Teapot Dome Scandal

The American government is not perfect. In American History, there have been notable cases of corruption at the highest levels of the US government and one of these incidents was the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920s. The affair would be one of the most serious in American history prior to Watergate during the Nixon administration. 

The causes of the Teapot Scandal can be traced back to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, where it all began. In the early 20th century, officials dreamt of an American navy that could fulfill the imperialistic desires of the nation. The first ships were run on coal but eventually they all transferred to oil. Because ships started to use petroleum, the people from the Navy worried that oil would run out so they asked Congress to set aside some federally owned lands in places where known oil deposits most likely existed. And at this moment in history, Albert Bacon Fall would step onto the world stage as a criminal. The scandal began when President Warren G. Harding transferred supervision of the naval oil-reserves set aside from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. Fall was able to convince Harding to transfer the oil reserves over to the Department of Interior because he argued that the department was better able to oversee the protection of the land. 

After acquiring supervision of the reserves, Fall granted rights to the Teapot Dome reserves, hence the name Teapot Scandal, to Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil Company. However, this was not the only party Fall had transactions with. He also granted rights to Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum Company for Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills reserves in California. It was discovered in a later investigation that after signing the Teapot Dome lease, Fall and members of his family received more than $200,000 in liberty bonds from an unknown source. It was found out that the bonds came from a company organized by Sinclair and others receiving benefits from the lease. Also, before the Pan American contracts and leases, Doheny from Pan American Petroleum Company sent $100,000 in currency to Fall as a “loan that had not been repaid”, which is obviously suspicious. 

When the affair was uncovered, Congress ordered President Harding to cancel the leases. The Supreme Court also declared the leases fraudulent and ruled Harding’s transfer of power to Fall illegal. The President was not directly linked to the transactions, but became disillusioned and exhausted after finding out what his associate had done. He eventually died before the whole affair was exposed. Fall was convicted of accepting a bribe in the Elk Hills negotiations and imprisoned. Doheny and Sinclair were acquitted of charges of bribery and criminal conspiracy. Despite the scandal, the Republican Party was unaffected in the long term as Republican Calvin Coolidge was elected president in 1924. About forty later, the nation would face another scandal at the highest level of government: Watergate.