A shiny new version of the Lincoln penny, stamped with 2000, is working its way into pockets and purses, just in time for the 16th president’s birthday.
It will, like its predecessors, inevitably end up in coin collections, on city streets and between cushions on rec room sofas.
Such is the fate of the 10 billion to 13 billion or so Lincoln pennies produced each year. It is America’s oldest coin still in circulation and, perhaps, its most controversial.
”The penny is a peculiar thing because people perceive it as a nuisance. They don’t perceive it as having any purchasing power,” says U.S. Mint spokesman Michael White. ”But anytime people are polled, roughly 6 out of 10 favor keeping it.”
Americans for Common Cents, a pro-penny group based in Washington, D.C., would be the first to agree, noting on its Web site: ”Current and future generations of Americans deserve to live in a country where a penny saved is truly a penny earned.”
Begging to differ is the Coin Coalition, an anti-penny organization also in D.C.: ”Elimination of pennies from cash registers would save consumers and retailers time and money,” it says on its Web site.
Such debates are not limited to cyberspace, nor office watercoolers nor family dinner tables. Congress has considered dumping the penny several times in the last 25 years.
And each time, the conclusions have been pretty much the same as those of a 1996 U.S. General Accounting Office study.
That GAO considered government costs, public attitudes, fairness of rounding prices and so forth before presenting testimony before a House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Financial Services subcommittee. “Public opinion on the penny is mixed,” the GAO report said. “While over half of the people (polled) would prefer rounding to using pennies, a similar percentage also believe the penny is useful and should be retained.”
It was “a monumentally anticlimactic thing,” says White.
That doesn’t surprise Stephen Lea, an economic psychologist at England’s University of Exeter.
“The reluctance to give up outdated money, whether pennies or dollar bills, has to do with an unwillingness to accept how much inflation has taken place,” suggests Lea, whose courses have looked at the psychology of money. “We have lived through all sorts of inflation so that we are looking back to days when the penny was actually worth something.”
What Lea calls “this peculiar attachment to old coins” is aside effect of our belief in money as a form of currency. “It’s only money because we all believe it’s money. It’s not gold or cows or another common form of currency.”
“The penny is a nuisance,” says Jim Benfield of the anti-penny Coin Coalition. “They don’t circulate. People empty their pockets every night (into a container at home). And they’re not very liquid. Can you plunk down six rolls of pennies at McDonald’s?”
Mark Weller of Americans for Common Cents might argue that you can. He believes pennies are a symbol of thrift and that people do count their pennies. “Maybe not in metro areas, but in non-metropolitan areas people do count their pennies,” he says, citing a study that found that 18- to 24-year-olds have a high level of support for the penny, as do those over 55. “Those groups are starting out and making less or older and on fixed incomes.”
Some consider pennies works of art — including a guy in Canada who wants to build an Empire State Building from pennies and a Taiwanese artist who used a million pennies in a sculpture. And because “it costs less than a penny to manufacture a penny, it is still profitable to the government,” according to White, which means the penny will probably be around for a while.
Even if occasional penny shortages make the news.
“We have found there is a correlation between how the economy is doing and the production of pennies,” says Weller. “We found that when it is doing well, people have tendency to pull them out of circulation and put them in a drawer. When the economy slows down, more people sit down, count them and roll them and take them to the bank.”
Debates over penny issues such as economics, taxes, rounding and time-saving matters may be one part of the discussion on whether to keep the little copper-brown coin, but the rest of the discussion has to do with the penny’s place in our culture.
“Abraham Lincoln is on the penny,” says the Mint’s White. “He is an American icon.”
“It’s not just about the exchange value, it’s the meaning and memories associated with the object,” says Stacey Menzel Baker, an assistant professor of marketing at Bowling Green State University, who has studied consumer behavior and collectors. “It’s not just the penny, it’s what Lincoln meant to the culture and what he did for our nation. He became part of our collective consciousness. He is what we think of as a president. He personifies what we want our president to be. He is the penny … and to be getting rid of it would be getting rid of a piece of our culture or heritage.”
“I think Congress realizes that their experience with the metric system and Susan B. Anthony that there has to be a pressing need to change anything that is such a significant part of our society,” says Weller.
