Early career[edit]

Born in San Francisco, he studied at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute for six months, started his career as an unpaid cartoonist for The San Francisco Examiner.[4] The Honolulu Advertiser was among the other newspapers art departments that he served in.[5] He also contributed to the San Francisco Evening Post. He also worked as an itinerant actor (for both stage and screen), newspaper illustrator, and piano player.[3] In 1906 he moved to the East Coast. In the 1910s he contributed many illustrations to both Red Book magazine and its sister publication, Green Book.[4]

Before World War I, Irvin contributed illustrations regularly to Life, and rose to the position of art editor. (Life the humorous weekly, and not to be confused with the more famous magazine of the same name published by Henry Luce). Irvin also contributed to Cosmopolitan when it was a serious literary publication. He illustrated Wallace Irwin's "Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy" in Life.[6] He would later incorporate Japanese imagery in satirical kakemono for The New Yorker.[6]

He also created a series of humorous advertisements for Murad (turkish tobacco cigarettes).[6]

He also contributed the illustrations for "Snoot If You Must," by Lucius Beebe, a noted raconteur of New York's cafe society (1943, D. Appleton-Century).

He was fired from his position as art editor at Life in 1924.

Career at The New Yorker[edit]

However, Irvin had joined an advisory board to help launch The New Yorker and then worked on the magazine's staff as an illustrator and art editor. When he had first taken the job, Irvin had assumed that the magazine would fold after a few issues,[4] but his work would ultimately appear on the cover of 169 issues of The New Yorker between 1925 and 1958.[7]

The magazine's first cover, of a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Irvin; the dandy replaced at the last minute a drawing of theater curtains revealing the skyline of Manhattan.[3] The gentleman on the original cover is referred to as "Eustace Tilley," a character created for The New Yorker by Corey Ford. Another example is the piece known as The Unity of the Allied Nations, which appeared on the cover of the July 1, 1944 issue, and depicts the national personifications of the Allies (the American Eagle, the Chinese Dragon, the Russian Bear and the British Lion).[7]

Besides covers for the magazine, Irvin also drew various illustrations, department headings, caricatures, and cartoons.[3]

The New Yorker signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above The Talk of the Town section, is called "Irvin" or "Irvin type," after him.[8] An alphabet drawn by the American etcher Allen Lewis, who had received training in woodcutting in Paris, was used as the typographical basis for the "Irvin type."[3] Irvin may have spotted Lewis' lettering, which was drawn to imitate a woodcut, in a pamphlet entitled "Journeys To Bagdad", and liked it so much that Irvin asked Lewis to create the entire alphabet.[3] Uninterested in this project, Lewis suggested that Irvin create the alphabet himself –this became the "Irvin type."[3]

He also added the New Yorker's squiggly column rules; these provide a delineation between the text and illustrations.[7] He was also responsible for the vertical "cover strap" that was used for the magazine's margins.[3]

Before the Watergate scandal, Teapot Dome was regarded as the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics".^[2] It permanently damaged the reputation of the Harding administration, already hurt by its handling of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and Harding's 1922 veto of the Bonus Bill.^[3]

Congress subsequently passed permanent legislation granting itself subpoena power over tax records of any U.S. citizen, regardless of position.^[4] These laws are also considered to have empowered Congress generally.^[5]

To ensure that the Navy would always have enough fuel, President Taft designated several oil-producing areas as naval oil reserves. In 1921, President Harding issued an executive order to transfer control of Teapot Dome Oil Field in Natrona County, Wyoming, and the Elk Hills and Buena Vista Oil Fields in Kern County, California, from the Navy Department to the Department of the Interior. This was not implemented until the next year, when Interior Secretary Fall persuaded Navy Secretary Edwin C. Denby to implement the order.

Later in 1922, Fall leased oil production rights at Teapot Dome to Harry F. Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, a subsidiary of Sinclair Oil Corporation. He also leased the Elk Hills reserve to Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. Both leases were issued without competitive bidding; this was legal under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920.^[6]

The lease terms were very favorable to the oil companies, which secretly made Fall a rich man. Fall received a no-interest loan from Doheny of $100,000^[7] in November 1921 (equivalent to $1.64 million in 2022^[8]). He received other gifts from Doheny and Sinclair totaling about $404,000 (equivalent to $6.63 million in 2022^[8]). While the leases were legal, these transactions were not. Fall attempted to keep the deal secret, but the sudden improvement in his standard of living raised suspicions. He paid up his ranch taxes, for example, which had been as much as 10 years past due. Carl Magee, who later founded The Albuquerque Tribune, wrote about this sudden affluence and also brought it to the attention of the Senate investigation.^[9]

In April 1922, a Wyoming oil operator wrote to his senator, John B. Kendrick, angered that Sinclair had been given a contract to the lands in a secret deal. Kendrick did not respond, but two days later on April 15, he introduced a resolution calling for an investigation of the deal.^[10] Republican Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin led an investigation by the Senate Committee on Public Lands. At first, La Follette believed Fall was innocent. However, his suspicions were aroused after his own office in the Senate Office Building was ransacked.^[11][12]

Democrat Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, the most junior minority member, led a lengthy inquiry.^[13] For two years, Walsh pushed forward while Fall stepped backward, covering his tracks as he went. No evidence of wrongdoing was initially uncovered, as the leases were legal enough, but records kept disappearing mysteriously. Fall had made the leases appear legitimate, but his acceptance of the money was his undoing.^{[citation needed]} By 1924, the remaining unanswered question was how Fall had become so rich so quickly and easily.

Money from the bribes had gone to Fall's cattle ranch and investments in his business. Finally, as the investigation was winding down with Fall apparently innocent, Walsh uncovered a piece of evidence Fall had failed to cover up: Doheny's $100,000 loan to Fall. This discovery broke open the scandal. Civil and criminal suits related to the scandal continued throughout the 1920s. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that the oil leases had been corruptly obtained. The Court invalidated the Elk Hills lease in February 1927, and the Teapot Dome lease in October.^[14] Both reserves were returned to the Navy.^[15]

In 1929, Fall was found guilty of accepting bribes from Doheny.^[16][17][11] Conversely, in 1930, Doheny was acquitted of paying bribes to Fall.^[18] Further, Doheny's corporation foreclosed on Fall's home^[19] in the Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, because of "unpaid loans" that turned out to be that same $100,000 bribe. Sinclair served six months in jail on a charge of jury tampering.^[20]

Although Fall was to blame for this scandal, Harding's reputation was permanently sullied^[21] because of his involvement with the wrong people. Evidence proving Fall's guilt only arose after Harding's death in 1923.^[22]

The Teapot Dome oil field was then idled for 49 years, but went back into production in 1976. After Teapot Dome had earned over $569 million in revenue from the 22 million barrels (3,500,000 m³) of oil extracted over the previous 39 years, the Department of Energy in February 2015 sold the oil field for $45 million to New York–based Stranded Oil Resources Corp.^[15][23]

Life is an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, a monthly from 1978 until 2000, and an online supplement since 2008. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, Life was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest magazine known for the quality of its photography, and was one of the nation's most popular magazines, regularly reaching one-quarter of the population.

Life was published independently for its first 53 years until 1936 as a general-interest and light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the most important writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of its time: Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell and Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after John Ames Mitchell died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in The New Yorker) of plays and movies running in New York City, but with the innovative touch of a colored typographic bullet resembling a traffic light, appended to each review: green for a positive review, red for a negative one, and amber for mixed notices.