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“LINCOLN REPUDIATEDTHE GOLD CLAUSE”
173
●
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D. Autograph Manuscript, unsigned, notes for a
speech [concerning the Gold Clause Cases of early 1935]. Each a place card with the title
of a meeting or dinner attendee written vertically under FDR’s text in an unknown hand.
The first: “The Ambassador to Germany.” The second: “The President of the United
States.” 4 pages, 6
1
/
2
x3
1
/
4
inches, written on the recto and verso of two cards; titles affecting
text (but still legible), vertical crease to first card, short closed tear to second card, scattered
minor smudging to text, minor paperclip stain to left edge of second card. (TFC)
Np, [1935?]
[1,000/2,000]
“
. . . Great Britain went off the gold
standard a year earlier / Quick adjust-
ment of Congress /Votes for economy .
. . Planned economy—Preparation for
battle / Lincoln repudiated the gold
clause. / Washington who won a war
for social freedom in spite of some
members of the Continental Congress /
Jackson—man on horseback who took
the Treasury back to Washington. . . .
[Charles Evans?] Hughes led a rev-
olution against
W[oodrow?]
W[ilson?]. . . . Get the New Deal
Religion or Get Hell / Gradual grow-
ing Consumerism . . . & Gradual
Correction of inequalities . . . .”
To fulfill his campaign promise to give
Americans suffering from the Great
Depression a “New Deal,” newly-
elected FDR introduced sweeping
economic reforms, which Congress then
passed into law, including a resolution
to render invalid all clauses in any con-
tract permitting the creditor to demand
payment in gold—thus allowing the
government to pay its own debts in
greenbacks. Challenges to the resolu-
tion were heard by the Supreme Court
in February of 1935; the Court
upheld the resolution, justifying it as
an instance of the government’s power
to regulate money.According to a
New
York Times
article by Arthur Krock
published on February 20, two days
after the Court’s ruling, President
Roosevelt had prepared a speech to be
delivered in the event that the ruling
had gone otherwise, an historic speech
that argued the Courts could not be
permitted to decide certain critical ques-
tions, just as Lincoln had argued in his
First Inaugural speech: “[I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole
people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordi-
nary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”