Part of The Gold Story, our cited history of gold.
When owning gold became a crime
On the 5th of April 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102. It required almost every citizen of the United States to hand over their gold coin, gold bullion and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve, by the 1st of May, in exchange for paper dollars at the official rate (The American Presidency Project).
Read that again. In the largest democracy of the free world, in living memory, it was made illegal for ordinary people to own their own gold. Not a foreign despotism. Not a distant century. The United States, 1933.
The revaluation
The reason was not decoration. Once the public had surrendered its gold at the old price of $20.67 an ounce, the government, through the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, revalued it to $35 an ounce — an overnight increase of about 69 per cent. Citizens had handed in their gold at one price; the state then marked it up, capturing the difference. It is one of the clearest demonstrations in modern history of a simple truth: a government can change the value of paper money by decree. It cannot change what an ounce of gold is.
Why it matters to anyone holding gold today
The ban was not fully lifted until 1974, four decades later. For an entire working lifetime, private American gold ownership was restricted. The episode is not offered here as alarm — it is offered as history, documented and dated, and you can read the order in the President’s own archive above. But it explains, better than any argument, why people through the ages have valued gold held quietly and directly, in a form that is unmistakably their own. Gold’s enemies have never been thieves in the night. They have usually worn suits.