Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Teapot Dome Scandal

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In the early 1920s, what was considered to be the largest political scandal in American history became public. Despite the enormous amount of attention given to it in the press at the time, both the scandal and the president that was attached to it, have both been largely forgotten. Yet, the legacy of this scandal can still be found in the laws today, as well as in how the media and the public respond to political scandals. Learn more about the Teapot Dome Scandal and how it affected the administration of President Warren G. Harding on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early 1920s, what was considered to be the largest political scandal in American history became public. Despite the enormous amount of attention given to it in the press at the time, both the scandal and the president that was attached to it have both been largely forgotten. Yet, the legacy of this scandal can still be found in the laws today, as well as in how the media and the public respond to political scandals. Learn more about the Teapot Dome scandal and how it affected the administration of President Warren G. Harding on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. If you're not from the United States, there's a good chance you may have never even heard of President Warren Harding. and if you are from the United States, there's still a good chance you may have never even heard of President Warren Harding. Warren Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal is one of those things which is mentioned in American history courses, and most people recognize the words, but they aren't really sure what the scandal was about. Entering the election of 1920, Americans were looking for a change from the internationalism of Woodrow Wilson, who had gotten the country involved in the First World War. Harding was not a standout politician. He was initially a newspaper,

paper publisher from Ohio. In 1899, he began his political career by winning various state-level offices in Ohio before being elected a United States senator in 1914. Harding was an outgoing guy. He liked to give speeches, play cards, drink whiskey, and listen to brass bands. Going into the Republican convention in 1920, he was not a leading candidate for president. The overwhelming favorite of the Republicans going into 1920 was former President Theodore Roosevelt, but he died in 1919. Other top candidates included General Leonard Wood, Illinois Governor Frank Loudon, and California Senator Hiram Johnson. Second-tier candidates included Herbert Hoover, whose career prior to becoming president is actually worth an episode of its own, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge,

and General John J. Pershing. Despite Harding's poor performance in the primaries, he had emerged as a compromised candidate, if for no other reason, then no one hated him. If you've ever heard of the metaphor, a smoke-filled room in determining presidential candidates, that was popularized from the Republican's 1920 convention, where the party elders settled on Harding after eight ballots in a smoke-filled room. What most people did not know at the time was that the oil industry heavily influenced the convention. The chairman of the convention was a guy named Will Hayes, who was an attorney who worked for the oil industry. Most importantly, the convention was funded by one Harry Ford Sinclair of Sinclair Consolidated Oil Company to the tune of $3 million.

The oil industry got behind Harding because they felt he could easily be manipulated to do their bidding. Harding easily defeated the Democratic nominee James Cox in a landslide. Ironically enough, Cox was also a newspaper publisher from Ohio. It turns out the vice presidential candidates for each party ended up being more significant to history than the presidential candidates were. Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Harding took office in 1921, his cabinet appointments were a mixed bag of talent and cronyism. The relevant appointment for this story was the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, who was the senator from the state of New Mexico.

Fall was staunchly against the conservation movement, which had been championed by another Republican, Theodore Roosevelt. He was also a big supporter of the oil industry, as well as being a rancher and an attorney who represented timber and mining interests. Here, I need to shift the story to explain U.S. government policy regarding oil and the U.S. Navy. When naval ships became mechanized, they initially ran on coal. However, in the early 20th century, modern naval ships began to run on oil. The Navy became concerned that, in the event of a prolonged war, they might not have access to oil, which would cripple the fleet. So, during the Taft administration,

the United States set aside federal land with oil deposits as naval oil reserves. In particular, three oil fields were part of the naval oil reserves, elk hills and Buena Vista Hills in California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Teapot Dome got its name from a natural sandstone formation known as Teapot Rock, which was nearby. The rock looked like a teapot. However, the handle broke off in 1930

and the spout broke off in 1962. The rock is still there, but it no longer looks like a teapot. The events which initiated the scandal began when Albert Fall convinced Harding to transfer control of the naval oil fields from the Department of Navy to the Department of the Interior. The act of transferring control from one department to another wasn't in and of itself a scandal. The land was considered a reserve, so there wouldn't be any active oil drilling unless there was a war. Management of the surface would be a natural job for the Department of the Interior.

However, once oversight of the land was transferred, Fall began secret negotiations with his friends in the oil industry. In 1922, without any competitive bidding and without any public announcement, Fall granted drilling rights to the oil reserve to two of his friends in the oil business. The California properties were leased to the Pan American Petroleum Company owned by Edward Dohaney, a donor to the Harding Campaign. The teapot Dome site was leased to the mammoth oil company, which was owned by none other than Harry Ford Sinclair, the same man who spent $3 million on the Republican Convention and had donated $1 million,

to the Harding campaign. The value of the oil in the ground at the three sites had a combined value at the time of hundreds of millions of dollars, and all the companies had to do in exchange were a few minor construction projects for the federal government. The deal didn't remain secret for long. Oilmen in Wyoming began to notice Sinclair oil trucks moving equipment to the Teapod Dome site. They brought this to the attention of the media, and the Wall Street Journal broke the story

