Some coin series fade away only to return once again years later. The Morgan Dollar is a great example of that; it was a coin whose curtain seemed to fall in 1904, only for it to take another bow in 1921 for one more year. But one of the biggest such 20th-century surprises in the American numismatic sphere came in 1999. That’s when the Susan B. Anthony Dollar, a coin that debuted in 1979 and engendered such rejection from the public that it was abandoned in 1981, was resurrected for one last tour. Many may wonder why the Susan B. Anthony Dollar was brought back to life nearly a generation after it was canned, but the reasons are logistically simple to understand.
By the mid-1980s, the Susan B. Anthony Dollar was beginning to reemerge as a practical coin for use in metro transit systems and as change in vending machines that handled higher-cost transactions, such as those involving books of postage. In the mid-1990s, talks arose once more about reintroducing a dollar coin into United States commerce, and this led to the fruition of the United States $1 Coin Act of 1997, which authorized the production of a new golden-colored dollar coin. The provision also gave the Secretary of the Treasury room to reprise the Susan B. Anthony Dollar if the need for striking dollar coinage came to pass before the new dollar coin could begin production.
As things worked out for “Susie B.,” continued use of the disco-era dollar depleted reserves of a coin that had sat in vaults by the hundreds of millions for years. By 1999, supplies were dwindling. And there was something else brewing: more people were clamoring for “hard money” as Y2K fears mounted that digital bank accounts would become inaccessible due to terminal computer errors that many theorized would hit at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. Thankfully, the Y2K concerns were mostly unrealized, but by then tens of millions of 1999 Susan B. Anthony Dollars were hot off the presses to fulfill commerce demands.
The lot of 1999 Susan B. Anthony Dollars provided three different issues, including business-strike coins from Philadelphia and Denver as well as Philly-struck proofs that were sold to the public individually. None of these issues is rare, with the conditional exception of top-end pieces that yield very few known specimens. Yet, these modern pieces are popular curiosities that serve as a resounding exclamation point for one of the nation’s shortest-lived and most colorful coin series.