Daugherty Burns Scandal
As Daugherty Burns scandal are revelations of abuse known in 1924 to the resignation of US Attorney General (Attorney General) Harry M. Daugherty and the Director of the Bureau of Investigation ( Bureau for investigation , BOI) - the precursor of the later Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - William J. Burns led.
However, the scandal can only be understood as a consequence of the larger Teapot Dome scandal , which in turn can only be seen as a focal point of a great wave of corruption scandals in the USA under the Warren G. Harding presidency in the first half of the 1920s . The Daugherty Burns scandal is seen as a specific entity within the broader context of the various Ohio gang scandals because it encompasses what goes on in Daugherty's Justice Department, which also ran the BOI, and does not center around bribery and corruption of the officials involved is characterized by repeated attempts by the two protagonists to hinder the investigations into these scandals using official means.
background
Daugherty and Burns both entered their respective offices almost at the same time in the wake of another political scandal. The so-called " First Red Scare ( Red Scare ) " took place in 1920 culminating in the Palmer Raids ( Palmer Raids ) , a series of Attorney General Alexander M. Palmer arranged and in the BOI of Assistant Director J. Edgar Hoover organized raids against anarchist, Bolshevik and communist activities suspected Americans and foreigners, in the course of which there were thousands of legal violations by officials of the BOI. Criticism of the excessive action of the authorities and the lack of support in the new Harding government ultimately led Palmer to resign. President Harding installed his close confidante and campaign manager, Attorney Harry M. Daugherty, as Palmer's successor on March 4, 1921.
William J. Burns was a former Secret Service special agent who, while serving in the state, was accused of having had jury members shadowed and threatened by hired gangsters in a 1901 trial . At the time of the Palmer Raids, he was director of the William J. Burns International Detective Agency he founded , the second largest private detective agency in the United States after Pinkerton's National Detective Agency . By solving a few spectacular cases and skillful PR - Burns even appeared in a film in 1914 as himself - he became the most famous detective in the USA and earned the reputation of "American Sherlock Holmes ". Criticism of the disreputable business practices of his detective agency - like many American private detective agencies of the time, Burns International earned the majority of its money with the persecution of and sometimes violent repression against the labor movement, but at the same time was also involved in morally questionable adultery investigations - Burns could largely without it Survive loss of reputation. When, shortly after Palmer's resignation, the then BOI director William J. Flynn resigned from his post for personal reasons, Daugherty appointed Burns as his successor on August 22, 1921. During this time, William J. Burns handed over the management of his detective agency to his son William S. Burns, but his naturally continuing close relationship with the company would later prove problematic.
Ohio Gang and Teapot Dome
Along with the beginning of Harding's presidency, the so-called " Ohio Gang " came to Washington, DC , a group of politicians mostly from Harding's home state, Ohio , who were close to the new president and who have now been given cabinet posts by him. At the core of the Ohio Gang included Albert B. Fall , who became Secretary of the Interior , Will H. Hays , Hardings Postmaster General , Charles R. Forbes , the new director of the Veterans Office , Edwin Denby , who was named Secretary of the Navy , and Thomas W. Miller , the Harding as Chairman of the Office of Alien property ( trust authority on foreign ownership ) made. Daugherty, who was considered to be the head of the Ohio gang alongside Harding, later stated in his memoir that he was proud to have belonged to this group of good men. The wider community also included various other associates such as the convicted alcohol smuggler, fraudster and impostor Gaston Means , who had also worked for Burns' detective agency in the past, or Harding's personal courier Jesse S. "Jess" Smith , who had an unspecified official post in Daugherty's Ministry. The outside, conspiratorial and closed group was not very popular with the Washington establishment or within the Republican Party , and Harding quickly earned a reputation as a weak president. Journalists and political opponents alike received Harding's gratefulness when the members of the Ohio Gang gradually became entangled in corruption cases.
