THE DEPARTMENT OF EASY VIRTUE, revisited

During the administration of Warren Harding, a president known for an incompetent group of political suck-ups loosely known as the "kitchen cabinet", the justice department was often referred to as the Department of Easy Virtue. During that time the Interior Secretary, Albert Fall, was involved in a land grab favoring the CEO of Sinclair oil that has gone down in history as, The Tea-pot Dome Scandal. Sinclair was one of several oil magnates to give money under suspicious circumstances to Harding's election. You might have heard that one before, if you are not a Republican. William Burns, who had started a famous detective agency was the head of the Bureau of Investigations. Earlier he was known as America's Sherlock Holmes. He ended his career as a tarnished cabinet member know for "Gilded Favoritism and Millionaire immunity." Maybe this will sound familiar to those of you not in the cult of Donald J. Trump. William Barr, anyone? It should surprise no one today to know that Harding was a Republican. The stink of official corruption left a pall over Hardings vice-president, Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded him after Harding died in office.  Herbert Hoover, who succeeded Coolidge  after he declined to run for a second term, inherited the beginnings of the Great Depression. It took a Democrat to rebuild the economy that had collapsed under Republican economic policies, and political favoritism during those twelve years. That President was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His third vice-president, Harry Truman, was chosen for his attempts as a congressman to curb corruption in the arms industry (remember Daddy Warbucks in Little Orphan Annie, and the play by Arthur Miller, All My Sons). Roosevelt managed to get reelected three subsequent times because he was able to end the taint of insider trading and corruption that started with Harding. He also created a vibrant middle-class from the economic ruin of the Depression and sent an army of healthy young men to fight fascism a decade after the families of those men were standing in soup lines. 
     To be clear corruption of industries and corporations is part of the DNA of capitalism. Both parties are susceptible to corruption, in one party it is a dominant gene.

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