January 28, 2006
Coin of the Realm: New Nickel Tells a Lot About Old Value
By David
M. Shribman
Who says
money isn't part of the American psyche?
Sorry, Pittsburgh
and Seattle fans, but the most important new coin minted in 2006
is not the 24-karat gold-plated .999 fine silver commemorative
created for the opening coin toss of next week's Super Bowl. You
can buy a replica of that one for $69.95. Instead, the most important
new coin is 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel. You can get
one of those at your bank for 5 cents.
Never has
the nation made a bigger, or more important, statement at so little
cost.
The new Jefferson
nickel, which in the next couple of weeks will be in full circulation,
won't buy you a good 5-cent cigar; there is no such thing, as
Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said in despair eight decades
ago. But though this new nickel still has a value of only 5 cents,
it says a lot about American values.
This new
coin is notable for only one characteristic; but then again, how
much do you really expect for a nickel? That characteristic: Thomas
Jefferson is looking forward.
Now that's
not a small thing, particularly when you remember that there was
a big national contretemps when Jimmy Carter moved the part on
his hair from the right side of his head to the left, or when
James Watt changed the Interior Department seal to have the famous
buffalo image moving to the right instead of to the left, or when
Ronald Reagan decided to move his inauguration from the east side
of the Capitol to the west.
Mr. Carter's
hair and Mr. Watt's buffalo immediately took on semi-serious political
symbolism, though Mr. Carter lost the election to a man who parted
his hair on the right, and even the secretary of interior doesn't
have the power to affect how the buffalo roam, or even whether
the deer and the antelope play.
But Mr. Reagan's
gesture of looking to the west in January 1981 had real meaning,
political and symbolic. It marked the coming of age of the West
in American politics (even though another Californian, Richard
Nixon, beat him to the inaugural dais) and symbolized the meaning
of the westering process in American life (even though a man from
Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, beat him to the New Frontier metaphor
and slogan).
There is
no debate, however, that the Jefferson nickel is a billion-dollar
statement about America. Never before has a figure on an American
coin looked forward -- a shame because this is, after all, the
nation that has always prided itself on its ability to look forward
and that was founded on the most forward-looking idea ever: that
all of us were created equal.
The man who
wrote that line, and who also synthesized the Enlightenment ideas
of human freedom in the Declaration of Independence, was Thomas
Jefferson himself.
Let us leave
aside the question of whether the current resident of the house
that Jefferson occupied in 1801 is pursuing policies that are
forward- or backward-looking. Nor should we linger on whether
his opponents have a better claim on resting their arguments on
their awareness of the burdens of the future or on their affection
for the comfortable nostrums of the past.
We can all
agree that, just as this country has always looked west, it also
has always looked to the future, to tasks remaining to be tackled,
to dreams still unformed. "For this is what America is all
about," Lyndon B. Johnson said in what may have been his
most lyrical remark. "It is the uncrossed desert and the
unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest
that is sleeping in the unplowed ground."
Jefferson
had his faults, to be sure. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, whose status
in the national pantheon has remained remarkably stable, there
have been dramatic changes in the way Americans regard Jefferson.
It is telling, for example, that the nation built the Lincoln
Memorial before it built one for Jefferson; it wasn't until 1938
that ground was broken for the Jefferson Memorial. In years in
which the preservation or extension of freedom was the leitmotif
of our politics -- during World War II and during the civil-rights
years, for example -- Jefferson has risen in the national estimation.
But the fact
that Jefferson owned slaves (and, it now seems extremely likely,
had a personal affair with a slave) has in recent years diminished
his luster. And yet he remains the pre-eminent philosopher of
the American ideal, if not always the American practice.
That is what
this new nickel celebrates. It wasn't, after all, the world that
existed in 1776 that so motivated the American founders. It was
the world these founders sought to build after 1776 that was the
oxygen of their efforts.
The new nickel
was designed by Jamie Franki, who is an associate professor and
coordinator of the illustration program at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte. He used as his model an 1800 life study
by Rembrandt Peale. "There was an aspect of Mr. Jefferson
that Peale was able to capture that no other artist was able to:
his subtle wit, his good nature," says Mr. Franki, whose
drawing was chosen from 147 entries. "Many of the portraits
of Mr. Jefferson were quite formal. This (reflected) only one
part of his personality. His optimism was a good part of who he
was."
For years
the U.S. Mint preferred profiles over forward-looking images,
mostly because of worries that the figure's nose would be too
high and might rub off in circulation. Now the mint is warmly
embracing the forward-looking Jefferson. It is, says Michael J.
White, the mint spokesman, "definitely a statement about
Americans looking to the future."
The future
of the American penny may be in jeopardy; every once in a while
someone proposes eliminating this pesky coin that seems to be
worth so little these days. But with the infusion of this new
Jefferson coin, it looks as if the nickel will be with us forever
-- just like the ideals that Jefferson himself sowed in the American
mind. That's a heavy statement of principle you'll be carrying
in your pocket one of these days. Spend it in good health, and
wisely.
Copyright
2006 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