The most spectacular and still most prominent of these scandals was the Teapot Dome scandal , at the center of which was Interior Minister Albert B. Fall. The name of this scandal is often used in retrospect as a synonym for the corruption of the entire Ohio gang. In 1921 President Harding had transferred responsibility for some oil fields, which the US Navy directly controlled in order to use them as reserves for the propulsion of their oil-fired ships, from the Navy Department to the Home Office, but this did not take effect until 1922 after the direct influence of the Fall on Navy Minister Denby has been. Fall used his new powers to very small the oil fields known as "Teapot Dome" from Teapot Rock in Natrona County in Wyoming to a subsidiary of Sinclair Oil and the oil fields in the Elk Hills in Kern County in California to Pan American Petroleum To lease rent. The lease did not exceed the powers of the Minister of the Interior, but was carried out without prior tendering. Fall had received several grants from Harry F. Sinclair, head of Sinclair Oil, and Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum, including an interest-free loan from Doheny of $ 100,000 and other gifts and gifts totaling over $ 400,000 from the two oil tycoons - at today's (2012) value a total of about 7 million dollars. Secretary of the Navy Denby was aware of this as Fall required Denby's signature for the lease by a resolution of Congress .
In mid-April 1922, articles in the Wall Street Journal and letters to several Senators drew the public's attention to the matter. As a result, an investigation into the case was initiated in the responsible Senate Committee for Public Lands, which dragged on for several years. While the investigation, which was soon conducted in parallel by a committee of the House of Representatives, was broken into, among other things, in the offices of various senators and members of Congress and a number of potentially incriminating documents disappeared from the ministries involved. It was the widening Senate committee investigation and the journalists' investigation into this case that gradually brought more and more Ohio Gang members into focus. Almost all of Harding's closest confidants got caught up in more or less minor scandals and investigations, and Harding and the Ohio Gang came under heavy public pressure. For example, the death of Jess Smith on May 30, 1923, officially classified as suicide , caused a sensation because, as Harding's personal messenger and courier, he was apparently involved in all the proceedings and possibly had the best inside knowledge. At the same time, according to Senator James Thomas Heflin, he would have played the central role in a plan to pour millions of dollars into money from alcohol smugglers to the Republican Party, and even Harding himself has been linked to death for allegedly saying he was want to get rid of Smith. When Warren G. Harding died in office on August 2, 1923, the Ohio Gang suddenly lost support and the investigation was intensified. The Tepot Dome scandal in the strict sense of the word did not reach its finale until 1929 when Albert B. Falls was sentenced to a fine of $ 100,000 and a one-year prison sentence - making Fall the first American cabinet member to be committed during his tenure Crime was sentenced to prison.
Daugherty and Burns
Attorney General Daugherty also got caught up in the Teapot Dome scandal. As against almost all members of the Ohio Gang, allegations of corruption, fraud in office and violation of various prohibition laws were brought against him. However, these allegations were on the verge of the emerging Daugherty Burns scandal. As Attorney General, Daugherty was immediately held responsible at the start of the Senate investigation for failing to investigate Fall's misconduct, and it was suspected that he had known about Fall's corruption and also Denby's indirect involvement in the proceedings without taking any action . However, an internal Justice Department investigation concluded that Daugherty was unaware of what had happened. This official result of the investigation was not able to silence rumors to the contrary. Daugherty also came under pressure in connection with the death of Jess Smith. Smith was technically subordinate to Daugherty, even if he had no official role in Daugherty's agency. On the night before Smith died, Daugherty had announced that he would be investigating him. After Smith died, Daugherty refused to make any further statements on the case, raising suspicions that he was trying to cover up surviving Ohio Gang members or hiding his own responsibility for the death.
William J. Burns was involved in the scandal in two ways (see below), but it was his actions at the instigation of his superior Daughertys that formed the core of the Daugherty Burns scandal. Daugherty had directed Burns in 1922 to open a secret Bureau of Investigation investigation into Democratic Senator Thomas J. Walsh . Walsh was the driving force behind the Congressional investigation into Home Secretary's case. Daugherty planned to scan Walsh to find any incriminating material so that he could pressurize him to stop the investigation. Later, when a direct investigation was launched against Daugherty in the American Metal Company matter (see below) headed by Senator Burton K. Wheeler , Gaston Means was put on Wheeler for intelligence; other employees of the Burns detective agency and apparently agents of the BOI were supposed to search for incriminating material in Wheeler's home state of Montana . When the investigative congressional committee became aware of what was going on in the BOI and the misuse of the agency's resources for political purposes, Burns refused to give him the relevant Justice Department documents. As a result, Congress opened direct investigations into the BOI and its director for the abuse of official funds, while adding these points to the allegations against Daugherty. The press reported extensively on this investigation, whereupon Burns dispatched special agents from the BOI to various newspaper offices to intimidate the journalists. However, this had the opposite effect that these intimidation attempts were now discussed in the press and the official investigations against Burns and Daugherty were intensified. The Burns affair fell directly back to Daugherty as his responsible superior, and in the case of the Attorney General the allegation of obstructing an investigation was of course particularly serious.
