The most famous thing about Warren G. Harding is the Teapot Dome scandal — a bribery scheme involving the secret leasing of federal oil reserves that, for half a century, was the standard American unit of measurement for political corruption, the thing every later scandal got weighed against until a break-in at an office complex called the Watergate finally retired the trophy. It is the part of the Harding presidency that made the textbooks.
It is also, comfortably, the most boring part.
The Teapot Dome scandal did not involve a sitting president having sex with a much younger mistress in a coat closet a short walk from his office. It did not involve the Republican National Committee paying off a second mistress — a suspected German agent under active Secret Service surveillance — with twenty thousand dollars, monthly hush payments, and a one-way slow boat to Asia. It did not involve bootleg whiskey flowing through a legally dry White House, a cabinet partly assembled at a poker table, two extremely well-timed suicides, or the president dropping dead in a San Francisco hotel suite while his wife politely declined to allow an autopsy. The oil thing was the respectable scandal. Everything orbiting it was stranger, seedier, and a good deal more entertaining — and almost all of it runs a direct cable to something happening in 2026.
A Cabinet Partly Recruited from the Card Table
Harding got to the White House on a slogan and a face. The slogan was “a return to normalcy” — a word he popularized and grammarians hated — pitched to a country exhausted by war, pandemic, and Woodrow Wilson’s moralizing into the political equivalent of a weighted blanket. The face was the other half: Harding looked exactly like what central casting would send over if you ordered “President,” and his own party kingmakers reportedly picked him in part because he photographed well. The phrase “smoke-filled room” entered American English describing precisely this transaction — party bosses settling on Harding at the deadlocked 1920 Republican convention, in a suite at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, reportedly around two in the morning, over cigars and bourbon, because he was the inoffensive compromise nobody actively hated. He was a newspaper publisher from Marion, Ohio, genial, handsome, and almost aggressively undisturbed by ambition — a man whose speeches the critic H.L. Mencken would savage as the worst English he had ever heard, prose that reminded him of “a string of wet sponges.” He did not particularly want the job. He took it anyway, which is roughly the energy of a man agreeing to be club president because no one else would do it.
The trouble started with who he brought along. Harding’s genuine appointments included real heavyweights — Charles Evans Hughes at State, Andrew Mellon at Treasury, Herbert Hoover at Commerce — but woven through the serious men was a contingent of Ohio cronies whose qualifications began and ended with proximity to Harding. He made his campaign manager, Harry Daugherty, Attorney General. He made a former senator with a dilapidated New Mexico ranch and a stack of unpaid taxes, Albert Fall, his Secretary of the Interior. Rewarding the loyalists who got you there with the offices that control the money is the oldest move in coalition politics, a behavior so basic that primatologists document the identical pattern in baboon troops — you back the alpha, the alpha backs you, and everyone grooms everyone until the food runs out. Harding’s version simply had access to the federal budget.
The Little Green House on K Street
The clubhouse for all this was a rented brick townhouse at 1625 K Street, remembered by history as the Little Green House on K Street, and operated by associates of Attorney General Daugherty — most notoriously his factotum and roommate, Jess Smith, a diabetic department-store owner from Washington Court House, Ohio, who held no official government title but had a desk inside the Department of Justice and an enormous amount of unofficial power. From the green house, the so-called Ohio Gang ran what was effectively a secret syndicate operating inside the machinery of the state, a private club selling the public’s authority by the slice.
The menu was extensive. They sold paroles to imprisoned men with money. They sold immunity from prosecution. They sold permits to withdraw “medicinal” liquor from bonded government warehouses — meaning the Harding administration was quietly retailing access to the one substance its own Prohibition was supposedly stamping out, the structured circumvention of a ban being its own durable industry in any era you care to name. Smith reportedly sold bonded whiskey to bootleggers and arranged “fixes” of every description. Charles Forbes, whom Harding installed as the first director of the new Veterans’ Bureau, treated the agency built to care for wounded soldiers as a personal slush fund, skimming construction contracts and dumping hospital supplies at fire-sale prices to favored buyers, running up graft and waste later estimated in the neighborhood of two hundred million dollars. It was, in the plainest terms, an inside job — the looting of an institution by the very people hired to run it, and it sat comfortably inside the broader American tradition of treating public assets as something to be quietly walked out the back door.
