RIP Penny, an Essential Part of Americana
Sure, the cent is ineffectual, outdated, and often in the way. But it deserves our appreciation—and our grief.
They killed the penny. RIP to a real one. On Wednesday, November 12, at a special event in Philadelphia, the U.S. Mint pressed its final 1-cent coins. We'd known the end was coming for a while. Donald Trump announced plans to scrap America's brownest piece of legal tender back in February, and now the penny, as they say, and please appreciate this joke, has dropped.
What hurts most is the lack of respect. You'd think a coin that's been part of American life since the 18th century would inspire some heartfelt tributes—piles of flowers outside the Treasury, neighborhood murals featuring the penny and Frida Kahlo walking hand in hand into heaven, maybe a surprise Ariana Grande single called “100,” to get the kids using the emoji—but no. "The Penny Dies at 232," the New York Times headline artisans wrote. "A long decline into irrelevance ended on Wednesday in Philadelphia." As commemorations go, it's an insult. On the other hand, I'll be keeping that subhed on file for my haters' obituaries.
The penny's dead; nobody cares. I get it. There's a lot going on. It's hard to get excited about petty coinage. A penny costs more than 3 cents to make and can’t buy a stick of beige gum. Those simply aren't big-league numbers, especially for a coin that's the literal LVP. People on all sides of the political spectrum have been coming for the penny for years. John McCain took a shot at it at one point. If anything, it's impressive that the penny survived for so long.
Still, Marie Kondo says you should never throw something away without thanking it for its service. I think the penny deserves our appreciation, if not our grief. I like the penny. I'm fond of the little guy. Sure, it's ineffectual, outdated, and often in the way. Yes, producing it costs more than it's worth. These are also the qualities I cherish in my written work.
Speaking technically, it's not quite accurate to say the penny has been canceled. Production of the penny has been paused. It takes an act of Congress to eliminate a currency, and let's be real: There's a good chance Mike Johnson has never heard of money. Congress doesn't really act these days. It stays very still, like a kid watching TV after bedtime, in the hope that everyone will forget it's there. So while there are bills afoot that would make the penny's death official, the decision to drop it at this moment fell to the executive branch, and the coin met its end in the manner of so many other once-stable facets of democratic society: on social media, amid typos, with 9.22K ReTruths.
You'll still see the penny in the wild, for now. Due to the circumstances, it's still valid as money, and existing pennies aren't being recalled. The Fed just won't mint new ones. Still, numismatics-wise, this is a seismic moment. No one expects the penny to return. Its suspension marks the first time a unit of currency has been removed from production since the half cent got taken out behind the barn in 1857. Don't cry, son. Pa had to do it. You'll understand one day.
Did you know the penny isn't really called the penny? Its legal name is the "cent." I had no idea. We call it the penny because that's the name of the British coin worth one one-hundredth of a pound. "If you haven't got a penny, a ha’penny will do"—that's our penny's namesake. This country is never beating the Anglophilia allegations. The Lincoln penny that we know today dates back to 1909, but if you trace the cent back beyond its British progenitor, you find that pennies are ancient, deriving from the Carolingian denarius of the eighth century and arguably from the Roman denarius before that. (The old abbreviation for the penny is "d." for this reason.) The Middle English word for the coin was "peni." Please don't ask me to look up the plural.
Look, pennies are a hassle. I'm not denying it. Fifty-five percent of Americans use them once a year or less. Most Americans support getting rid of them, and while most Americans in the Bari Weiss era would believe the sky is green if they heard it on a podcast, most Americans in this case are on the rational side. My appreciation for the penny, and my mild sadness at seeing it phased out, comes down to something less rational. It's just … the penny's been around, you know? It's familiar. It's part of the scene. It's in our language: "Dime for your thoughts" sounds vaguely indecent. It's part of the culture: I'm glad Victorian horror novels are mostly British, because I never want to see a TV reboot called Nickel Dreadful.
Familiarity is no argument for keeping pointless things around (though your girlfriend seems to disagree). But there's something mildly reassuring about spotting tiny copper Abraham Lincolns on a regular basis: on your hotel nightstand, in the cafe tip jar, under the AAs in the battery drawer. My wife always stops to turn sidewalk pennies lucky side up for the next person, and I love it when she does. I love that pennies have a lucky side, though I never remember which side it is. No one's making wishes with a quarter. Pennies are the coins you find in old wells, the coins you throw in fountains. They're the coins that turn up in the sofa; who knows how they got there? If your car has an ashtray, it's got pennies in it. Our cultural fabric is made up of these little stitches. Mailboxes. Kitchen matches. Safety pins. House keys. Common objects you take for granted but share with everyone else. And because you share them, they mean something beyond the strict utility they offer. Shout-out to being used to things; it's the best.
Well, the planet never stops turning, and the penny will be far from the only common object to fade away in our lifetimes. They fade away all the time. Unless you die very young, you will reach a point in your life when you say, “That was the world I lived in, and it's not the world I live in anymore.” The brontosaurus is a dinosaur, and then it's not. (And then it is again.) Pluto is a planet, and then just a lowly dwarf planet. It doesn't change your Wednesdays. It just gives you an undercurrent of awareness that the world is less solid than you think, and one day all the components of your material reality will seem as quaint and alien to living people as those of the dude who said "peni" seem to you. And you have something in common with that guy: the penny! Or, anyway, you used to.
I hate to admit this, but I think the end of the penny affected me a little more than, say, the death of the compact disc, because the penny is a product of the state, and like it or not, the state is a major source of the illusion of permanence under which we live. It precedes us, we assume it will outlive us, and it does much of the work of organizing our daily reality—traffic lights, fire hydrants, parks, sidewalks, schools. And at this moment, because of the assault by the Trump administration and its allies on the democratic foundations of society, the meaning of that reality is shifting with frightening speed, so even an insignificant and reasonable change like scrapping the penny comes to seem like part of an overall course of ruin. It's not, in this case! It's probably for the best! Still, this is an unnerving moment to face the slow disappearance of millions of Abe Lincolns from American life. The penny—sorry, the cent—won't be replaced with a one-to-one equivalent, but there is a new coin in the works from the U.S. Mint. It will be worth a dollar. It will bear the legend "FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT." And it will feature Donald Trump on both sides.