Resignations and further entanglements
After Harding's death, Calvin Coolidge succeeded him as president. Although he initially wanted to hold on to Daugherty as Attorney General, the heightened criticism of Daugherty eventually convinced him that he had become untenable. On March 28, 1924 Daugherty had to resign at the request of Coolidge, his successor was Harlan Fiske Stone . This also resulted in the resignation of William J. Burns on May 9, 1924, who was replaced by J. Edgar Hoover as initially managing director of the BOI. For the BOI, this meant both the continuation of an old and the beginning of a new era, because Hoover made the policy of persecution of the communists, which Burns had cut back sharply as BOI director, the main maxim of the BOI and led it later Agency renamed the FBI until his death almost exactly 48 years later on May 2, 1972.
With their resignations, the affair was not over for Daugherty and Burns, the various investigations against them continued. In the course of this investigation, Daugherty's very own bribery scandal was uncovered: During the First World War , the US government had confiscated the German-owned American Metal Company, after the end of the war it was managed by the Office of Alien Property, which was managed by Thomas W. Miller, another Ohio gang mate, Daugherty's, was directed. Through Daugherty's mediation, Miller and Daugherty had received bribes from the German owners and ensured that the company was returned to their possession. The investigation into this case was led by Senator Wheeler, who found a key witness in Gaston Means : Means had originally been appointed by Daugherty on Wheeler, but explains to him that he would be willing to testify against Daugherty if he and Burns did not would be prosecuted. In fact, Means turned out to be an unreliable witness with unclear motives who evaded evidence and tended to hamper the investigation. Two trials against Daugherty in this matter resulted in a tight " hung jury " so Daugherty was not convicted. The Smith case was also not over yet, because it turns out that Smith had acted as an intermediary between Daugherty and Miller in the course of the American Metal Company business and thus had been a potential witness against Daugherty. His death was once again linked to Daugherty. Daugherty finally wrote in 1932 a "disclosure book" in which he denied any guilt, declared Albert B. Fall - who, incidentally, only became Home Secretary through a forgery of Harding's signature - the main culprit and interpreted Smith's death as suicide for the main motive was Smith's diabetes.
Burns, on the other hand, was directly involved in the Teapot Dome scandal again after his resignation. After leaving the civil service, he turned back to his detective agency without officially taking over its management. In late 1927, Harry F. Sinclair was charged with the Teapot bribe. One of the managing directors of Sinclair Oil then turned to Burns and instructed him to influence the outcome of the proceedings. Burns, in turn, turned to his son and organized a shadowing of the jury in the Sinclair case by employees of the Burns International Detective Agency, the financing was provided by the Sinclair Oil managing director - an approach that is well reminiscent of the allegations brought against Burns in 1901. When these proceedings became public, the proceedings against Sinclair had to be broken off and a new jury started again - Sinclair was eventually sentenced to six months in prison for bribery. Another trial was brought against the implicated Sinclair Oil representative, William J. Burns, and his son, William S. Burns, for interfering with the jury. They defended themselves by saying that they simply wanted to prevent the jury from being intimidated by government officials. William J. Burns was sentenced to 15 days in prison and his son was fined $ 1,000, but the two appealed and were acquitted by the Supreme Court in 1929 .
