Every president fears scandal within his administration. It is one of the most crippling nightmares in American politics. Even if a president makes all the right choices and makes every honorable decision he can still be dragged down by the decisions and actions of those in his administration. Government officials are representatives of the administration which they serve and their actions are projected onto the administration as a whole and on the president himself. There have been numerous scandals in American politics since the beginning. Most of them have had to do with money. One of the most serious was uncovered in the early 1920s during the term of Warren G. Harding. The Teapot Dome Scandal rocked Harding’s administration and was said to be the worst government scandal until Watergate.
The Teapot Dome intrigue began in 1920. At the center of the scandal was Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall and the owners of several large oil corporations, Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny. In 1921, President Harding had transferred three oil reserves from the control of the Navy Department to the control of the Department of the Interior. These included Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming and two other oil reserves in California: Elk Hills and Buena Vista.
This transfer eventually happened in 1922. The Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, leased the oil reserves to two different oil tycoons, Sinclair and Doheny, without competitive bidding. This in and of itself was not illegal. However, Fall accepted bribes from Sinclair and Doheny and this was illegal. Eventually, the deal began to come into the light in April, 1922, when an owner of a small Wyoming oil company complained to his senator. Hearings were held in the Senate, led by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin. Initially, no incriminating evidence could be found against Fall. It seemed that he would get off the hook. However, a one-hundred-thousand dollar loan from Doheny was discovered by Thomas Walsh, a Democratic senator from Montana. This was the nail in the coffin for Fall and for President Harding himself. In 1927, the leases were revoked and the oil reserves returned to the Navy. Fall was found guilty of bribery and sentenced to jail in 1929.
Today, the Teapot Dome scandal has lost its magnitude in our minds. Watergate would loom larger than the Teapot Dome dealings and after that the Iran-Contra scandal would further America’s distrust of her government. In recent years, the current administration has been plagued by multiple scandals. The American government has only regressed from the strong, moral force that it was in the earliest years of our nation’s history.