What stirred America’s gold conspiracy rumours amid dollar anxiety?

Fort Knox, home to much of the nation’s gold reserves, doesn’t get many visitors. The last time this happened — a full-throated cry to audit the nation’s gold reserves — came at another critical moment in American monetary history, when anxiety about the future reached crisis levels. The Rockefellers, he alleged, had “divorced the dollar from its gold backing and brought about this horrendous inflation” in order to “get at the gold at Fort Knox.” Beter, citing various sources, reported that the Rockefellers had organized a convoy of Army trucks to take the gold from Fort Knox, transporting it to Mexico and then to Switzerland. Acting a bit like elementary schoolchildren on a field trip, they got to weigh a bar of gold before one of them — Rep. John Rousselot — declared: “I think it’s there.” Nonetheless, Congress requested that the General Accounting Office weigh all the nation’s gold bars to confirm that none was missing or fake. Whether this ends with yet another field trip to Fort Knox is an open question, though one thing is certain: So long as anxiety about the dollar intensifies, worries about the whereabouts of the nation’s gold will remain.