The Teapot Dome Scandal

February 4, 2008
McCartney (Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story) does an efficient job of narrating 20th-century America\x92s first great federal corruption scandal. Petroleum preserves (or domes) were set aside on public lands in California and Wyoming, to be kept until needed by the navy. During 1921, President Harding\x92s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, took control of the lands from Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby and leased two domes\x97Teapot Dome in Wyoming and California\x92s Elk Hills\x97to Harry Sinclair\x92s Mammoth Oil Co. and Edward Doheny\x92s Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Co., respectively. Concurrently, Fall received personal payments from the two men totaling $404,000, some of which he distributed to underlings who helped with the transactions. Scandal ensued, continuing through the presidency of Harding\x92s successor, Calvin Coolidge. Congressional investigations were held; Coolidge appointed special prosecutors, and in 1929 a federal court found Fall guilty of bribery, fining him $100,000 and sentencing him to a year in prison. Though McCartney adds nothing new to the story, he has a solid grasp of it in this retelling.

January 15, 2008
Journalist McCartney ("Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story") examines corruption and scandal at the highest levels of the federal government in his look at the scandal of Warren G. Harding's administration, Teapot Dome. The groundwork for the scandal was in fact in place even before Warren G. Harding had won the Republican nomination in his bid for the presidency. America's top oil companies had funneled money into the Harding campaign, providing the kind of monetary support needed for Harding to win the White House. In return, Harding appointed Albert Fall as his secretary of the interior, a position the oil interests believed would open up the Naval Oil Reserves in Wyoming (the teapot dome reserve) and California for their companies, something that Fall did accomplish. Once this quid pro quo became public, Congress pressed Harding to nullify the lease; the Supreme Court ruled that the authority Harding had given to Fall in the first place was illegal. McCartney's final section details what happened to the key individuals. The major conspirators received little or no jail time. The Teapot Dome scandal showed how monetary political contributions could lead to political corruption, something we now take for granted. Readers unfamiliar with this bit of history will find this work heavy in detail and light in general context. Recommended for informed readers in public and academic libraries.Michael LaMagna, Cabrini Coll. Lib., Radnor, PA

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2007
Featuring graft, murders, suicides, and prison, the Teapot Dome affair of the 1920s vies as the most egregious case of American political corruption. The rip-off was so brazen that investigations quickly began, but the challenge, as ever in bribery, was proving the quid pro quo. As McCartney ably recounts, the scandal originated in the avarice of several oil companies for reserves set aside for the navy. National defense be damned: there were profits in those reserves, one of which lent its odd name to history. Explaining how a cabal of oil magnates financed Warren Hardings election as president in 1920 and ensconced their agents in key cabinet posts, McCartney retails the details of boodle paid and benefits received. These turned the Washington rumour mill and attracted the investigative attention of a senator of great rectitude, Thomas J. Walsh of Montana. The hero in McCartneys history, Walsh conducted hearings that pierced improvised cover-ups and exposed the shenanigans of Teapot Dome. Aficionados of office vending can depend on McCartney to clarify the terms of this notorious sale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)