The supporting cast deserves a moment, because it reads like a screenwriter overreached. Gaston Means, who would later invent the Harding poisoning hoax, was during the green-house years a Bureau of Investigation agent moonlighting as a bagman, double-crosser, and all-purpose grifter who took money from every side of every deal and kept meticulous notes for the inevitable shakedown. Ned McLean, the dissolute heir to the Washington Post fortune and owner of the cursed Hope Diamond, was handed a code book, a badge, and a card and allowed to play at being a Secret Service man for his own amusement. These were the people with access to the Attorney General and, through him, to the President — a federal government partially staffed, at its discretionary edges, by men whose résumés would not survive a background check at a regional bank.
The Teapot Dome Scandal Itself
The marquee crime was, fittingly, the one with the strategic resource attached. In 1921 Harding signed an executive order transferring three naval petroleum reserves — Teapot Dome in Wyoming, named for a teapot-shaped rock, plus Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills in California — from the Navy, which had been keeping them in the ground as an emergency fuel supply, to Albert Fall’s Department of the Interior. Fall then quietly leased them, with no competitive bidding, to two oilmen who happened to be his friends: Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil got Teapot Dome in April 1922, and Edward Doheny of Pan American Petroleum got the California fields. In exchange, Sinclair and Doheny handed Fall what investigators eventually totaled at roughly four hundred thousand dollars in cash, no-interest “loans,” and gifts — close to five million in today’s money. Doheny dispatched his own son to carry one hundred thousand dollars to Fall in a black leather satchel, a scene so operatically corrupt that Doheny’s wildcatting career would later help inspire the oil baron at the center of There Will Be Blood. The reserves themselves had been set aside under Presidents Taft and Wilson for the specific purpose of guaranteeing the Navy would never run dry in a war — which means Fall sold the nation’s emergency insurance policy and pocketed the premium.
The Teapot Dome scandal unspooled the way these things do: a suspicious senator, a Senate investigation that nobody expected to find anything, and then the spectacle of a cabinet secretary’s dirt-poor New Mexico ranch suddenly sprouting new herds, fresh fencing, and improvements no public salary could account for. Montana Senator Thomas Walsh ran the hearings for two grinding years, pulling the thread until the whole sweater came apart, and as Britannica’s account of the Teapot Dome scandal records, the Supreme Court voided both leases in 1927 and handed the reserves back to the Navy. The bribe money itself had been disguised as a personal loan between gentlemen, the original of a concealment technique that later centuries would industrialize into a global business of laundered favors and friendly paper. Fall was convicted in 1929 of accepting a bribe and sentenced to a year in prison — the first cabinet officer in American history to go to jail for crimes committed in office, a distinction that anchors the entire Shadowcraft inventory of how power quietly enriches itself.
Here is the detail that has aged into pure dark comedy. Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe. Doheny was acquitted of paying the exact same bribe — the identical transaction, viewed from the other end, somehow not a crime when the man on trial owned an oil empire. A reporter watching the wealthy oilmen walk summarized the verdict with a line that should be carved over the entrance to several modern courthouses: “You can’t convict a million dollars.” Sinclair dodged the bribery charge too; his contribution to American jurisprudence was hiring a fleet of private detectives to physically shadow the jurors in his trial, which earned him six months for jury tampering and contempt of Congress and nothing at all for the underlying oil deal. And the closing image is almost too neat to be real: Fall’s hundred-thousand-dollar fine was eventually waived because he was broke, having lost everything — including his beloved New Mexico ranch, which Doheny foreclosed on. The man who paid the bribe walked free and ended up owning the home of the man who went to prison for taking it. The pattern — the broke fixer goes to prison, the billionaire commodity baron buys his way clear and waits for a friendly pardon — has not noticeably changed.
