The Mercury Dime was introduced in 1916, one of the winning designs of a contest to change the designs of the remaining three coins unaffected by former president Theodore Roosevelt's Earlier campaign to beautify U.S. coins. (Whew, did you get all that?) Many people mistook the obverse design, which depicted Liberty wearing a winged cap, for the Roman god Mercury, though he wore wings on his sandals, not his cap. In reality, the wings were meant to represent liberty of thought. The reverse design was a fascist (a battle axe wrapped in a bundle of sticks) and an olive branch. This was meant to represent peace, but the fascist earned a bad name from Mussolini's Fascist Party in World War II. This, along with the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945, may have been a reason for the end of the Mercury Dime and the introduction of the Roosevelt Dime the next year.
The Mercury Dime
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