Fiends and Foes

A History of Drug Policies and Racism in the United States

University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities Dr. D.G. Barthe, PhD TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Opium 6 1.1 Brief history of opium 6 1.2 History of Chinese immigrants in the United States 9 1.3 Prohibition of opium 11

Chapter 2: Prohibition 15 2.1 Temperance unions and Prohibition 15 2.2 Prohibition and immigrants 19

Chapter 3: Cocaine 23 3.1 Jazz 23 3.2 African-Americans and cocaine 26

Chapter 4: Marijuana 30 4.1 Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics 30 4.2 Marijuana and Mexican immigrants 34

Conclusion 37

Bibliography Introduction

In the trials that followed the Watergate scandal, it was revealed that President Richard Nixon used a taping system in the White House installed in the interest of recording his conversations for posterity. Only he and a few staff members knew of the taping system and Nixon had kept it a secret so that the people he was speaking to, either in person or on the phone, would really speak their minds.1 When the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, he was reluctant, but agreed to release written summaries of the conversations. Throughout the trials, even after nineteen people had pleaded guilty to offenses that were linked to the Watergate scandal, Nixon maintained that he had done nothing wrong and even maintained that he should stay in office.2 But the support for Nixon was fading away when the Supreme Court ordered him to release all the tapes and transcripts and the public began to learn that Nixon had been a part of planning the activities surrounding Watergate from the beginning. Moreover, in several conversations one could hear the President speaking about raising blackmail money and avoiding perjury, despite of him maintaining his innocence. Finally, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.3 Nixon wasn‟t the first president to record his conversations: every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had, though Nixon was the last. Unlike his predecessors, Nixon employed a taping system that was automatically triggered if somebody started talking, resulting in more hours of conversation on tape than all previous Presidents combined.4 Not all the tapes have been released to the public yet, mostly due to sensitive information, but the tapes that have been released paint a portrait of Nixon as a deeply paranoid racist. Among the groups that Nixon perceived as his primary adversaries were anti-war activists, Ivy League intellectuals and Jews.

1 Luke A. Nichter. “Play, Pause, Stop, Record: Why Presidents Taped. The Case of Richard Nixon,” Nixontapes.org, accessed April 8, 2016, http://nixontapes.org/origin.html. 2 “The Watergate Story. The Government Acts,” Washington Post Politics, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/part2.html. 3 “The Watergate Story. Nixon Resigns,” Washington Post Politics, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/part3.html. 4 Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter, The Nixon Tapes (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), x. See also Ken Hughes. “A Rough Guide to Richard Nixon‟s Conspiracy Theories,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, accessed April 11, 2016, http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/a-rough-guide-to- richard-nixons-conspiracy-theories. Later, when it became clear that Daniel Ellsberg (whose parents were Jewish but was himself a Christian Scientist) had leaked the Pentagon Papers with assistance from anti-war activists, Nixon saw his paranoia manifested into a true political crisis. He knew Ellsberg‟s guilt was clear, but he was convinced that there had to be others involved. Nixon knew he couldn‟t go after Ellsberg too viciously; he did not want the media (who he also hated and feared) to make Ellsberg into a martyr. Nixon wanted to leak all the information there was in the investigation into the Pentagon Papers to the press to destroy Ellsberg‟s reputation, even though this was a crime. Eventually, because of Nixon‟s meddling, Ellsberg‟s prosecution ended in mistrial. 1

Nixon‟s prejudices are apparent in his taped conversations. In one of his recorded exchanges, Nixon speaks with John D. Ehrlichman, his political adviser, and H.R. „Bob‟ Haldeman, Chief of Staff, about the legalization of marijuana, which Nixon vehemently opposed. Nixon equates homosexuality, marijuana and moral depravity, summoning images of the fall of classical Greek civilization to buttress his bigotry and topping it all off with an anti-Semitic flourish just for good measure:

You don‟t glorify it John any more than you glorify, uh, uh, uh, whores…What do you think that does to eleven and twelve year old boys when they see that?...Well by God can I tell you it outraged me. Not for any moral reason. Most people are outraged for moral reasons, I, it outraged me because I don‟t want to see this country go that way…You ever see what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them… You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general: these are the enemies of strong societies. That‟s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they‟re trying to destroy us. You know it‟s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them?5

