Thomas J. Walsh: Teapot Dome Prober Who Died on the Way to Washington

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Thomas J. Walsh was born in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, in 1859 to Irish Catholic immigrants Felix Walsh and Bridget Comer, and taught school to pay for University of Wisconsin law school, graduating in 1884. In 1890 he moved his family to Helena, Montana, and practiced personal injury, water rights and copper mining law. After losing a House race in 1906 and a Senate bid in 1910, he won a Senate seat from the legislature in 1912. In 1918, his first popular vote race, he beat Republican Oscar M. Lanstrum and Jeannette Rankin despite voting for war with Germany and backing the League of Nations and prohibition, positions unpopular with many Irish Catholic voters. He won again in 1924 and by a landslide in 1930.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee he pursued Teapot Dome, noticing Interior Secretary Albert Fall's sudden wealth, disproving a claimed $100,000 loan and tracing Liberty bonds from oil men to Fall. In December 1927 he launched a Federal Trade Commission investigation of utility holding companies that ran until 1935. Franklin Roosevelt chose him as attorney general in 1933. In late February, at 73, Walsh secretly married a wealthy Cuban widow in Havana, and on March 2, 1933, he died on the train to Washington days before the inauguration. Rumors that his new wife poisoned him spread at once but were never proven.

• He managed Woodrow Wilson's western campaign in 1916.
• He served as permanent chairman of the Democratic National Convention in 1924 and 1932.
• The utility inquiry produced nearly a hundred volumes of testimony and led to four major laws that broke up holding company structures.
• He also backed a graduated income tax, farm loans, women's suffrage and limits on child labor.
• His funeral was held in the Senate chamber, and he was buried at Resurrection Cemetery in Helena.