Why It Was Somehow the Boring One
Lay the Teapot Dome scandal next to the rest of the administration and a strange thing happens: the oil bribery starts to look like the responsible adult in the room. It was, at least, a normal kind of corruption — a public official taking money to hand a public asset to a private friend, a transaction so legible that it became the template every subsequent scandal was named after. The Teapot Dome scandal was America’s worst political scandal for fifty years precisely because it was comprehensible. You could explain it to a child: the man whose job was to guard the oil sold the oil and kept the money.
The personal life was where things got genuinely deranged, and it is also where the modern resonances get loud. Because the Harding presidency was not mainly a story about institutional financial corruption of the sort that brings down banks and bishops, though it had plenty of that. It was a story about a man whose appetites — for women, for cards, for whiskey, for the company of crooks who flattered him — were managed by a political apparatus working overtime to keep the public from finding out, and who then died at exactly the moment the bills started arriving. The cover-up was the real organizational achievement. The official denial maintained against a true accusation is a recurring feature of the Harding record, and it held, in one case, for ninety years.
The Coat Closet
Nan Britton was from Marion, Ohio, like everybody else in this story, and she had been infatuated with Harding since she was a teenager papering her bedroom walls with his campaign photos. The infatuation became an affair around 1917, when she was roughly twenty and he was a fifty-one-year-old United States senator. In 1919 she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, whom she always insisted was Harding’s. The conception, by her account, predated the presidency; the affair did not end with it. Britton later wrote that their encounters continued in Washington, including in a coat closet near the president’s office — a five-by-five-foot anteroom that has done more for the Harding legend than any policy he signed.
The logistics, by her telling, were managed with the same quiet machinery the administration applied to everything else it wanted hidden. Secret Service agents, she claimed, helped arrange the meetings and waved her through. Harding sent money for the child’s support through intermediaries and once, she said, peeled bills off a roll while an agent waited outside the door. Elizabeth Ann grew up not knowing the identity of her father, was raised partly by Britton’s sister, and lived a quiet life in the Midwest and Oregon under the name Blaesing until her death in 2005 — a private citizen who happened to be the only child of a president, and who never got to hear the verdict that finally cleared her mother’s name a decade after she was gone.
In 1927, four years after Harding’s death, Britton published The President’s Daughter, widely regarded as the first blockbuster kiss-and-tell memoir in American political history. It named Harding as the father of her child and described the affair in detail explicit enough to scandalize the Jazz Age, which took some doing. The book sold enormously, the way a genuine national sensation propagates through a culture when it combines sex, power, and a dead president. And then the Harding family and loyalists did what the apparatus had always done: they called her a liar, a fantasist, a gold-digger, and a fabricator. They floated the theory that Harding had been left sterile by a childhood case of the mumps and therefore could not have fathered anyone. For nearly nine decades, the official position was that Nan Britton made the whole thing up.
The DNA Test That Settled It in 2015
The official position was a lie, and in 2015 a cheek swab proved it. AncestryDNA compared genetic samples from Britton’s grandson, James Blaesing, with samples from two descendants of the Harding family and reported the result as 99.9 percent conclusive: Warren Harding fathered Elizabeth Ann. The mumps story was retired. The woman who had been smeared as a fantasist for ninety years was, it turned out, simply telling the truth and getting punished for it on schedule — the denied-but-documented claim that the paperwork eventually vindicates, arriving a half-century too late to do the accused any good.
