Writing about FBI blackmailer Edwin Pauley reminded me that Bert Andrews had mentioned Pauley in one of his opinion pieces about the 1948 election. The context was Congressional hearings about commodities trading by Federal officials.
Found two separate Pauley events in a Congressional Quarterly. The pattern of the two events is distinctly revealing.
The first event was serious, and would have triggered an impeachment if Truman had been a Sacrificial Anode like Nixon and Trump. Truman was Deepstate’s official Good Guy, so nothing happened.
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During a dispute over President Truman’s nomination of Edwin Pauley as Under Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary, Harold L. Ickes, resigned.
Ickes, who opposed Pauley’s nomination, declared that Pauley during the 1944 Presidential campaign had offered heavy campaign contributions from California oilmen if the Government would drop its suit to establish federal title to offshore oil lands. Pauley denied the allegation.
When President Truman at a press conference said Ickes could be wrong, Ickes resigned and charged the President with wanting him, in effect, to commit perjury for the sake of the Democratic party. Pauley’s nomination was subsequently withdrawn March 13.
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Remember Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”? Of course.
The second event, mentioned by Andrews, tells us what happened to Pauley:
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A rash of grain speculation in September 1947, touched off a heated political controversy , involving investigations by both House and Senate Committees. The affair was highlighted by a clash between Republican Presidential hopeful Harold Stassen and the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Army, Edwin W. Pauley, who was also Democratic Committeeman from California and a close friend of President Truman.
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Pauley didn’t stay out of government long. Truman gave him a military position to make up for the loss of the Interior position. Expert blackmailers never apologize or lose. They just win all the time.
Congress wasn’t really investigating commodities, it was just helping Truman create a diversion for the inflation problem, which Wallace diagnosed correctly as the result of corporate monopolies. Truman wanted to blame the consumer.
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The President Oct. 5, in a speech urging meatless Tuesdays and other measures for conserving food, charged that grain trading in September had averaged about 30 million bushels a day. “The cost of living in this country,” he said, “must not be a football to be kicked about by gamblers in grain.”
But the first sensational disclosure of a speculator was made by Stassen Dec. 10. In a speech at Doylestown, Pa., he charged that Pauley and other Administration insiders had profiteered in food, and thus aggravated inflation.
Royal the next day told the Senate Committee that Pauley had told him of his holdings when he had been appointed in September, and had promised no further speculation. Pauley Dec. 12 testified that he had done pretty well, but had lost $100,000 additional profit he would have made if he had not pledged to dispose of holdings as rapidly as possible, consistent with eligibility for taxation of his profits as capital gains rather than income. He related his holdings in detail, denied he had used his position to obtain information useful in speculation, etc.
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No problem when you’re an expert blackmailer. Congress had to satisfy the public with a show, but nothing really happened.
Stassen was an Errand Boy for the Men of Monopoly, helping to create fake outrage. He played a more important role in the 1948 election, eliminating popular antiwar Taft to let prowar Dewey and prowar Truman stand as the sole bidders in the killcount auction.
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