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March 2021
The Rise And Fall Of Albert Fall By Shannon Wagers
L
ike most New Mexicans, I felt a bit of patriotic pride when President Joe Biden appointed one of our own, U.S. Representative Deb Haaland, to be secretary of the Interior Department. By long-standing tradition, the individual named to head the Interior is usually a westerner, since most of the public lands and resources administered by the department lie west of the Mississippi River. Nevertheless, Haaland is only the third New Mexican to hold the post in the department’s 172-year history. The second was the late Manuel Luján Jr., who served under President George H.W. Bush. The first was a larger-than-life character named Albert Bacon Fall, who took office 100 years ago this month, appointed by President Warren G. Harding. He resigned in disgrace two years later, enmeshed in a scandal that ended his political career and ultimately landed him in prison. A Kentuckian by birth, Fall came to the Southwest in 1880 at the age of 19. He punched cattle in Texas, worked as a hard-rock miner in Mexico, and later in the Kingston mining district in New Mexico’s Black Range. It was
there that he first met another itinerant miner named Edward L. Doheny. Both were dirt-poor at the time, but Doheny went on to become a multi-millionaire oil man, while Fall embarked on a successful career in law and politics. Their paths would cross again decades later. Fall studied law sporadically for several years and was admitted to the bar in 1889. Opening a law office in Las Cruces that year, he quickly made a name for himself representing clients in a number of high-profile cases. He entered the political arena at around the same time, winning a seat in the Territorial Legislature in 1890 as a Democrat. In 1907, he switched parties and became a Republican. During his long political career, Fall also served as Territorial Attorney General and as an associate justice of the Territorial Supreme Court. He lobbied hard for statehood, and was one of the chief architects of the 1910 state constitution. After statehood was achieved in 1912, he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served until joining Harding’s cabinet in 1921. Despite his impressive résumé, there was another side to Albert Fall. He could be quick-tempered and
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unpredictable, occasionally even violent. He was widely suspected of complicity in the murder of a political rival, Albert Jennings Fountain, although he was never charged. He lost his seat on the Supreme Court as a result of allegations that his rulings were flagrantly partisan, and that he had abused his authority by interfering in local elections. During a visit to New Mexico by President William Howard Taft in 1909, Fall berated the president for his inaction on the statehood question at a banquet held in his honor at Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel. Both the president and the other guests were shocked at Fall’s effrontery, but Taft eventually signed the bill admitting New Mexico to the Union anyway. In the Senate, Fall’s colleagues were impressed by his intellect but put off by his brusque personal style. With his walrus mustache, broadbrimmed Stetson hat, and everpresent cigar, he seemed to embody the truculent spirit of the Old West. He kept a six-shooter in his Senate desk and sometimes wore one under his coat. He admired Theodore Roosevelt but disagreed with most of TR’s progressive platform, particularly his conservationist ethic. In Fall’s view, the nation’s natural resources ought to be turned over to private enterprise to be exploited and developed with minimal government interference. That put him at odds with the progressive wing of the Republican Party but made him a good fit for the pro-business Harding administration. Teapot Dome was an untapped oil reservoir on federal land in eastern Wyoming, named for an eroded sandstone outcrop that resembled a teapot. Along with two other oilfields in California, it had been withdrawn from the public domain and turned over to the Navy as a strategic reserve to fuel its ships, should a war or other national emergency cut off access to
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regular sources of oil. Early in his administration, Harding issued an executive order transferring control back to the Interior Department. The following year, Fall quietly leased the Teapot Dome reserve to an oilman named Harry Sinclair and awarded a permit to drill on the Elk Hills reserve in California to his former co-worker, Edward Doheny. The entire story of Teapot Dome is far too complicated to relate here. Suffice it to say that while there was some justification for Fall’s actions, there were irregularities in the bidding process, and some regulations were sidestepped. Several newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, picked up the story. A Senate investigation followed, during which it was revealed that Sinclair and Doheny had made secret payments to Fall totaling $404,000, including $100,000 in cash, delivered by Doheny in a black leather bag. Fall was forced to resign. Doheny claimed that the money was simply a loan to an old friend, but federal prosecutors thought otherwise. Fall went on trial for accepting a bribe in 1929, was convicted, sentenced to a year in federal prison, and fined $100,000. Doheny and Sinclair, tried separately for proffering the bribe, were acquitted. After exhausting his appeals, Fall finally entered prison in July of 1931. Because of his failing health he was allowed to serve his time at the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe. He was released after 9 ½ months, having spent the entire time as a patient in the prison hospital. The Teapot Dome affair left Fall broken financially, physically, and spiritually. He was forced to sell his majestic 750,000-acre Three Rivers Ranch, near Tularosa and lived quietly in El Paso, Texas, for the rest of his life. He died there in 1944 at the age of 83.
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