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In 1926 the press and Progressive reformers were stunned when a federal jury, after hearing lurid testimony about the exchange of valises full of cash, acquitted Albert Fall and Edward Doheny of bribery in the Teapot Dome oil-leasing controversy. Certain that Fall and Doheny were guilty, commentators debated the outcome of the three-week-long deliberation: Was the prosecution inadequate? Was the conspiracy statute faulty? Was the trial too long delayed? Ultimately they seized on what the former secretary of the navy Josephus Daniels called the “inferiority complex of the jury.”1 In the Nation, reporter Paul Y. Anderson analyzed the Fall-Doheny jury and found it composed of ordinary men—a teamster, a steamfitter's apprentice, an electrician, a railroad clerk, a cigar clerk, a grocery clerk, a bank clerk, a newsstand proprietor. Except for one or two, Anderson argued, these men lacked the intelligence, experience, and maturity (seven of the twelve were in their twenties) to interpret the evidence and understand the crime at issue. They had been “yanked from shop, counter, truck and desk” and then “their bewildered eyes and confused ears were assaulted with a huge volume of oral and documentary evidence, much of it highly contradictory.” The only juror who fought for conviction was the one “professional man” on the jury, an architect “whose intelligence and educational advantages” allowed him to sift through the confusion in the manner Anderson had. But this man, Anderson lamented, had been unable to persuade his fellows, some of whom accepted the exchange of money as normal business and governmental practice.2

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Empires and Intimacies: Lessons from (Post) Colonial Studies > Articles
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