The first mistake the US government did was to declare an official national currency of the US dollar, backed by precious assets held by the government.
The US government should never even have concerned itself with monetary policy in the first place. It never even needed to. There is nothing special about money that requires statutory recognition. People recognise money, not government.
All in all, they could have simply stuck with a system of banks giving receipts for precious assets held in their depository to depositors, and that could have solved the problem of handling money supply itself. The same level of development would have continued with no worries about money supply, and without the recessions that keep occurring from federal monetary and credit expansion.
This gold debate has been the most useless debate ever, because government should never even have had control of monetary policy.