The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that when, in a bid to pull the country out of depression and get people back to work, he depreciated the U.S. dollar in relation to gold and annulled debt contracts retroactively. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history.
Sebastian Edwards provides a masterful account of the economic and legal drama that embroiled a nation already reeling from global financial collapse. It began on April 5, 1933, when FDR ordered Americans to sell all their gold holdings to the government. This was followed by the removal of the country from the gold standard, the unilateral and retroactive rewriting of contracts, and the devaluation of the dollar. Anyone who held public and private debt suddenly saw its value reduced by nearly half, and debtors--including the U.S. government--suddenly owed their creditors far less. Revaluing the dollar imposed a hefty loss on investors and savers, many of them middle-class American families. The banks fought back, and a bitter battle for gold ensued. In early 1935, the case went to the Supreme Court. Edwards describes FDR's rancorous clashes with conservative Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a confrontation that threatened to finish the New Deal for good--and that led to FDR's attempt to pack the court in 1937.
At a time when several major economies are on the brink of default or devaluing or recalling currencies, American Default is a timely account of a little-known yet drastic experiment with these policies, the inevitable backlash, and the ultimate result.
Description: The Making of the Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 collection provides descriptions of the major trials from over 300 years, with official trial documents, unofficially published accounts of the trials, briefs and arguments and more. Readers can delve into sensational trials as well as those precedent-setting trials associated with key constitutional and historical issues and discover, including the Amistad Slavery case, the Dred Scott case and Scopes "monkey" trial.Trials provides unfiltered narrative into the lives of the trial participants as well as everyday people, providing an unparalleled source for the historical study of sex, gender, class, marriage and divorce.
++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++
09/01/1915
Court Record
1874 Harvard Law School Library Bangor: O.F. Knowles & Co., Steam Book and Job Printers 1874
