This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.
The Royal Canadian Mint recently completed melting down over two hundred thousand gold coins, after selling what they would to collectors. The coins were $5 and $10 denominations unearthed in a vault at the Bank of Canada, which the Canadian government simply decided it was time to fire off.
This brings to mind the melting of United States gold coins, in particular the 1933 Gold Double Eagle – and why it’s a fascinating saga that still drags on today.
In the beginning, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, ordering the recall of all gold coins. Now that was a measure to help take the US off the gold standard; however, there was a snag. The US Mint had already struck 445,500 Saint Gaudens Gold Double Eagles for its business-strike distribution, and now they abruptly weren’t supposed to exist.
No problem, they would melt them all down. And yes, officially, that is what happened. All save two were supposed to have been melted, with the last two given to the U.S. National Numismatic Collection for display and historic record.
But, as the 1913 Liberty Head Nickel teaches us, things aren’t always that simple. A few copies were apparently flinched from the Mint before they could all be melted. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend, legend became myth, and for seventy-two years the 1933 Gold Double Eagle passed out of all knowledge until…
Well, actually, several were recovered before the 2005 discovery. The U.S. Secret Service snagged a few in the 1940s and 1950s, one of which, famously, belonging to King Farouk of Egypt, who possessed the coin without knowledge that it was contraband and was mistakenly granted an export license for it.
One more was discovered in the wild in 1996. That last piece was the subject of a legal settlement and then auctioned in New York City for $7 million on July 30, 2002. The laws had changed in 1974; the coins were no longer legally required to be melted down.
And one of these was even the subject of a Smithsonian documentary, the hysterically over-dramatized trailer presented here:
And now to 2005, when a hoard of ten 1933 Gold Double Eagles were discovered, in the possession of one Joan Switt Langbord. There are several theories floating around as to how they ever came to be owned by Langbord. Most center around head Mint cashier George McCann, who was already caught, tried, and convicted for embezzlement (in a separate matter) and was the only point of exit for the 1933 Double Eagles.
So, somebody had a connection back there seven decades ago, and the coins were passed down through the generations. The trouble now is, there’s an ongoing legal battle over the ownership of the coins. Through various rulings, appeals, re-rulings, and retrials, the coins have now been named as John Does 1-10 – no really, they had to name the coins! They’ve been trucked back and forth between the Mint and courtrooms to be exhibited as evidence. As of April of 2015, a federal appeals court has ruled that the coins be returned to the Langbord family, based on the fact that due process was never followed for the coins’ seizure in the first place.
Regardless of the disposition of this last known piece, the question remains always unanswered… How many more are out there? Could there be a cache of hundreds? One or two more? Could there be secret jars stashed in attics, lone pieces possessed by unsuspecting widows, or untold specimens lost in the soil of the Earth? The world may never know.
