Essay: A century ago, Denver newsmen helped unearth nation’s biggest political scandal
Old news all.
A hundred years ago today, in the nation's biggest political scandal up to that time, a U.S. cabinet secretary was indicted — thanks to the scheming of a Denver publisher, the doggedness of his immigrant reporter, and the courage of a muckraking editor.
The scandal was called Teapot Dome, and its story lends historical perspective to today's polarized, weaponized era of uncivil discourse.
The tale begins with a man named Carl Magee, who made a name for himself as a Progressive Era reformer in Tulsa before his wife's tuberculosis forced the family to move to Albuquerque for its healthful desert climate.
There, in 1920, he pursued a lifelong dream of running a "truth-telling" newspaper, buying the Albuquerque Journal and launching attacks on New Mexico's widespread corruption.
The exposés enraged U.S. Sen. Albert Fall, who ran the state's Republican political machine.
Their feud continued after President Warren Harding picked Fall to be U.S. secretary of the interior. In that new role, Fall cut a no-bid deal with an oil tycoon — Harry Sinclair — to drill in the Navy's Teapot Dome petroleum reserve in Wyoming.
Magee had known Sinclair in Tulsa and was deeply suspicious of the arrangement. His suspicions deepened when Fall started showing signs of sudden wealth. The editor began to investigate.
The Denver Post got a whiff of the scandal, too.
In early 1922, one of Fall's secretaries sent a letter to a friend in Denver. In it she complained that the interior secretary was giving away oil leases to cronies like "kisses at a wedding."
The letter found its way to Frederick Bonfils, the Post's publisher. But rather than pursuing the story, he sat on the tip and waited for a chance to exploit it.
That opportunity soon arrived.
An oil lobbyist named John Leo Stack approached the publisher and complained that Fall and Sinclair had cheated him out of an old claim he had in the Teapot Dome oil field. Bonfils agreed to work with Stack to extract a payout.
The Post began publishing s critical of the oil leases, and Bonfils dispatched a star reporter — D.F. Stackelbeck — to New Mexico to dig up dirt on Fall and Sinclair.
The reporter went to Carl Magee for help.
New Mexico's powerbrokers had forced Magee to sell the Journal by then, but he had launched a new weekly newspaper called Magee's Independent.
He had no resources to pursue the oil-lease story himself. So he told Stackelback about the tips he'd received, and the reporter set out on the story.
Careful not to expose his identity for fear of "great bodily harm," Stackelbeck spent weeks traveling throughout New Mexico, investigating Fall's tax payments, land purchases, and a rendezvous with Sinclair in his private railcar. The journalist even delved into the long-unsolved murder of one of Fall's old political rivals.
On his way back to Colorado, Stackelbeck met again with Magee. All of his leads had panned out, and the reporter expected the story to break in two weeks.
It never did.
Instead, Bonfils locked the report in a safe, claiming he feared a libel suit if the exposé were published.
Stackelbeck was in no position to complain. He was a German immigrant, naturalized in 1905. His loyalty had been questioned during World War I. Now his wife was in poor health. He couldn't afford to put his job in jeopardy.
Bonfils, meanwhile, proceeded with his plan to shake down Sinclair and Fall. In September 1922, he and Stack met with the oil baron in a hotel in Kansas City. Sinclair agreed to pay the Denverites $250,000 and give them rights to 320 acres in Teapot Dome with a guaranteed value of $750,000.
The truth remained locked away.
Magee soon took his newspaper daily. (It would become The Albuquerque Tribune.) But he continued to struggle financially.
In 1923, the Scripps-Howard group came to his rescue, buying the newspaper while retaining Magee as editor and adopting his newspaper motto as its corporate slogan. "Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way" soon inspiried the company's enduring lighthouse logo.
Magee, in turn, told his new colleagues what he knew about Fall's suspicious windfall.
A Scripps-Howard editor in Washington, D.C., passed that information on to U.S. Sen. Thomas Walsh, the Democrat who was bulldogging a Senate inquiry into the Teapot Dome matter.
Walsh contacted Stackelbeck, who told the senator what he had learned. But the reporter insisted that his role remain confidential; Walsh should call Magee to testify.
On Nov. 30, 1923, Magee told the Senate Public Lands Committee about the riches that seemed to flow to the Interior secretary after the contracts to lease the Naval oil reserves were let.
His testimony turned a humdrum political controversy into a national sensation.
In early 1924, investigators uncovered some $400,000 in payments that Sinclair and another oil man made to Fall, equivalent to about $6.5 million today, and on June 30, 1924, a grand jury handed down indictments against Fall and Sinclair.
Sinclair eventually would be convicted of contempt and spend six months in jail. Fall would be sent to prison — the first cabinet secretary ever — for receiving a bribe.
Bonfils, too, would be called before the Senate committee to explain the payoff he received from Sinclair. The hearings revealed that John C. Shaffer, the businessman who owned the Post's rival, the Rocky Mountain News, also had received a payoff from Sinclair.
Both publishers insisted they had done nothing untoward, though the American Society of Newspaper Editors – a newly formed group – declared the behavior highly unethical.
Scripps-Howard would later buy the Rocky Mountain News, and it would display Magee's "Give Light" motto and lighthouse logo until it closed 15 years ago.
The Teapot Dome scandal wasn't the end of the Carl Magee saga.
In New Mexico, a vindictive Republican judge tried him on trumped-up charges of libel and contempt. Magee escaped imprisonment thanks only to a gubernatorial pardon.
Later that same judge encountered Magee in a hotel lobby and attacked. Beaten to the floor, the editor grabbed a gun and shot the judge in the arm. But the gunfire also killed a bystander who tried to intervene. Magee was charged with manslaughter but acquitted.
In time, Scripps-Howard transferred Magee to Oklahoma City, where its struggling Oklahoma News needed "jazzing up."
In 1932, the Chamber of Commerce asked Magee to chair a committee trying to solve the city's downtown parking congestion. The editor had an idea. Why not build a gadget that could rent spaces to motorists for limited visits?
So he invented and patented the parking meter.
The world's first Park-O-Meters were installed in Oklahoma City in 1935. So today millions of drivers can blame Carl Magee every time they are forced to feed the meter.
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