Word: shales
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Regarding oil shale, on the disposal of which he was challenged recently by an underling (TIME, Oct. 13), he declared: "No leases have been issued under this Administration. But oil-shale claims valid in 1920 can be taken to patent under the. mining law, without any discretionary power in this department to decline to issue the patent...
...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...
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...
...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...
...President Hoover read with satisfaction a report of his Attorney General clearing his Secretary of the Interior of charges of maladministering public shale oil lands in Colorado. The Attorney General could find "no merit or substance" to the accusations made by Ralph S. Kelley, resigned field chief of the general land office at Denver, in a series of 14 long, legalistic articles in the New York World (TIME, Oct. 13). Declared Field Chief Kelley: "A ridiculous whitewash!" Generally anticipated was a Senate investigation of the Kelley charges this winter...