Archive: America Is Destroying America

News that President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior had been secretly selling government oil for his own profit naturally angered the Post editors, but they regarded this crime as part of a pattern of national wastefulness.

Political cartoon of the Teapot Dome scandal, possibly from the Washington Star (Library of Congress)

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—“What’s the Hurry?,” Editorial from the March 8, 1924, issue of The Saturday Evening Post

Teapot Dome is a symbol of the American attitude towards the nation’s resources.

We have the demagogue who promises everything, and the grafter who takes anything. We find him scheming to cheat the Indians; to slice a piece off one of the national parks; to nose into another for power and water; to reclaim and irrigate everything in sight, even though much land under the plow is half-cultivated and half-bankrupt.

Many men with clear ideas of right and wrong about private property still consider that government land, water, oil, and coal are nobody’s land, water, oil, and coal; that government money is nobody’s money; that the first is fair game for the strong and unscrupulous; and that the second may be spent magnificently, carelessly, even wastefully.

Read the editorial from the March 8, 1924 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

 

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Comments

  1. This lamebrain, completely misleading headline is unworthy of the SEP. The author does NOT say “America is destroying America” – a tautology if ever there was one. What he does say is that “corrupt officials” and “corrupting businessmen,” the “predatory rich” will destroy the nation unless checked. He specifically exempts from condemnation “the clean rich” and the “great body of honest business men.” These phrases are from the last two paragraphs of the editorial. You could have written a headline that made sense and was on topic; but I guess you were in a hurry and went for a catchy, though meaningless phrase.

    Sad, sad, sad.

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