The US government stopped producing the Lincoln one-cent coin last month when the Philadelphia mint struck its last penny. There was even a mock funeral for the familiar coin last week, when hundreds of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to mark the end of penny production.
While penny-pinchers will bemoan the tendency of retailers to conveniently round off prices higher – no more $9.99 sales – I am more interested in the penny’s Jewish story.
A word about America’s one-cent coins. The first – called Fugio or Franklin – was produced in 1787, even before Congress established the United States Mint and mandated that a penny be valued at one one-hundredth of a dollar. The Mint distributed its first set into circulation in March 1793. On the centennial of 16th president Abraham Lincoln’s birth in 1909, the Lincoln penny was issued.
Theodore Roosevelt was then president. Before 1909, American coins didn’t bear the likenesses of real persons, just allegorical figures. The head of a generic Indian adorned the one-center.
However, Roosevelt was a great admirer of Lincoln, who had saved the Union and was of Roosevelt’s same Republican Party. He reputedly viewed a bas-relief plaque of Lincoln that he loved in a Lower East Side settlement house, and learned that the artist who created it was an immigrant named Victor David Brenner.
Avigdor ben Gershon Brenner was born in Siauliai (Shavl), Lithuania, in 1871, then part of the Russian Empire. He received a traditional Jewish education and engaged from a young age in the family expertise in metalwork. Some say his grandfather was a blacksmith. Then his father became a metalworker and maker of family seals for aristocracy.
Avigdor ben Gershon learned the trade of die-cutting and worked in his father’s little shop in the vibrant Jewish community. At 16, he traveled around the region, learning line engraving for publications, how to cut rubber stamps, and jewelry engraving. For a time, he had his own small shop in Kovno, today, Kaunas. At age 19, he – like tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms and seeking opportunities – sailed to the US.
Avigdor ben Gershon then changed his name to Victor David Brenner. Despite his many skills, he had a hard time finding work in New York City. He finally got a job in a small shop on Essex Street, where he engraved badges for neighborhood clubs and societies and cut dies for jewelers and engravers. Two years later, he opened his own shop on Fulton Street and managed to bring over his parents and brothers to America.
One day, a well-known coin collector came across a badge featuring the head of Beethoven in a Lower East Side shop. The badge had been created for a local choir. The collector admired the work and sought the designer –Victor David Brenner, and introduced him to the head of the American Numismatic Society. Brenner subsequently received commissions for prestigious metals.
Despite his growing success, Brenner boldly closed his shop and traveled to Europe to improve his artistry, studying at the Académie Julian in Paris with artist Oscar Roty and sculpture with Alexander Charpentier, an adherent of the Rodin School. Brenner won awards at the Paris Exposition of 1900, finally returning to New York in 1909. He was 38 and now a full-fledged artist.
At that time, America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, decided to redesign American coins. For the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Roosevelt wanted to replace the Indian Head cent with an image of Lincoln. He reportedly saw a sculpture he loved in a Lower East Side settlement house, made by Brenner. Roosevelt met with Brenner and hired him to do the coin design. The new penny was so popular, that the New York police had to control crowds at the Subtreasury Building when it was issued.
Nonetheless, soon a controversy erupted: There were complaints that Brenner’s initials on the coin were too large. Among the complainers was The New York Times, asking sarcastically why they didn’t print Brenner’s address and his picture on the penny as well.
The production halted to remove his initials.
According to the leading American numismatic magazine Coin World, for more than a century collectors have been asking whether Brenner, the man who designed the most popular coin in the history of the world, was denied his due in 1909 because he was Jewish.
“Over the years, darker motives have been ascribed to the removal of the initials. Brenner was a private medalist and a Jewish immigrant. Mint employees, particularly chief engraver Charles E. Barber, chafed at seeing outsiders work on US coins and fought using them at every turn. Some numismatists believe, too, that antisemitism might have played a part in the decision to remove Brenner’s initials,” the magazine wrote.
In 1918, the year after Barber died, Brenner’s initials were returned to the coin – in letters so small you need a magnifying glass to see them. They can be found on the beveled edge at the base of Lincoln’s portrait, just below Lincoln’s shoulder.
WHY AM I so interested in Brenner’s story? Not because my late father was an avid numismatist with a specialty in colonial currency, the banknotes produced before the United States unified its money.
There is a presence of Victor Brenner in Jerusalem, where many Jerusalemites have literally walked over without recognizing his art!
Women's Zionist Organization spreads throughout the US
Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization, was founded in 1912 and soon spread throughout the United States. There was a competition among regions to create a seal. New York Hadassah turned to its local artist, Victor Brenner, who helped it win the competition.
A version of Brenner’s Hadassah seal, executed in Jerusalem mosaic, is embedded into the Hadassah Hospital floor, right before the staircase of the rather grand entrance hall designed by International Style architect Erich Mendelsohn, who fled Germany in 1935 and received the hospital commission from the women of Hadassah.
The seal has a Star of David in the middle, surrounded by branches of myrtle – hadas in Hebrew, the root of the organization’s name and also the Hebrew name of Queen Esther. Brenner’s original Lincoln penny had wheat sheaves on the reverse.
Hadassah Hospital on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus was opened in 1939, in time to absorb many doctors and nurses fleeing Hitler. It was moved to temporary quarters in town after the massacre of the medical convoy of April 13, 1948. The empty buildings were guarded by Israeli armed personnel until the Six Day War.
When Jerusalem was reunited in 1967, then-mayor Teddy (another Theodore) Kollek called then-Hadassah national president Charlotte Jacobson to say, “Charlotte, I have your keys.” It took a decade to renovate and modernize the building.
The Brenner-designed seal in mosaic was preserved along with the Mendelsohn dramatic staircase, an oddity for a hospital.
Whenever I give a tour there, I like to have a Lincoln penny jingling in my pocketbook to remember the Jewish artist of the most reproduced work of American art.
Pause next time you’re there, and have a look.
Brenner died in 1924 at age 53 and is buried at Mount Judah Cemetery in Queens, New York.
A 1909 Lincoln US cent with his initials VDB was placed on a calibration device on board the NASA Curiosity rover located on the surface of Mars.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, with Holocaust survivor Rena Quint, who is celebrating her 90th birthday.