Another Memory Hole: The Buchanan Committee

Congressman Frank Buchanan

Did you ever hear of the House of Representatives Buchanan Committee aka United States House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities?  What about one by Clinton Anderson in 1944? I hadn't either until the great Brian Doherty of Reason informed me of its existence during a Book TV interview with Doug Bandow of the CATO institute.  You can find a link to Doherty's book Radicals for Capitalism in the left column of this page.

What was the Buchanan Committee?  It was a 1950s congressional committee to suppress freedom Franklin Delano Roosevelt style.  In this case, any speaking against the government, not unlike similar activities during the Wilson administration.

Good luck finding out much about it.  For some reason, anything that does not fit the Socialist narrative either fails to emerge in WikiPedia and gets deleted from YouTube.  Compare to the McCarthy hearings where every single person called before the joint House and Senate Committee was in fact guilty as sin, but not a one of them spent a day in jail and none were falsely maligned.  If you do not believe that last sentence, then produce one.  Nobody can, but that does not stop Leftists from claiming that there were.  After the release of the Venona Decrypts and the Soviet Archives, every single person who appeared before McCarthy, Kennedy, and Nixon has been confirmed as working for Stalin's Soviet Union.

One of the only places to find information on this Liberal Fascist commission is at TheFreeManOnline.Org. (Italics and links mine)

The Day FEE Was Called before Congress

After a failed effort to set up a Senate-House joint committee, the House assigned the investigation to a committee led by Rep. Frank Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Buchanan was not only a stalwart Fair Dealer but had his own axe to grind because the CCG (Committee for Constitutional Government) had successfully fought expanded public housing, a goal he had championed. He defined lobbying in the broadest possible terms to include groups that had an indirect influence on the formation of public opinion. The committee sent out a probing questionnaire to 166 businesses and organizations, most of them opponents of the Fair Deal. The Buchanan committee ignored lobbying by government agencies, but perhaps for the sake of balance a questionnaire also went to the Civil Rights Congress, an organization with close ties to the Communist Party.

When Buchanan’s staffers, armed with a dragnet subpoena, arrived in force at FEE’s (Foundation for Economic Education) headquarters in early 1949, Read reluctantly cooperated. It became readily apparent to him, however, that the investigators were leaving no stone unturned in the hope of finding something—anything—to discredit the organization. It was also clear that the committee had formed a working alliance with key New Deal interest groups and journalists. Almost immediately after the committee rummaged through FEE’s offices, someone leaked the information to Drew Pearson. Pearson’s column publicized the best-known names on FEE’s “secret” contributor list and quoted liberally from internal correspondence. Mullendore expressed his outrage about the leak in a letter to Buchanan: “Those who seek to extend the power of government try to close the mouths of citizens who dare to oppose them. . . . Your inquisitorial and extremely burdensome demand for information which you have no moral right to demand is a most alarming example of the use of this means of intimidation.”

Read the whole thing. Some of the names mentioned are researchable.  Fair warning, if you think the MSM has a left bias, just wait until you read this stuff.

The Socialist Workers Writers at the Village Voice made mention of the CGC once, in 2010, while praising a Marxist takeover of the Albany Senate.  Note: it was really a Democrat takeover, but leave it to the Village Voice to wordsmythe it into a second coming of Lenin.  Beyond that, it is difficult to find anything about the group that committed the sin of opposing oppressive government regulation.

Leading up to this was an FDR tactic, later to only be mentioned in articles about Richard M. Nixon, the Treasury Department was ordered directly by the President (FDR) to "audit" newspaper publisher Moses Annenberg, and others who were vocally against the New Deal, even after major portions of it like the National Recovery Act (NRA) were ruled unconstitutional and FDR advocated packing the United States Supreme Court with National Socialism friendly Justices.

How, seriously, do the Socialists get away Scott free with these shenanigans?