2. Warren G. Harding’s Teapot Dome
Since Warren G. Harding was a Republican, you can well imagine that his contribution to our store of presidential scandals was of a financial nature, but not staying quite true to the Republican standard, Harding also had a few mistresses, one of whom managed to involve him in scandal posthumously. However, Harding’s romantic scandal did not break until after he had died, while his financial scandal broke while he was in office, its the Teapot Dome Scandal that counts.
In the Teapot Dome scandal, Albert Fall, Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, sold rights to Federally owned oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming and other locations in return for personal payments to himself of money and cattle. When Fall was caught, tried and sentenced to jail, this did not reflect well on Harding. The problem, of course, was not simply corruption, but the fact that the Federal government had oil reserves to sell, in the first place. People do not get in trouble if they are selling oil rights to something they themselves own. But when the government owns something of value, all bets are off.
Of all Harding’s mistresses, Nan Britton was the one who helped tarnish his name. In 1928, after Harding had died, Britton revealed in a book that Harding had fathered her daughter Elizabeth Ann Britton Harding Blaesing, while he was serving in the senate, a year before he was elected president. At the time, this was not necessarily taken as a proven fact, but the allegation have since been confirmed by DNA testing.
Until the Watergate Scandal broke, Harding was considered one of our worst presidents in terms of scandal.
