During World War II hemp made a brief comeback as an American crop due to shortages of rope-making stock from other countries. Hemp for Victory is a 1942 US Department of Agriculture film that encourages farmers to grow hemp. It opens with a discussion of the ancient history of hemp (canvas derives from cannabis) and then moves into how it is being farmed in Kentucky and other US states to help in the war effort.
The film has an interesting history. For decades the USDA and the Library of Congress denied that such a thing had ever been made but in 1976 Rastafarians delivered a copy to a reporter in Florida.
I remember talking to some guys in the early 70s who told me they were on their way down to Kentucky to check out some abandoned “dope farms”.
In the mid-1970s I worked at an agricultural field lab located on a former WWII munitions storage facility in Nebraska. The large spaces between the individual warehouses had been planted in hemp during the war. While most of it had been plowed under years before, creek banks and other areas where it was impractical to plow were still covered in the stuff (once established, it’s darned hard to get rid of). From time to time I encountered folks from Lincoln and Omaha in those areas harvesting “dope.” A waste of time — getting high smoking industrial hemp is more work than getting drunk on 3.2 beer…
Just a change of prepositions , from “War with drugs” to “War on drugs” ?
In the 19th century there was also a war for drugs, aka Opium War.
Now I’m wondering what the JOINT Chiefs do in their bunker?
as a farmer myself, I’m always astonished when i see these old videos of people on tractors all day long without ear protection. these guys must have been deaf as doornails
If they were all smoking the crops, they probably weren’t listening anyway. I think the same thing when I see guys operating jackhammers in old photos.
As a farmer, what are your feelings about OSHA rules in your industry? For example, do you feel they’re an intrusion into your rights as a businessman, or that they fairly represent the rights of those (including yourself) who would like to keep their senses and body appendages beyond 30 years of age?
It’s surprising the people have any real trust in what the government tells them with this type of coverup. Who cares if pot is illegal for the public but grown in controlled areas for rope — that was and still is the case. The fact the government would seek to increase the production if there were a shortage of hemp for ropes (which I hear has some hard to reproduce characteristics) needed for the war. Such lying is a thousand times worse than having made such a promotional film.
I must say, I liked how they spelled marijuana on the tax certificate.
So true. So very, very, true.
there were some interesting properties discussed there. “hemp can be a barrier crop for a second planting”. if this is true (and it’s unknown since the emphasis on this piece is to convince you to switch to growing it) this would save a lot of money of pre and post emergents. also, it seems like it could be done well with winter wheat (or whatever kentuky’s version is).
otoh, it says it seems to require high degrees of soil fertility and was grown right on riverbanks. i bet the nitrogen run-off was ghastly.
Alex or Tyler, do you know who paid for the hemp rope? ie the end consumer was the navy/army/etc, but was there a local county middleman? Selling directly to uncle sam would probably be easier, as you could borrow on credit with a US Gov’t quote in hand fairly easy. If it was a middleman, all initial payments would need to be done upfront by the farmer, making it a much riskier proposition.
(as an example, one tool they used was a pto driven rice harvester, a produt you’d not be likely to have in wisco or KY. and they’d not liekly be cheap)
This is just another conspiracy theory. The government couldn’t lie about such a thing, someone would have leaked this.
In places where there was a lot of production, you’ll still find ‘ditch weed’ growing wild, especially hot wet summers. I’ve been told that it’s worthless for ‘personal use’ but it otherwise looks and smells like the real thing.
Hemp has yielded military victory in the past!
My great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Knaus and his two sons were slaveholders in Missouri at the outbreak of the Civil War. Their Union sympathies (not uncommon among slaveholders in border states) led them to volunteer for the Union Army. Alas, they were ignominously defeated in their first engagement at the Battle of Lexington, more commonly known as the Battle of the Hemp Bales.
The Confederate-aligned State Guard had the Union soldiers surrounded in Lexington. To force their surrender, the Confederates soaked large bales of hemp in the river, so the bales would not catch fire from heated Union cannon shot. They then rolled the bales toward Union lines, using them as mobile breastworks.
It being early in the war, the Confederates paroled the Union soldiers on their promise that they would not fight anymore. Jacob and his sons spent the rest of the war avoiding Union recruiters, who had a different view regarding the validity of their promise not to fight.
Good summary of the battle here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Lexington
Bob,
That’s close to where I grew up. I used to like seeing the (replica) cannon ball in the court house column in Lexington
I remember in the early 70′s, I think, a discussion of the records of the War Hemp Industries. I was working in the successor agency to the “AAA” (the Triple A mentioned in the film). Apparently they used the Commodity Credit Corporation funds to set up the Industries, and the AAA to spread the information to the farmers, along with the film. I don’t recall any controversy about the records, although I don’t think they’d yet been transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration. See this link http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/161.html#161.2 for their current location.
That “ditch weed” that grows wild in lots of places is still a big target of the war on drugs. i.e. governments spend millions of dollars eradicating plants even though smoking those plants would cause, at most, a nasty headache.
There seems to be a lot of knowledge on this blog about which weeds are good and not good for “personal use”. I’m beginning to understand why a lot of the numbers economists come up with are often inconsistent, not to mention why they have a suspicious obsession for ethnic cuisine on their blog sites.
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