In 1933, When Banks Closed, Detroit Printed Its Own Money

Paul Vachon    Sun, December 26, 2021,

Images of the era are searing.  In one, a gaunt man holds a hand-lettered placard that reads, “WORK IS WHAT I WANT — NOT CHARITY. WHO WILL HELP ME GET A JOB?”

The stock market crash of 1929 hit the nation like a sucker punch. Shocked by the unexpected calamity, both ordinary wage earners and businesspeople braced themselves for the worst. The following years proved so draconian that by 1933 Detroit’s city government was forced to meet its payroll with scrip — a substitute for real money.

Frank Murphy: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1890-1949)

Detroit essentially printed its own greenbacks, authentic-looking bills that still circulate today — among collectors.

Leading the city during one of its darkest hours was an empathetic guide, Mayor Frank Murphy, the former Recorder’s Court judge who would go on to serve as Michigan governor, U.S. attorney general and a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

During his tenure Murphy saw his role as similar to that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Intimately attuned to the plight of the unemployed, Murphy established the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee that set up soup kitchens and vegetable gardens to serve needy people. Murphy even dined with jobless men at free-food sites.

Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy, second on right, dines with unemployed men at a soup kitchen in 1932 during the Depression.

Detroit also had a Welfare Department, one of the few such municipal agencies in the nation. In 1932 the department assisted homeless families by placing them in vacant homes owned by the city. The support was urgently needed. According to the Free Press, by the summer of 1932 landlords threatened some 100 tenants per day with eviction.

Massive layoffs at each of the Detroit automakers made the city's situation especially acute. Eighty percent of Detroit’s manufacturing capacity stood idle. By 1933, Michigan’s jobless rate stood at 34%, while Detroit’s rate of tax delinquencies was the highest in the nation.

 Amid the financial carnage, Roosevelt took Michigan in a landslide in 1932, making FDR the first Democrat to carry the state since Franklin Pierce in 1852. Determined to respond with bold action, the new president also saw his role as counselor to the nation.

“When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on,” Roosevelt told Americans.

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