Of course, Richard Nixon‟s bigotry and racism did not end with homosexuals and Jews. Nixon had no shortage of scorn for the Irish, the Italians or for African-Americans. He states clearly his belief in essentialist ethnic stereotypes in a conversation Nixon had with Charles W. Colson, Special Counsel observing that

…all people have certain traits. The Jews have certain traits. The Irish have certain - for example, the Irish can‟t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I‟ve known gets mean when he drinks. It‟s sort of a natural trait. Particularly the real Irish…The Italians, of course, just don‟t have their heads screwed on tight.6

In another taped conversation between Nixon and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, he takes issue with Secretary of State William P. Roger‟s, fairly progressive, opinions on African-Americans, observing that

Bill Rogers has got somewhat – and to his credit it‟s a decent feeling – but somewhat, sort of, a sort of blind spot on the black thing because he‟s been in New York. He says, well, „They are coming along, and that after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart‟ So

5 “Oval Office Conversation 498-5. Meeting With Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. May 13, 1971.” Common Sense for Drug Policy, accessed April 8, 2016, http://www.csdp.org/research/nixonpot.txt. 6 Rob Stein. “New Nixon Tapes Reveal Anti-Semitic, Racist Remarks.” The Washington Post, December 12, 2010. 2

forth and so on. My own view is I think he‟s right if you‟re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it‟s wrong if you‟re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that‟s the only thing that‟s going to do it…7

It was Nixon‟s paranoia, combined with his clearly racist beliefs, that led to his „War on Drugs‟. Although Nixon promoted his „War on Drugs‟ under the banner of a public health concern, in 1994 John Ehrlichman refuted this narrative. It was not in the interest of public health that Nixon promoted his policy of repression but, instead, the War on Drugs was conceived primarily as a cynical policy of hyper-criminalization targeting left wing activists and African-American communities. Speaking to journalist Dan Baum, Ehrlichman recalled that

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I‟m saying? We knew we couldn‟t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.8

In a 1969 speech, The Great Silent Majority of My Fellow Americans, he accused anti- war protestors of wanting America “to lose in Vietnam” and that, by this, they invited “defeat and humiliation.”9 Nixon himself wanted to get out of Vietnam too, but on his terms, saying that it wouldn‟t be good for the South-Vietnamese people to withdraw immediately because of the threat of the North taking over the South. By starting the War on Drugs he could gain control over both this group of dissenters as well as over the African-American community that had opposed his Presidency and for whom he harbored racial animosity. With all that said, Nixon was certainly not the first to utilize drug prohibition as a means of repressing ethnic and racial minorities. In this thesis, I intend to argue that, although Richard Nixon amplified the repression, drug prohibition has always been used by American elites to facilitate the repression of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States. To make this argument, I intend to critically examine the way the prohibition of opium was used to marginalize Chinese immigrants, how

7 Stein, “New Nixon Tapes.” 8 Dan Baum. “Legalize It All. How to Win the War on Drugs.” Harper‟s Magazine, last modified April, 2016, accessed April 8, 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/. 9 Rick Perlstein, ed., Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 187. 3 alcohol prohibition targeted working class Irish, German and Italian immigrants, as well as Catholics, how the prohibition of cocaine was used to marginalize African-Americans and how the prohibition of marijuana was used to marginalize Mexican-Americans. The choice to structure this thesis in this manner stems from the chronology of the timeframe of every respective drug prohibition: the Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States around the 1850s and opium prohibition went into effect in 1914. While European immigrants, such as the Irish, German and Italian immigrants, started coming to the United States in big numbers a short time before the Chinese immigrants, alcohol prohibition did not go into effect until 1919, thus I will discuss the temperance movement second. Third, the association between African-Americans and cocaine emerges around the 1900s and cocaine prohibition went into effect in 1914 but perpetuated into the jazz age of the 1920s and became a major component of the contemporary War on Drugs. I will discuss marijuana prohibition and its association with Mexicans last since marijuana prohibition went into effect only in 1937. This is an important subject to examine because it explains the racist significance of the War on Drugs that is still going on to this day. Richard Nixon was a true racist who set out to start the War on Drugs to specifically repress African-Americans and anti-war protestors. However, the racist motives behind the War on Drugs was a fact that was missed by many Americans because Nixon presented it to them as a public health concern. This strategy was not new: in this study, I will demonstrate that many drug laws in America have been connected to a racial or ethnic minority group at some point and that for decades on end, the media (newspapers in particular), have been deceived by public officials to present stories to the public that were simply untrue in order to invigorate the support for their goals to prohibit drugs. Through manipulation of the media, politicians have created an atmosphere that has been utterly hostile towards ethnic and racial minorities, and it is my hope that this thesis will help to raise awareness of the true origins of this terrible, racist, and feckless, regime of drug prohibition. Because the media has been so important in shaping the public‟s mind and creating support for the drug laws, this thesis will make extensive use of newspaper articles ranging in time from historical articles written during the period that drug prohibition laws were made, as well as more contemporary sources (as appropriate). These newspaper articles provide an important insight into historical attitudes, especially with regards to attitudes towards minority racial or ethnic groups. Laws are not made in vacuums and by interrogating journalistic sources, it is also easier to understand why law makers could make the laws on the grounds

