Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, June 1933, FDR says to Americans, give me all your gold.

We will get into the details, but safe to say, the economic

picture in early summer 1933 was not great, and part of that was related to the fact that

U.S. currency was tied to the price of gold. The Roosevelt administration felt hamstrung by this,

so in the spring of 33, they took a number of steps to basically manipulate the gold market, invalidating contracts

that included a gold standard, and asking Americans to turn in their gold, effectively sell

it to the government for a fixed price. In essence, FDR was saying, hey, Americans, all of you guys

who are hoarding gold, you should stop doing that because we need to hoard

the gold. My administration needs it all. So here to discuss FDR's Gold Rush are, as always,

Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there. Okay, before we get into this market manipulation on the part of FDR, you know, currency devaluation.

Currency devaluation, all that stuff. Let's talk about the overall economic situation in 1933.

I'm going to go out on a limb say, not great. I would say not the best economy the U.S. has ever had, possibly the worst economy it's ever had. Look, we've talked about

how dire the crisis with the banking industry was on the eve of Roosevelt being sworn in.

Like, the U.S. was 24, 48 hours away from having a complete collapse of its banking system.

So that's what's happening sort of in the immediate forefront of the

economy. But the broader picture of the economy is also so dire. You have the stock market

crash, but that is just a moment that reveals how out of sorts and weak the U.S. economy and the global economy had

become, that it was all puffed up, but it didn't have much underneath it. And so part of the

problem is as the economy starts to slow down, people aren't investing, businesses, because

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