¦ Doheny pursued wealth with obsessive determination. In Wall Street (1987), the character Gordon Gekko declares that "Greed is good."How does greed promote economic growth? How does it become a destructive force?
¦ Did Doheny benefit society and, if so, how? How did he harm it?
The Greystone mansion, built by Edward Doheny, consisted of eighty-five rooms, a bowling alley, two movie theaters, a library, a billiard room, and many secret bars.
Although the three culprits in the Teapot Dome scandal escaped conviction on the charge of conspiring to defraud the government, Sinclair was sentenced to nine months in jail for contempt of the Senate and for tampering with a jury, and Fall was fined $100,000 and given a year in prison for accepting a bribe. In 1927 the Supreme Court revoked the leases and the two reserves were returned to the government.
The public still knew little of the scandals when, in June 1923, Harding left Washington on a speaking tour that included a visit to Alaska. His health was poor and his spirits low, for he had begun to understand how his “Goddamn friends” had betrayed him. On the return trip from Alaska, he came down with what his physician, an incompetent crony whom he had made surgeon general of the United States, diagnosed as ptomaine poisoning resulting from his having eaten a tainted Japanese crab. In fact the president had suffered a heart attack. He died in San Francisco on August 2.
Few presidents have been more deeply mourned by the people at the moment of their passing. Harding’s kindly nature, his very ordinariness, increased his human appeal. Three million people viewed his coffin as it passed across the country. When the scandals came to light, sadness turned to scorn and contempt. The poet E. E. Cummings came closer to catching the final judgment of Harding’s contemporaries than has any historian:
The first president to be loved by his
“bitterest enemies” is dead
The only man woman or child who wrote
A simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical
Errors “is dead”
Beautiful Warren Gamaliel Harding
“is” dead
He’s
“dead”
If he wouldn’t have eaten them Yapanese Craps somebody might hardly never not have been unsorry, perhaps
Source: "the first president to be loved by his." Copyright 1931, © 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1979 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
World History