on April 14, 1922. The very next day, Wyoming Democratic senators, John Kendrick introduced a resolution to open a congressional investigation into the dealings. This began a series of congressional investigations into the matter. The primary and longest investigation was conducted by the Democratic Senator from Montana, Thomas J. Walsh. Fall and Sinclair kept evading congressional investigators, and documents kept going missing. Fall ended up resigning as Secretary of the Interior in January 1923 to retire to his ranch in New Mexico. However, that did not stop the investigations. As evidence started piling up, the stress and low approval numbers from the

scandal began to get to President Harding. In June 1923, he set out on a trip across the United States, which he called the Voyage of Understanding. He was going to travel across the country by train, sailed to Alaska, and then back down the west coast by ship, visiting Mexico, the Panama Canal, and Puerto Rico. Harding actually became the first sitting president to visit both Alaska, and, believe it or not, Canada. By the end of July, he began to develop health problems. In San Francisco, on July 29th, it became bedridden in his hotel, and on August 2nd, he found the ultimate get-out-a-jail-free card from any political scandal.

He died. Under the new president, Calvin Coolidge, two special prosecutors from each party took over the Senate investigations. What they discovered was the real scandal. Secretary Fall had received a $100,000 interest-free loan from Edward Dohaney, the oil baron who was awarded the rights to the California oil field. and that would be worth about $1.4 million today. Dohaney's son delivered the loan money in a black bag filled with cash. Likewise, Henry Ford Sinclair gave a large herd of cattle to fall

and also gave Fall son-in-law $300,000 worth of cash and bonds. In 1929, Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes from Edward Doheny and became the first U.S. Cabinet Secretary convicted for acts taken while he was in office. He was sentenced to one year in prison. Oddly enough, in a subsequent trial, Doheny was acquitted for bribing Falls. But this was not the end of the affair. In 1929, Edward Doheny's son, who delivered the money to Falls in a bag, was killed by his friend who helped him deliver it in a murder suicide. Supposedly, the friend feared going to jail over his involvement.

There were also several cases that made it to the Supreme Court. In 1927, the Supreme Court invalidated the original contracts made by Falls, reverting the land back to the court. to the federal government and the Department of the Navy. The next case had to do with a parallel investigation by Congress into the Attorney General and a friend of Harding from Ohio, Harry Doherty. Congress was investigating why the Justice Department didn't investigate the Teapot Dome Affair, and as part of the investigation, they called Doherty's brother, Mallie Doherty to testify, and he refused.

He was arrested and convicted of contempt of Congress. The case was taken to the Supreme Court in the case of McGrain v. Doherty, and in 1927, the court ruled that Congress did have the power to compel testimony. Harry Sinclair went to trial for bribery in 1927, and the case was ordered a mistrial when it was discovered that Sinclair had hired detectives to follow members of the jury. He was convicted of contempt of Congress and jury tampering and sentenced to six months in jail. His appeal also went to the Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction and the ability of Congress to conduct investigations.

The Teapot Dome scandal is really all that most people, people know about the Warren Harding administration. He was president for a little over two years, and the scandal overshadowed everything. Despite that, he was still reasonably popular when he died, given that the economy was doing well. What really tarnished Harding's legacy was his mistress, Nan Britton coming forward in 1927, and announcing that her daughter Elizabeth, born in 1919, was the illegitimate child of Harding. This revelation sparked rumors for years that Mrs. Harding actually had President Harding poisoned. Harding almost certainly was not aware of the under-the-table dealings of Albert Fall.

However, he created an environment where such things could have happened. In fact, his widow Florence later said that after his term in office was done, their plan was to do an extended cruise on a yacht owned by Henry Ford Sinclair. As for the teapot dome property itself, it remained idle when it returned to government hands for 49 years and went back into production in 1976 during the OPEC oil crisis. Over the next 39 years, 22 million barrels of oil were extracted worth over half a billion dollars. In 2015, the Department of Energy finally sold the property for $45 million to the Stranded Oil Resources Corp. This time, the sale was a fully transparent auction with competitive bidding.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thorpe Thompson and Peter Bennett. I have some boostograms to share with you today. First, I want to give a shout out to Petar and Joel W. Who have been sending Boots for almost every episode. It is quite appreciated. And Petar remains the MVP of the boostergram scene by a wide margin, sending 2,22 sats each and every episode.

I also received 1,000 sats from Heather Faye on the Fountain app, who said, quote, Gary, I'm halfway to the Completionist Club. I'll wait until I'm done to recommend topics since you've probably covered some of them already. To show my appreciation, here are most of the stats I've earned so far. Well, thanks, Heather. When you achieve completion, we will be there to welcome you with open arms. I also got a 5,000 sad boost from M.T. Bracer on the episode about the city of Troy. They wrote, I love the archaeological episodes. Another great episode, as always.

Have you heard of the Tel Caramel site? It's supposed to be older than Goldbecki Teppi, and is a settlement from before they had domesticated animals in agriculture. I'd love to hear your take on it. Your reply to that review is the best. The 5,000 sats are to thank you. It made me smile. Thanks, empty Bracer. There are plenty of archaeology-related episodes out there, which will be the subject for future episodes. As for Telcaramel, I've heard of it, but it hasn't gotten as much attention as Golbucky Tempe, primarily because I don't think the excavations have been as extensive. But it's something I'll look into it a little bit more. If you're wondering what this whole boostogram thing is about, you can find out more by going to fountain.fm. They have just released a new major version of the fountain app, which lets you both earn and give Satoshis to your favorite podcast.

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