an unadorned bust of McKinley, facing left, with the name of the country above and "McKinley Dollar" (in all capitals) below. McKinley, who had appeared on one version of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition dollar (issued beginning in 1903), thus became the first person to appear on two different issues of American coinage. The earlier pieces had also been designed by Barber, and the later coins, according to Bowers, "present an image so different that the uninformed observer would not know that the same man was being depicted". Bowers suggested that Barber might have been trying to create "a distinctively new version". Taxay agreed, opining that Barber's "chief concern seems to have been in making the portrait of McKinley as different as possible from that on the Louisiana Purchase coins". The reverse, designed by Morgan, is intended to be a facing view of the McKinley birthplace memorial in Niles, but according to Swiatek and Breen, "the most charitable view must characterize it as inaccurate and incompetently done". Above the building is "McKinley Birthplace/Niles Ohio", and beneath it the date and "Memorial". Art historian Cornelius Vermeule, in his volume on U.S. coins, disliked the McKinley pieces. "When Barber and Morgan collaborated ... the results were almost always oppressive. The McKinley Memorial dollars of 1916 and 1917 bear witness to these stylistic judgments, the unclothed bust on the obverse looking tastelessly Roman and the classical, colonnaded Memorial Building placed across a reverse further constricted by too much, too large lettering." Distribution and collecting The Philadelphia Mint struck 20,000 gold dollars in August and October 1916, plus 26 extra reserved for inspection and testing at the 1917 meeting of the United States Assay Commission. In February 1917, 10,000 more (plus 14 assay coins) were minted, again at Philadelphia. The Association sold these to the public at $3 each, the same price at which the Louisiana Purchase pieces, which sold poorly, had been vended. The McKinley Memorial pieces were ill-publicized, and few were sold at full price. Texas coin dealer B. Max Mehl purchased 10,000 pieces at an unknown price, selling them for years afterwards at $2.50 each. The Washington Post reported on July 30, 1916 that the gold dollars had been released and were being "gobbled up as souvenirs". Nevertheless, according to Mehl in his 1937 volume on commemoratives, "the Committee in charge apparently realized that the number of collectors in the country could