BOOK REVIEW BY DANIEL C. MUNSON
“One Nation Under Gold”
By James Ledbetter
Norton-Liveright Publishing, 2017
369 pages with notes
America’s fascination with gold is a
long and complicated tale, and James Led-
better’s One Nation Under Gold is a good
way to begin to understand it. Gold’s lus-
ter and beauty have mesmerized Ameri-
cans—and their government as well; gold
was an organizing force through much of
the nation’s financial history. To illustrate
this, Ledbetter connects the booms and
busts in the American economy to the
gold markets.
Ledbetter asserts that the Founding
Fathers disliked and distrusted paper
money. Gold was always preferred—Led-
better quotes a 19th-century government
official attributing this preference to God’s
will—but dependence on gold for com-
mercial transactions had consequences.
The California gold rush that began in
1848 filled the nation’s bank vaults with
gold, and as it did the banks lent freely
against it. Ledbetter quantifies the boom:
$155 million worth of gold was mined in
1853, up 10-fold from the amount mined in
the 1830s. Things came to a smashing stop
in late summer 1857 for various reasons,
including the wreck of the USS Central
America in a hurricane off the Georgia
coast that September, which took thou-
sands of pounds of California gold (and
400 passengers) bound for New York to
the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
The United States abandoned gold dur-
ing the Civil War in issuing unsecured
paper “greenbacks”—but only as a war
expedient. Ledbetter describes gold’s
move to the center of American political
debate during the last three decades of
the 19th century. Eastern banking inter-
ests favored gold-backed money, while
western agricultural interests favored the
minting of dollars with more plentiful
silver supplies to help buoy farm prices.
Banking interests generally prevailed.
The economic slump that began in 1893
sharpened the oratory of these western
“populist” politicians. Ledbetter spotlights
Nebraskan William Jennings Bryan, who
rose to speak at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago in July 1896
against this gold-backed money, or “gold
standard” system, just as prospectors were
about to strike gold in the Yukon. He told
the conventioneers, “We shall answer their
demands for a gold standard by saying to
them, you shall not press down upon the
brow of labor this crown of thorns. You
shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of
gold!” It was artful and biblical, but it was
too late: a stampede to the Yukon would
soon cause another surge in the nation’s
monetary gold stores. The political push
for broader-based money subsided.
Political ironies abound in Ledbetter’s
tale. Opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal efforts to abandon the gold
standard and increase dollar-denominated
prices was often most strident in the farm-
ing/ranching parts of the country where
such price increases were most needed.
36 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2018 | www.MoAF.org
Unmentioned in Ledbetter’s US-
focused account are the practical origins
of gold’s monetary role. Beautiful and
rare it is, but gold’s density—19.3 grams/
cubic centimeter, almost twice that of
lead—make it difficult to counterfeit and
easy to store, features that appealed to
medieval bankers. Gold’s ability to retain
value also goes largely undiscussed. FDR’s
1934 re-valuing of the dollar to $35/oz. of
gold and discontinuing dollar convert-
ibility into gold (for Americans) Ledbetter
characterizes as a welcome break with eco-
nomic orthodoxy, but the dollar’s decline
in value since is not detailed.
Ledbetter describes the US govern-
ment’s difficulties in the 1960s with Bret-
ton Woods arrangements, but not the
underlying problem of dollar decline. The
change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)
since 1934 has been about 1,900%—an
average of 3.6% per year. If it tracked the
index, gold would trade today for $670/oz.
The current price is roughly $1,200. Gold’s
uncanny ability to retain value over long
stretches is worth mentioning.
Gradual, decades-long trends make for
poor television, and Ledbetter discusses
the gold pitchmen of our era: the Alderd-
ice brothers, Glenn Beck, Goldline Inter-
national spokespersons—people who have
touted not gold’s ability to retain value but
its “get rich quick” potential and survival-
ist cachet. Their ads have been successful
(in the case of the Alderdice brothers,
right up until they were arrested) because,
as Ledbetter persuasively asserts, gold cap-
tures the imagination of an authority-
questioning, freedom-loving people.
Daniel C. Munson works as a chemical
engineer and enjoys reading and writ-
ing financial and scientific history. His
columns have appeared in Barron’s and
other publications. He is the author of
Malice Toward None: Abraham Lin-
coln, the Civil War, the Homestead
Act, and the Massacre—and Inspiring
Survival—of the Kochendorfers (2014).