"Now. Mr. Sinclair, about your Teapot Dome lease, will you please tell the commmittee"
"I decline to answer on advice of coun-sel."
Nine years have passed since Montana's grim-jawed Senator "Tom" Walsh, before a breathless audience that packed the big marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building, hammered out the questions & answers which sent Harry Sinclair to jail for contempt, put Albert Bacon Fall behind bars as a bribe-taker. Nine years have made the Oil Scandal investigation ancient political history. But its drama, its sensationalism, its clash and color of personalities were recalled by Washington observers who searched for something with which to compare the Senate's investigation of the House of Morgan.
The Morgan hearings were held in the same caucus room, with its enormous cut-glass chandeliers, its baronial doors, its high windows overlooking a courtyard fountain. But now thick carpets covered the stone floor. On rows and rows of folding chairs sat the same sort of sightseers who had plowed their way in past bucking policemen. But now a loud speaker system helped them hear better. At the same long committee table sat elderly Senators, poking and prodding with questions to make the day's headlines. But now not one of them knew which way the evidence would turn next. Gathered decorously in the background was the little knot of witnesses waiting their turn on the stand. But now there was no stubborn defiance of the Senate, no refusal to testify.
A decade ago the Senate Public Lands Committee was hunting official corruption. Scandal was in the air and Senator Walsh was out to prove by concrete facts an ugly hook-up between the oil business and the U. S. Government. Last week the Senate Banking & Currency Committee had no such tangible mission. It was probing the whole intricate subject of private banking, with the House of Morgan as Exhibit A. Against that firm was no specific charge of wrongdoing. Official corruption was not even hinted. Unquestioned was the personal honesty of its 20 partners. Yet the House of Morgan and all it stood for in U. S. economic life were as definitely on trial before the committee and the country* though defendants in a court of law.