Posted on 08/08/2021 5:28:06 AM PDT by euram
“The fact of the matter is that when he left the White House, Truman was loaded,” says Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who has done what no Truman historians seem to have bothered to do — examine the financial records in the Truman archives in Independence, Mo. “He wasn’t just comfortably well off. He was Rich with a capital ‘R,’ and way into the 1%.”
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
That was what I took from it as well.
Los Angeles Times is at it again, pinning their own bad morals to Republicans.
TRUMAN WAS A DEMOCRAT, JUST LIKE ALL THE KKK members that served in Congress.
Campos claims that Truman was actually wealthy, most by using a tax-free account available to him as President. Whatever.
The man still supported his family as a farmer, then as an Army Captain in WWI, tried to start a clothing business, which failed. He also refused to serve on corporate boards and did not give speeches for money.
Just curious if Campos will investigate both the Obamas and Clintons - politicians who never held a “real job” in their entire lives, both who are worth $$ hundreds of millions.
Did Liberal Hitzlik ever delve into why Obama has gotten so wealthy just a few years out of office? I betcha he doesn’t care about that only Trump TDS!
“The author also asserts that Truman was rich when he left office but he doesn’t show that Truman had anything other than the $50,000. Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?”
Go back to the source article:
“Every aspect of this narrative is false. My research into Truman’s private financial files, which became available with the release of his widow Bess Truman’s personal papers, reveals the following:
• When Truman left the White House, he had, according to his own (far too conservative) estimate, a net worth that would be equivalent to $6.6 million in simple inflation-adjusted terms.
• By his own accounting, Truman’s wealth increased by the 2021 equivalent of another $3.7 million when Congress passed the Former Presidents Act five and a half years after he left office.
• Contrary to his claims, Truman made a fortune from his memoirs, and from other writing and speaking engagements, in the years immediately after he left the presidency.
• Truman’s repeated insistence that only his inheritance and subsequent sale of the family farm were keeping him from financial distress was false in several ways. For one thing, Truman had already become a very wealthy man several years before he sold that land. For another, Truman did not actually inherit any of the land: He bought it, in no small part, with money that he had misappropriated from the federal government. He then sold it a few years later at an enormous profit....
...Exactly how much richer he became is revealed by another document in Bess Truman’s files: an accounting that Truman made of his assets in January 1959, five months after the passage of the Former Presidents Act. This accounting includes a detailed breakdown of the former president’s holdings, which by this time included a diversified portfolio of stocks and even an ownership share in the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams franchise, whose part-owner was his longtime friend Edwin Pauley.
All told, Truman calculated his net worth to be $1,046,788.86. Six years after leaving the presidency, he was a millionaire — and at a time when this term still retained its pre-inflationary grandeur. A person in 2021 would have to have a net worth of approximately $74 million to be as rich as Truman was in 1959, relative to the other Americans of his time.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/the-truman-show.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Read the whole article. Truman pocketed government funds not intended for personal use, tax free.
Henry Wallace would have become POTUS when FDR died if he had not been replaced on the 1944 ticket by Truman.
Agree !
I also give credit where it’s due also. However if I am to damn the “warts” (and “warts” only through modern “eyes”!) of the Founding Fathers & the Southern Leadership. I am certainly going to damn these “moderns” for their “warts”. Since these “moderns” have lived or are currently living in this “oh so enlightened” age aren’t their “warts” worse?
I watched a film of Truman's 1948 Democratic Convention acceptance speech on C-Span a few years ago.
It sounded like Stalin and Mao had written it.
Not only that, but his anger and contempt for the GOP were completely sincere, and very similar to the tone and rhetoric that Conservatives hear from the Political Left every day in 2021.
“ In other words you discovered he was a typical democrat “
Beat me to it.
I already adjusted for inflation. The amount in 1951 dollars was $50,000 not $500,000. I also used 1952 as the starting point year for inflation.
Golly. Nothing suspicious about Algore’s wealth. He is really just trying to save the planet.
Perhaps the article mentions it, I’m not going to invest the time to read it, but it must be remembered that Truman, for better or worse, came up through democrat ranks as a Pendergast Machine in Kansas City. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t ‘dip his beak’ every now and then.
And while not faultless as President, I think he was a lot better than the one he replaced as FDR’s VP—Henry Wallace, who thought we should be much closer to Stalin and the USSR after the war.
“The amount in 1951 dollars was $50,000 not $500,000.”
That makes a big difference. I took the $500,000 from the original post to which I rsponded.
Agreed. Actually after I went back and clicked on the underlying article, I got the answers to my questions, and posted that as a comment. The editing of the LA Times article is atrocious.
But then I went back and read the full txt of the law and it’s clear to me that the $50,000 was intended to operate like a per diem where they give it to you because you are expected to have expenses, but they don’t require you to provide receipts and also if you spend less you keep the balance.
Have a look yourself and if you disagree I’ll be happy to explain my reasoning:
https://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=63&page=4#
“Does $50,000 alone make your rich back then?”
Not in my book. $50K then is about $750K which is a nice chunk but hardly rich.
Leaving a nation founded on the right to independence is not “treason.” It is exercising a right given to mankind by God.
Truman was a machine guy in MO politics if I recall correctly.
MORE from your Truman trashing ‘professor’ Paul Campos:
radical leftists had then and continue to have now zero political influence, let alone actual power, in American life,
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/08/loving-america-while-hating-americans
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.