4 that they did: racist politicians made racist laws because there was public support for racist laws. Also, this thesis will draw on books and articles that are written by a number of historians and journalists. In particular, it will draw on the work of Douglas Valentine and Alexander Cockburn, whose writings I have utilized to undergird the arguments made in this thesis. A lot has been written about the War on Drugs and drug prohibition, yet only recently have scholars begun to make the explicit connection between racism, past drug laws and Nixon‟s War on Drugs before. It is my hope that this work will contribute meaningfully, and positively, to that emerging dialogue.

5

Chapter 1 Opium

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, large groups of Chinese immigrants came to the United States to work. The Chinese worked for lower wages than American-born workers, which did not earn them any sympathy with their new countrymen. Over time, as more and more Chinese workers went to America, an anti-Chinese sentiment arose that caused the American government to take action against Chinese immigration to the United States through legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In this chapter I intend to argue that, although there were already measures taken to curb Chinese immigration to America, white American elites, through government action and legislation, marginalized and criminalized Chinese immigrants, and Chinese-Americans, through a legal regime of opium prohibition.

1.1 Brief history of opium Opium, or rather the opium poppy, has been cultivated for many centuries. Although opium poppies are thought to be indigenous to what the Romans called „Asia Minor‟ (present-day Turkey) the Arabs took the poppy to the East, as far as China, Persia and the Indian subcontinent. Still, it was the Greeks who first discovered the merits of opium juice, which was more valuable than the seeds, the oil and the capsules, which had all been cultivated previously. After this discovery of the extensive medicinal benefits of opium, its cultivation commenced on a large scale such that by the time the Christian era began, knowledge of the opium plant was widespread.10 The use of opium, a drug with monstrous potential for abuse, was never limited to medicinal purposes but by 1600, the popularity of opium began to increase, for medicinal as well as recreational purposes. About a century later, Dutch traders brought shipments of Indian opium to China and Southeast Asia and also introduced the Chinese to the custom of smoking opium, rather than ingesting it. It was not long thereafter that the Chinese emperor Yongzheng decreed that the trade and use of opium be limited to medicinal purposes. This did not lead to the decrease of opium use he was hoping for, however.11

10 Dr. Watt, “History of Opium, Opium Eating and Smoking,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 21 (1892): 329, 330. 11 “Opium Throughout History.” PBS Frontline, last modified 1998, accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heroin/etc/history.html. 6

The British East India Company, who already gained control over several opium- growing districts in India, still brought two thousand chests of opium a year to China and by the end of the eighteenth century had established a monopoly on the opium trade. In China, the opium problem became much worse, a circumstance that compelled the emperor Jiaqing to ban opium altogether in 1799 though this ban did not have the intended effect. The black market in opium made it even more profitable to smuggle opium into China and when countries such as England and America began to notice that the products they bought from China were outweighing what China bought from them, they counteracted this by increasing their opium sales in China. This caused the First Opium War between England and China, a conflict wherein China was defeated.12 It was in 1804 that a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertürner came across the active ingredient in opium: an alkaloid that he named „morphine‟ in honor of the Greek god of sleep and dreams. In 1843, Doctor Alexander Wood pioneered the glass syringe and found that injecting a patient with morphine through a syringe was a far more potent method of delivery than other ways of administering the drug.13 The First Opium War was concluded with a series of treaties between England, among others, and China. However, after a few years, the European powers, unhappy with both the terms of the treaties and the Chinese government‟s failure to adhere to them, revisited the issue which manifested as the Second Opium War. Once again, China was defeated and was forced to sign new treaties, this time with England, France, Russia and the United States. After the Second Opium War, in 1860, the import of opium into China was once again legalized.14 Even though the opium trade was going well, at the end of the nineteenth century the use of the drug was becoming an increasingly bigger problem in the west. In 1874 an English researcher discovered that by heating morphine, he could purify it into diacetylmorphine, the drug that is today better known as heroin and which is far more addictive than opium, with a much higher potential for abuse. In 1878, the British parliament passed the Opium Act in

