The Sacagawea golden dollar: a Good Idea!

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Date: 14 May 2000 11:48:24 -0700

In article <QgAT4.41157$55.823519@news2.rdc1.on.home.com>,
Dave Brown <dagbrown@home.com> wrote:
>If you're lucky, you'll get a $2 coin soon, too, and it'll be
>really *nifty* like the Canadian one is.

On the plus side: the bimetallic thing is nifty, and I like the picture of
the polar bear.  Three things I don't like about the twoonie:

1. The name is stupid; they should have called them "dubloons" (double
loon, get it?).

2. They're not heavy enough.  I know, people don't want them to be too
heavy because they'll make wallets too heavy or something, but these don't
feel like real money, they feel like game tokens.  It's hard to take them
seriously, especially when this point is combined with point #1.

3. The factor-of-two difference between the twoonie and the loonie isn't
big enough; as a result, I don't get very many loonies in change, and I
always have trouble scraping up enough of them to do my laundry (the
machines don't take twos).  Also, the change machines at the University,
which used to change twos to ones as well as changing paper money, back
when the two was first introduced, have had that feature DELIBERATELY
DISABLED FOR NO IMMEDIATELY APPARENT REASON.  The vending company sent
employees around to actually bolt little covers over the coin slots so
people couldn't change twos.

The only explanation I can think of is that they thought this would
increase sales from nearby snack machines - because if I change a two I'm
going to use both loonies for laundry, but if I change a five (or a
twenty, which is the smallest denomination the bank machines dispense)
then I'll have extra loonies in my pocket and might use one to buy a bag
of chips, if I weren't so pissed off at the vending company for forcing
me into this situation.

I'm undecided about the edge thing on the twoonie (alternating bands of
smooth and what I think they call "reeded").  It's certainly unique, but
it's also a little silly.

Now, as for the Sagacawea golden dollar (I was planning to write an
original rant about this, but now you'll all have to settle for a
foollowup).  I think the new dollar is about as American as such a thing
could possibly be.

First of all, of course, They Invented The Idea, even though the Canadians
were doing it a dozen years earlier.

They wanted to put manganese in the alloy for electrical purposes, but
they had to do a lot of experiments before finding an alloy that worked,
because most of the alloys they tried turned out pink.  I think it is
really unfortunate that the law required them to make the coin
gold-colored; a Pink Dollar would have been really cool, and would have
been a further sop to various special interests.  (See:
http://www.sciencenews.org/20000401/bob1.asp )

Not that there is any shortage of special interest in the Sacagawea
dollar.  The choice of portrait for the coin is singularly appropriate to
current US culture.  Not only do they pick a woman, not only do they pick
a *minority* woman (hey, I thought the *twoonie* was tokenish!), not only
a teenage mother, but they pick the 16-year-old concubine of an abusive
paedophiliac[1] Canadian fur trader.  Oh, but ain't that America?  I don't
know how much Sacagawea was valued at when the Mandan gambled her to
Charbonneau, but it amuses me to think the answer would be "one dollar".  
I don't know whether "marginalized groups" ought to be pleased or
insulted; either way, I'm amused.  It'll also be amusing to see how much
of this part of the biography makes it into the elementary-school
propaganda.

[1] Well, probably not a paedophile, technically, but if *I* were middle
aged, won a teenage girl in a game of chance, and fucked her, *I'd* be
called one.

It appears that Sacagawea was well aware of the consequences to "her
people" of helping white explorers do their thing, and, like a true
American Heroine, didn't care.

Nobody actually knows what Sacagawea looked like, so they made a portrait
of an otherwise not particularly remarkable modern-day Shoshone woman and
used that.  Good idea!

Shoshone women traditionally carry their children on their backs in cradle
boards facing backwards, but they depicted Sacagawea carrying hers in a
sling, facing forwards, because they figured it looked better, and some
historians say that Sacagawea *did* do that, too, sometimes, probably.  
Good idea!

If you go to Wyoming and talk to the Shoshone, they'll show you a grave
and a plaque asserting that a woman named Sacagawea died in 1884 and is
buried there.  They're good Americans, too, pocketing plenty of those
golden tourist dollars.  To be quite charitable, there is *some*
historical evidence that there is *a* Shoshone woman buried in that grave,
who *did* die in 1884, and that while living, that woman claimed to be
Sacagawea.  There is also considerable evidence that the woman depicted on
the coin (I mean the one who WOULD be on the coin if the Mint knew what
she looked like, which they don't) actually died 72 years earlier, among
white people in Missouri.  See:
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Hall/9626/NativeAmericans.html ,
which seems more opinionated than I like in a scholarly work, (in
particular, she accuses the Shoshone of being even more sexist than white
people) but the references do appear to be solid.

Nobody is 100% sure how to pronounce, spell, or translate "Sacagawea".

You remember I mentioned the manganese alloy electrical conductivity
issue?  Well, the reason they spent so much time on it was that they
wanted the coin to work in vending machines designed for the Susan B.
Anthony dollar without needing to re-adjust the machines.  That's
important!

The new coins are being circulated by being distributed to major financial
institutions.  And Wal-Mart, and the makers of Cheerios.  Good idea!

In a recent survey, 60% of Americans said that after seeing the lavish
television ads, they either "believe that the new dollar contains real
gold" or "are unsure whether the new dollar contains real gold".  The ads
talk about the "golden dollar" without saying anything about its metal
content.  The coins cost twelve cents each to make, but I'm told that some
people are taking them straight from the Cheerios box to the safety
deposit box, in the mistaken belief that they have bullion value far
exceeding the face value of a dollar per coin.

But even that isn't the end of it.  The honor of Most American Reaction To
The Sacagawea Dollar belongs to Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas), the chair of
the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.  He's
trying to start a legal investigation of the Mint, claiming that they're
deliberately misleading the public by calling the dollars "golden" when
they don't contain gold.  ("Golden" is defined in most dictionaries as
*either* "made of gold" or "gold colored".)  He's also very unhappy about
their plan to strike a special collector version that *will* be made of
real 22K gold.  There have actually been several of those struck already 
as display pieces, but they want to do some to sell as well.  Gramm cites
the possibility of "gold plating scams", further consumer confusion, etc.,
but he says that his REAL concern is whether or not the Mint has "legal
authority" to make such coins.  That's important!  See:
  http://www.coinworld.com/news/2000/050100/GAOinvest050100.html
  http://www.coinworld.com/news/2000/050100/editorial050100.html
  http://www.coinworld.com/news/2000/032700/legaltoown032700.html
Incidentally, a lot of serious collectors seem to be scorning the real
gold golden dollar as "an off-metal version", "not real money", etc.  I'd
wouldn't mind owning one, but what the heck do I know?  See this bulletin 
from the American Numismatic Association:
  http://www.money.org/consumeralert199911.html

I was rather annoyed to discover that the US Mint's online store won't
ship to Canada; I'm not even a real collector, but I'd still like to have
some golden dollars just for coolness value.
-- 
Matthew Skala, "the modern CEO's worst nightmare" (Macleans, 2000-04-10)
    My Internet doesn't include channels, commercials, or the V-chip.
       http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/ mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca

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