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Oil Scandal Rocks American Politics In Roaring '20s

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By ROGER K. MILLER

Published: February 3, 2008

"The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country," by Laton McCartney (Random House, $27)

Though today there are efforts, primarily by Republican pundits, to downplay the significance of Teapot Dome, Laton McCartney, the author of two other books on American history, is having none of it. He says it was "the biggest scandal the nation had seen since President Grant's second term."

The chief investigator of the 1920s scandal, Democratic Sen. Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, 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 was known as "Teapot" for its shape). They salivated over leases that would be worth, in today's money, multibillions of dollars.

When the Democratic administration of President 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 Warren G. Harding, a skirt-chasing, hail-fellow-well-met senator from Ohio.

The idea was that Harding - when he could take time from romping in the Oval Office with his main squeeze, Nan Britton - would appoint an equally compliant interior secretary to shift administration of the reserves from the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Interior. Initially, this was to have been Jake Hamon, a "corporate buccaneer" from Oklahoma, but he got himself inconveniently shot dead by a mistress, so the job fell to Republican Sen. Albert B. Fall of New Mexico.

Rumors of the scheme soon spread. A Senate committee held hearings, initiated by Progressive Republican Sen. Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin and conducted by Walsh.

To reduce a long story to its criminal essentials, the committee found that Fall had leased Teapot Dome to Sinclair's Mammoth Oil Co. 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 lawsuits 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 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 nine months for contempt of Congress and for criminal contempt for jury tampering.

"The Teapot Dome Scandal," apparently based largely on secondary sources, is a nice, compact summary of this disgraceful episode in U.S. history.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer and author of the novel "Invisible Hero."

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