Oregon Trail Memorial Half Dollar - Authorization

Authorization

By 1925, Congress was reluctant to authorize more commemorative coins; twelve pieces had been issued between 1920 and 1925, and many legislators felt that coins were being allowed that "commemorate events of local and not national interest". The entire mintages of commemoratives were sold at face value to the sponsoring organizations designated in the authorizing acts. These groups then sold the coins to the public at a premium, thus raising money for causes that Congress had deemed worthy. Made cautious by a series of unsuccessful issues, Congress rejected a number of proposals for special coins in early 1926. Among these were pieces to honor the completion of the Lincoln and Victory Highways, and a proposal to commemorate the centennial of the birth of American composer Stephen Foster.

An act to authorize the coinage of 50-cent pieces in commemoration of the heroism of the fathers and mothers who traversed the Oregon Trail to the far West with great hardship, daring, and loss of life, which not only resulted in adding new states to the Union but earned a well-deserved and imperishable fame for the pioneers; to honor the twenty thousand dead that lie buried in unknown graves along two thousand miles of that great highway of history; to rescue the various important points along the old trail from oblivion; and to commemorate by suitable monuments, memorial or otherwise, the tragic events associated with that emigration—erecting them either along the trail itself or elsewhere, in localities appropriate for the purpose, including the city of Washington.

Preamble of the act authorizing the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar

The bill authorizing the Oregon Trail Memorial half dollar was first introduced in the House of Representatives on January 25, 1925 by Washington Congressman John Franklin Miller, who had previously been mayor of Seattle, about 50 miles (80 km) from Meeker's home in Puyallup. According to local historian Bert Webber in his 1986 monograph on the coin, "there is little doubt that Mr. Miller was influenced to propose this coin by Ezra Meeker." The bill was not opposed in the House of Representatives, though one member, Michigan Congressman Louis Cramton, asked several questions before it passed by unanimous consent.

On April 26, 1926, the 95-year-old Meeker appeared before the Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency in his capacity as president of the Oregon Trail Memorial Association, Inc. (the Association), a New York corporation. He advocated the issuance of commemorative half dollars, which could be sold by his organization to raise funds for markers and memorials along the Trail. Congress duly passed Public Law 325, authorizing the issuance of up to 6,000,000 half dollars to honor "the heroism of the fathers and mothers who traversed the Oregon Trail"; this was enacted into law on May 17, 1926. President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill into law on the White House lawn; Meeker was present at the signing ceremony and was photographed shaking hands with President Coolidge.

The bill required that the Association pay for the half dollars at par, and that the dies and other costs of preparation not be at the expense of the United States. The figure of six million was the largest in American commemorative history, exceeding the five million commemorative half dollars authorized in support of the building of the Stone Mountain sculpture in Georgia. Congress placed no restriction on which mint should strike the coins, and did not put a time limit on the authorization. According to numismatists Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen in their encyclopedia of US commemoratives, the bill passed "possibly because the stated purpose was nationalistic rather than obscurely local". Coin dealer and author Q. David Bowers states that "on the surface the motivation seemed to be good enough ... doubtless many American citizens had family ties to the famous migration".