On Presidential Coins and the Imperial Presidency

This month saw the issuance of the first of the new Presidential dollar coins. A new one will be issued every three months until all the presidents have their coin issued, providing they are dead. I see in this one more effort to establish in the public mind the concept of the imperial president. Let me explain. Personages represented on our coins and currency have always been people deemed to have made an exceptional contribution to society. Not all presidents have been represented because they made no such contribution. We understood that the office does not make the office holder, but rather the office is made exceptional by the office holder. We long have made it an item of American democracy that the President is no more than any other citizen of the republic. He or she is not above the law and when they leave the office they return to being a citizen again. This is the way a democracy provides leadership. We have had exceptional individuals as presidents, e.g. Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Madison, and Roosevelt. We have had some that were abysmally corrupt, bigoted and those that focused on the welfare of the rich at the expense of the rest of society, e.g. Taft, Pierce, Buchanan, Reagan, and both Bushes. When we start honoring a class of individuals who have held the power implicit in the American presidency for that reason alone, we have begun to make that office definitive of human worth. This is anti-democratic and is the thing Washington rejected when many sought to make him king. When the war mongering and naked aggression of a Polk or a G. W. Bush can find equal status with Washington’s admonition to avoid entangling agreements with other nations and Wilson’s attempt to establish the League of Nations, one knows that any meaningful commonality between these individuals is absent, that one is dealing with the office, not the occupant. This, in my judgment, has no place in a democratic government based upon the interests of the citizen not those of an officeholder.

In my judgment the Imperial Presidency is not just about G. W. Bush. It is about the corporate displacement of the state by its own governing structures. This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One of the most powerful political and military entities of the later Middle Ages in Europe was the Hanseatic League established by merchants in the interest of controlling trade in the Baltic and having self-contained “embassies” throughout Europe. It was eventually defeated by the nation states, principally England.

Why do I smell corporate interests behind the enabling legislation for these new coins? This is the third time that they have tried to sell the use of these coins to the public. Why do they keep at it? Is it because the U. S. Mint says it would save 500 million dollars a year? Savings alone have seldom generated such repeated efforts by a legislative body. John Sununu originated this bill in the Senate. Notably he was on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee receiving major campaign contributions from the likes of Citicorp. Both Representative Mike Castle and Representative Carolyn B Maloney, sponsors of the bill in the House, are on the House Committee on Financial Services. Both receive the majority of their campaign contributions from banking, financial and insurance companies. The coin vending machine manufacturing and coin-based businesses, e.g. food, car washes, are known to want coins to promote automatic vending, a less labor-intensive retailing mechanism, ergo, more people laid off and out of work. The printing industry wants the one dollar bill retained. The Mint says that it could save 500 million dollars a year by going to one dollar coins and is spending mightily promoting the coins. The Mint web site provides teacher lesson plans and totally bland comments on the presidents. These students will never see the motives and horrible mistakes some of our presidents have made. They will be given an adulatory account. There are even coin-related cartoons for children. The public is known to favor the dollar bill, so Congress has required the continued issuance of the one dollar bill so the overall cost of the one dollar denomination has skyrocketed. Additionally, embedding the concept of an Imperial Presidency is consonant with the corporations’ preference for an authoritarian government that they can directly make deals with rather than one that requires the checks and balances of the democratic process. This is evidenced by their support for Pinochet and Mussolini.

Finally, I believe the ubiquity of these coins and the daily contact people of all ages will have with them will lead to acceptance that all these people were really great individuals and benefactors of our democracy. Such a belief will become as axiomatic as the belief that “In God we trust” was on our coinage from the very beginning rather than added in 1865 at the behest of Christians believing that without acknowledging God on our coinage the outcome of the Civil War was in jeopardy.

Does this all add up to a conspiracy? No, it’s just business as usual, namely corporations seeking their own ends even if it means a further dumbing down of the electorate.

Bob Newhard