This is the cleanest line the whole saga runs to the present. The technology that exhumed Harding’s secret is the same consumer genetic-genealogy industry that, in the 2020s, has quietly rewritten the rules of human secrecy — the spit-tube services that have cracked cold-case murders through distant cousins, dissolved donor anonymity, surfaced uncounted unacknowledged children, and made the old aristocratic confidence that a paternity could be permanently buried look quaint. Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings was settled the same way. The Gilded Age and the Jazz Age both ran on the assumption that a powerful man’s secrets died with the people sworn to keep them. A database of three-quarters of the population’s relatives has repealed that assumption, and the repeal applies retroactively. Harding is simply the most famous president to be convicted, posthumously, by his own descendants’ chromosomes.
The reversal since has been total. The Ohio organization that maintains the Harding home and memorial now accepts the DNA result as fact and has built a section of its museum around Harding’s relationship with Nan Britton and their daughter — the precise relationship the family spent ninety years denying. Britton’s grandson, for his part, went to court in 2020 seeking to have Harding’s body exhumed from its sealed sarcophagus for further testing and formal recognition, a request the memorial’s keepers resisted on the grounds that Florence Harding lies in the same crypt and her relatives deserve a say. A man who spent his life hiding one body of evidence is now the subject of a legal fight over whether to dig up his actual body, which is the kind of ending no cover-up plans for.
The Other Mistress, and the Party That Shipped Her Overseas
If Nan Britton was the affair Harding’s people couldn’t bury, Carrie Phillips was the affair they spent real money to relocate. Phillips was the wife of one of Harding’s close friends in Marion, and her affair with Harding ran for some fifteen years, beginning around 1905. It generated a cache of love letters so long, so frequent, and so floridly explicit — Harding gave his own anatomy a pet name and wrote it poetry — that when a Harding biographer first stumbled onto roughly a thousand pages of them in a shoebox in 1963, the family went to court and had the whole correspondence locked away. The Library of Congress kept them sealed until July 2014, more than ninety years after they were written, on the theory that the country was not yet ready to read a president comparing a mistress to a national landmark.
The letters were not the dangerous part. The dangerous part was that Carrie Phillips had spent time in Berlin, sympathized openly with Germany, and, during the First World War, fell under the kind of quiet government surveillance reserved for suspected foreign assets — a sitting senator’s mistress being tailed as a potential enemy sympathizer. She reportedly tried to leverage the relationship to pressure Harding’s vote on the declaration of war against Germany, which is blackmail with a geopolitical payload attached, and exactly the species of compromise that modern counterintelligence spends its days worrying about. When Harding ran for president in 1920, his party did not gamble on her discretion. It bought it. As the University of Virginia’s Miller Center documents, the Republican National Committee handed the Phillipses a leisurely, all-expenses cruise to Japan, twenty thousand dollars in cash, and a promise of monthly payments for the duration — a structured arrangement to make an inconvenient woman financially comfortable and geographically distant, the direct nineteen-twenties ancestor of the hush-money payment that would land on the front page a century later when a different campaign’s effort to silence a different mistress produced the first criminal conviction of an American president. The mechanism was identical. Only the bookkeeping got more careful.
Bootleg Whiskey in a Dry White House
Harding signed nothing repealing Prohibition; the Eighteenth Amendment was the law for the entirety of his term, and his Justice Department was nominally enforcing it — raiding speakeasies, smashing stills, and prosecuting ordinary citizens for the possession of exactly what the president was drinking on poker night. His own White House, meanwhile, was wet. Guests at Harding’s twice-weekly games — the so-called Poker Cabinet — described a study thick with cigar smoke, poker chips, and bootleg liquor served by the president of the country that had banned it. Harding played for real stakes; one durable legend has him losing a set of White House china that had survived since the Benjamin Harrison administration on a single hand, and while that particular story is hard to nail down, the bottle on the table is thoroughly documented and the carelessness it implies is entirely in character. The same administration peddling federal liquor permits through a townhouse on K Street was pouring the contraband upstairs, the profitable circumvention of a prohibition running simultaneously as official policy and personal habit.
