5 – Albert B Fall
Our next elected representative who should have known better is also from the United States. Albert B Fall was born in Kentucky in 1861. After working in a cotton factory as a child, he moved to Oklahoma, then to Texas and eventually settled in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he practiced law and worked as a teacher simultaneously.
Having been admitted to the American Bar in 1891, Fall served in New Mexico’s House of Representatives. He was made a judge of the third judicial district in 1893 and then an associate justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court later that year. He became the territory’s attorney general in 1897. A member of the US Republican Party, Fall was elected as one of the first Senators for New Mexico to the US Senate in 1912. Over the next few years, he occupied a number of prominent positions on various Senate Committees, including chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Commerce and Labor. He was also notable for his support of the suffrage movement and isolationism at the time the United States entered the First World War.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Fall as Secretary of the Interior. Shortly afterwards, the President ensured that Fall’s department should assume responsibility for the Naval Reserves at Elk Hills, California, Buena Vista, California and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. In April 1922, the Wall Street Journal reported that Secretary Fall had that two of his friends, oil barons Harry F Sinclar and Edward L Donheny should be granted leases to drill in parts of the Naval Reserves without having to go through open bidding.
Fall accepting bribes for the leases was the root of the Teapot Dome scandal. In the congressional hearings on the scandal which ensued in 1924, Fall explained the concept of “oilfield drainage” with a line subsequently adapted in the dialogue of the 2007 film There Will Be Blood: “Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake.”
The Congressional investigation into the scandal concluded that Fall was guilty of conspiracy and bribery. Edward L. Doheny had paid him $385,000 in return for the grant of the leases. Fall was jailed for a year. He was the first-ever former US cabinet officer sentenced to prison because of misconduct in office. While Doheny was acquitted on a charge of bribery, his corporation foreclosed on Fall’s home in New Mexico as a result of “unpaid loans” which were in fact the $100,000 bribe Doheny had paid. Fall died in 1944, in El Paso, Texas.