Before the currency of the USA had natural and animistic beings and deities on it. Now they only have Caesar and his mausoleums.
The photos in the left column show coins before 1925-ish. The photos in the right column show currency after 1925-ish.
What does this say about our Democracy? About us? I think it says the people at the top of the power structure are more given to command / control society and they constantly push us in a direction that favors them having more power.
Only consolation is Benjamin Franklin the scientist is on the highest denomination.
I propose to change this back to animistic dieties. No human with mainly political accomplishments should be on currency. These political guys are about as useful as tits on boar hogs. Yeah Obama that even includes you. When will these guys figure out that their ambition is not our well being. Never going to happen.
Well 13 years later I found this passage in an article by a coin collector:
In the era of this nation’s birth, currency was often recognized as a character issue—specifically, the contemptible character of politicians. Shortly before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, George Washington warned that unsecured paper money would “ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”
But as time passed, Americans forgot the peril of letting politicians ravage their currency. In 1933, the US had the largest gold reserves of any nation in the world. But fear of devaluation spurred a panic, which President Franklin Roosevelt invoked to justify seizing people’s gold to give himself “freedom of action” to lower the dollar’s value. FDR denounced anyone who refused to turn in their gold as a “hoarder” who faced ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
FDR’s prohibition effectively banished from circulation the most glorious coin design in American history—the twenty-dollar Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle gold piece. I was captivated by early American coin designs, especially those featuring idealized female images emblazoned with the word liberty. I was unaware that George Washington refused to allow his own image on the nation’s coins because it would be too “monarchical.” Until 1909, there was an unwritten law that no portrait appear on any American coin in circulation. That changed with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, whom the Republican Party found profitable to canonize on pennies.
By the mid-twentieth century, American coinage had degenerated into paeans to dead politicians. Portraits of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower were slapped onto coins almost as soon as their pulses stopped. This reflected a sea change in values as Americans were encouraged to expect more from their leaders than from their own freedom.
