Leaders of the March on Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, including Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 Aug 1963. Photographer: Rowland Scherman. Public domain.
As an architectural historian, I see other complicating issues in the shield penny. Buildings are not abstract symbols. Even if images of buildings might operate much like a shield, buildings themselves are rooted in place and time. They house events and offer places for commemoration. They may still be changeful, moving targets in historical consciousness, and yet their physical presence counts for something. This is one reason why their appearance on coinage dates to Antiquity—the tradition from which American coinage ultimately comes. Romans were particularly fond of placing the most symbolic of buildings, triumphal arches, on coins. Set up at the entrances to conquered towns and on the sacred and political routes of cities, triumphal arches have been called acts of “ostentatious inutility.” Romans drained marshes, built roads, erected great aqueducts that still carry water, and shaped laws that continue to inform modern legal codes, while, at the same time, they could pause to express and impose their self-gratification with such grand, nonsensical gestures.
With this we might think that the Union Shield is like a triumphal arch, a Roman gesture. Yet unlike the shield, the arches on Roman coins all referred to specific events and to their perpetuation at specific places in the empire. They simultaneously recalled a site of victory and a site of remembrance, such as the Via Sacra in Rome. Through a coin, for instance, the victory of Septimius Severus over the Parthians triangulated between three geographies: the Roman periphery in Central Asia, the source of power in Rome where the arch was erected, and the economic geography of circulation, embodied in one’s hand or purse. The coin drew new connections everywhere it went. A shield can do none of this. It is geographically dumb. It has no place—except on a coin or flag.
The shield also has no sense of time. Roman coins featured specific temples, monuments, basilicas, and other public buildings that drew connections between an emperor’s economic power, military might, and the amenities of Roman urban life he provided. The Roman Colosseum, Trajan’s Forum, even Nero’s Macellum or market all show up on coins, as do specific bridges, city gates, and equestrians of emperors prancing in victory. Above all else, they rooted power in place and time, and they did so for an increasingly far-flung empire. By contrast, the shield’s intellectual and cultural position is defensive. It is of a piece with the border wall with Mexico, the amber alert, the Patriot Act, but the image itself does not tell us this. In lieu of events that anchor us in place and time, the Union Shield is atemporal. And this might be why it appeals directly to a child, whose sense of space and time is still abstract. My son would say “yesterday” when he meant tomorrow: morning and evening befuddled him. Space was equally abstract. A shield, however, is concrete and immediate. It is what his toy knights hold up.
It must be conceded that, like the Roman arch, the shield is gestural and that gesture has a long and relevant history in coinage. Shields first appeared as a staple on medieval coins. In fact, the shield became such a commonplace of coinage that the very words for money became entangled with words for shield. The French écu, Spanish escudo, Italian scudo, and the Latin scutum all mean shield. Unlike the Union Shield, these heraldic coats of arms referred to specific lineages or royal houses and thus to the cultural geography of European power. As symbols, they linked heraldic images to domains, family lineages rooted in places, if not to the seats of their power, often called Houses. They were not explicitly architectural, but they implied place to those who could read the symbols.
Perhaps the closest source to the Union Shield is the “Unite,” a gold coin minted in seventeenth-century England as a symbolic union of England and Scotland under the Scottish James I who ascended to the throne in 1603. With a bust of James I on the front and a crowned shield the Unite recalls the Union Shield penny in name and imagery. The words “FACIAS EOS IN GENTEM UNAM” (I will make them one nation) also echo the American “e pluribus unum,” one out of the many, which is written on the shield of the penny. If the Union Shield’s artist, Lyndall Bass (who seems incidental to the story) had a precedent, this was it. But how odd to connect the Civil War and the reconciliation of the nation with the reconciliation of England and Scotland. These are not commensurate events. They have no historical connection. The Union Shield Penny, in other words, replaced specific American historical events–the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement–with the generic tradition of the scutum, one few Americans could trace back to its roots in medieval Europe. If we are going to be so utterly ahistorical, we may as well ask Andy Warhol for a design.
The change in the penny was part of a much larger change in American money and culture. Following the lead of paper money around the world, in these same years American bills were getting more colorful. And while the penny works against geographical specificity, the state quarters that have appeared in recent years are all about staking state identity to geographical, historical, or at least regional phenomena. In this sense, at least, the penny does something that the rest of our coins do not: it moves away from specific commemoration rooted in place and time towards bellicose abstraction. While Virginia’s quarter adopted Jamestown, New York’s the Statue of Liberty, California’s John Muir, and Georgia’s a peach, the penny had war. It was on this nearly worthless alloy that the U.S. confessed its most poorly kept secrets. While many Americans will celebrate the demise of this not-so-cheap vehicle of fatuous meaning, it can no longer serve as an unintentional confessional.
I’d like to thank Michael J. Lewis and my students in my “What Is This!?” course at Berkeley.
Citation
Andrew M. Shanken, “Farewell to the Penny,” PLATFORM, April 7, 2025.