Final rating
The Daugherty Burns scandal, strictly speaking, was just one of many affairs attached to the various members of the Ohio Gang as a result of the Teapot Dome scandal and, strictly speaking, must be separated from Daugherty's “personal” corruption scandal in the case of the American Metal Company. Rather, it is precisely the special quality of the Daugherty Burns scandal that - in contrast to the other revelations of the time - the focus here was not on old mistakes by the protagonists, but rather the reaction of the officials involved to the criticism of them turned into a scandal . Daugherty's central position in the Ohio Gang system and his connection to Jess Smith made him particularly vulnerable, while at the same time, as the chief criminal investigator of the US government, he would have been primarily responsible for clearing up everything that was going on. Daugherty not only failed to do so, but actively used the means of power of his office to obstruct the investigation and press coverage of the Teapot Dome scandal. In William J. Burns, with his shady background as a private detective, he found a willing subordinate.
The Daugherty Burns scandal is of particular importance to the history of the Bureau of Investigation, and thus that of the later FBI. Burns had been appointed BOI director in 1921 to initiate a cleaner fresh start for the agency after the Palmer Raids scandals. Particular trust was placed in the investigator, who comes from the private sector and is famous in his field. Although Burns was not part of the Ohio Gang and was probably not directly involved in any of the bribery cases, he willingly committed abuse of office and legal violations on Daugherty's instructions during his tenure, which - also together with his later activities as a private citizen - shows that he had the mentality of the paid private detective had not given up. The attempt to reform the BOI with the respected “professional” Burns had exactly the opposite result: in 1924 the BOI was considered a corrupt, inefficient and politically instrumentalized authority. Burns' resignation was not an inevitable result of the collapse of the Ohio gang system after Harding's death, but an expression of the new Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone's realization that a real professionalization of the agency was necessary. Obviously, J. Edgar Hoover, who had been in a leading position in the BOI for many years and was considered morally impeccable, was appointed as Burns' successor. Hoover actually pushed the professionalization of the BOI with great force. At the same time, however, Hoover's appointment represented a return to the maxims of the Palmer era, from which Burns had been able to break away during his tenure. So it was the Daugherty Burns scandal that was at the beginning of the development that ultimately led to the FBI's activities in the 1950s as part of the " second Red Scare " and the " McCarthy era ".
literature
- Mark Grossman, Political Corruption in America. An Encyclopedia of Scandals, Power, and Greed, Santa Barbara 2003.
- Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The FBI. A History, New Haven 2007.
- Regin Schmidt, Red Scare. FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943, Copenhagen 2000.
Remarks
- ^ Matt Novak, Unlocking the Mystery of the $ 10 Million California Time Capsule on paleofuture.gizmodo.com, March 4, 2014, accessed March 4, 2014.
- ^ Ohio Gang article in the online Encyclopædia Britannica , accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ Article Teapot Dome Scandal in the Free Legal Encyclopedia at law.jrank.org , accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ Conversion according to the Consumer Price Index of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ See Grossman, Political Corruption, p. 94.
- ↑ It seemed reasonable to assume that the men from Burns' environment trained in the relevant techniques were responsible for this, but could not be proven.
- ^ Article Again, Heflin in TIME Magazine , December 7, 1926.
- ↑ Charles R. Forbes had already been sentenced to two years in prison and a $ 10,000 fine in 1926 for offenses committed in office, but the position he held as director of the Veterans' Bureau was not officially awarded the rank of minister until 1989 (with Ed Derwinski ) Cabinet Member.
- ↑ Ohio Gang article at Ohio History Central , accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ See Burton K. Wheeler / Paul F. Healy, Yankee from the West. The Candid, Turbulent Life Story of the Yankee-born US Senator from Montana, Garden City, NY 1962 ( full text available from the Internet Archive [accessed January 24, 2013]).
- ↑ Article Harry Micajah Daugherty in the online edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ Article Harry Micajah Daugherty in the Free Legal Encyclopedia at law.jrank.org , accessed December 18, 2012.
- ↑ So judges, regardless of the outcome of the proceedings, Grossman, Political Corruption, p. 92.
- ↑ See Burton K. Wheeler / Paul F. Healy, Yankee from the West ( full text available from the Internet Archive [accessed January 24, 2013]).
- ^ Harry M. Daugherty / Thomas Dixon, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy, New York 1932.
- ↑ WDR 5 ZeitZeichen : May 2, 1972 - The anniversary of the death of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover ( Memento from January 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (MP3; 7.1 MB), accessed on January 13, 2013.