20 Small Decisions That Exploded Into National Scandals

When Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren Harding, persuaded Harding to turn over the oil-rich Navy reserves in Wyoming and California to his department, he promptly rented them without competitive bidding to two oil men. One of them brought along his own son, who delivered a black bag containing $100,000 in cash. After a Senate investigation uncovered the scheme, Fall was sent to jail in 1929, becoming the first U.S. cabinet officer ever sent to prison.

Angry over their low salaries from Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, players Chick Gandil and Eddie Cicotte were persuaded by New York gambler Arnold Rothstein to throw the 1919 World Series in return for roughly $100,000. The team lost, five games to three. When an eight-player trial occurred in 1921, all were acquitted as vital evidence mysteriously disappeared. Yet baseball’s first commissioner still banned the men for life. Shoeless Joe Jackson, the star outfielder, denied involvement for the remainder of his life.

The corrupt politician Boss Tweed led Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled New York City in the late 1860s. He directed a group of contractors building a new courthouse to submit wildly inflated bills. One carpenter was paid $360,000 for a single month, then gave most of the money back to Tweed. The cost of the $250,000 project ballooned to more than $12 million. A leaked ledger and newspaper cartoons exposed the fraud. Tweed fled to Spain, where he was recognized from the cartoons. He was extradited back to New York, sent to jail, and died there.

In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, was convicted of treason based on flawed evidence fueled by anti-Semitism, and he was banished to a prison island. The real spy was eventually identified by a French intelligence officer, but army officers refused to release his report, instead forging documents to ensure that Dreyfus remained convicted. The novelist Émile Zola’s open letter blaming the French army for a cover-up brought the case back into the limelight. Dreyfus was exonerated completely in 1906 and went on to fight in World War One.

A French cardinal named Louis de Rohan, looking to regain the favor of Queen Marie Antoinette, became convinced by a con artist named Comtesse de La Motte that the Queen secretly desired an extravagant diamond necklace. De La Motte forged the Queen’s name on letters and staged an impersonation of her at night in the palace gardens. The cardinal then purchased the necklace on credit and gave it to the Comtesse, whose accomplice sold the diamonds in London. The ruse fell apart when Rohan was arrested, and though Marie Antoinette did not purchase the necklace, she bore the infamy.

In January 1917, the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann dispatched a secret message suggesting that Mexico ally itself with Germany against the United States and promising Mexico Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in exchange. Intercepted by British code-breakers, the message was initially thought by some Americans to be a British forgery, but Zimmermann then admitted sending it. Mexico’s president rejected the offer as unworkable, but the confession still helped turn isolationist sentiment in the U.S. in favor of entering World War One weeks later.

In summer 1932, over 17,000 World War One veterans had camped in Washington demanding payment of bonuses promised to them. President Herbert Hoover told Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to clear the downtown buildings, but not to cross the river and enter the veterans’ camp. MacArthur crossed, nevertheless, bringing in troops and tanks to burn it down with tear gas. Over 100 were injured, and two babies died from the gas. Hoover, charged with issuing an order he never gave, was defeated in his bid for re-election in November.

President John Adams had sent diplomats Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and John Marshall to Paris to halt France’s attacks on American shipping. When they arrived, however, they were denied an official meeting. Instead, agents of the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, solicited a bribe of $250,000 for the French minister himself and a $10 million loan to pave the way for official negotiations. When the Americans refused, Adams brought the affair to light. The X.Y.Z. Affair helped establish the U.S. Navy Department and led to an undeclared war at sea between the United States and France.

By the early 1870s, federal tax agents in such cities as St. Louis and Chicago were taking bribes from whiskey distillers to allow them to avoid paying the 70-cent-a-gallon liquor tax. This cost the federal government several million dollars a year, some of which was then channeled into political campaigns. Treasury Secretary Benjamin Bristow conducted a secret investigation that led to surprise raids in 1875. More than 350 people were indicted. Even President Ulysses S. Grant’s personal secretary, Orville Babcock, was among those arrested. Yet thanks to Grant’s sworn testimony, he went free.

In 1829, Secretary of War John Eaton wed Peggy Eaton, but Washington’s cabinet wives, led by Vice President John Calhoun’s wife, Floride, snubbed her due to rumors of her sexual history. The newly elected President Andrew Jackson, stung by previous slanders aimed at his own dead wife, ordered his cabinet members to make their wives socialize with Mrs. Eaton. When they refused, cabinet meetings ground to a halt for two years. The stalemate ended when Secretary of State Martin Van Buren stepped down, allowing Jackson to appoint a new cabinet.