That argument doesn’t faze anti-penny Benfield: “Save a few. Scotch tape them to your wall and bow to them every morning,” he counters wryly.
The Lincoln penny is used to controversy. Before it was minted in 1909, there was some concern over the use of Lincoln’s portrait on the coin. Prior to the Lincoln cent, U.S. coins had avoided using portraits of actual people on coins, favoring instead images and adaptations of, say, Liberty. Public sentiment prompted the minting of a Lincoln penny to mark the 100th anniversary of Abe’s birth.
Right away there was an uproar because the designer — Victor David Brenner — made his initials too large. Production of the coin was stoppedthe initials removed and coins minted. A version with smaller initials were minted in 1918.
All this interest in pennies and penny history delights guys like Steve Bobbitt, a spokesman for the Colorado-based American Numismatic Association, a group founded in Chicago 109 years ago.
Last year, Bobbitt showed up at the group’s August convention in Rosemont and spent three valuable 1914 D pennies — each worth about $80. He then announced he would give $100 to anyone who could come up with them. They were, he says, “either gobbled up by collectors or still in circulation.”
That doesn’t bother Bobbitt, who does such things to get folks to look closely at their coins for one reason: “Money,” he says, “is history in your hands.”
THOUGHTS FOR YOUR PENNY
— The first one-cent coin in the U.S. (known as the Fugio cent) was minted in 1787. In 1859, the Indian cent depicting an Indian princess was introduced. The Lincoln cent entered circulation on Aug. 2, 1909.
— The penny (or cent coin) began as pure copper, has changed in composition over the years, and is currently copper-plated zinc (97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper).
— The penny weighs 2.500 grams and is 1.55 mm thick.
— Until the Lincoln penny was introduced, U.S. coins had avoided using portraits of historic figures in regular series. Putting the 1909 Lincoln penny into circulation was fueled by public sentiment surrounding the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.
— All portraits of the presidents on coins face left except Lincoln’s, which faces right — the choice of portraitist-sculptor Victor David Brenner.
— The obverse side (with Lincoln’s head) features the artist’s initials (VDB) in tiny letters under the right shoulder along the rim — and is usually almost worn off on all but the newest pennies.
— Coins generally have a life span of 25 years. When ”uncurrent” (worn yet recognizable) or ”mutilated” (chipped or fused, for example) they head back to the mint. On the Lincoln penny, Abe’s cheek-bone and jaw are usually the first to show wear.
— In 1909, with the Lincoln penny, the words ”IN GOD WE TRUST” were added to the one-cent piece, joining the prescribed elements: the word ”LIBERTY” and the date.
— And ”E PLURIBUS UNUM”? It means ”One out of many.”
— On Feb. 12, 1959, the wheatheads on the penny’s reverse side were replaced by a Lincoln Memorial design by Frank Gasparro (his initials are near the shrubs on the right side of the memorial’s base). Gasparro is also credited with the half-dollar’s Heraldic Eagle and both sides of the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin.
— More one-cent coins are produced than any other denomination. It is estimated that there are more than 130 billion pennies in circulation.
— Penny blanks are made in Tennessee, then minted in Philadelphia and Denver. Cent coins minted in Denver carry the ”D” mint mark near the date. Because Philadelphia was the first mint, its coins do not carry identification.
— The Lincoln penny features Abe on both sides — Brenner’s familiar bust on the obverse (front) and the seated Abe statue within the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse.
— In 1993, a Vermont woman told USA Today that she had tiled her bathroom floor with 12,000 pennies and it only cost her $120.
— A penny will get you 12 minutes of parking time at parking meters in Hinsdale.
— A penny will still buy you a one-cent U.S. postage stamp.
— According to the Coin Coalition, an anti-penny group, 25 percent of the pennies produced yearly end up in landfills.
— On an average day, 800,000 pennies are tossed into toll-booth baskets on Illinois Tollways.
— Empty your penny jar: A 1914 D one-cent piece in mint condition could be worth $1,300, says a numismatic expert; a piece in less than mint condition could be worth $80. Possibly the single most valuable one-cent piece is a 1909 S mint with large VDB initials in circulating condition. Its possible value? $350.
— Compiled by Judy Hevrdejs
Sources: U.S. Mint, Tribune archives.