12 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.”; “Milestones: 1830 – 1860. The Opening to China Part 1: the First Opium War, the United States and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839 – 1844,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/china-1. 13 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.” 14 “Milestones: 1830 – 1860. The Opening to China Part 2: the Second Opium War, the United States and the Treaty of Tianjin, 1857 – 1859,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/china-2. 7 response to the perception that opium consumption was getting out of hand. At the same time, the United States imposed a tax on both opium and morphine.15 These measures caused heroin use and addiction in the world to steadily decline. It is not long thereafter that America also prohibited the importation of opium for the purposes of smoking. This prohibition prepared for the Shanghai Conference of 1909 where the United States wanted to talk about legislation to limit the sale of opium to China. At this conference the United States pled to an international delegation that opium was an evil substance that caused immorality.16 America was not the only one who wanted to get rid of opium: in 1912 the first Hague Convention was held and signed by many other countries. In contrast to the Shanghai Conference, the Hague Convention was also concerned with drugs like morphine, cocaine and heroin and in many ways laid the foundation for many drug policies around the world.17 In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in Congress. This act was aimed at opiates and cocaine, but did not directly prohibit them. Instead, it was “an act to provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.”18 It meant that doctors could not dispense the drug freely anymore: they had to keep a list of who they gave the drug to, and why. Many users could thus not get their drug via a legal route anymore and were forced to buy it illegally, allowing for a flourishing black market to arise. Violations of the new act resulted in a fine of as much as two-thousand dollars, or as much as a five-year prison sentence.

Still, for all the problems with opioid abuse in the west, opium smoking had acquired a special significance in China where “opium smoking was not merely about the physiological absorption of an alkaloid, but rather a means of social communication with complex symbolic meanings”.19 Opium was originally a luxury item in China that was associated with wealth and power since only the imperial family (or those with connections to the Chinese ruling class) could afford it. Indeed, for those who did not belong to the imperial family but could

15 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.” 16 Ibid. 17 “The 1912 Hague International Opium Convention,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, last modified January 23, 2009, accessed May 11, 2016, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/the-1912-hague- international-opium-convention.html. 18 “Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, 1914,” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, accessed May 25, 2016, http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1910/harrisonact.htm. 19 Frank Dikotter, et al., “Narcotic Culture: A Social History of Drug Consumption in China,” The British Journal of Criminology 42, no. 2 (April 1, 2002): 319. 8 afford opium, like wealthy merchants, smoking opium became a way to signify a privileged social position. Offering opium to one‟s guests meant that one was affluent, if not aristocratic. By the middle of the eighteenth century, opium consumption by elites became very ritualistic and complex. From the preparation to the taste, everything about the process of smoking opium was taken into account.20 Because the use of opium was associated with both wealth and power, it gradually became more and more important for the common people of China, too. Because of its status, more people wanted to use opium and eventually could, because opium was getting cheaper and more readily available. From the nineteenth century onward “opium smoking also became a mark of hospitality among less privileged social groups, where opium was never used alone: consumption was shared, and smoking was an occasion for social intercourse.” 21 This could be done at home, but opium houses were also becoming more common. When large numbers of Chinese began arriving in the US in the middle of the nineteenth century, these immigrants brought their custom of smoking opium along with them.

