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The article provides a reassessment and a restatement of the important properties of gold standards and stresses the role of the Real Bills Doctrine in Federal Reserve policy as the main cause of the Great Contraction of 1929-1933 in the U.S. The author has taken issue with articles and books that have assigned major fault to gold standard for the decline of employment, prices, production, income, and welfare. He also tries to rectify the omissions overlooked in the studies analyzing the Great Contraction. It also demonstrates that the Real Bills Doctrine, not “the” gold standard, was the intellectual and operational basis for the disastrous Fed policy of 1929-1933.