[On April 14, 1922, the Wall Street Journal published a story breaking the news of a crooked deal that became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that history and four other presidential scandals, leaving aside the Grant administration as we’ll get to them in a couple weeks and the Trump administration because ugh. Share your thoughts on these & other histories, including Grant or Trump if you’d like of course, for a scandalous crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On three figures
at the heart of (at the time) the biggest presidential scandal in American
history.
1)
Albert
Bacon Fall: President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior was the public
face of Teapot Dome, eventually becoming the first Cabinet member in U.S. history
to serve a prison sentence (as much for his multiple years of tax
evasion as for his role in the scandal’s corruption, it seems). But Teapot
Dome is just one part of Fall’s multi-layered connection to the Western U.S. in
the early 20th century—the former Senator
from New Mexico was also a key player in Woodrow Wilson’s fraught and
possibly illegal 1916 military invasion of Mexico (also known as the
Punitive Expedition) to end Pancho Villa’s guerrilla raids. Both Teapot
Dome and that invasion can after all also be connected to the foundational
history of U.S. land theft throughout the West, not only from indigenous
peoples but also from
Mexican American communities.
2)
Thomas
J. Walsh: The investigator who brought down Fall was Montana Democratic
Senator Thomas Walsh, a former prosecutor whose brought those skills to his
two-year investigation into Fall and Teapot Dome. Walsh wasn’t the first
Senator to engage with the unfolding scandal—after the April 1922 story of the
land deal first broke, it was Wyoming Democratic Senator John Kendrick who introduced
an initial resolution to investigate; and then Wisconsin Republican Senator
Robert La Follette who initially
led that investigation in his role as Chairman of the Senate Committee on
Public Lands. But it’s fair to say, given all the other business of the Senate
as well as Fall’s careful attempts to cover his tracks, that it took the dogged
persistence of Walsh to finally uncover and expose the depths of Teapot Dome.
3)
Warren
G. Harding: Like the Reagan administration Iran-Contra scandal I wrote
about two days ago, President Harding was never formally tied to Fall and
Teapot Dome. But he was most certainly associated with the scandal, not only in
the media and public opinion but through his own statements. To cite two quoted
in that hyperlinked official White House history (drawn from Frank Freidel and
Hugh Sidey’s book The Presidents of the United
States of America): he complained to allies that “My friends, they’re
the ones that keep me walking the floors nights!”; and on a 1923 Western trip
with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, Harding asked Hoover, “If you knew
of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country
and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?” While on that trip
Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco—but the Teapot Dome scandal to
which he referred (in all likelihood) would gradually emerge nevertheless.
Last scandal
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Takes on this scandal or other ideas you’d share for the weekend post?
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