Did gold coins really circulate??
PutTogether
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I know they did way back when........but were people really carrying them around and spending them in the teens and twenties?
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jom
yes sometimes................... but moreso in the western states
jp morgan and his followers in the really late 1920's up to 1932 bought at face value many bags of saints and shipped many overseas to switzerland
a bag is usually 2000 to 3000 coins
usually 2.5 gold pieses would be bought as gifts to give at amas special occasions this was where lots went during this time period
michael
Mike
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First you must remember that a dollar had a lot more relative buying power when gold coins were used than it does now. Therefore a five dollar gold coin could easily represent a week’s wages for many workers. Most people did not run around with those in their pockets.
Also there have been periods when gold coins were worth more than their face value in terms of federally issued paper money and silver coins. Therefore most prudent people would not have spent them, but would have hoarded or exchanged them at a premium. People also used gold coins for savings. They were most reliable form of money and were viewed as “safe.”
Prior to the Civil War, African-American slaves set aside surprising amounts of money that they were paid from doing certain tasks. There are instances were slaves were able to save enough money to buy their freedom, which could total over $1,000. When I was child one of my mother’s cleaning ladies showed me a group of gold dollars that she said dated from the time of her grandparents and earlier. I’ll never forget it. One of the coins was an 1853-C gold dollar! If that coin could talk, I’m sure that it could have told an interesting story.
Since gold was the most stable currency many 19th century contracts specified that payment was to be made in gold. Therefore when a contract was settled payments might have been made with a bag or strongbox of gold pieces.
When I started my first job in the early 1970s, one of the employees at the company, who had worked there for 49 years, told me an interesting story. One day he and a couple of his colleagues were called into do a special job in a secure room. When they got there, they were shown bags of $2.50 gold coins and were asked to count them. The company had received these coins in payment for goods and now the clerks had to verify the total.
Back before the early 1960s one could walk into a bank and ask to exchange paper dollars for silver dollars. As a child I received a number of silver dollars as gifts for birthdays and the like. It was not a numismatic gift, but a way to give money that was in a more distinctive form that just currency.
My parents told me when they were children they sometimes received similar presents in the form of gold coins. Like the silver dollars that I received as a child, the gold coins were a distinctive but inexpensive way to make the gifts seem more special.
Awards were also given out that way. When my father graduated from high school he won $75 in prizes and awards in gold (he was the Val Victorian). Sadly, gold was nothing special then, and he deposited the money in the bank. When the Great Depression hit, the bank when belly up, and he lost it.
Bill, those are GREAT stories. Thanks for sharing.
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Hmmmm... I was recently told by my dealer that about 90% of the $5 Indian circulated (early 20th century coin). kinda makes sense given the availability of EF's and AU's, and the price increase in Unc.
Proof
She said she did remember her parents carrying quarter eagles and half eagles in their coin purses and also said that gold coins were in common use in California at that time. (No doubt a leftover from the post-Gold Rush days when Californians wouldn't even use Greenbacks!)
By the way, one reason you might see more XF-AU Indian Head gold than BU is that the uncirculated coins would still have been in bank vaults in 1933 and would have been more likely to have been melted than the lightly circulated coins in private hands.
Check out the Southern Gold Society
any gold piece that was deemed collectible did not have to be turned in !
yet my grand parents turned in all the gold they had !
my grandfather was killed by a car in 1934.
wish i had some o that gold today !
well actually i wish my Dad and Grand dad were still here !
the hell with the gold
Proof
the 33 Saint was never monetised ! (well except 1)
no 33's were issued at all.
Proof
actually circulated?" Just something to think about.
<< <i>If there's one president I hate, its Predisent Roosivelt. (I call him "Roosie" for short, hehe). Why the hell would you want to band gold? Plus, didn't people have to GIVE up their gold coins and get no money in return? Thats lame. And if it wasn't for that dumb rule, there would be more 1933 saint gaudens. Also, if gold didn't become illegal, there would be less middle east counterfeit Indian gold pieces, since they made them (Not for fradulent purposes) because gold was illegal.
The gold Surrender Order was part of an overall policy that Franklin Roosevelt's "brain trust" came up with to combat The Great Depression. The plan was to devalue the dollar on the world market from $20.50 per ounce of gold to $35.00 and ounce. That would make U.S. exports less expensive for foreign buyers and it was hoped lower unemployment and get the economy moving. Believe it or not $35.00 per ounce for gold was often an artificially high number. It was only in the 1960s when that began to change.
The Gold Surrender Order was issued to prevent those who holding gold coins to realize a wind-fall profit. Did it work?
Nothing really ended The Great Depression until the World War II put an end to it. But you could not really blame Roosevelt from trying. When he was elected this nation was a close to a revolution as it had been in a long time. Communism was starting to look pretty good to some people even though most of them really didn't understand what it was and how in practice it would destroy their freedoms. Demagogues like Hugey Long were gaining a political foothold with their welth re-distribution garbage, and "Every man a king" nonsense. Roosevelt gave people hope.
And yes, I don't like the fact that a lot of great gold coins went to the melting pot. But that's the nature of history. Some is good; some is bad.
<< <i> Why the hell would you want to ban gold? >>
It wan't so much that they wanted to ban it as they wanted as much of it as possible to be in the governments hands. In order to try and get the ountry out of the depression th government was planing to to a lot of spending and increasing the money supply. (Didn't work) The problem was that by law in order to issue more paper money they had to have gold on hand to back it. The easiest and fastest way to get it was simply to require the private sector to turn in what they had.
<< <i>Plus, didn't people have to GIVE up their gold coins and get no money in return? >>
No, everyone who turned in their gold coins were paid in paper money for the face value of the coins. Gold in non coin form was paid at the rate of just over $20 an oz This had the effect of getting more money into peoples hands because paper money hey would tend to spend while the gold coins they hoarded effectively removing that money from circulation.
After all of the gold was turned in the government changed the official price of gold from $20 to $35 an ounce. This meant that now the government could almost double the amount of paper money in circulation and still have it fully backed by gold. Now they could have changed the official price without the recall but it would not have been as effective, and it would have guaranteed that the gold coins held by the people would never circulate and add to the economy again.
<< <i>No one robbed the Mint. What did happen was that a few were purchased before the official release. This was fairly common practice at the time >>
They Treasury even offered for sale to collectors. Back then the Treasury maintained a list of current and previous coins that could be ordered from the Treasury. On at least one of these lists from a collectors files from 1933 there is the hand written notation that the eagles and double eagles had now been struck and were on hand too. The list was dated before the gold recall. If someone had ordered 1933 double eagles from that list the governement would have supplied them. (at least as long as the order was filled before the gold order was signed.) The coins could also have been requested at the cash window of the Treasury bulding.
There have also been reports that the Secretary of the Treasury had some two dozen pieces and he offered them to collector friends. William Woodin, who was Secretary of the Treasury at the time (and who would have been in a position to have easily aquired the coins), was a "big time" coin collector. (This is the same guy who got the trunks full of pattern coins from the government in exchange for the two gold 1877 fifty dollar patterns. and who went on to write the first book on US pattern coins, the Adams-Woodin book.)
Contrary to some stories that had the 33 double eagles trading hands in clandestine deals, they were actually traded openly and even advertised in display ads up until the first confiscation in 1944.