Some of my favorite coin designs

Just about every American collector knows this coin. And for good reason: the Saint-Gaudens gold twenty dollar Double Eagle is one of our most interesting pieces of currency.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt decided he’d had enough with what was, in his opinion, his country’s butt-ugly coinage. Shortly after viewing an exhibit of ancient Greek coinage at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute, he wrote up a letter to Treasury Secretary L. M. Shaw, asking him to fix their coinage, which he called “artistically of atrocious hideousness.” (For an example of one of the coins Roosevelt was talking about, check out the slabbed coin in this post. Personally, I agree with Teddy.) Roosevelt suggested he hire Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a then-famous American sculptor who had designed many celebrated monuments.
Saint-Gaudens took the job and produced the design that would become the new Double Eagle. The new twenty dollar coin featured a walking Lady Liberty on the obverse and an eagle flying over the radiant Sun on the reverse. The original series ran from 1907 to 1932, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt criminalized private gold ownership in an attempt to prevent wealth hoarding during the Great Depression. Executive Order 6102 required all US residents to deliver all their “gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” to a Federal Reserve member bank and levied high fines and imprisonment on those who disobeyed the order.

Above, a familiar face on an unfamiliar bill. In the early part of the 20th century, you’d have been able to exchange one of these twenty dollar gold certificates for a twenty dollar double eagle.

This executive order didn’t actually result in any convictions. However, it did inadvertently create one of the rarest coins in the world. As a result of order 6102, ownership of the 1933 Double Eagle was effectively made illegal, and the US Mint melted their stock of that year’s gold coins after sending two 1933 Double Eagles to the Smithsonian to put on display.
Despite the ban, several 1933 Double Eagles slipped out of the Mint’s hands and turned up in auctions later on, where they sold for stupidly large sums of money. Since ownership of the 1933 gold coin was technically illegal, however, the government decided that the 1933 coins in question must have been illegally obtained, and it has ever since made a policy of confiscating the coin from private owners who try to put it up for auction. One case is still on appeal, with government lawyers arguing that the ten unaccounted-for coins were illegally obtained and the family of the deceased owner arguing they weren’t.
But the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle would eventually make a comeback. In 2009, the US Mint released a limited-run reproduction of the twenty dollar gold coin in “ultra-high” relief (relief meaning how far the coin’s features stick out of the coin’s surface, basically.) This was the way Saint-Gaudens had originally wanted his coin to look. As a modern reproduction, the 2009 coin doesn’t have any numismatic value, but it’s still nice. Saint-Gauden’s Lady Liberty design was also retained for the American Gold Eagle 22k gold bullion coin that the US government began minting in 1986, though it uses a different eagle design on the reverse. So, you know, don’t confuse the two.