“In the summer of 1933, Wall Street found itself in the dismaying situation of playing its familiar game with a ball that kept changing in size and in weight. The dollar, Wall Street’s ball, had itself become a volatile security, like Youngstown Sheet & Tube. A man innocently planning to make an honest dollar had to worry about whether, by the time he had got it, it would still be an honest dollar. All this, it was widely felt south of Fulton Street, was enough to shake one’s faith in God; it was suggested once or twice that the legend on United States money should be changed from ‘In Gold We Trust’ to ‘I Hope That My Redeemer Liveth.’”

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That’s the lead paragraph from John Brooks’ account in the New Yorker of Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to tinker with America’s monetary system by boosting the price of gold. Brooks, no right-winger, called his piece, issued in 1969, “Gold Standard on the Booze.” It’s a reminder that there was a time when America’s leading magazine took a more newspapermanly approach to the gold standard. Now the New Yorker is out with a squib about Donald Trump’s alleged “interest rate flip flop.” It concludes that the options for monetary policy in a Trump administration would “appear to range from fringe kookiness and ignorance all the way to nihilistic collapse.”

The magazine’s reporter reached that conclusion by judging Mr. Trump’s “words and the people with whom he surrounds himself.” He includes Lawrence Kudlow, whose column runs in the Sun, and Judy Shelton, who has written for us on occasion; both support some role for gold in the monetary system. Supporters of the gold standard, the New Yorker asserts, “typically reject the very idea of a Federal Reserve.” It reckons that “if Trump were to appoint Kudlow, Shelton, or another gold-standard supporter to the Fed, it would be the most radical and potentially damaging economic move since the dawn of our modern economic system.”

That the New Yorker’s famous fact checkers allowed this elision to get by we can only lay to an uncharacteristic inattention. For whatever their enthusiasm for the gold standard, neither economist is a proponent of ending the Fed. They are animated by, among other things, empathy for the millions who have been stranded by the slow growth of the Obama years. They are interested in pro-growth polices. They comprehend, as Brooks grasped in respect of FDR’s experimenting, the importance of sound and stable money.

Brooks hearkened to markets. The short-lived Roosevelt rally in the spring of 1933 stalled while FDR played with money, as Chairman Yellen & Company have been doing. Roosevelt saw the error of his ways and, by 1934, returned to a gold-based standard. The market then did proceed upward. The gold standard was “off the booze,” and money was more stable. Mr. Kudlow and Ms. Shelton understand that Roosevelt failed to get the growth he wanted because he assailed business with the taxes and regulation (and relentless prosecution) that prolonged the Great Depression.

Today’s New Yorker reports that “under the gold standard, recessions and deep depressions were frequent, and the central bank and government officials had no ability to respond.” Hmmm, compared to what? It dasn’t even mention the record under the post-war Bretton Woods gold exchange standard, when unemployment averaged 4.7%; it has averaged above 6% in the era after 1971, when President Nixon — the New Yorker’s favorite president? — closed the gold window and ushered in the age of fiat money.

Today the big drive for reforming the Federal Reserve is coming from Congress, which, after all, holds the constitutional grant of the monetary powers and is growing alarmed that the central bank may be part of the problem that created the Great Recession and curdled growth during the Obama years. Congress is, in a rare development, way ahead of the conventional press. So is Mr. Trump to the degree that he, like FDR, has come to the conclusion that stable money is better than fiat money. Congress and Mr. Trump are both ahead of the New Yorker on this story, though we suspect they wouldn’t have been had John Brooks, for all his liberalism, been with us still.