Academic literature on the topic 'Teapot Dome Scandal'

This chapter focuses on the end of an important period of policy making which began in 1890 and gave lasting shape to the nation's public lands. This also ended for several decades the intense congressional engagement in reforming public land policies, leaving the executive branch as the primary engine of policy development until the 1960s. Although Congress produced a steady stream of legislation on public lands over that time, only a handful of laws had a fundamental impact. Additionally, the chapter examines the Teapot Dome scandal. Although it had little impact on public land policy overall, it did make public land administration a favorite subject for press scrutiny and occasionally led Interior Department officials to express frustration with the multiple layers of review installed to reduce opportunities for fraud.

Chapter four explores Harry Sinclair's involvement in the notorious Teapot Dome oil scandal. Republican Warren G. Harding's landslide victory in the 1920 presidential election marked a new direction in American politics, ending the Progressive Era and ushering in a pro-business climate that would further enrich men like Sinclair and facilitate the return of American horseracing to national prominence. New secretary of the interior Albert B. Fall transferred oil reserves held by the US Navy in Wyoming to Sinclair. As news of the shady deal spread, Sinclair debuted his colt Zev, named after the oilman's attorney, William Zevely, who was a facilitator of the corrupt bargain. Zev would surpass Man o' War's all-time American earnings record, and his twenty-three career wins would include scores in the Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and the Race of the Century against English champion Papyrus.

On October 20, 1923, at Belmont Park in New York, Kentucky Derby champion Zev toed the starting line alongside Epsom Derby winner Papyrus, England's top three-year-old colt. Few happenings had ever been covered so closely by American newspapers as the spectacle officially dubbed the International Race. The extraordinary hype surrounding the event was even more notable considering that only a few years earlier Thoroughbred racing had been on the brink of Progressive-era extinction in the United States. But following a post-World War I political sea change in the United States, in what would later be remembered as a "golden age" of sport, Americans rallied around the horse that was, in the words of its owner Harry F. Sinclair, "racing for America," while Sinclair was engaged in a scheme to defraud the United States of millions of barrels of publicly owned oil in one of the most notorious instances of political corruption in American history -- the Teapot Dome scandal. America First examines the postwar revival of American horseracing, culminating in the intercontinental showdown between Zev and Papyrus, that captured some of the incongruity and contradiction of 1920s America.

World War I, according to President Woodrow Wilson and other sloganeers, made “the world safe for democracy.” Americans were largely spared the cataclysmic effects of the Great War endured by Europeans. Nonetheless, the national mood in the United States changed dramatically, and, as is so often the case, this shift in sentiments could be clearly discerned in new priorities for the school system, initially for children of welleducated and wealthy parents. Pundits proclaimed that assimilation had been achieved, although the practices associated with it faded only gradually over the next two decades and particularly persisted in schools serving immigrant and other low-income children. America in the 1920s experienced a period of growing wealth, considerable corporate and governmentally ignored greed, widespread racial and religious bigotry, and rapidly changing social mores, particularly for urbanites. In such a period, discussions about the national need for assimilation as a means of preserving the democracy seemed out of place. With so much change in the air, “adjustment” to the new times emerged as the new catchword. Many of the most salient events and practices of the post–World War I period (the Teapot Dome financial scandal, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the economic depression following the stock market crash of 1929) did not reflect well on the democracy Americans aspired to have. President Wilson might claim that the world was “safe for democracy,” but his piece of the world, the United States, did not admirably demonstrate it at the time. Nor, of course, did the new Soviet Russia, recently emerged both from incredible losses in World War I and from the yoke of the czars and now engaging in a different form of authoritarian rule. Germany, principal adversary of the Allies in World War I, entered the 1920s badly broken. The Germans attempted a new and ultimately unstable form of government before acquiescing to Hitler’s takeover in 1933, resulting in a devastating defeat of democracy. As the Roaring Twenties took off, American educators, always anxious to be au courant with what was expected of them, found their old priorities obsolete. Prescient school men recognized that the focus was shifting from schools serving a need defined by the nation (assimilation) to one defined by informed, ambitious, and often affluent parents seeking a more supportive school environment for their children and by newly articulate professors of education.