Beach faced accusations of plagiarism because of the similarity of the reverse design to a work by Beck, though he and fellow sculptor James Earle Fraser denied any impropriety.

United States officials feared that a Quadruple Alliance of Prussia, Austria, Russia, and France would restore Spain to power in the Americas.

In 1823, he proposed to the American minister to Great Britain, Richard Rush, that their two nations issue a joint statement against the retaking of the former Spanish colonies by force.

The President consulted with his predecessors, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who favored the joint statement, as an alliance with Britain would protect the United States.

The doctrine had little practical effect at the time, as the United States lacked the ability to enforce it militarily and most European powers ignored it, considering it beneath their dignity even to respond to such a proclamation.

Established in the Los Angeles area during the 1910s after moving from such eastern venues as Fort Lee, New Jersey, the industry had been rocked by a number of scandals.

These included the mysterious shooting death of film director William Desmond Taylor, and the subsequent evasive testimony concerning it by actress Mabel Normand, which helped destroy her career.

These scandals, together with the death of romantic lead Wallace Reid from a drug overdose and a number of instances of onscreen sexual explicitness, led to nationwide calls for a boycott of Hollywood films.

[7][8] The city of Los Angeles wanted to use the fair to show it had come of age, as had Chicago for the Columbian Exposition and San Francisco with the Panama-Pacific event.

The obvious candidate was the Boston Tea Party of 1773, but according to numismatists Anthony Swiatek and Walter Breen in their volume on U.S. commemorative coins, that episode "could not be tortured into even the vaguest relevance to California, let alone to Los Angeles".

[8] On December 18, 1922, California Congressman Walter Franklin Lineberger introduced a bill to strike a half dollar in commemoration of the centennial of the Monroe Doctrine, with the Los Angeles Clearing House (an association of banks)[a] given the exclusive right to purchase the pieces from the government at face value.

They are going to have a 50-cent piece and have decided that on the obverse shall be the heads of President Monroe and John Quincy Adams ... On the reverse will be the western continents from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn with some dots for the West Indies and some indication of the Panama Canal ...

[b][12] Moore informed Davison that the commission had concurred with the revision, and that Beach had been instructed to complete work as quickly as possible so as to have the coins available at an early date.

[12] On February 24, 1923, commission secretary Hans Caemmerer showed the completed models to Assistant Director of the Mint Mary Margaret O'Reilly, who was pleased with them.

O'Reilly suggested that if Beach was certain there would be no further changes, that he send photographs of the models to the commission's offices, to be forwarded with its endorsement to the Bureau of the Mint in Washington.

In October, Fraser wrote to Beck, stating that he had suggested to Beach that he use figures to represent the continents instead of maps, and that he had never seen the Pan-American seal until Scobey forwarded the letter.

Most of these were sent to the Los Angeles Clearing House,[14] though 77 pieces were set aside for transmission to Philadelphia and examination by the 1924 United States Assay Commission.

Sales continued after it closed, but by October 1923, they had dropped off to almost nothing, and the banks holding them released the remaining nine-tenths of the mintage into circulation, which accounts for the wear on most surviving specimens.

[22] Swiatek, in his 2012 volume on commemoratives, notes that many specimens have been treated to make them appear brighter or less worn; these, like other circulated pieces, are worth less.