 Large quantities of two-cent pieces were withdrawn in the 1870s and after. Approximately 17,000,000 of the some 45,600,000 two-cent pieces issued had been repurchased by the Treasury as of 1909. Withdrawn pieces were melted and recoined into one-cent pieces. A bill for a two-cent piece bearing the portrait of recently deceased former president Theodore Roosevelt passed the Senate in 1920 and was strongly recommended by a House committee but never enacted. Numismatist S. W. Freeman noted in 1954 that few alive could remember using a two-cent piece, but for those who did, it was often associated with spending it at a candy store. He recalled that two cents would buy a quantity of sweets, as a dime did in Freeman's day, and, he feared, it would take a quarter to do in the future. Full legal tender status was granted the two-cent piece by the Coinage Act of 1965, long after the coin had passed from circulation, as it made all coins and currency of the United States good for all public and private debts without limit. Nevertheless, numismatist Jack White pointed out in a 1971 column that due to its short lifespan, the piece "hardly got its two cents in".
