Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters (review)

Reviewed by: Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters Emiliano Aguilar Crooked: The Roaring '20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, A Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal Nathan Masters Hachette Books, New York, 2023. $30 cloth. Today's readers might shrug at most political scandals, but the Teapot Dome scandal shocked Americans in the 1920s. Nathan Masters delightfully narrates this definitive political moment in Crooked. Although the courtroom and congressional hearings spanned a relatively short period, the incident became vital to the fate of democracy. At the center of this conflict, a crusading junior senator from Montana, Burton Wheeler, rose to national prominence with a simple campaign promise: "I'll get Daugherty!" The book has a prologue and three parts that divide the political drama. The prologue introduces us to our two main characters: Wheeler, the crusading junior senator, and our Machiavellian antagonist, Attorney General Harry Daugherty. Immediately, the prologue frames these two as diametrically opposed: Wheeler as a politician hoping to erect institutional changes and remove the taint of corruption, and Daugherty as a politician willing to use his position and network to elevate his power (and his friends). The first section begins with the death of Jess Smith, an aide to Daugherty. The death gained attention as the Harding administration received scrutiny for leasing a Wyoming oil field called Teapot Dome to politically connected oilmen without a competitive bidding process. The book then follows Senator Wheeler's effort to establish a committee to investigate the attorney general and the extent of corruption, hoping that Teapot Dome and Smith's mysterious death would unveil the dark underbelly of Washington, DC. While Daugherty at first dismisses potential threats, the book's second section discusses the increasing pressure on [End Page 85] him and his colleagues. Spanning the initial investigation into Daugherty and ending with his dismissal from his post by President Coolidge, Daugherty faces smoking guns, from a former agent in the Justice Department to Smith's ex-wife, Roxie Stinson. Masters demonstrates in the book's third section that despite Daugherty's dismissal, the battle was far from over. Agents in the Bureau of Investigations attempted to smear Wheeler's character: forces loyal to Daugherty issued a ten-page indictment, relying on a conflict-of-interest statute from 1864. The incident in question was when a recently elected Wheeler arranged a meeting between a client from his law practice and a representative of the Interior Department. This indictment and legal battle in Montana's District Court highlighted the increasingly manipulative methods of the Bureau of Investigation as a retaliatory arm. Masters's account of the Teapot Dome scandal is engagingly written and well-researched, reading at times like a political thriller. Unfolding from the opening death of an aide to the Attorney General, the tale is complete with subterfuge, aliases, kickbacks, blackmail, double-crosses, and surprises galore for readers both familiar and unfamiliar with the scandal. Masters weaves in biographical details as needed about the cast of characters and carefully selects the most interesting exchanges from the case hearings, which involved 115 witnesses and spawned 3,338 pages of transcripts. Without becoming muddled by the broader context of events, like the Volstead Act or a scandal in the Veterans' Bureau, Masters's narrative progression slowly unveils a period when "a dark cloud of suspicion hung over Washington" (58). Ultimately, the book sets these historical figures and the Teapot Dome scandal as a precedent for the current moment of political discord. Masters concludes, "More than anyone, Wheeler pioneered the modern political scandal as a weapon against potentates who purport to stand above the law" (288). [End Page 86] While Daugherty's demise in the court of public opinion did not translate into incarceration, the drama highlighted the role of sensational journalistic accounts, public hearings, and the limits of the weaponization of scandal for political opportunity. These characteristics became key ingredients in subsequent scandals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wheeler and Teapot Dome set the stage for political scandals, even if Teapot Dome is often neglected. [End...