The Teapot Dome Scandal

The Teapot Dome Scandal, one of the most sensational in American political history, took its name from the site of a naval oil reserve in Wyoming that in 1922 was leased by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall to the oilman Harry F. Sinclair.This and a similar lease of the Elk Hills, California, reserve to Edward L. Doheny were possible because Fall, an advocate of private development, had recently persuaded President Warren G. Harding to give him jurisdiction over the reserves and had won the navy's agreement by stipulating that oil royalties could be used to expand above‐ground storage facilities. Conservationists objected strongly, and the secrecy surrounding the deal aroused suspicions of favoritism and bribery, especially when Fall began improvements on his New Mexico Ranch. The Senate voted to investigate, and in late 1923, after Harding's death and Fall's departure from the Cabinet, Senator Thomas J. Walsh began an inquiry.

As the story unfolded in subsequent governmental investigations and court cases, Fall had received $409,000 from the two oilmen, partly as unsecured, interest‐free loans and partly through the assignment to him of $233,000 in government bonds. The leases would probably have been made without these incentives, but as the evidence of fraud mounted, they were canceled. Fall, convicted of accepting bribes, was sentenced in 1929 to a year in prison and fined $100,000. Sinclair and Doheny were acquitted of criminal charges, although Sinclair did serve short jail sentences for contempt of Congress and contempt of court.

Teapot Dome entered American political folklore as the symbol and major example of Harding Era corruption, and as late as 1928 revelations about those involved and their connections with Republican party financing continued. Thanks, however, to Harding's death, President Calvin Coolidge's success in winning public trust, and revelations connecting leading Democrats to Doheny, the scandal failed to shake Republican dominance. Teapot Dome's long‐range significance lay less in its political fallout than in its relationship to conservation policy. Its roots were in the fierce conservation battles of the William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson administrations, and conservationists made good use of the scandal to overturn the prodevelopment actions of 1921–1922, secure creation of a Federal Oil Conservation Board, and return the oil reserves to naval control.
See also Conservation Movement; Environmentalism; Petroleum Industry; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

M.R. Werner and and John Starr , Teapot Dome, 1959.
Burl Noggle , Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920s, 1962.

Ellis W. Hawley