The Great Morality Panic
CHAPMAN, WILLIAM
The Great Morality Panic TEAPOT DOME: OIL AND POLITICS IN THE 1920S By Burl Noggle Louisiana. 434 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by WILLIAM CHAPMAN Staff Reporter, "Washington Post" In one of the...
...If any Democrat might have gained from the Republican scandal, it was surely Senator Thomas I. Walsh, who had pressed the Senate investigation when others were reluctant...
...His scholarship appears competent but the adroitly pieced together facts are narrated in a fashion which is at best confusing and at worst tiresome, despite the journalistic flourishes sprinkled on every page...
...Coolidge was elected easily in 1924 and there is nothing to indicate that any Republican, other than those directly involved, suffered because their party was smeared with oil...
...From the first, they had suspected the Secretary, with his frontier habit of exploitation, of being hostile to the gains achieved under Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt...
...But none could compare with Teapot Dome, the audacious giveaway of oil reserves which Burl Noggle, assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University, records in his study of "Oil and Politics in the 1920s...
...The analysts and careful scholarship in detailing Slattery's key role is the major accomplishment of this otherwise limited work...
...Yet his political career was not perceptibly advanced by his persistent search for the truth...
...During the "great morality panic of 1924," as Will Rogers called it, rumors spread that the entire scheme had been planned at the Republican convention which nominated Harding...
...Teapot Dome itself was tendered to Mammoth Oil Company's Harry Sinclair who, subsequent testimony showed, gave the obliging Secretary $233,000 in Liberty Bonds...
...The oil industry was anxious to tap them, and Fall was anxious to assist...
...The first scenes of the Teapot Dome affair were played like a sequel to the Richard BallingerGifford Pinchot conservation controversy of 1910—with Pinchot himself leading the attack...
...With one enlightening exception, he has told us little of importance that standard historians have not already imparted...
...One lease went to a company owned by Edward L. Doheny, who conveniently loaned (or more probably gave) Fall $100,000 in the famous "little black bag...
...Lying deep underground in Wyoming and California were the U.S...
...Fall resigned in 1923, shortly before the start of a Senate investigation which was to expose his conspiracy, but the scandal rolled on through court hearings until 1930...
...There is throughout a tendency to cling to the obvious, and on the final page we discover Fall, dying alone in shame and debt, put to rest with this observation: "As he remembered his catalytic role, he no doubt wished it might have been different...
...Their fears were confirmed by the oil transfers and by Fall's attempt to control the Forestry Service...
...It was a dedicated Pinchot protege, in fact, the comparatively unknown Harry Slattery, who provided the ammunition which eventually brought down Fall...
...Evidence of this is offered only in the case of William G. McAdoo, whose pursuit of the 1924 Democratic Presidential nomination was unquestionably affected by the revelation that he was an attorney for oilman Doheny...
...But Professor Noggle has managed to do so anyway...
...But the simple fact is that Teapot Dome had little lasting effect on either party...
...At almost every juncture, just as we are prepared to receive some new impression, he retreats to safe and well-explored judgments...
...With Harding's blessing, the Secretary obtained control of the reserves from the Navy Department and proceeded to lease drilling rights...
...Noggle's deductions frequently echo the editorial comment of the time...
...Reviewed by WILLIAM CHAPMAN Staff Reporter, "Washington Post" In one of the most poignant and memorable comments any American President has bequeathed to history, President Warren Gamaliel Harding once observed to William Allen White: "I have no trouble with my enemies...
...It was 1921 and we had returned to normalcy, a condition which Albert B. Fall, the New Mexico Senator newly installed as Secretary of the Interior, regarded as the opportunity to undo one of the major conservationist achievements of the preceding decade...
...I can take care of them...
...Navy's largest reserves of crude petroleum...
...Noggle claims that Teapot Dome was "as embarrassing to some Democrats as it was to some Republicans...
...Given these elements of intrigue and chicanery, it is difficult to imagine the Teapot Dome scandal being translated into dull reading...
...There was outright looting in the Veterans Bureau and virtual theft, under the color of legality, from Government warehouses...
...Many other prominent men were implicated, and it was finally disclosed that in 1920 the Republican party had received at least $160,000 in bonds from a shadowy Canadian company formed by American oilmen who were to benefit from Fall's opening of the reserves...
...The friends were men Harding had appointed to office, men who one by one were to depart amid the seamiest scandals to beset any administration since Grant's...
...In one area, however, Noggle does manage to sharpen our perspective by showing that the exposé began as a move by conservationists to get rid of Fall...
...It is my friends that are giving me my trouble...
...No doubt...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 2
