Liberty Issue

The Liberty issue was a definitive series of postage stamps issued by the United States between 1954 and 1965. It offered twenty-four denominations, ranging from a half-cent issue showing Benjamin Franklin to a five dollar issue depicting Alexander Hamilton. However, in a notable departure from all definitive series since 1870, the stamp for a normal first-class letter—the 3-cent value—did not present the portrait of a president, but instead offered a monocolor image of the Statue of Liberty. Moreover, two-color renderings of the Statue of Liberty appeared on both the 8 cent and 11 cent stamps; and it is from these three denominations that the Liberty issue takes its name. (Oversized versions of the 3c and 8c stamps also appeared on a Miniature sheet issued in 1956 for the Fifth International Philatelic exhibition.) Pictures of other national landmarks, such as Bunker Hill and Mount Vernon, are found on several values, while the rest of the stamps follow tradition, containing portraits of well-known historic Americans. The six denominations in the set that illustrate buildings (The Alamo, Monticello, etc.) were all designed in landscape format, resulting in a free intermixture of landscape and portrait orientation for the first time in a definitive U. S. issue (in all previous mixed sets, landscape stamps had been confined to the highest denominations).

Like three previous U. S. definitive issues, the Liberty series offered one—and only one—image of a prominent woman. But while Martha Washington had played this role in the series of 1902, 1922-25 and 1938, the Liberty Issue eliminated her, instead presenting Susan B. Anthony, portrayed on the 50-cent stamp. The Liberty Issue was the first definitive series including multiple presidents issued since 1861 which did not contain a single stamp honoring a recently deceased president. To be sure, the only president who would have qualified, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had died quite a while before—some nine years—and, moreover, was not admired by the political party that introduced the new series. FDR was the first deceased president since Chester A. Arthur (d. 1886) to have been excluded from the next multi-president definitive series to appear after his death—denied an honor that had been accorded to his eight predecessors in office: Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding and Coolidge. It is also notable that only 28% of the Liberty series stamps offered images of presidents (7 out of 25 denominations): a smaller presidential percentage than had appeared on any previous U. S. definitive issue.

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