How Americans Tried to Keep Their Gold When FDR Banned It

On 5 April 1933, Executive Order 6102 gave every person in the United States 26 days to hand their gold coins, gold bars and gold certificates to a bank for paper dollars at $20.67 an ounce. Nine months after the deadline, the official price of gold was $35. Case Notes (PDF) with sources, charts and glossary: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uuls... This is the story of FDR's 1933 gold order, told through the people who had to decide what to do with their gold and through a man who fought it in court. Frederick Barber Campbell, a Manhattan lawyer, kept 27 gold bars in a Chase National Bank vault, worth about $135,000 at the old legal price. When he demanded them, the bank refused. He sued, was indicted, and in November 1933 a federal judge agreed that the President had reached past his authority on one count. In early January 1934, with his appeal still pending, Chase handed the bars to the Treasurer of the United States anyway. The episode follows the run-up: the February 1933 gold withdrawals, the bank holiday of 6 March, and the Emergency Banking Act of 9 March, which let the President prohibit hoarding but gave the Secretary of the Treasury the separate power to require delivery. Campbell's case turns on that split. It then walks through what stayed legal after 5 April: up to $100 in gold coin and certificates (until 28 December 1933), rare and unusual collector coins, the gold that manufacturers, dentists and artists needed for their trade, jewellery, and shares in a gold mine, which no order covered. A San Francisco jeweller convicted for selling thirteen $20 gold pieces, the Columbus Dental Manufacturing Company's approved application for gold, a Swiss company with $1,250,000 in double eagles stored in New York, and William Randolph Hearst's Homestake Mining shares show where several of those boundaries fell. No named case of a saver caught hiding gold at home survives in the records behind this episode, and none is invented. Then the arithmetic. An ounce surrendered under the orders brought $20.67. From 1 February 1934 the Treasury bought gold at $35. The person who complied was paid about 41 percent less than that price; measured the other way, gold rose 69 percent. Revaluing the government's whole gold stock gave the Treasury a paper profit of nearly $3 billion. In February 1935 the Supreme Court told a holder who had surrendered under protest that he had suffered no actual loss, with four justices dissenting. The restrictions, in changing forms, lasted until 31 December 1974. An ounce kept illegally from 1933 was worth about nine times as many dollars when the ban ended in 1974, but only about 2.3 times as much after inflation. What you'll understand by the end: • Why the administration wanted gold in the reserve banks rather than in private hands, in the Treasury's own words • How the order's exceptions worked, and who was convicted for stretching them • Why Roosevelt called the gold in before he moved the official price, and where the gain landed • Why winning a legal argument did not open Campbell's vault • How Argentina's 2001 withdrawal limits and the 2013 treatment of Bank of Cyprus deposits compare, and where the parallel ends Chapters: 0:00 The order: 26 days to hand in your gold 1:06 The gold run, February to March 1933 3:06 The exceptions: what you could legally keep 8:08 The ruling: won the argument, lost the case 9:40 The second order and the new price 12:19 Four decades: then and now Nothing here is financial advice. The closing comparison is pattern recognition, not prediction. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into financial history and the figures who shaped our world #Gold #EconomicHistory #MonetaryHistory #FinancialHistory #Confiscation #ExecutiveOrer #MonetaryDebasement