Teapot Dome (and a greater scandal, much more recent)

I read a brief account of the so-called “Teapot Dome Scandal” recently.  I learned about it, I’m sure, in high school American History, but I could remember none of the facts about it.  It took place during the Presidency of Warren G. Harding (who died in office in 1923).

I learned three things about the scandal that surprised me, and will probably surprise you, too.

1) A claim of national security was used to sell the scam

2) Oil companies used the US government to make huge profits

3) The oilfields, national assets, were used for corporate profit, in other words, the American people paid the price; it was their wealth that was funneled into the pockets of a few wealthy corporatists.

Compare this to what George W. Bush did in 2002, in the run up to the invasion of Iraq.  He sold that invasion as necessary for national security, defense contractors used the US government to make huge profits, benefiting from no-bid (sole-source) contracts to take hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and put it in their own pockets.  It was theft, by government, just like Teapot Dome. And it should’ve been viewed as as such, as a scandal and a disgrace.

So, why wasn’t it?

Teapot Dome, until Watergate, was considered the greatest political scandal in U.S. history. The scandal centered around three oilfields that in 1909 had been legally allocated to the United States Navy—a safeguard against possible shortage of oil in time of emergency. They were Naval Reserve No.1, at Elk Hills, California; No. 2, at Buena Vista, California; and No. 3, at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. As the oil lay dormant underground, there became concerns that adjacent wells would either advertently or inadvertently siphon off the oil. Congress addressed these concerns by giving the secretary of the navy discretion over how best to conserve and utilize the oilfields.

Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, had his own plan. Rather than receive competing bids for the leases of the reserves, he would sole-source the leases under a national security justification. He would then lease the three reserves to three separate friends with terms that were disproportionately favorable to the oil companies. The punch line of Fall’s scheme was that by making the oil companies richer, he would earn kickbacks in the form of no-interest loans, Liberty Bonds, livestock, and cash that would make him a very rich man. Fall would then retire from government and use the money to build out his Three Rivers Ranch in New Mexico. This would include adding 9,500 acres of land through two separate transactions, a home renovation, the purchase and installation of a new hydroelectric plant, paying off his back taxes, and what must have been a massive landscaping project. All he had to do was get the president to transfer the three reserves from the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Interior.

With his cabinet seemingly in agreement, Harding, in one of his first acts as president, authorized the transfer through his May 31 issuing of executive order No. 3474. President Harding had immolated himself, committing to pen and paper his complicity in the Teapot Dome scandal.

With the executive order in place, Fall spent the following year orchestrating the leases as planned, which he consummated at Teapot Dome on April 7, 1922, and at Elk Hills on December 11 that same year. On January 2, 1923, less than one month after the Elk Hills deal, Fall had completed his mission and retired a wealthy man.

Six years later, Albert Fall earned the distinction of being the first cabinet secretary in U.S. history to serve prison time.  [ more ]

From: Jared Cohen’s Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America (Pub. 2009)

Woodstock '69, the day after (CBS news coverage)

Woodstock CBS coverage for Monday, August 18, 1969, the day after the Woodstock festival ended:

https://youtu.be/WehjMZcQqPA

CBS news anchor, Walter Cronkite, and veteran war reporter John Laurence (who is still living, by the way), both expressed positive opinions about the three day festival.  Laurence's comments were quite favourable about the people who attended.

It was not because either man respected the hippies, but because both realized that they could not, themselves, claim to be men of honour if they did not publicly oppose the nation's pathological pursuit, in Vietnam, of an atrocity of immense proportions.

At that point, the Vietnam war was over.  I believe Woodstock marked the end of it.

Max Yasgur speaks at Woodstock '69 (17 August 1969)

Max Yasgur (1919-1973)

Max Yasgur was 49 years old, a thin man with a heart condition, when he heard that concert organizers had been tossed off the site of a three-day outdoor concert they were trying to organize which they were calling "Woodstock" near Bethel, New York. They were in trouble, they had just 30 days before the concert date to find a new venue. Max approached the four young organizers with an offer; he had a dairy farm nearby, he had land, he wanted to help. And Max Yasgur became an American counterculture icon, a part of history, his name will live forever. For what? For standing up for the rights of "hippies," for the "others," for the rights of people he didn't know, for the rights of people with whom he had almost nothing in common. Although the short hairs in his community reviled him for it, and threatened him anonymously, he was a champion for the rights of Americans to assemble, and their rights of free speech. For hippies.

And that's why Max Yasgur was a great American, a courageous man, and my hero. He stood for the rights and the dignity of others, at a time when intolerance and bigotry and hatred were tearing his nation apart. You know, like today.

When his neighbors found out that Yasgur was planning to lease land to the Woodstock organizers, they did all they could to stop him. His wife Miriam described later how they put up a sign along the road that said "Don't buy Yasgur's milk - he loves the hippies." When Max and Miriam drove by the sign, she said later, "I thought, 'You don't know Max. Now it's going to happen. The sign did it. When Max saw that, I knew darned well he was going to let them have their festival. You didn't do that to Max. He just turned to me and said, 'Is it alright with you?' ... I knew he was not going to get past this sign, so I said, 'I guess we're gonna have a festival." And he said, 'Yup, we're gonna have a festival.' And that was it."

At a town meeting, Yasgur addressed the entire assembly saying: "So the only objection to having a festival here is to keep longhairs out of town? Well, you can all go pound salt up your ass, because come August 15, we're going to have a festival!"

And that's what happened.

On the afternoon of the final scheduled day of the festival, Sunday August 17, 1969, just before Joe Cocker took the stage, Max Yasgur addressed a crowd of half a million people. Max said:

I'm a farmer, I don't know how to speak to twenty people at one time, let alone a crowd like this. But I think you people have proven something to the world - that a half a million kids - and I call you kids because I have children that are older than you are - a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God Bless You for it!
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Max Yasgur, Woodstock, early afternoon, August 17, 1969 (just before Joe Cocker performed)
Video of the "I'm a farmer" speech (it's short, 2 minutes long)

Less than four years later, on 9 February 1973, after having retiring to his winter home in Marathon, Florida, Max Yasgur died. He was only 53 years old.

Thank you, Max.
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Charles Aulds

August 17, 2019