The hypocrisy was not a secret kept from the cabinet; it was the cabinet. The selective enforcement of a sweeping ban — ruinous for the powerless, optional for the connected — is one of the most reliable patterns in the history of prohibitions of any kind, and Harding’s White House ran the demonstration model. A nation was being fined and jailed over alcohol while the executive mansion functioned as the best-stocked bar in Washington. “A return to normalcy,” it turned out, did not extend to the bartender.
The detail that captures it best involves the one cabinet member who didn’t fit. Herbert Hoover, the future president and a man with the recreational instincts of a tax form, was invited to a Harding poker night exactly once and never asked back, having apparently failed to grasp that the point of being in the room was to lose graciously and stay useful. A White House where the most disqualifying trait was sobriety is, on its own, a fairly complete portrait of the operation. It is the rare presidency where you could be too honest to be invited to the party, in the most literal sense available.
The Suicides
By the spring of 1923 the apparatus was beginning to fail, and the people who knew the most started dying. Charles Cramer, the legal adviser to Forbes’s looted Veterans’ Bureau, shot himself in March. Then, on May 30, 1923, Jess Smith — the title-less fixer at the center of the green house, the man who knew where every body and every bottle was buried — was found dead of a gunshot wound in the Wardman Park Hotel apartment he shared with the Attorney General. It was ruled a suicide. Smith was depressed, diabetic, and had just been told by Harding that he was no longer welcome in Washington, so the ruling is plausible. The circumstances around it are the problem.
William J. Burns, the director of the Bureau of Investigation — the agency that would become the FBI — happened to live in the same hotel, reached the scene before the police, and took it upon himself to tidy up the room before anyone official arrived. No autopsy was performed. Smith had burned his personal papers in the days before he died. A man who could have testified about the entire racket exited the stage with the federal investigative apparatus personally managing the cleanup, and the country was asked to accept that this was simply a sad coincidence of grief and bad nerves. Maybe it was. The official account that conveniently forecloses further questions is, at minimum, a recurring character in this administration.
What Smith could no longer say, his ex-wife did. Roxy Stinson, who had stayed close to him after their divorce, took the stand before a Senate committee in 1924 and described the green-house economy in detail — the cash that moved, the cases that got fixed, the “we” Smith used when he talked about the money he and Daugherty were making. Daugherty, for his part, flatly denied ever setting foot in the place, insisting he had never so much as seen the mysterious house on K Street, a denial of the sort that only ever gets issued about addresses the speaker knows extremely well. He was tried twice for defrauding the government and walked both times on hung juries, having declined to testify in his own defense on the grounds that doing so might require him to discuss his relationship with the late president.
He Died Before the Bill Came Due
Harding never lived to see Teapot Dome break wide open. In the summer of 1923, sensing the storm gathering and worn down by the dawning knowledge that his friends had been looting the government in his name, he set out on a cross-country speaking tour grandly titled the Voyage of Understanding, which included the first presidential visit to Alaska. Herbert Hoover was along for the trip, and Harding — visibly anxious, sleeping badly, playing bridge for hours to keep his mind occupied — reportedly pulled him aside and asked what a president should do if he discovered a great scandal brewing inside his own administration: announce it and take the credit for honesty, or bury it and protect the party? Hoover said expose it. Harding did neither. On the way back, in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, on August 2, 1923, he died suddenly — officially of a heart attack or stroke. He was fifty-seven.
