THE MELLON TAX CASE
Mr. SCHALL. Mr. President, the attempt of Roosevelt the Second to persecute citizens of the United States for political reasons is in keeping with Communistic policies. I refer to the failure of Roosevelt the Second to indict Andrew W. Mellon. This also shows that the people of the United States do not intend to be fooled much longer. Twenty-six men on a grand jury at Pittsburgh, Pa., yesterday, after hearing a bunch of "framed up" stories about Mr. Mellon, voted a "no bill", and the case was dismissed.
This case had been tried in the newspapers, which of itself would prejudice an unthinking jury, but despite this and all the grapevine methods of the Government to railroad those hostile to their dictatorship, the grand jury refused to be fooled into an indictment.
This case should be almost as big a boomerang as the unconstitutional cancelation of air-mail contracts, and is the beginning of the end of the attempt to sovietize the United States.
I ask leave to print & newspaper article in connection with the case against Mr. Mellon.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
MELLON VICTOR IN TAX CASE
Pittsburgh Pa., May 8, 1934.—Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the United States Treasury under three Presidents, was given a clean slate in his income-tax payments by a Federal grand jury which failed to return an indictment against him here today.
The grand jury, which heard five witnesses during its investigation of Mr. Mellon's income-tax payments for 1831, did not return a true bill against the wealthy industrialist and former representative of the United States at the Court of St. James. The jurors ignored the Government's claim by returning no true bill on a charge that the former Secretary of the Treasury, by claiming two losses, attempted evasion of income-tax payments for the year 1931.
The first was a loss on the sale of stock of the Pittsburgh Coal Co. (an ordinary loss of $5,766. 30 and a capital loss of 8$5,672,-189.756) and the second a loss on the sale of stock of the Western Public Service Co. (an ordinary loss of $49,600 and a capital loss of $352,500).
Capital losses are taken on stock held over 2 years and ordinary losses on stock held less than 2 years.
WHERE IS OUR MONEY—EDITORIAL BY E. P. CHASE
Mr. DICKINSON. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Record the editorial which was awarded the Pulitzer prize for distinguished editorial writing. That prize was granted yesterday for an editorial written by a good friend of mine, E. P. Chase, of Atlantic, Iowa. The editorial was entitled "Where Is Our Money?"' It has a philosophy in it which I believe is applicable to today's condition.
There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Herald Tribune, May 8, 1934]
(The following editorial by E. P. Chase, published in the News Telegraph of Atlantic, Iowa, on Dec. 2, 1833, won the $500 Pulitzer prize for "distinguished editorial writing":)
WHERE IS OUR MONEY?
It is announced that at 10 o'clock tonight, Iowa time, William Randolph Hearst, well-known publisher, will broadcast an address on the subject which appears as the caption of this article.
The subject is a broad one and permits of many ramifications. Likewise the query is a live one and has been for several years with many people who formerly were in comparative affluence and have found themselves suddenly in a position where money is a scarce article. The whereabouts of the money of the individual is perhaps beside the point in this comment, if we stick to the text, as doubtless Mr. Hearst's broadcast will deal with the whereabouts of the money of the Nation as a whole rather than the financial plight of the individual citizen; but the subject intrigues one and suggests a line of thought relative to the part the individual has in rendering himself particularly susceptible to the injuries inflicted by the period of economic stress.
