‘Scandal’ revisits Big Oil’s power grab
NONFICTION | Author keeps devious players, tangled turns from becoming tiresome
Jesse Smith, a member of what Laton McCartney calls the Ohio Gang of “swindlers, sharpies, con men, and extortionists” who turned sleazy criminality into an art in the Republican administration of President Warren G. Harding, used to go around cheerfully singing, “My God, how the money rolls in.”
It rolled in from, among other sources, government jobs that allowed ample opportunities for such things as selling pardons, paroles and permits for “medicinal liquor.”
But that was for pikers; the promise of real money lay, then as now, in oil.
McCartney does not mention this particular Smith anecdote, but The Teapot Dome Scandal offers nearly as many other anecdotes as the incidents of dishonesty they sprang from.
Though today there are efforts, primarily by Republican pundits, to downplay the significance of Teapot Dome, the author is having none of it. He says it was “the biggest scandal the nation had seen since Grant’s second term.” The chief investigator of the 1920s scandal, Montana Democratic Sen. Thomas J. Walsh, called it “corruption without parallel in the history of the country.”
Teapot Dome is shorthand for the attempt by Big Oil owners — notably Edward L. Doheny and Harry F. Sinclair — to gain control by stealth of naval oil reserves, or “domes,” on public lands in Wyoming and California (one in Wyoming known as “Teapot” for its shape). They salivated over leases that would be worth, in today’s money, billions of dollars.
When the Democratic administration of President Woodrow Wilson steadfastly stonewalled their importuning, they set in motion a plan to handpick a Republican nominee in 1920 to do their bidding when elected. This they did in the notorious “smoke-filled room” at the Chicago convention, emerging finally with Harding, a skirt-chasing, hail-fellow-well-met senator from Ohio.
The idea was that Harding — when he could take time from romping with his No. 1 girlfriend, Nan Britton, in the Oval Office — would appoint an equally compliant Interior secretary to shift administration of the reserves from the Navy to Interior. The job fell to Republican Sen. Albert B. Fall of New Mexico. To help ensure success of the rip-off, Harry M. Daugherty, ringleader of the Ohio Gang, was appointed attorney general.
Alas for the Ohio Gang, rumors of the scheme soon spread, pursued, initially, by the Denver Post. A Senate committee held hearings. To reduce a long story to its criminal essentials, the committee found that Fall had leased Teapot Dome to Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company and the California reserves to Doheny’s Pan-American Petroleum, receiving from them in return gifts and “loans” totaling $404,000.
Further hearings and civil and criminal suits followed throughout the 1920s. The Supreme Court ruled that the oil leases had been wrongfully secured and invalidated them, restoring the reserves to government control. Fall was found guilty in 1929 of receiving a bribe, fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, becoming the first Cabinet member ever to go to prison for crimes committed while in office.
Doheny, giver of the bribe Fall was imprisoned for receiving, was acquitted of all charges. Sinclair served a total of nine months for contempt of Congress and for criminal contempt for jury-tampering.
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