Large denominations of United States currency
Today, the currency of the United States, the U.S. dollar, is printed in bills in denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100.
At one time, however, it also included five larger denominations. Shown here is a $100,000 Gold certificate from 1934. High-denomination currency was prevalent from the very beginning of U.S. Government issue (1861). $500, $1,000, and $5,000 interest bearing notes were issued in 1861, and $10,000 gold certificates arrived in 1865. There are many different designs and types of high-denomination notes.
The high-denomination bills were issued in a small size in 1929, along with the $1 through $100 denominations. Their designs were as follows:
- The $500 bill featured a portrait of William McKinley
- The $1,000 bill featured a portrait of Grover Cleveland
- The $5,000 bill featured a portrait of James Madison
- The $10,000 bill featured a portrait of Salmon P. Chase
- The $100,000 bill featured a portrait of Woodrow Wilson
The reverse designs featured abstract scrollwork with ornate denomination identifiers. All were printed in green, except for the $100,000. The $100,000 is an odd bill, in that it was not generally issued, and printed only as a gold certificate of Series of 1934. These gold certificates (of denominations $100, $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000) were issued after the gold standard was repealed and gold was compulsorily purchased by presidential order of Franklin Roosevelt on March 9, 1933 (see United States Executive Order 6102), and thus were only used for intra-government transactions. They are printed in orange on the back, and are illegal to own. All known pieces are in government museums. This series was discontinued in 1940. The other bills are printed in black and green as shown by the $10,000 example at right.
Printing of other high-denomination bills was discontinued in 1946, but the bills continued to circulate until 1969, when they were officially withdrawn. The $5,000 and $10,000 effectively disappeared well before then: there are only about 200 $5,000 and 300 $10,000 bills known, of all series since 1861. Most of the $10,000 bills are due to the preservation of 100 ($1,000,000) of them by Benny Binion, the owner of Binion's Horseshoe casino in Nevada. For many years, they were displayed in a glass case in the casino. The case is no longer there, and the bills were sold to collectors.
Circulation of high-denomination bills was halted in 1969 by executive order of President Richard Nixon, in an effort to combat organized crime.
For the most part, these bills were used by banks and the Federal Government for large financial transactions. This was especially true for gold certificates from 1865 to 1934. However, the introduction of the electronic money system has made large-scale cash transactions obsolete; when combined with concerns about counterfeiting and the use of cash in unlawful activities such as the illegal drugs trade, it is unlikely that the U.S. government will re-issue large denomination currency in the future.
Fake denominations
Other denominations of bills have been created by individuals as practical jokes or as genuine attempts at counterfeiting. In September 2003, an unknown individual in North Carolina used a $200 bill (with George W. Bush's likeness on it) at a Food Lion to purchase $150 in groceries. The cashier obligingly cashed the fake bill and presented the perpetrator with $50 in change. There have been other $200 incidents, including one where a man bought a $2.12 sundae at a Dairy Queen in Danville, Kentucky with a $200 bill (with George Bush on it) and received $197.88 back in change. In 1997, in Wichita, Kansas, a man tried to pass two freshly-printed $16 bills at an airport hotel.
In March 2004, Alice Regina Pike attempted to use a $1,000,000 bill with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the front to purchase $1671.55 in goods from a Wal-Mart in Covington, Georgia, for which she was then arrested. Various $3 bills have been released, generally poking fun at politicians or celebrities such as Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, or Hillary Clinton; this likely stems from the American idiom "queer as a three-dollar bill".