Where is our money? Here in Iowa, if competent statistics are to be believed, during the ultra-prosperous years of the World War period, when money flowed like water into the coffers of the farmer and the business man and everyone else, some $200,000,000 of good Iowa money for stocks, shares in half-mythical concerns which were worth exactly their value as a piece of printed paper, During that period and shortly thereafter a good many hundreds of millions from the Middle West went into the first-and second-mortgage bonds of apartment hotels and the like, security issued on appraisals inflated to the nth degree. The most of these bonds are now worth just what the stocks we referred to are worth—the value of the paper and the printing contained therein. There is no way of estimating how many hundreds of millions of money the country over went up in smoke and vanished in thin air when it suddenly dawned on us that even the most productive land in a section like ours is not worth $300 or $400 an acre. It took only the simplest mathematics to arrive at that conclusion, for even at the prices brought by farm products at their peak the return on the land in this section would not pay interest on an investment of $300 or $400 an acre. It can easily be recalled that during that hectic period it was considered a mark of provincialism not to buy a new automobile every year. A lot of fur coats and a lot of diamonds and a lot of expensive clothes for both men and women were indulged by all classes. The wage earner suddenly awoke to the fact that by buying on the installment plan he could keep up with the Joneses, and he not only spent every cent he could get his hands on in many instances but he pledged the major portion of his wages or salary months ahead to pay for automobiles and other articles which were worn out by the time he had completed the payments.
These are but a few instances, cases in point. One might go on indefinitely telling of the wild orgy of spending and of contracting obligations without thought of the pay day and with little or no thought of the economic soundness of such spending. Then came deflation. We got down to cases. We danced and are still paying the fiddler. Like children, we have sought someone to blame for our plight and, also like children, we now seek some magic way to cure our ills and expect the Government to supply the cure. The man who contracted debts does not want to pay them just now, because in most instances he cannot pay them. In every way we have met the crisis which was thrust upon us as though we had nothing to do with producing it. As a matter of fact, we had all to do with producing it. In the proportion that the individual citizen went "haywire" with extravagance and reckless spending, governmental units went on with the same kind of an orgy and whooped our taxes 100 percent in 10 years.
Bond issues were pyramided by communities with the same disregard of the coming of the pay day which characterized the individual. We built great cathedrals of education, with motion pictures and swimming pools and all sorts of gewgaws and frills. We erected public buildings in many cases entirely beyond possible needs of communities for a hundred years. Just as private enterprise overbuilt in every direction, governmental building activities got out of bounds. The people have to pay the bill. The saturnalia of expenditure created fixed taxes, and taxes have a2 habit of certainty in good times and bad times alike. With our incomes and our business revenues depleted, our tax bill in the main has remained the same. All an echo of the period of extravagance and wild-eyed inflation which brought about our troubles. We were talking about "two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot" and we made much about the so-called "American standard of living", whatever that meant. We insisted that all the various elements of our population should attain that standard, and we instilled into the minds of many people who could not afford it a desire for the things had by others more fortunate in life. Oodles of people who had no more business with an automobile than a wagon has with five wheels bought cars. Oodles of people learned to live beyond their means. It began to look as if it would not be long until there would be no one to do the work of the country, as all were seeking the same mythical standard to which we referred. And we still have the automobiles.
The bottom went out of things. Or it might be more appropriate to say that the top was blown off. Then the people of the United States commenced to take stock. Seeking someone to blame, they listened to the fulminations of the politicians who represented the "outs", and who told that the way to cure their ills was to convert the "outs" into the "ins" and the "ins" into the "outs." This they did with their usual disregard of essentials and fundamentals. It became a pleasing flection to attribute our plight to the tariff, and later to our money standard. The people were told that all that was necessary was to reduce the tariff which protects American manufacture and agriculture, and all would be "Jake". Now they are being told that the way to put money into the hands of those who are penniless, end make it possible for the debtor to pay his obligations and start things moving on a normal basis, is to cheapen our money.
A lot of other experimental schemes are being worked out by an administration of which the people demand action. We are spending huge sums of money, borrowed for the purpose, in an endeavor to squander ourselves back to prosperity. In the face of the fact that debt is one of the basic causes of our troubles, we are following the theory that incurring more debt would cure us. And in the face of the fact that excessive taxation is another of the causes of our trouble, we are laying the groundwork for more of the same, under the delusion that the application of all of these methods will relieve us of the trouble which we brought on ourselves, aided and abetted by the world-wide economic upheaval.
We are a queer lot, we Americans. We expect whichever party happens to be in charge of the Government to so manipulate the
