Making the Teapot Dome scandal relevant again! trump can learn from Harding's disaster
(I was thinking last night of teapot dome, t and trump,-and then I found this--no coincidences, eh???)
As Donald Trump is looking to roll back environmental regulations, lease more public lands, and re-organize government to follow business practices, he would be wise to remember the Teapot Dome scandal of 95 years ago, the biggest presidential scandal until Watergate. On April 7, 1922, President Warren G. Hardings secretary of interior, Albert Fall, leased the oil reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming to Harry Sinclairs Mammoth Oil Company. Several weeks later, Fall leased more reserves at Elks Hill in California to Edward Doheny of the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. The deals were done in secret, and Fall was later convicted of taking a $100,000 bribethe only cabinet officer ever to be found guilty of a crime. The scandal trashed Hardings reputation.
The Teapot Dome story is not just about profits and corruption, however. Its about geopolitics, anti-Progressive ideas, and Washington party politics. When Harding was elected, one of his primary goals was to reorganize government as part of the return to normalcy in the wake of an enlarged bureaucracy at the end of the Great War. For Secretary Fall, this meant moving the US Navys oil reserves to the interior department. On May 31, 1921, Harding signed Executive Order 3474, which Fall wrote.
The conservationists were upset, but the Harding administration was more concerned with changing geopolitics and threats to national security. By 1920, the United States exported 80 percent of the worlds oil, and the US Navy had converted its ships engines from coal to oil. The rise of the automobile also increased oil demand. Experts believed that the oil reserves would be depleted in 10-20 years, and the public thought the country was losing out on oil deals in Latin America, the Middle East, and the Dutch East Indies. Secretary Fall differed significantly from President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909), a Republican and one of our nations most famous conservationists. Fall would feel more at home in todays Republican Party as he saw regulations as an impediment to jobs and development. He was a product of the western frontier of New Mexico, made his money as a lawyer representing timber, mining, and oil companies, and hated bureaucrats.
Although the Teapot Dome and Elks Hill leases were done in secret, newspapers quickly broke the news, and Senator Robert M. La Follette (R-WI) began to investigate. In response, Harding wrote a letter to the Senate saying he approved of the lease policy. Now the president was directly linked to the developing scandal. The investigations continued after Fall resigned on March 4, 1923, as another senator, Thomas Walsh (D-MT), began to look into the matter. Walsh found out that Mammoth Oils Sinclair had invested in Falls New Mexico ranch, and that Fall received $100,000 from Pan Americans Doheny. In January 1924, Doheny testified it was a personal loan, not a bribe, but senators began to wonder if the loan gave him unfair access to the oil reserves.
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https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/making-teapot-dome-scandal-relevant-again
GeorgeGist
(25,294 posts)Trump learn?
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)If we needed confirmation, Woodward's book pretty well dispels that notion.
SWBTATTReg
(21,856 posts)It's a sad reflection of how some view their history lessons during school. rump obviously didn't learn too much as he seems to have issues w/ just about anything, all of which he could have learned, either from school or first hand via some of his buddies (who are probably all long gone by now)...