Lot 1236
1920 Liberty Walking Half Dollar. NGC graded MS-66 Starr. If you peer at this, you will find a number of tiny ticks up and down Liberty's leg and on the sun, but it's still one of the most wonderful Walkers you will ever behold. The reverse is sheer perfection, shimmery and gleaming and nearly flawless. Cartwheel luster abounds beneath the wonderful color: speckly "aluminum foil" silver perfectly sheathing the surfaces, indicating of course a totally original, never dipped or played-with specimen. A key date in this grade, often overlooked in favor of the elusive 1921s. A great coin!
1920 was an interesting year. In the wake of World War I, the Nation began a Red Scare that would ultimately erupt in the 1950s under Sen. Joe McCarthy. The infamous Sacco & Vanzetti murder trial was a year away but in 1920 a killing supposedly involving these immigrants shocked the citizenry, in an early revulsion to the "Reds," meaning in 1920 any foreigner. Sacco and Vanzetti were summarily sentenced to death, despite faulty proof. The scariest event of the year, though, was passage of the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, for it would usher in an era of violence and resistance to the law unknown since the outlaw days of the Wild West. These would be the Roaring Twenties and the age of the Tommy Gun and the Great Gatsby, and many young and idealistic Americans would emigrate to Europe and go down in history as the Lost Generation. Hold this coin in your hands and you capture all of this nostalgia at once and in the finest state of preservation likely to have survived the tumults of these last 80 years.
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