There is an assertion often made online by libertarians and free market-types that gold was confiscated en masse by FDR under Executive Order 6102 in the early 1930s. Over the years, I’ve suspected that there was no real wide-scale confiscation in the sense that these people often mean, so I have questioned that claim multiple times. I have been challenged by several people on social media to Google it because it is supposedly so self-evident that the U.S. government actually took the gold held by private citizens, so I am accepting that challenge. (NOTE: when I challenged all of them on providing such obvious evidence against my claim, no one met it). Now, let’s define confiscation:

the action of taking or seizing someone’s property with authority; seizure.

Notice this definition is the antithesis of “voluntary.” This means that convincing people through propaganda (“it’s for the good of the nation”) does not apply, and neither does the threat of action against gold holders count because confiscation implies action. If I say to someone “I’m going to kill you if you don’t go away”, that is not murder itself. It is the threat of murder. It may influence your actions, yet it may not. What matters is the actual action of killing, and in this case, confiscation.

That being said, let me be clear about my claim. It is that the government did not proactively assemble to forcefully take anyone’s privately and legally held gold en masse. This doesn’t involve anecdotal accounts of wealthy individuals or potential “criminals” avoiding taxes or using suspicious means of holding their gold. After a Google search, here are the more relevant links I found on the topic, for instance:

First the U.S. Treasury defaulted on its promises to pay gold bonds in gold; then under notable executive orders, the U.S. government confiscated the gold of American citizens and threatened them with prison if they didn’t turn it in.

There is no data or evidence to back this up. Just a bare assertion.

Here is another:

The decree forced Americans to sell their gold at an artificially low “official price.” If they refused, the government could hit them with stiff penalties: a $10,000 fine (equivalent to $180,000 today) and/or up to 10 years in prison. The government blatantly stole wealth from the American people.

Again, no evidence.

Yet another one,

As citizens complied with the new ”law” by turning in gold, the gold reserves of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve increased. After most of the public’s gold was turned in, FDR raised the official price from $20.67 to $35.00 per troy ounce. How “convenient”.

Turned in? Or confiscated? And what percentage? Where did they get this estimation from? (We’ll come back to this particular point below).

Then there’s this explanation,

1. FDR’s executive order was far from an outright grand theft “confiscation.” It was a paid-for expropriation. Surrendering a $20 double-eagleto the bank got you a $20 fiat paper note. While aiming to steal the economic power of gold, FDR left its nominal value in citizen’s pockets. (Yes, he did devalue the dollar soon thereafter.) 2. FDR did not outlaw the ownership of gold. He outlawed the “hoarding” of gold. The distinction is not minor. FDR intended to destroy gold as an everyday currency and took aim at larger concentrations of gold meant for everyday commerce. He had no intention, and no means, of putting millions of Americans in jail. 3. FDR left a lot of gold on the table, allowing each citizen to personally keep $100 in gold coin. That meant anywhere from 100 individual one-dollar gold pieces to 5 twenty-dollar double-eagles. The population exceeded 120 million in 1933, meaning technically hundreds of millions of bullion gold coins (more than existed) were exempted. Roosevelt wasn’t worried. He knew depression-ravaged Americans needed every penny they could find, and gold was suddenly not spendable. 4. He added exemptions for jeweler’s gold stocks, gold marked for export, and rare, collectible coins, but without specifically defining which coins qualified as rare. (The collectible coin exemption has since been over-hyped by unscrupulous marketers to get investors to pay huge markups for supposedly “rare” coins.) 5. Enforcement against “hoarding” was largely impossible and largely ignored. The late economist Milton Friedman found that one year after FDR’s order, 78% of America’s gold was still in private hands. The evidence for that is the abundance of “classic” pre 1933 US Gold coins surviving today. Those coins had been quickly shipped to Europe and South America for safekeeping – or were buried in tin cans on the family farm. It’s apparent our great-grandparents knew more about history and economics than FDR and his socialist hand puppets. Our forefathers simply told FDR to shove it. 6. Prosecution for hoarding gold was microscopically rare. The case cited most often was that of a New York attorney who publicly challenged FDR to take his gold. He was tried for the crime of hoarding gold – and acquitted!

Points 2 and 3 are important, and cast doubt on the assertion that any and all gold must have been subject to confiscation. In addition, the article’s point about Friedman’s findings is interesting, and is located in his book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Jake Towne echoes this notion that only 20% of gold was turned in. If this is true, which it seems to be, it puts serious doubt on the idea of a massive government confiscation of private gold. In essence, less than 1/5 of gold owners were persuaded to voluntarily turn their gold in. This is not the same as outright confiscation through force.

Furthermore,

A myth has gained credence over the years that the IRS executed a nationwide search of safe deposit boxes as part of the government’s “confiscation policy”. The myth is supported by reference to portions of E.O. 6102. I’ve reviewed 6102, and the language cited by the mythmakers is not in the original. Moreover, there are no contemporary accounts of such searches and seizures. It’s hard to imagine they would have escaped press attention.

However, there are a few cases in which gold was, in fact, confiscated (without compensation). As far as I’ve been able to determine, all of these confiscations came as a result of criminal prosecution of people who had violated federal law. There was no widespread prosecution of individuals who simply owned gold. The cases brought by the government were typically against gold traders, dealers, and companies that failed to surrender large quantities of gold.

The last two sentences of the first paragraph are telling. Where were the mass reportings on gold seizures on people’s property? Why wasn’t it covered nationally? More importantly, even if it had been, why was no record kept of even an approximation of how much gold was taken?



This is a brief take,/

It’s documented that an extra 9.8 million ounces of gold were taken out of circulation in 1932, well before gold confiscation was enacted. Beyond any doubt, a lot of this gold was taken out of the banks by people that had concerns regarding what was coming and were worried about the approaching devaluation of the dollar. A lot of this gold was stashed away or sent overseas. Though many folks felt it was absolutely loyal to turn in their gold, several individuals did refuse to turn in their gold and, apart from one case, weren’t prosecuted. People actually turned in 21.9 (Nabers & Chongchua, 2009) of the gold that was antecedently in circulation. The government wrote off the rest as lost or destroyed….

It was estimated that 50% of the gold in private citizen’s hands was collected. The rest was either buried or illegally sent out of the country. An estimated 500 tons of gold were taken over as a result of this Executive Order. Executive Order 6102 made it illegitimate for Americans to possess gold. (RCW Financial, 2012).

The article claims over 50% of the gold was turned in, and has a source citing this. The source is below:

Unfortunately, this is just a brochure by a seller of numismatic coins, and doesn’t provide any credible sources for its claims either.

Im sum, there doesn’t seem to be any concrete evidence that gold was forcibly taken from the populace through physical confiscation, though there is scant evidence that a number of individuals turned theirs in, though this was roughly a small percentage of the population. Thus, libertarian alarmists should be more reserved and careful when addressing the history behind FDR’s role in ending the private ownership of gold in the United States.