Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Bunny received a letter from Dan Irving, telling about his new job. It was a simple matter to be a radical press correspondent in Washington these days; the regular newspaper fellows were loaded up with material they were not allowed to handle. All but a few of the "hard guys" were boiling over with indignation at what they saw, and when they met Dan, they boiled over on him. The only trouble was, his labor press service had so little space, and only a score or two of radical papers that would look at its material.

President Harding had brought with him a swarm of camp followers, his political bodyguard at home; the newspaper men knew them as "the Ohio gang," and they were looting everything in sight. Barney Brockway had given one of his henchmen a desk in the secret service department; this was the "fixer," and if you wanted anything, he would tell you the price. The Wilson administration had grown fat by exploiting the properties seized from enemy aliens; and now the Harding administration was growing fat out of turning them back! Five percent was the regular split; if you wanted to recover a ten million dollar property, you turned over half a million in liberty bonds to the "fixer. " Bootlegging privileges were sold for millions, and deals were made right in the lobbies of the Capitol. Dan heard from insiders that more than three hundred millions had already been stolen from the funds appropriated for relief of war veterans -- the head of that bureau was another of the "Ohio gang. " And the amazing fact was, no matter how many of these scandals you might unearth, you couldn't get a single big newspaper or magazine in the country to touch them!