I found some interesting info that I thought readers of my original post would appreciate. Here's a link to my original post:
It's an extensive exploration of newspaper articles from that time period (1933), that were basically cheering the confiscation of gold.
The question I was left with was...how many people who had gold actually turned it in? Who stayed quiet and kept their gold? I found no good answers until I saw some references in an article from the Tenth Amendment Center:
https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2024/05/16/executive-order-6102-a-deep-dive-into-fdrs-gold-confiscation-program/
Basically, there was no real enforcement in the sense of governments ransacking people's homes. The government relied on propaganda and threats to encourage voluntary compliance. And voluntary compliance was NOT widespread.
Here's some excerpts:
The total amount of gold turned into the Fed remains unclear because the central bank isn’t required to disclose detailed accounting. However, in their book A Monetary History of the United States, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz estimated the amount was relatively small and that most people simply ignored the order.
According to their calculations, Americans turned in about 20 to 25 percent of gold held in private hands at the time. In other words, a large percent of people simply ignored the order.
Friedman and Schwartz came to this conclusion when they found something wonky in the official government data. The amount of gold the government said it held (in dollar terms) before the confiscation order was abnormally low.
“If the estimates of gold lost and gold exported without record are added to the gold coin returned to the Treasury since 1934, we are still far short of accounting for even half of the $287 million. We therefore concluded that in Jan. 1934 the bulk of the $287 million was retained illegally in private hands.”
In effect, the Federal Reserve cooked the books to make it look like more gold was turned in than really was.
So, I found this kind of encouraging. Apparently a solid majority of gold "hoarders" back in the 1930's thumbed their nose at government dictates and quietly held on to their gold.
I hope that when the moment comes, bitcoiners will do the same.