"The Good Old American Way"

Ten weeks ago, President Truman picked out inflation's villain. The villain was the commodity speculator. Harry Truman said that gamblers in grain were making the cost of living their football. Attorney General Tom Clark and Agriculture Secretary Clinton B. Anderson joined in the booing. Speculators, Clark said, were "profiteering in human misery."

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee hauled in a real, live, big-time speculator and put him under its klieg lights. Who was he? None other than Edwin Wendell Pauley, the rich California oilman, the moneybags of the Democratic National Committee, great & good friend of Harry Truman.

Profit & Loss. It was Harold Stassen who had put the finger on Ed Pauley. He accused him of being one of several "insiders in the national Administration . . . profiteering in food." That was enough to bring Pauley to the committee's attention.

Big Ed sweated and squirmed as he admitted that he had played the commodities game. But he tried to play the whole thing down. His "little transactions," he said, "were peanuts in the whole scheme of things . . . something less than $1,000,000." It was true that he had been operating in the grain and other markets while he was Harry Truman's ambassador on the Allied Reparations Commission and while Secretary Anderson had been his house guest in Hawaii last summer.

But it was not true, he protested, that he had ever used his Government connections to get inside information. When he became special assistant to the Secretary of the Army last September, he and Secretary Kenneth Royall had agreed that he would have nothing to do with the Army's procurement. He had also sold out 90% of his holdings--300,000 bushels of oats, 200,000 bushels of corn, 300,000 pounds of cottonseed oil, 500,000 pounds of lard, more than 1,700,000 pounds of hides. On paper, selling out had cost him about $100,000 in profits. Still, he had to admit that he had "done pretty well . . . over all, I made a profit."

Something for the Family. Big Ed insisted that he had not been gambling. He had merely taken a wise and legitimate way to "protect my family" against the declining value of the dollar. Was he profiteering in human misery? "Never," cried Pauley. "Making investments is the better way to put it. ... I am a free trader. ... I have been in the market for years--in real estate, rubber, oil, everything in which business judgment could make a profit, in the good old American way."

Free-Trader Pauley said he did not think that grain speculation had caused higher food prices--"even though certain loose charges to that effect have been tossed about by some political parties and candidates." Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson asked blandly if by any chance he meant President Truman? "No," snapped Ed Pauley, "I mean Harold Stassen."

Pauley, whose 1946 appointment as Under Secretary of the Navy was bounced back to Harry Truman's desk by a Senate committee, disclosed that he had recently tried to make himself acceptable to the right Senators for another sub-Cabinet post. After last week, even his staunchest Democratic friends knew that Ed Pauley was through.

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