Why Mess With the Penny?

If it ain't broke ...

The humble penny. It’s worth next to nothing. It's the only unit of U.S. currency that inspires its owner to hand one over in order to avoid getting 99 back.

Despite our efforts to avoid them, pennies are plentiful, almost always there when one needs a cent or two, lurking in the bottom of a purse or pocket, awaiting Coinstar in a jar on the dresser or penny-short customers in a tiny dish next to the cash register.

The penny is the coin most of us first learn to count with – its bright copper color easily discernible for the youngest among us, so different from the silver sliver of a dime, the thick nickel, the full moon of a quarter. 

Since 1909, the penny’s heads (or obverse) side has featured sculptor Victor David Brenner’s likeness of President Abraham Lincoln in profile. From 1959 to 2008, according to the U.S. Mint, the tails (reverse) side featured an image of the Lincoln Memorial designed by Frank Gasparro.

But now there’s something new. On Feb. 11, the U.S. Mint unveiled the 2010 penny. Lincoln’s profile continues to grace the front, but the Mint described the design on the reverse side as:  “A union shield with a scroll draped across and the inscription ONE CENT.  The 13 vertical stripes of the shield represent the states joined in one compact union to support the federal government, represented by the horizontal bar above.  The horizontal bar features the inscription E PLURIBUS UNUM — ‘out of many, one’ — while the inscription UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is depicted along the upper rim of the coin.” 

Why the change?  We can thank Public Law 109-145 (the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005.) Title III of the law states:

"The design on the reverse of the 1-cent coins issued after December 31, 2009, shall bear an image emblematic of President Lincoln's preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country."

How a law pertaining to the redesign of the $1 coin results in the overhaul of the penny is a question only a member of Congress could answer.
 
But the better question, again, is why?
 
Why remove one of our city’s most revered memorials from the nation’s most ubiquitous coinage?
 
If you are of a certain age, you may recall the penny that came before the Lincoln Memorial penny. It is commonly known as the wheat penny. In production from 1909 to 1958, the front bore Lincoln’s profile. The reverse featured a design in which two sheaves of wheat flanked the words ONE CENT and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. “Those are worth a lot of money,” many whispered as they pocketed them, and so for years we examined penny backs, dreaming of riches to come.
 
Could the Lincoln Memorial penny someday become a windfall? We're not dumping our 401(k)s, but from now on, maybe we’ll skip the Coinstar runs and keep filling the jar on the dresser.

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