FDR PROMOTES SILVER

In a campaign speech on October 20, 1932, in Pittsburgh’s triple-tiered Forbes Field, with thousands cheering as though the Pirates had won the National League pennant, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “If the nation is living within its income, its credit is good…. But if, like a spendthrift, it throws discretion to the winds … and continues to pile up deficits, it is on the road to bankruptcy.”¹ Marriner Eccles, a Utah banker who would soon become chairman of the Federal Reserve System, America’s central bank, suggested that the conservative rhetoric in Roosevelt’s speeches read like “a giant misprint” in which