During my time in New England I had the opportunity to meet Richard Gregg, author of The Power of Nonviolence, a book I read before going to prison in 1942. He had spent considerable time working and walking with Gandhi, and it was this experience he recorded in the book. I met him when he was giving a nonviolence workshop. The workshop was my first real contact with the intellectual ideas behind nonviolence and with other people who were also seeking alternatives to violence. At the time we discussed his plans to work with Dr. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, who had recently moved to the United States to establish a biodynamic farm and training center near Kimberton, Pennsylvania. Biodynamic farming was very new in this country at that time, but along with organic farming it has since become more widespread as the public has become concerned with health and chemical-free food. My farm experiences in Ohio and Vermont provided background for my correspondence with Richard Gregg about farming when I was in prison and after I was released.

When I first met Richard at the workshop, I was not familiar with a small book he had written called The Big Idol. This book, I later discovered, had an answer to the question which had plagued me as a young man during the Depression: Why is money so scarce at one time and plentiful at another, especially during a war or arms race? By the time I discovered the book, Gregg had become ill with a terminal neurological disease, rendering him mute. He was no longer capable of discussing the book. But in recent years other writers, notably Margrit Kennedy, who wrote Interest and Inflation Free Money, have espoused the same idea, which really comes from Silvio Gesell's The Natural Economic Order.

The idea is simple: money should not be hoarded, and rather than interest being paid on money not in use, a tax (called a demurrage tax) on money not in circulation should be applied in order to assure that money does not stagnate in the system. Gregg's book gives an example of how the principle was applied in two towns in Europe (one in Austria and one in Germany) during the Depression. These towns issued their own money and imposed a demurrage tax. The result was dramatic—within a year or so the towns pulled themselves out of the Depression and were thriving again. Unemployment went from 25 percent to almost zero. The two towns became so famous that economists and journalists went there to find out how the miracle came about; among them was Irving Fisher, a professor at Yale University, who wrote articles about the achievement of the two towns.

Fisher, in fact, tried to introduce the system on a national level. President Roosevelt was intrigued and asked Howard Sprague, a Harvard professor, to investigate the idea. Sprague reported back to the President that it could work, but he said it would decentralize the entire banking system because all issue of money was (and is) controlled through the Federal Reserve. Roosevelt vetoed it. Although a few communities and towns did issue their own currency during the Depression, none of them, to my knowledge, used the demurrage tax principle. After Roosevelt discouraged the practice, no more local currencies were issued.