S E N A T E D E M A N D S I N F O R M A T I O N

O N T E A P O T D O M E

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Washington, April 15th.—The secretary of the interior and the secretary of

the navy were requested to inform the senate if negotiations are being conducted

for the leasing to private oil interests of 7,000 acres of government oil lands in

Wyoming, by a resolution adopted by the senate Saturday by a viva voce vote.

The resolution was sponsored by Senator Kendrick, Democrat, of Wyoming.

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E

After having made an unpardonable and inexcusable blunder in the leasing of

the naval oil reserve in Wyoming to the Sinclair oil interest, purely a Standard

Oil company, the secretaries of the navy and interior have issued the statement

below, not because it is news, but in a feeble attempt to justify the most serious

blunder that the present administration has made up to date.

The preposterous idea of getting oil out of the ground where it is stored free

and putting it into tanks that cost a lot of money, where loss from evaporation

and from other causes are large, where danger from fire, lightning and storm is

constant and tremendous, is an absurdity so great as to make all oil people and

all sensible people smile and wonder if this is a sample of the efficiency of our

naval and interior departments.

They leased the entire Teapot dome, the very center of the best oil field in the

world; a section five miles long by one mile wide; a section that is supposed to

contain over a half a billion dollars worth of oil; and they leased that to one

company, and did not give a single other person or company in the world a right

to bid.

It is beginning to look as tho the present administration is heart and soul in

harmony with all the big corporation interests in the United States, and that the

common everyday fellow is to get very little except the pleasure of paying

enormous taxes and help make the corporations of the United States so rich and

powerful as to dominate our officials and to pass and construe our laws.

That’s what the people of Colorado, Wyoming and the Rocky mountain

region are protesting against. It is just such favoritism, based on just such stupid

reasons as the secretary of the navy and the secretary of the interior are using to

try to justify this awful lease that shakes confidence in our Washington officials.

The most powerful corporation of the country gets everything and not an

independent oil man in the United States is even given a chance to bid.

A few such arbitrary and autocratic deals as this will set the country aflame

with protest against these kinds of methods, these kinds of deals, and this kind

of favoritism of the government for the powerful and already completely

entrenched oil monopoly.