page_title: Warren G. Harding
section_title: Teapot Dome
hierarchical_section_title: Warren G. Harding / Scandals / Teapot Dome
caption_attribution_description: English: U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall
context_page_description: Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular U.S. presidents to that point. After his death, a number of scandals—including Teapot Dome—came to light, as did his extramarital affair with Nan Britton; each eroded his popular regard.
  Harding lived in rural Ohio all his life, except when political service took him elsewhere. As a young man, he bought The Marion Star and built it into a successful newspaper. In 1899, he was elected to the Ohio State Senate; he spent four years there, then was elected lieutenant governor. He was defeated for governor in 1910, but was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1914. He ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1920, and he was considered a long shot until after the convention began. The leading candidates could not gain the needed majority, and the convention deadlocked. Harding's support gradually grew until he was nominated on the tenth ballot.
context_section_description: The scandal which has likely done the greatest damage to Harding's reputation is Teapot Dome. Like most of the administration's scandals, it came to public light after Harding's death, and he was not aware of the illegal aspects. Teapot Dome involved an oil reserve in Wyoming which was one of three set aside for the use of the Navy in a national emergency. There was a longstanding argument that the reserves should be developed; Wilson's first Interior Secretary Franklin Knight Lane was an advocate of this position. When the Harding administration took office, Interior Secretary Fall took up Lane's argument and Harding signed an executive order in May 1921 transferring the reserves from the Navy Department to Interior. This was done with the consent of Navy Secretary Edwin C. Denby.
  The Interior Department announced in July 1921 that Edward Doheny had been awarded a lease to drill along the edges of the Elk Hills naval reserve in California. The announcement attracted little controversy, as the oil would have been lost to wells on adjacent private land. Wyoming Senator John Kendrick had heard from constituents that Teapot Dome had also been leased, but no announcement had been made. The Interior Department refused to provide documentation, so he secured the passage of a Senate resolution compelling disclosure. The department sent a copy of the lease granting drilling rights to Harry Sinclair's Mammoth Oil Company, along with a statement that there had been no competitive bidding because military preparedness was involved—Mammoth was to build oil tanks for the Navy as part of the deal. This satisfied some people, but some conservationists, such as Gifford Pinchot, Harry A. Slattery, and others, pushed for a full investigation into Fall and his activities. They got Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette to begin a Senate investigation into the oil leases. La Follette persuaded Democratic Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh to lead the investigation, and Walsh read through the truckload of material provided by the Interior Department through 1922 into 1923, including a letter from Harding stating that the transfer and leases had been with his knowledge and approval.
  Hearings into Teapot Dome began in October 1923, two months after Harding's death. Fall had left office earlier that year, and he denied receiving any money from Sinclair or Doheny; Sinclair agreed. The following month, Walsh learned that Fall had spent lavishly on expanding and improving his New Mexico ranch. Fall reappeared and stated that the money had come as a loan from Harding's friend and The Washington Post publisher Edward B. McLean, but McLean denied it when he testified. Doheny told the committee that he had given Fall the money in cash as a personal loan out of regard for their past association, but Fall invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he was compelled to appear again, rather than answer questions.
  Investigators found that Fall and a relative had received a total of about $400,000 from Doheny and Sinclair, and that the transfers were contemporaneous with the controversial leases. Fall was convicted in 1929 of accepting bribes, and in 1931 became the first U.S. cabinet member to be imprisoned for crimes committed in office. Sinclair was convicted only of contempt of court for jury tampering. Doheny was brought to trial before a jury in April 1930 for giving the bribe that Fall had been convicted of accepting, but he was acquitted.
caption: Albert B. Fall, Harding's first Secretary of the Interior, became the first former cabinet member to be sent to prison for crimes committed in office.
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