Against Irving Fisher’s ​“Rubber Dollar”

New York: Robert M. McBride and Company, 1934. Orange cloth boards; 164pp. Plus photographic frontispiece and two full-page photographic plates. Orange cloth titled boldly black; in orange dust jacket printed in blue and gilt. First Edition, published February 1934. Frontispiece is a collage with metallic onlay color (shows all the minted gold in the world as if melted together into a huge cube sitting in the middle of Wall Street). One photographic plate showing a farm auction is entitled ​“Farm Foreclosing Ushers in Civil War in 1933–34” and the 2nd photographic plate is of a drawing of bulls running in front of the stock market ​“A Contributing Factor to the Depression”. Nice vignette block print head-pieces, in-text cartoons and figures. Willard E. Atkins (1889–1971) was a professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department at NYU from 1927 until 1951. This may be the first book critical of the Roosevelt administration published after President Roosevelt’s April 5, 1933 executive banning the hoarding of gold. Atkins is critical of Irving Fisher (1867–1947), calling him the ​“noted exponent” of the ​“rubber dollar”. Fisher, of course, was described by his peers as ​“the greatest economist the United States has ever produced”. Atkins is also critical of ​“Coin” Harvey, calling his theory a ​“museum piece”. And Atkins is critical of Roosevelt presidential advisor George Warren (1874–1938), the first man to have advised Roosevelt to raise the price of gold. This book was intended for a non-professional audience and explains in relatively simple terms the gold market and Roosevelt’s changes to it in 1933.