I am finalizing my article on the history of the genesis of municipal bankruptcy law, and I realized the following point is not significant enough to include, so I am posting the passage here sans its footnotes (copyright Josiah M. Daniel, III, 2017-2025):
A source who ought to have known, Sanders Shanks, Jr., editor of the Bond Buyer, credits Florida's Senator Duncan I. Fletcher with filing the first-ever municipal-bankruptcy bill. For instance, in a letter two years later Shanks asserted:
In February, 1933, during the closing days of the last "lame duck" session of Congress, Senator Fletcher of Florida introduced an amendment to the federal bankruptcy law under which insolvent municipalities might arrange a special composition of their debts with the consent of holders of a majority of such debts. This bill was introduced at the instance of officials of certain Florida municipalities. At about the same time, and in ignorance of the introduction of this bill, representatives of creditors of Florida and other municipalities [the Florida Bondholders Group] visited Washington with the express purpose of investigating the possibility of securing federal legislation of this very nature. . . .
His memory is incorrect, inaccurately conflating the promulgation of Wyman’s Draft with a “visit [to] Washington” by the Florida Bondholders Group that occurred a month later. Moreover, although he was a member of that group and a contemporary actor, Shanks’s account is not borne out by the Congressional Record. In the dame duck Congress, Fletcher never introduced either an amendment to H.R. 14359 or S. 5551 or any standalone bill. Rather the record indicates for this period that this Senator submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee something “intended to be proposed by him,” but he acknowledged that it was never filed. Only in the opening weeks of the new Congress, the 73rd, or New Deal, Congress did Fletcher file his own municipal bankruptcy bill, S. 403, and later an update of it. These texts were based on the Wyman Draft but Fletcher’s two bills lacked features Wilcox had added to his first bill. Fletcher’s bills died, and the Senator had no responsibility for the creation of municipal bankruptcy.