His wife, Florence, declined to permit an autopsy and had the body embalmed quickly, which was not in itself sinister — autopsies on presidents were not routine — but which left just enough vacuum for the rumor mill to fill. The country, which did not yet know what its president’s friends had done, mourned him extravagantly: the funeral train crawled back across the continent through crowds standing silent at the tracks, hymns rising from depot platforms at three in the morning, an outpouring of genuine national grief for a man most Americans had found likeable and decent. Then the hearings opened, the leases surfaced, the suicides started to look like punctuation, and within a couple of years the same public that had wept at the rail line had reclassified Harding as the worst thing to happen to the office. Few reputations in American history have fallen so far so fast from so warm a start. In 1930 a former Ohio Gang bagman and full-time con artist named Gaston Means published The Strange Death of President Harding, alleging that Florence had poisoned her husband, variously to spare him the humiliation of the unfolding scandals or out of jealousy over the mistresses. The book was a fabrication by a serial liar, and historians have dismissed the poisoning theory for a century — but it never fully dies, because it sits in the exact spot where a convenient death, a refused autopsy, and a documented cover-up culture reliably breed conspiracy. The truth is almost certainly more banal and more damning: a soft, overwhelmed man with a bad heart and a worse set of friends worked himself into the ground trying to outrun a reckoning, and the reckoning arrived a few weeks after the funeral anyway. Teapot Dome broke open that October. Harding was already in the marble.
What 2026 Owes the Worst President of the 1920s
Harding lands, with grim regularity, at or near the bottom of every scholarly ranking of American presidents, and the Teapot Dome scandal is the reason historians can point to without lowering their voices. But the durable lessons of the administration are the ones that keep resurfacing in modern dress, and there are more of them than the oil.
Start with the resource itself. Teapot Dome was a fight over a strategic reserve — a stockpile of a critical material the state held back against future emergency — and the temptation to convert that public hedge into private profit. The specific commodity has changed; the structure has not. The twenty-first-century equivalents are the national stockpiles and supply chains that have become the center of great-power competition: the scramble over uranium and the fuel that powers reactors and warheads, the chokehold contest over the rare-earth elements a modern military and grid cannot function without, the quiet panic over a depleting federal helium reserve that almost nobody thinks about until an MRI won’t run, and the slow recognition that water itself is becoming a strategic resource governments will fight to control. Every one of them is a Teapot Dome scandal waiting for an Albert Fall — a public asset, a private buyer, and an official with signing authority and unpaid debts.
Then there is the hush money, which stopped being a historical curiosity in the 2020s and became courtroom precedent. The RNC paying Carrie Phillips to sail to Japan and the modern machinery of nondisclosure agreements and catch-and-kill payments are the same instrument; the law simply caught up enough, a century later, to make the second one indictable. There is the cronyism — the appointment of loyal mediocrities to offices that control vast sums, a practice the Machiavellian arithmetic of coalition-building guarantees will never go out of style. There is the spectacle of a connected billionaire walking free while the broke functionary takes the fall, which remains the most reliable outcome in white-collar prosecution. And there is the oldest lesson of all, the one Harding shares with every operator who treated concealment as a core competency: the secret you spend the most to bury is usually the one that outlives you and tells the world anyway.
There is even a quieter thread that connects Harding to the man who governed thirty years before him: the body of the president as a state secret. A sudden death, an embalming hurried along, a widow declining the autopsy that would have answered every question — the public was simply told what it would believe and left to fill in the rest. A country that spent the 2020s arguing, with no settled protocol and no neutral arbiter, over how much it is entitled to know about the physical and mental condition of the person holding the office is relitigating a question the Harding deathbed left wide open. The presidency has never had a reliable mechanism for telling the truth about the president’s own body. It has only ever had a cover story and the length of time it takes to unravel.
The whole administration is a permanent exhibit in the museum of presidents who treated the office as a personal opportunity, and it earns its place not because Harding was the most malicious man to hold the job — he was probably one of the least — but because he was the most available. He wanted to be liked, he trusted the wrong people, he couldn’t say no, and he handed the keys to a gang that emptied the building. The Teapot Dome scandal is what we remember. The coat closet, the cruise to Japan, the tidied-up hotel room, and the unopened body are what we should. He was, by most accounts, a genuinely warm and decent man. It was the single most dangerous thing about him.