I thought the Susan B Anthony dollar was about women’s suffrage.
When they decided to introduce a dollar coin, which the people didn’t particualarly want, the women in Congress insisted that it feature a woman. When Susan B Anthony was chosen, the mint tried to ‘soften her portrait’ a bit. The powers-that-were were outraged. They wanted her depicted in all of her hatchet-faced glory. So we ended up with a coin that was ugly and too close in size to a quarter. The public rejected the coin.
Problem was, and still is, I believe that there are 10s of millions of these coins in warehouses to this day. Every year they’re in storage costs money. But melting them down isn’t an option either. Each SBA dollar has a bit more than 5¢ worth of metal in, meaning that if they’re melted down the government will have to write off a 95% loss. At least we were able to pass off the Sacagawea dollars to Ecuador.