1.2 History of Chinese immigrants in the United States In the 1850s large groups of Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States. They worked in goldmines, agriculture and factories, as well as on railroads in the west. This large influx of Chinese workers caused tension in the United States. Most of the Chinese immigrants came to America to work but sent their money home to their families, who, in China, had a lower standard of living. This combined with the fact that the Chinese immigrants had to pay off their debts to the person that had paid for their passage to America caused the Chinese immigrants to ask for a lower wage than other American workers. As a result, more jobs were filled with Chinese workers instead of American workers, who were growing increasingly dissatisfied and started resenting the Chinese workers for taking their jobs.22 This resentment fostered an anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States that led to a series of federal acts designed to curb Chinese immigration. The first act was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which restricted labor based immigration from China to America for the next ten years. Any Chinese citizen that wanted to immigrate to the United States had to

20 Dikötter, et al., “Narcotic Culture,” 319, 320. 21 Ibid. 320. 22 “Milestones: 1866 – 1898. Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866- 1898/chinese-immigration. 9 prove they weren‟t doing so because they wanted to work there, which meant that virtually no Chinese could immigrate to America because the act stated that “skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining” were barred from entering the US. Additionally, the Exclusion Act meant that Chinese immigrants who already lived in America had to have special certifications if they needed to re-enter the country and “Congress refused State and Federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them.” 23 After the Chinese Exclusion Act had expired in 1892, a new act was passed to renew the restrictions: the Geary Act. This act still restricted Chinese immigration to the United States but also required Chinese residents in America to have a certificate of residence with them at all times. Deportation loomed over those immigrants who did not have such a certificate. The Geary Act was made permanent in 1902 and wasn‟t repealed until 1943, leaving in place a limit of 105 Chinese immigrants to enter America. Chinese immigrants who were already in America could now finally seek naturalization.24 The anti-Chinese sentiment contributed to ghettoization and Chinese immigrants, and Chinese-Americans, began to live together in neighborhoods where they could eat, drink and feel as if they were in China; these neighborhoods were often dubbed “Chinatowns.” The oldest, largest and most famous of these Chinatowns was in San Francisco, California. A city within a city, San Francisco‟s Chinatown was almost entirely self-sufficient. Local politicians in San Francisco were not very happy with the emergence of these new neighborhoods. In their opinion, Chinatown was a nuisance and above all damning for the real estate prices in surrounding neighborhoods. When a hurricane hit San Francisco in 1906, a series of fires broke out in Chinatown, leaving nothing but destruction behind. The local politicians saw their chance to build something else in its place, but the people of Chinatown argued successfully that rebuilding it in traditional Chinese style would attract more tourism to the town.25 This approach worked: San Francisco‟s Chinatown began to attract the attention from tourists who were interested in everything from the food to the architecture, and everything in between. But as time went on, tourists also came to value San Francisco‟s Chinatown, as well as the Chinatowns in other cities, for their vice: gambling, prostitution and opium dens. In 1895, when opium was still legal, one writer for The Arizona Republican in Phoenix “has for

23 “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882),” National Archives, Our Documents, last modified 1989, accessed April 18, 2016, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47. 24 Ibid. 25 “San Francisco Chinatown,” The Bancroft Library, Berkeley, University of California, last modified January 31, 2005, accessed April 20, 2016, http://vm136.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/collections/chineseinca/sfchinatown.html. 10 some time been looking for a favorable opportunity to give its readers a comprehensive conception of the evil that is being maintained – not only as a general nuisance but where the morals of the youth of Phoenix are corrupted by the existence of these Chinese dens.”26 The writer goes on to tell his readers that the Chinese should be removed from the inner city to the very outskirts, “where they will be less obnoxious.”27 – hoping that the youth of Phoenix would further remain untouched by the evils of opium.

1.3 Prohibition of opium Chinese immigrants brought the custom of smoking opium socially with them to the United States but, in America, opium smoking was perceived entirely different: it was seen as an immoral act that only the most degenerate would indulge. Adding to this narrative of degeneracy, the Chinese were also perceived as taking jobs from the native-born Americans, and morally corrupting (white) American youth. This lead to a movement for prohibition of the drug. The first city to take action against opium was San Francisco because, on top of the other ideas about opium and the Chinese, at the end of the 19th century “rumors began to circulate that the opium den houses were evil and that unsuspecting members of the community – young women were used frequently as examples – were at risk for unknowingly heading down dangerous paths toward disrepute and drug addiction.”28 San Francisco‟s Opium Den Ordinance of 1875 was specifically designed to target the opium dens where opium was smoked. Opium dens became illegal in the city and operating or visiting an opium den became finable up to 500 dollars and one was at risk of a jail sentence of up to six months.29 Making opium dens illegal gave the city of San Francisco an excuse to both criminalize Chinese immigrants who operated opium dens, as well as „protect‟ white citizens from the evils of opium addiction. The idea that white people had to be protected from the evils of smoking opium survived a few decades, as can be seen in newspaper articles written at the time.30

