Executive Order 6102 - The Myth of A Safe Deposit Box Seizures Order

The Myth of A Safe Deposit Box Seizures Order

According to a folk rumor on the internet, President Roosevelt ordered all the safe deposit boxes in the country seized and searched for gold by an I.R.S. official. A typical example reads:

By Executive Order Of The President of The United States, March 9, 1933.

By virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5 (b) of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended by Section 2 of the Act of March 9, 1933, in which Congress declared that a serious emergency exists, I as President, do declare that the national emergency still exists; that the continued private hoarding of gold and silver by subjects of the United States poses a grave threat to the peace, equal justice, and well-being of the United States; and that appropriate measures must be taken immediately to protect the interests of our people.

Therefore, pursuant to the above authority, I hereby proclaim that such gold and silver holdings are prohibited, and that all such coin, bullion or other possessions of gold and silver be tendered within fourteen days to agents of the Government of the United States for compensation at the official price, in the legal tender of the Government.

All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed, pending action in the due course of the law. All sales or purchases or movements of such gold and silver within the borders of the United States and its territories and all foreign exchange transactions or movements of such metals across the border are hereby prohibited.

Your possession of these proscribed metals and/or your maintenance of a safe deposit box to store them is known by the government from bank and insurance records. Therefore, be advised that your vault box must remain sealed, and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the Internal Revenue Service.

By lawful order given this day, the President of the United States.

Franklin Roosevelt – March 9, 1933

Most of this text does not appear in the actual Executive Order. In fact, safe deposit boxes held by individuals were not forcibly searched or seized under the order and the few prosecutions that occurred in the 1930s for gold hoarding were executed under different statutes. One of the few such cases occurred in 1936, when a safe deposit box containing over 10,000 troy ounces (310 kg) of gold belonging to Zelik Josefowitz, who was not a U.S. citizen, was seized with a search warrant as part of a tax evasion prosecution. Approximately 500 tonnes of gold were sold to the U.S. Treasury in 1933 at the rate of $20.67 per troy ounce. although other sources refute this amount stating that 56 tonnes (1.8 million ounces) as a more accurate amount, based on calculations using US Treasury data as well as from Milton Friedman’s book, "The Monetary History of the United States".

The U.S. Treasury came into possession of a large number of safe deposit boxes due to bank failures. During the 1930s, over 3,000 banks failed and the contents of their safe deposit boxes were remanded to the custody of the Treasury. If no one claimed the box, it remained in the possession of the Treasury. As of October 1981, there were 1,605 cardboard cartons in the basement of the Treasury, each carton containing the contents of one unclaimed safe deposit box.