Investigations

Any playwright knows that the most difficult part of play writing is to prevent the last act from falling flat. After traveling through the first two acts at a fast pace, it is hard to hold that pace until the end. Moreover, if the first two acts are well constructed, they should force a fairly inevitable conclusion. With a public like the American people, fed from its infancy on news, it is difficult to inspire interest in the inevitable.

In the oil investigation, principal effort was directed to trying to tie up both parties with the oil scandal by means of their campaign contributions in 1920. Senator Thomas J. Walsh (Democrat) produced witnesses to try to prove that the late Jake Hamon of Oklahoma, oil man, bought President Harding's nomination for oil purposes. Senator Spencer (Republican) tried to prove that Mr. Doheny had contributed $75,000 to the Democratic campaign fund.

The Daugherty investigation was devoted chiefly to calling ex-employees of the Department of Justice and trying to establish that certain alleged war graft cases had not been prosecuted for political reasons. One of the witnesses brought in the name of Secretary of War Weeks who, it was asserted, had withdrawn a case from the Department of Justice instead of allowing a claim for $5,000,000 to be prosecuted.