The US mint is producing a commemorative coin series to
depict the 225th anniversary of the United States Marshals
Service. This is my critique. Spoiler alert – it’s not pretty (but
neither are the coins).
Who celebrates a 225th anniversary? I recall the American bicentennial
celebration of 1976. Twenty five
years later, the 225th anniversary of the US went unnoticed. Even worse is the fact that the 225th
anniversary of the US marshall service was in 2014, but the coins are produced
in 2015. So we are really
celebrating the 226th anniversary. The coins have both the dates “1789 – 2014” and the date
2015. Ridiculous.
The five dollar gold coin has two sides that look like
reverses. The theme of the coin
(according to the advertising brochure) is “225 years of sacrifice.” In order to show the theme, the
designer merely wrote the words “225 years of sacrifice.” Boring.
The silver dollar represents the best effort in the
set. The obverse (which the mint
calls the reverse) features a wild west era US Marshall with a wanted poster in
hand. The reverse (which the mint
calls the obverse) shows the US Marshall star and some cowboys that have been
run over by steam rollers (the mint refers to these as silhouettes).
The clad half dollar is a hodge podge of miscellany.
The obverse is shared by an old west marshal and a modern marshal whose hair is pulled by an unseen gravitational field. The reverse has a plethora of symbols such as a
spaghetti-haired blind justice, scales, the marshal’s star, railroad tracks,
schoolbooks, handcuffs, the constitution, and a whiskey jug. Do you know what everything
represents? Yes, all this on a
single side of a coin.
The mint’s brochure states that surcharges of $35 per gold
coin, $10 per silver coin, and $3 per clad coin are authorized “to be paid to
several organizations.” Sounds
vague to me. Something tells me
that these coins will not make the organizations rich.
The mint is producing both uncirculated and proof
varieties of each of the three denominations. Do we really need all these commemorative coins?
For information and my opinion about other American commemorative coins, please go here.
For information and my opinion about other American commemorative coins, please go here.
2016 will be the 121st
anniversary of the first corrugated cardboard box. Perhaps a commemorative coin set will result.