Albert Fall

Albert Bacon Fall (Nov. 26, 1861 - Nov. 30, 1944), lawyer, Senator from New Mexico, and cabinet officer, was born in Frankfort, Ky. He was the eldest of three children (two boys and a girl) of Edmonia (Taylor) and Williamson Ware Robertson Fall, both schoolteachers. His paternal great-grandfather had emigrated in 1817 from Surrey, England, to Kentucky; his mother came of a prominent Kentucky family. When Albert's father joined the Confederate Army during the Civil War, the child went to live in Nashville, Tenn., with his grandfather Philip Slater Fall, a former Baptist minister who had become a leader in the Campbellite movement led by his close friend Alexander Campbell [q.v.]. From this scholarly grandfather the boy acquired the habit of reading omnivorously. At the age of eleven he took a job in a cotton mill. Although he attended schools taught by his father, he was largely self-educated. After teaching school and reading law in his spare time, Fall moved west in 1881 in search of employment and a milder climate; throughout his life he was plagued by respiratory ailments. He worked as a cattle drover and as a cowboy cook before settling in Clarksville, Texas, where he sold insurance, operated a real estate agency, and, for a time, ran a small grocery store. On May 7, 1883, he married Emma Garland Morgan, whose father, Simpson H. Morgan, had been a representative from Texas to the Confederate Congress. They had four children: John Morgan, Alexina, Carolyn, and Jouett.

Soon after his marriage Fall set out on a prospecting trip through eight states of Mexico, finally locating at Nieves in the state of Zacatecas, where he worked in hard-rock mining operations. This was the beginning of a lifelong interest in Mexico and in Mexican mining. He returned to Clarksville in 1884. A later prospecting trip took him to the mountains of southern New Mexico Territory, and in 1887 he settled at Las Cruces. There he became a practicing attorney (1889) and had a rough-and-tumble political apprenticeship as a Democrat at a time when political rivalries often led to gunfights and the mysterious disappearance of opponents. He served as a member both of the territorial house (1890-92) and the territorial council (1892-93, 1896-97, 1902-04), as an associate justice of the New Mexico supreme court (1893-95), and twice, briefly, as territorial attorney general (1897, 1907). In 1910 he was a delegate to the New Mexico constitutional convention.

In his law practice, Fall, though always maintaining his voting residence in New Mexico, opened an office in El Paso, Texas, where he represented irrigation and development enterprises, mining companies, timber concerns, railroads, and other industrial interests. At the same time he increasingly devoted himself to mining promotion in northern Mexico. Small-scale ventures led to an involvement in some of the multi-million-dollar operations of William C. Greene, from which he derived a modest fortune and several potentially valuable Mexican mining properties. Because of his strong sympathy for private enterprise, particularly in the exploitation of natural resources, Fall early gained the image of a "corporation man." Although professing himself a Democrat as late as 1904, Fall for various reasons--not the least, his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt--had already begun a shift to the Republican party that became official in 1908, when he was a delegate to the national convention. When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, Fall became one of its first two United States Senators. In appearance somewhat like "Buffalo Bill" Cody, bombastic and often cynical, Fall gained national attention as the most outspoken Senate advocate of forceful protection of American property rights in revolution-torn Mexico. In 1919 and 1920 he headed a Senate subcommittee which conducted a freewheeling investigation of Mexican affairs. He was a bitter critic of President Woodrow Wilson's Mexican policy and an opponent of the Treaty of Versailles, sometimes being classed among the irreconcilables.

Fall became a poker-playing crony of Warren G. Harding while the two served together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Harding became president in 1921, he wanted Fall for his Secretary of State, but upon being dissuaded by Republican leaders, appointed his friend instead as Secretary of the Interior. Less than three months after taking office, Harding and his Secretary of the Navy, Edwin Denby [q.v.], obligingly agreed to transfer control of naval oil lands to Secretary Fall. Several months later, in 1922, Fall stealthily negotiated drilling agreements with Harry F. Sinclair for the Teapot Dome Naval Oil Reserve in Wyoming and with Edward L. Doheny [Supp. 1], an old prospector friend, for a similar reserve at Elk Hills, Calif. Fall himself, as disclosed by later Senate investigations, received at least $404,000 and some blooded livestock from Sinclair and Doheny. Meanwhile, Fall's proposal to transfer the Forest Service from the Agriculture back to the Interior Department had roused conservationist opposition. Dissatisfied with public service generally and with what he felt was his insufficient role in administration councils, Fall retired from the cabinet in March 1923.

That October Senator Thomas J. Walsh began pressing the hearings that brought out into the open what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. The notoriety given the affair in the 1924 and 1928 elections and the sensational criminal and civil court actions that followed the Senate investigation kept Fall and Teapot Dome in the headlines for nearly a decade. Fall's initial false testimony that he had borrowed from the newspaper publisher Edward B. McLean the $100,000 that Doheny later admitted sending him in a "little black bag" did much to discredit him. To a large extent, all the iniquity of the besmirched Harding administration was ascribed to Fall. The Teapot Dome and Elk Hills leases were canceled by the courts in 1927, and two years later Fall was found guilty of accepting a bribe. Doheny was acquitted of giving the same bribe that Fall had been found guilty of receiving. Sinclair served short prison sentences for contempt of Congress and jury shadowing, but otherwise he, too, went free.

In 1931, sixty-nine years old and suffering from a chronic heart ailment, pleurisy, and crippling arthritis, Fall left his home by ambulance to begin a one-year prison term, the first American cabinet officer ever convicted and imprisoned for a serious crime committed while in office. In his last years, broken in health, reputation, and finances, he was staunchly supported by his wife. He died of heart failure in 1944 at the Hotel Dieu hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he had lived since the loss of his Three Rivers, N. Mex., ranch in 1936. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, El Paso.

Although for many Fall came to epitomize the unfaithful public servant, he insisted to the end that his personal acquisitions from Sinclair and Doheny were legitimate loans and normal business transactions having no bearing on his official leasing policy. The drilling agreements with the two oil magnates, he maintained, had saved the Wyoming and California reserves from drainage through private wells on adjoining lands. His program had envisioned preservation of the oil for future use in above-ground storage tanks, as well as making it immediately available to the navy, whose high command was apprehensive of an attack by the Japanese in the Pacific. Later, the strategic role of Pearl Harbor in World War II convinced Fall that his thwarted efforts to build a great fuel depot there twenty years before had been vindicated.

SOURCE

Stratton, David H. "Albert Bacon Fall."Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 3: 1941-1945. American Council of Learned Societies, 1973. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

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Albert Fall

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