The Missing Years: When America Almost Stopped Making Money

Three Years Without a San Francisco Cent

Pull a date run of Lincoln cents from the early 1930s and something is missing. There is no 1932-S. There is no 1933-S. There is no 1934-S.

They do not exist.

San Francisco struck no cents at all for three consecutive years. The last one before the gap, the 1931-S, was struck to a total of 866,000 pieces, and most of them sat unissued until 1935.

But the cent is the small version of the story.

In 1933, America Struck Two Things

Lay out every circulating denomination for 1929 to 1935 and the early thirties are startling:

                1929   1930   1931   1932   1933   1934   1935
Cent             DPS    DPS    DPS     DP     DP     DP    DPS
Nickel           DPS     PS      S     --     --     DP    DPS
Dime             DPS     PS    DPS     --     --     DP    DPS
Quarter          DPS     PS     --    DPS     --     DP    DPS
Half Dollar       DS     --     --     --      S    DPS    DPS
Dollar            --     --     --     --     --    DPS     PS

No silver dollars at all from 1929 through 1933. No half dollars in 1930, 1931 or 1932. No quarters in 1931 or 1933. No nickels or dimes in 1932 or 1933.

Which leaves 1933 as the narrowest year on the grid. Apart from gold, the only coins struck for circulation that year were cents — and a single half dollar, 1,786,000 Walking Libertys from San Francisco. That is the entire silver and base-metal output.

The Reason Is Not Quite What You Would Guess

It is tempting to assume the Mint could not afford to strike coins. That is not it.

Demand for coins and notes collapsed with the Depression, and coins already struck were sitting unused in vaults. There was no call for more. The Mint did not stop because it was broke; it stopped because the money it had already made was not moving.

The cent shows the scale of it. In 1929 the three mints struck 277 million Lincoln cents between them. In 1931 the combined total was 24,742,000 — a fall of nearly 91% in two years.

The Quarter Only Exists Because of an Anniversary

Here is the detail that makes the period strange rather than merely quiet.

There was no reason to strike quarters in 1932. None had been struck in 1931 and none would be needed again until 1934. The 1932 quarter exists because it was the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth, and a coin that NGC describes as meant to be a one-year commemorative replaced the Standing Liberty quarter outright (a 1931 House committee memorandum, by contrast, already called it a permanent replacement).

So the Washington quarter — a design that would run for decades — entered circulation in a year when the country did not need quarters, as a one-off tribute that stayed. Just over 5.4 million were struck at Philadelphia, against 436,800 at Denver and 408,000 at San Francisco.

And Then There Is the Gold

The grid above covers cent through dollar. Gold is a separate and darker story, because there the question is not what the Mint declined to make — it is what survived.

1933 was the year private gold ownership was banned. Coins already struck were recalled and melted.

Coin	Struck	Survives
1933 $20 Saint-Gaudens	445,500	One that may legally be held privately
1933 $10 Indian	312,500	Estimated at 30 to 40 — and these can be legally owned
1932 $10 Indian	4,463,000	Escaped the melt in quantity

Two gold coins dated 1933, from the same recall and the same furnaces. One you essentially cannot own. One you can.

What to Look For

If you collect rather than just read, look at the coins on the edge of the gap. The 1931-S cent at 866,000 gets most of the attention, and the 1931-D beside it was struck to 4,480,000. The 1931 Mercury dimes are the only US silver coins struck that year. And the 1932-D and 1932-S quarters come from the first year of the Washington design.

Go and look at a date run from the early thirties. The holes are the story.