Mr. and Mrs. Ed. Doheny with Chief Defense Counsel Frank Hogan 1929
Edward Laurence Doheny (Aug. 10, 1856 - Sept. 8, 1935), oil producer, was born near Fond du Lac, Wis., the son of Patrick Doheny, of Irish birth, and Eleanor Elizabeth Quigley, a native of Newfoundland. After some schooling he left home at sixteen to drive mules for the government's geological survey of the boundary line between Arizona and New Mexico. He picked up some of the rudiments of surveying, but it did not seem a lucrative profession for him, so he began prospecting for gold in the western mountains, and at one time and another in the next twenty years he enjoyed a modest prosperity. In 1892, however, he was walking on a street in Los Angeles with comparatively little money in pocket when he saw a wagonload of what looked like dark brown earth pass, driven by a Negro. Questioning the driver, he was told that the stuff was "brea," a Mexican word for pitch, that it was used by some small factories for fuel, and that he had dug it near Westlake Park. To Doheny it appeared to be oil-soaked earth. He went to the spot indicated and found an oily exudation from the soil. He and an old prospector friend, Charles A. Canfield, leased a vacant lot nearby and began digging with pick and shovel. When they had gone some distance down, the oil seemed so near that they employed a driller, who at 225 feet brought in a well that produced 45 barrels of oil per day. This started an oil boom in Los Angeles, and within five years there were 2,500 wells in the city. Doheny persuaded the Santa Fe Railroad to convert a yard engine into an oil-burner for demonstration purposes.
A. A. Robinson, then president of the Mexican Central Railway, saw this oil-burning locomotive and suggested to Doheny in 1900 that he prospect near Tampico, Mexico, promising him a contract with the railroad for oil if he found it. As a result, Doheny presently had leases on 250,000 acres near Tampico, but when he brought out his first oil, he found that there had been a change in the management of the railroad, and its promise to buy oil from him was repudiated. There was an overproduction of oil in the United States at the time, and Doheny, left without a market, began to produce asphalt from his field. He laid about half the asphalt paving in Mexico City and did all the paving done up to that time in half a dozen other of the largest cities in Mexico. Then the automobile began to create a rapidly growing demand for gasoline; Doheny organized the Mexican Petroleum Company of California in the United States with a capital of $10,000,000 and was the dominant figure in the Tampico field, and later in the Tuxpan district, where a lighter oil of higher gasoline content was found. The Standard Oil Company had large interests in both these fields. The Doheny interests were friendly in their relations with President Díaz of Mexico, but when he admitted British companies to the oil fields, they were not so well pleased. They were accused of having a hand in the revolution of 1910 which overthrew Díaz and brought in Madero. The stock in Doheny's companies fluctuated so widely in market value that at one time he was called before the governors of the New York Stock Exchange for an explanation, but apparently he succeeded in convincing them that he had not manipulated it. In 1922 he procured from the United States Government a contract to build a large naval fuel station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and seven months later received drilling rights in 32,000 acres of naval oil reserve land at Elk Hills, Cal. Then the public learned that on Nov. 30, 1921, he had sent Albert B. Fall, secretary of the interior under President Harding, $100,000 in cash--Doheny claiming that it was merely a loan to Fall as an old prospector friend. A Senatorial investigation began in 1923. Fall resigned, and he and Doheny were indicted in May 1925 for bribery and for "conspiracy to deprive the nation of valuable property in exchange for private gain." Their trials were scattered through a period of several years. In 1926 both were acquitted of conspiracy. In March 1930, in their trial for bribery, the presiding judge charged the jury that they might upon the evidence convict Fall of receiving the bribe but acquit Doheny of giving it, and this became the verdict. The government, however, canceled Doheny's oil leases, and he was forced to make restitution of the profits he had gained from them. During these troubles, he had suffered a great shock in the loss of the only son of himself and his wife (who had been Carrie Estelle Betzold of Marshalltown, Iowa). Edward L. Doheny, Jr., was killed by a servant in 1929. The father built a million-dollar library at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles as a memorial to him. Doheny was greatly interested in the idea of establishing an Irish republic, and in 1921 at Chicago he was elected president of the American society for the recognition of such a state. He died at Beverly Hills, Cal., following an illness that had kept him bedridden for three years.
FURTHER READINGS
See: Who's Who in America, 1932-33; obituaries in N. Y. newspapers, Sept. 9, 1935; I. F. Marcosson, The Black Golconda (1924); F. C. Hanighen, The Secret War (1934); U. S. vs. Edward L. Doheny and Albert B. Fall. Indictment; Violation of Section 37, Penal Code; Conspiracy to Defraud the U. S. (1925); Literary Digest, July 18, 1925, Dec. 25, 1926, Apr. 5, 1930; New England Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Oct. 1935; Caspar Whitney, Chas. Adelbert Canfield (1930); Mark Sullivan, Our Times, vol. VI, "The Twenties" (1935). Metropolitan newspapers from 1924 to 1930 inclusive contain much material on the Fall-Doheny scandal; especially important are those of Mar. 14-23, 1930, which contain a report of Doheny's last trial, when he told the story of his life on the witness-stand.
Harlow, Alvin F. "Edward Laurence Doheny."Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
