A Centennial of Surviving Scandals

(Clifford Berryman, Washington Star, spring 1924. Library of Congress.)

By Kamron M. Spivey, ‘24

Legitimacy aside, scandals alleged against the previous Trump Administration have ruptured the current Republican Party and jeopardize a potential red wave in Congress and the Oval Office over the next couple of years. The Grand Old Party, however, has experienced its (perhaps more than) fair share of scandals before, and history indicates that the Republican Party’s best chance for national recovery is to drop its baggage—that is, Trump—and move on to a less-controversial yet strongly conservative platform.

One hundred years ago, on April 14, 1922, The Wall Street Journal leaked a secret deal between oil tycoon Harry Sinclair and the federal government for an oil reserve in Wyoming nicknamed the Teapot Dome. News criticized this lease from the start. One journal called the plot, “one of the baldest public-land grabs in history.”

Through eight years of congressional hearings and criminal trials the scandal would erupt far beyond oil into one of the greatest scandals in American history. A series of convictions, cover-ups, perjuries, briberies, blackmails, murders, suicides, and more deeply infiltrated the administration of Republican President Warren G. Harding: Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall would be the first cabinet member convicted of a federal crime, Attorney General Harry Daugherty would be forced to resign amid numerous allegations of corruption, and several multi-millionaire donors to the Republican Party would face similar scrutiny and charges.

Despite the connection or incrimination of many Republican Party leaders in the Teapot scandal, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency through the 1920s.

President Harding died midway through his first and only term, leaving the country to Vice President Calvin Coolidge in 1923. Coolidge, notably, was the first vice president to attend cabinet meetings. This could have further implicated him in the scandals affixed to Secretary Fall, or, at the very least, prompted the new chief executive to squash Teapot investigations in order to protect his handed-down administration from further scrutiny.

Instead, Coolidge appeared innocent in the entire Teapot affair. He was never called before any congressional hearing or grand jury, and he did not interfere on behalf of those accused. Although Coolidge claimed he did not know about the Teapot leases, his presence at the cabinet meeting where Harding approved them in 1922 proved otherwise. Still, since then, he deliberately turned a blind eye to scandal. Advised by former president Howard Taft to “do nothing” about Teapot, Coolidge later expanded, “The president shouldn’t do too much, and he shouldn’t know too much.” Coolidge even spent his first few nights as president away from the White House as the widowed Mrs. Harding removed (to burn later) the last of the “papers and letters that might portray the former president in an unfavorable light.”

Coolidge’s closest involvement with the Teapot scandal was when the Senate almost unanimously passed a resolution to open a second investigation, this time into Attorney General Daugherty. Technically unrelated to the Teapot lease, Daugherty had been accused of being “up to his neck in massive graft.” Initially hesitant to remove Daugherty, Coolidge changed his mind shortly after a witness gave a very emotional and damning testimony against the attorney general and his staff. Coolidge demanded his resignation on March 28, 1924—an election year.

Republicans feared that Teapot and Daugherty might hurt Coolidge’s upcoming reelection. Coolidge, however, had done everything he could to steer the party away from scandal—not simply by ignoring it—but by accentuating his conservative policies.

The economic boom of the “roaring twenties” began under Harding, who pledged to reduce the $22.3 billion national debt expanded under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and to restrict immigration to secure American jobs. Coolidge would further support these policies, while adding some of his own, like major tax reductions. In what one historian calls “the high tide of American conservatism[,]” both parties nominated a conservative candidate in the 1924 presidential election. Democratic nominee John W. Davis favored “small government, states’ rights, individual freedom, and free trade in the tradition of Jefferson, Madison, Cleveland, and Parker.”

The Progressive Party candidate, Robert La Follette, received 17% of the popular vote in the 1924 election. Davis received only 29% (the lowest of any Democrat ever), and Coolidge won with 54%.

Coolidge’s next four years in office were met with even more approval from the American public. The Teapot scandal lost its headline as the investigations wrapped up and surviving suspects were gradually acquitted or convicted. The “Coolidge Prosperity” fueled a Republican campaign to elect Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election. That election would be an even greater electoral landslide for the GOP.

Hoover had served as the Secretary of Commerce for Harding and Coolidge. Hoover and Coolidge did not agree on everything, but they insisted on avoiding Harding-era scandals. When a bipartisan group of congressmen asked President Hoover in 1930 to pardon Albert Fall, the commander-in-chief staunchly refused.

The Republican Party had moved on years before. The public, even, had moved on; they were not interested in some big-oil conspiracy between rich barons. They cared about their own prosperity, the “Coolidge Prosperity.”

That’s not to say that Coolidge invented the conservative policy of the 1920s. He merely adopted those of his predecessor and returned to bona fide conservative values: tax breaks, job security, and budget cuts. Those same values appeal to conservatives one-hundred years later. Some of those values featured in the Trump Administration and can be reused by a less-scandalized Republican candidate. As Coolidge and Hoover indicated, post-scandal Republicans are not guilty by association if they cut ties with the troublemakers. For Coolidge, it was easy: Harding died and Fall resigned. Daugherty tried his best to hang onto a sinking ship, but eventually capsized. Will the rest of the Republican Party today hang onto the ship, or will they swim the red waves back to shore?

[This opinion was written for POL-295A: Presidential Scandals.]

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