The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

This fascinating account begins with the magical, religious, and artistic qualities of gold and progresses to the invention of coinage, the transformation of gold into money, and the gold standard. The more important gold becomes as money, the more loudly it speaks of power--even more loudly than when it served as an entry to Heaven or a symbol of omnipotence. Ultimately, the book confronts the future of gold in a world where it appears to have been relegated to the periphery of global finance.

From the Bible to the Gold Rush era to modern day Fort Knox and beyond, unforgettable characters stride through these pages. Contemplate gold from the diverse perspectives of monarchs and moneyers, potentates and politicians, men of legendary wealth and others of more plebeian beginnings; from Asia Minor's King Croesus to Rome's noted speculator Crassus, to Byzantine emperors and humble miners, Venice's Marco Polo and Spain's Francisco Pizarro, to Charlemagne and Charles de Gaulle, Richard I and Richard Nixon, Isaac Newton and Winston Churchill, Britain's economists David Ricardo and John Maynard Keynes, and Christopher Columbus and the Forty-Niners. Perhaps most remarkable are the frantic speculators who pushed gold to $850.00 an ounce in 1980 just as their counterparts twenty years later drove Internet stocks to exorbitant heights.

Whether it is Egyptian pharaohs with depraved tastes, the luxury-mad survivors of the Black Death, the Chinese inventor of paper money, the pirates on the Spanish Main, or the hardnosed believers in the international gold standard like the United States' President Herbert Hoover, gold has been the supreme possession. It has been an icon for greed and an emblem of rectitude, as well as a vehicle for vanity and a badge of power that has shaped the destiny of humanity through the ages. As Bernstein muses, "The joke is that nothing is as useless and useful all at the same time."

Far more than a tale of romantic myths, daring explorations, and the history of money and power struggles, The Power of Gold suggests that the true significance of this infamous element may lie in the timeless passions it continues to evoke, and what this reveals about ourselves.

"Admirably written...a wonderfully interesting view;—not alone of gold but of the greater economic history. Like other of his work, it is assured of a wide readership." --John Kenneth Galbraith Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University

"This book is a noble treatment of the most noble of elements.The Power of Gold is a brilliant and unexpected taleof three thousand years of a metal as virtual reality." --Steve Jones author, Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated

"Hats off! We are in the presence of a master...to read with such delight in its manner as to pass too quickly over the subtlety of its understanding and the astonishing width and depth of Bernstein’s knowledge." --Roger G. Kennedy Director Emeritus, National Museum of American History

"...a fascinating story...wittily written, and full of original insights...Peter Bernstein has once more written a brilliant book, both highly instructive and entertaining." --Pierre Keller former senior partner, Lombard Odier & Cie, Geneva

THE HISTORY OF OBSESSION

The Supreme Possession

About one hundred years ago, John Ruskin told the story of a man who boarded a ship carrying his entire wealth in a large bag of gold coins. A terrible storm came up a few days into the voyage and the alarm went off to abandon ship. Strapping the bag around his waist, the man went up on deck, jumped overboard, and promptly sank to the bottom of the sea. Asks Ruskin: "Now, as he was sinking, had he the gold? Or had the gold him?"

This book tells the story of how people have become intoxicated, obsessed, haunted, humbled, and exalted over pieces of metal called gold. Gold has motivated entire societies, torn economies to shreds, determined the fate of kings and emperors, inspired the most beautiful works of art, provoked horrible acts by one people against another, and driven men to endure intense hardship in the hope of finding instant wealth and annihilating uncertainty.

"Oh, most excellent gold!" observed Columbus while on his first voyage to America. "Who has gold has a treasure [that] even helps souls to paradise." As gold's unquenchable beauty shines like the sun, people have turned to it to protect themselves against the darkness ahead. Yet we shall see at every point that Ruskin's paradox arises and challenges us anew. Whether it is Perseus in search of the Golden Fleece, the Jews dancing around the golden calf, Croesus fingering his golden coins, Crassus murdered by molten gold poured down his throat, Basil Bulgaroctonus with over two hundred thousand pounds of gold, Pizarro surrounded by gold when slain by his henchmen, Sutter whose millstream launched the California gold rush, or modern leaders such as Charles de Gaulle who deluded themselves with a vision of an economy made stable, sure, and superior by the ownership of gold—they all had gold, but the gold had them all.

When Pindar in the fifth century BC described gold as "a child of Zeus, neither moth or rust devoureth it, but the mind of man is devoured by this supreme possession," he set forth the whole story in one sentence. John Stuart Mill nicely paraphrased this view in 1848, when he wrote "Gold thou mayst safely touch; but if it stick/Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick." Indeed, gold is a mass of contradictions. People believe that gold is a refuge until it is taken seriously; then it becomes a curse.

Nations have scoured the earth for gold in order to control others only to find that gold has controlled their own fate. The gold at the end of the rainbow is ultimate happiness, but the gold at the bottom of the mine emerges from hell. Gold has inspired some of humanity's greatest achievements and provoked some of its worst crimes. When we use gold to symbolize eternity, it elevates people to greater dignity—royalty, religion, formality; when gold is regarded as life everlasting, it drives people to death.

