A Sip of The Teapot Dome Scandal

I highly recommend you check out Laton McCartney's book The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Brought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country. Now as one who loves non-fiction, I can say that this book is written like a novel and would be interesting to those who feel that history is just not the genre for them. I was constantly struck by how truth can really be stranger than fiction. Some of the incidents that happened with this scandal seem straight out of Hollywood. The book starts out with Jake Hamon, "The Oil King of Oklahoma" telling his mistress that she cannot come with him to Washington, DC as he starts his work with the Harding administration because of Mrs. Harding's insistence that he be reunited with his wife. Next thing you know, the mistress shoots Hamon. The way this sequence of events is revealed in Chapter 1 is quite intriguing and makes the reader hungry to see what's coming in the rest of the book.

I remember learning the term "Teapot Dome Scandal" in high school but I really didn't have an understanding what it was about. Given our concerns now about how much our country is dependent on petroleum products and the effects they have on our environment, I think it's worth a visit to events of the 1920's and the leasing of government land to benefit, you guessed it, oil companies.

Teapot Dome was land in Wyoming that contained oil that the Navy had for a reserve. President Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, leased the land to Harry Sinclair (think Sinclair Oil). As in every good scandal involving a presidential administration, there was a fall guy. In this case, his name Albert Fall and he became the first cabinet member to go to prison for his deeds while a cabinet member. Thus the term "Fall guy." He may have been comforted to know that his name would live on to this day as a term for someone who takes one for the team!

The Teapot Dome Scandal is now available in paperback. If you want, we're happy to order you a copy in Hardcover. You'll want to hang on to this one!