March 23, 2020, CCAC meeting: Merchant Mariners of World War II Congressional Gold Medal

Yesterday, from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) held a meeting by teleconference to review and discuss obverse and reverse candidate designs for the Merchant Mariners of World War II Congressional Gold Medal.

There was an interesting discussion from Mr. William McDonald of MARAD, about the term “Fourth Line of Defense,” which was used by Dwight Eisenhower, among others, to describe the Merchant Marine. CCAC member Lawrence Brown asked about the representation of women in the Merchant Marine, and Mr. McDonald said that the Mint’s designs are historically accurate for the World War II era, when women weren’t allowed to serve in the MM, because that would have required ships to be fitted with separate facilities. (Mr. McDonald noted that today the situation is quite different, with many female Merchant Mariners at sea.)

The program’s liaisons wanted to make sure that all ethnicities were well represented in the designs, to reflect the demographics of the Merchant Marine during the war.

For the obverse, Committee members gravitated toward designs O-06 and O-08. The Committee’s final recommendation was O-06, with a motion to add the words Act of Congress 2020 in an arc along the rim, opposite “Merchant Mariners of World War II.”

For the reverse design, R-08 received a strong recommendation, earning 30 of 33 possible votes in the Committee’s ranking. (The next highest-ranked reverse design was R-05, with 16 votes.)

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts had made the same recommendations: Obverse O-06 and reverse R-08.

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