Gold's most mysterious incongruity is within the metal itself. It is so malleable that you can shape it in any way you wish; even the most primitive of people were able to create beautiful objects out of gold. Moreover, gold is imperishable. You can do anything you want with it and to it, but you cannot make it disappear. Iron ore, cow's milk, sand, and even computer blips are all convertible into something so different from their original state as to be unrecognizable. This is not the case with gold. Every piece of gold reflects the same qualities. The gold in the earring, the gold applied to the halo in a fresco, the gold on the dome of the Massachusetts State House, the gold flecks on Notre Dame's football helmets, and the gold bars hidden away in America's official cookie jar at Fort Knox are all made of the same stuff.

Despite the complex obsessions it has created, gold is wonderfully simple in its essence. Its chemical symbol AU derives from aurora, which means "shining dawn," but despite the glamorous suggestion of AU, gold is chemically inert. That explains why its radiance is forever. In Cairo, you will find a tooth bridge made of gold for an Egyptian 4500 years ago, its condition good enough to go into your mouth today. Gold is extraordinarily dense; a cubic foot of it weighs half a ton. In 1875, the English economist Stanley Jevons observed that the £20 million in transactions that cleared the London Bankers' Clearing House each day would weigh about 157 tons if paid in gold coin "and would require eighty horses for conveyance." The density of gold means that even very small amounts can function as money of large denominations.

Gold is almost as soft as putty. The gold on Venetian glasses was hammered down to as little as five-millionths of an inch—a process known as gilding. In an unusually creative use of gilding, King Ptolemy II of Egypt (285-246 BC) had a polar bear from his zoo lead festive processions in which the bear was preceded by a group of men carrying a gilded phallus 180 feet tall. You could draw an ounce of gold into a wire fifty miles in length, or, if you prefer, you could beat that ounce into a sheet that would cover one hundred square feet.

Unlike any other element on earth, almost all the gold ever mined is still around, much of it now in museums bedecking statues of the ancient gods and their furniture or in numismatic displays, some on the pages of illustrated manuscripts, some in gleaming bars buried in the dark cellars of central banks, a lot of it on fingers, ears, and teeth. There is a residue that rests quietly in shipwrecks at the bottom of the seas. If you piled all this gold in one solid cube, you could fit it aboard any of today's great oil tankers; 8 its total weight would amount to approximately 125,000 tons, 9 an insignificant volume that the U. S. steel industry turns out in just a few hours; the industry has the capacity to turn out 120 million tons a year. The ton of steel commands $550—2¢ an ounce—but the 125,000 tons or so of gold would be worth a trillion dollars at today's prices.

Is that not strange? Out of steel, we can build office towers, ships, automobiles, containers, and machinery of all types; out of gold, we can build nothing. And yet it is gold that we call the precious metal. We yearn for gold and yawn at steel. When all the steel has rusted and rotted, and forever after that, your great cube of gold will still look like new. That is the kind of longevity we all dream of.

Stubborn resistance to oxidation, unusual density, and ready malleability—these simple natural attributes explain all there is to the romance of gold (even the word gold is nothing fancy: it derives from the Old English gelo, the word for "yellow"). This uncomplicated chemistry reveals that gold is so beautiful it was Jehovah's first choice for the decoration of his tabernacle: "Thou shalt overlay it with pure gold," He instructs Moses on Mount Sinai, "within and without shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round about." That was just the beginning: God ordered that even the furniture, the fixtures, and all decorative items such as cherubs were also to be covered in pure gold.

God issued those orders many thousands of years ago. What is the place of gold in the modern world of abstract art, designer jeans, complex insurance strategies, computerized money, and the labyrinths of the Internet? Does gold carry any significance in an era where traditions and formality are constantly crumbling beyond recognition? In a global economy managed increasingly by central bankers and international institutions, does gold matter at all?

Only time can tell whether gold as a store of monetary value is truly dead and buried, but one thing is certain: the motivations of greed and fear, as well as the longings for power and for beauty, that drive the stories that follow are alive and well at this very moment. Consequently, the story of gold is as much the story of our own time as it is a tale out of the past. From poor King Midas who was overwhelmed by it to the Aly Khan who gave away his weight in gold every year, from the dank mines of South Africa to the antiseptic cellars at Fort Knox, from the gorgeous artworks of the Scythians to the Corichancha of the Incas, from the street markets of Bengal to the financial markets in the City of London, gold reflects the universal quest for eternal life—the ultimate certainty and escape from risk.

The key to the whole tale is the irony that even gold cannot fulfill that quest. Like Ruskin's traveler jumping off the boat, people take the symbolism of gold too seriously. Blinded by its light, they cashier themselves for an illusion.

The following chapters proceed in roughly chronological order, but the story is neither a complete history of gold nor a systematic analysis of its role in economics and culture; detailed histories of money and banking abound. Instead, I explore those events and stories involving gold that most appealed to me because they display the desperation and ultimate frustrations that have inflamed human behavior. Beginning with the magical and religious attributes of gold, the history proceeds to the transformation of gold into money. As that transformation progresses, however, we shall never lose sight of the magical qualities of gold or the ironies of its impact on humanity.

My hope is that what I have chosen to include will illuminate and occasionally infuriate the reader about how the fascination, obsession, and aggression provoked by this strange and unique metal have shaped the destiny of humanity through the ages.

Copyright © 2000 Peter L. Bernstein. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-471-25210-7