Following a crash by a Navy airship in September 1925 that killed 14 people, the outspoken military air power champion, Army Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, held an unauthorized press conference. He charged military officials with “almost treasonable administration” of the national defense for failing to invest enough in aviation to keep up with battleship spending. President Calvin Coolidge ordered a court-martial, and Mitchell was convicted that December, leading to his resignation from the Army. In 1946, Congress posthumously awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal for his foresight regarding air power.

Oakes Ames, a Union Pacific Railroad director and congressman, established a fictitious construction firm, Crédit Mobilier, that overbilled the government for constructing the transcontinental railroad. To prevent investigation, Ames distributed discounted Crédit Mobilier stock to members of Congress in the winter of 1867, including future vice president Schuyler Colfax. In 1872, a newspaper revealed the corruption. Ames was censured by the House, and Colfax’s political fortunes never revived.

In early 1912, Britain’s attorney general, Sir Rufus Isaacs, learned that the government would shortly be awarding a lucrative wireless contract to Marconi, the firm run by his brother, Godfrey Isaacs. Before the deal was made public, he purchased 10,000 shares in one of its American subsidiaries and sold some to the chancellor, David Lloyd George, at cost. The shares appreciated substantially when the contract was announced. Though there was a subsequent inquiry in Parliament, the ministers argued they had only bought shares in an American subsidiary, distinct from the British firm, and a partisan committee report cleared them of corrupt conduct.

Former senator Stephen Dorsey and Thomas Brady, a senior official at the Post Office, ran a scheme in which contractors submitted low bids for service on remote mail routes out west. Brady would then use his authority to repeatedly “speed up” the service on paper. This meant that no additional mail was delivered, but payments were inflated to steal more than $4 million. President Garfield ordered an investigation into the matter, and Brady promptly resigned. When Garfield was assassinated, President Chester Arthur pursued charges, but juries acquitted both men despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

In 1926, when corruption within Canada’s customs department meant that Prime Minister Mackenzie King was about to face a censure vote in Parliament which he would almost certainly lose, King asked Lord Byng, the British-appointed Governor General, to dissolve Parliament and call a snap election. Byng refused, arguing that the opposition deserved a chance to govern first. King resigned and cast the refusal as foreign interference in Canadian affairs. His successor’s government soon lost the confidence of Parliament, and the election later that September returned King to power.

In the very close Canadian election of 1872, the Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, along with one cabinet minister, secretly took over $300,000 from shipping magnate Hugh Allan to guarantee that the contractor for the charter for the transcontinental railway would be Allan’s company. Leaked telegrams were published by opposition politicians. In one, Macdonald wrote, “I must have another ten thousand; will be the last time of asking; do not fail me.” The government resigned months later, although Macdonald was back in power a few years later.

President Andrew Jackson gave his cronies the highest positions. His friend and political supporter Samuel Swartwout was handed the lucrative post of collecting taxes at the nation’s richest port, New York. Jackson ignored a written warning from his secretary of state, Martin Van Buren, that Swartwout had questionable financial standing. Swartwout diverted much of the duty payments he collected, keeping the losses hidden for years, though later court reviews found that fraudulent subordinates and chaotic recordkeeping also contributed to the missing funds. When his term ended in 1838, he fled to England, leaving a $1.2 million hole in the accounts, one of the largest federal losses of the era. He eventually came back to the U.S. and forfeited his property to help cover the losses. He was never imprisoned.

The British continued to issue shrapnel shells designed for open-field combat, while in trench warfare high-explosive rounds were necessary to breach the German fortifications. When a major attack on Aubers Ridge failed in May 1915 because of a lack of ammunition, the commander-in-chief John French sent copies of a report about ammunition stocks to a war correspondent of The Times. This led to a newspaper exposé which forced Prime Minister H.H. Asquith to dissolve his all-Liberal cabinet and form a wartime coalition, with a new government department created just to fix the munitions supply.

When France’s ambassador Vincent Benedetti asked the king of Prussia, Wilhelm, for a permanent guarantee on a contested royal succession in Spain in July 1870, Wilhelm declined and sent word to his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck edited the king’s gracious words from the telegram and released it to the press, where it seemed as if both parties had insulted one another. Within days, Emperor Napoleon III of France declared war on Prussia.

A swindler named Serge Alexandre Stavisky ran a pawnshop in the French town of Bayonne, selling hundreds of millions of francs of worthless bonds secured against fake jewels. The fraud imploded at the end of 1933, and several weeks later Stavisky was shot dead, ostensibly having committed suicide. But many in France thought he was murdered by the police to silence him and protect the politicians who had protected him. In February 1934, the scandal led to riots on the streets of Paris that killed 17 people and brought down two different governments.

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