Why is the face of a penny faced opposite of the nickel dime and quarter?

Answer 1

Despite many myths and urban legends that the directions were chosen for political reasons, the truth is that the portraits' directions are purely artistic.

In particular Lincoln's portrait is based on a plaque that the artist (Victor D. Brenner) had made several years earlier. He chose to have Lincoln facing to the right and kept the same orientation for the cent. The current nickel, dime, quarter, and half-dollar designs were produced much later and those coins' artists simply followed a different practice. In fact, Jefferson's picture has faced three different directions: left on nickels from 1938 to 2004, right in 2005, and forward since 2006.

In the days prior to the current presidential portrait series most coins carried images of either Miss Liberty or a Native American, and directions were split roughly equally between left and right and have no political significance at all.