Shale & Shame

Newsgatherers at regular Tuesday noon press conference in the President's office last week were startled--for these conferences have lately become very dull affairs--to hear the President start reading a prepared statement in a voice edged with strong emotion:

"It is an attempt to charge odious oil scandals to this Administration . . . launched in the middle of a political campaign. . . .

"It certainly does not represent the practice of better American journalism. As a piece of politics, it is certainly far below the ideals of political partisan ship held by substantial men in that party. . . ." '

The President was talking, of course, about the arch-Democratic New York World's publication of Ralph S. Kelley's oil shale land charges against the Department of the Interior. When these charges appeared last month (TIME, Oct. 6) they were widely discounted as partisan campaign politics. When last fortnight Attorney General Mitchell, upon investigation, pronounced them "without merit or substance," they were left discredited in the Washington gutter for the Senate to nose into. But now, with President Hoover angrily denouncing them and their maker, they were suddenly brought back into sharp public focus.

A Theodore Roosevelt would have loudly branded such accusations as a "pack of lies" the day after they were made. A Calvin Coolidge would never have given them the dignity of his attention. But President Hoover is no Roosevelt with a brazen power to shout down the other fellow, no Coolidge with a skin time-toughened to public criticism. Three aspects of the Kelley charges made them especially obnoxious to Mr. Hoover: 1) they dealt with Oil, that horrid substance which so blackened the Harding Administration; 2) they appeared in the World, of all newspapers the one whose good or bad opinions can touch Mr. Hoover most sharply; 3) they impugned his favorite Cabinet officer, his old friend Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur.

In his statement to the White House newsgatherers the President continued: "I hope that the American people realize that when reckless, baseless and infamous charges, with no attempt at verification, are supported by political agencies and are broadcast, reflecting upon the probity of public men such as Secretary Wilbur, the ultimate result can only be damage to public service as a whole.

"There is hardly an administrative official of importance in the Federal Government who is not serving to the sacrifice of the satisfactions and remunerations he could command from private life. The only thing they can hope for is the enhancement of their reputations with their countrymen. The one hope of high service and integrity and ability is that such men should be willing to undertake it, and when men of a lifetime of distinction and probity do undertake it, they should not be subjected to infamous transactions of this character."

Question of Value. The substance of the Kelley charges in the World was that Secretary Wilbur and his predecessor, Dr. Hubert Work, had, by a series of rulings made under political pressure, allowed shale oil lands in Colorado to be transferred from the public domain to private oil companies (TIME, Oct. 6 et seq.). Mr. Kelley, longtime Denver field chief of the General Land Office, argued that these lands contained oil worth 40 billion dollars. The Attorney General and the President retorted that "these oil shale lands have little present value" because no commercial method has yet been developed for extracting oil from shale at a reasonable market price. To this the World in turn retorted: Why, then, have big oil companies been so eager for the land ? Try and buy some now and see how "valueless" it is.

Question of a Man. President Hoover complained that "no single inquiry was made [by the World] at the Department of the Interior as to the facts." The World replied: Of course not, because the man to whom such inquiry would surely be referred is Edward C. Finney, now the Department's solicitor, formerly (1921-29) Assistant Secretary, the man who saw nothing wrong when the Elk Hills and Teapot Dome scandals were in the making, the man most directly attacked by the Kelley charges. In 1928, Mr. Finney wrote the basic decision which Kelley protested as nullifying the "discovery" provision of the old mining laws and thereby validating countless paper claims of oil companies to shale lands. Mr. Finney was accused of brushing aside as "very embarrassing" certain geological evidence brought him by Chief Kelley which would have upset his ruling.

Assistant Attorney General Seth Richardson, who investigated the Kelley charges, found that many of Mr. Finney's oil decisions were "debatable," "close" or "susceptible of decision either way." But he could discover no "misconduct or wrongdoing" in any of them.

Upshot of the President's outburst was that the World, which paid $12,000 for the Kelley articles, seemed surer than ever to get what it professed to desire most--a Congressional investigation of the whole matter.

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