26 “Dens of Vice,” The Arizona Republican, September 21, 1895. 27 Ibid. 28 Stephen A. Maisto, et al., Drug Use and Abuse (Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015), 32. 29 Ibid. 32. 30 See also Jay Robert Nash, The Great Pictorial History of World Crime (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 324 – 328; Jeffrey Scott Mcillwain, “From Tong War to Organized Crime: Revising the Historical Perception of Violence in Chinatown,” Justice Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 1997): 25 – 48; Raymond W. Rast, “The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco‟s Chinatown, 1882 – 1917,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 1 (February 2007): 29 – 60; K. Scott Wong, “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain,” Chinese- American Literature 20, no. 1 (1995): 3 – 15; Mary Ting Yi Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Woman Suffrage, 1910 – 1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (September 2009): 393 – 417; Barbara Berglund, “Chinatown‟s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Racialization in Nineteenth-Century 11

The editor of the Spokane Press in 1908 quoted Charles B. Wilden, a secretary of the California board of pharmacy, asserted that “women of high social standard in this city, and even boys and girls have fallen prey to the opium habit (that) is a result of the traffic in the deadly drug in the foul dens of San Francisco‟s notorious Chinatown.”31 Charles B. Wilden “has been engaged in a night and day war on the local Chinese opium dealers. To protect white women from the opium-sellers was one of the chief aims of the crusade.”32 There are three things of interest in this particular newspaper article: first, it is odd that this secretary is surprised that upper class white women have „fallen prey‟ to opium addiction. Historian David Courtwright observed that during “the nineteenth century the typical opiate addict was a middle-aged white woman of the middle or upper class”33, so this should have been known to Wilden. Second, his „crusade‟ is specifically directed at white women, boys and girls. All other races, and men, for that matter, are thereby excluded from his „savior‟. Third, it is contradictory that he, a secretary of the California board of pharmacy, would assert such a thing. The group that was most responsible for opiate use, and ultimately addiction, were the doctors and pharmacists who, many times too freely, dispensed opiates to their patients and clients.34 Another article is also concerned with the well-being of upstanding, moral women. In a newspaper from Washington, a writer asserts that “women who go about the task of educating and Christianizing Chinamen take some dreadful risks”35 and that the Chinese opium dens “constitute a comparatively new danger to American morality and civilization.”36 He goes on to tell his readers that he finds it unbelievable that young women on missionary work are being trapped into a corner and are given opium, after which they lose both their morality and respectability forever. The Chinese can do this, in his opinion, because their influence is “insidious and their wiles so cunning as to be hard to withstand.”37 His indignation over what happened to one woman that prompted him to write the article, leads him to make generalized conclusions about what happens to women who do missionary work in Chinese neighborhoods, as well as the Chinese in general.

San Francisco,” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005): 5 – 36; Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, ca. 1600 – 1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 31 “Fighting to Save Women From Chinese Opium Traffic.” Spokane Press, June 9, 1908. 32 Ibid. 33 David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. 34 Ibid. 2. 35 “The Sigel Case and the Real „Yellow Peril‟.” The Wenatchee Daily World, August 30, 1909. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 12

Almost thirty years after San Francisco‟s Opium Den Ordinance a nationwide law was created that prohibited the smoking of opium: the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. The importation of non-medicinal smoking opium was thereby prohibited while leaving other forms of opium untouched.38 At the time there were Chinese immigrants who used opium, as well as other groups of people, mainly white men and women. A major difference lay in the way opium was used by these different groups: in general, it were the Chinese immigrants who smoked opium, while white men and women tended to take opium in a liquid form. Chinese immigrants who smoked opium were often referred to as „yellow dope fiends‟, while “white users were politely termed „habitués‟.”39 Prohibiting the smoking of opium with no further consequences for taking opium in another form was thus a law that was quite specifically aimed at the Chinese immigrants. Five years of uneven legislature went by before the government decided to change the laws surrounding opium: this was when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, targeting all forms of opium.40 As noted before, it was mostly white middle or upper class women who were addicted to opiates in the nineteenth century. “But from roughly 1895 to 1935 these were supplanted by a different kind of user. Lower-class urban males…became increasingly conspicuous and were identified in the public mind with the problem of opiate addiction.”41 So, while opium and opium addiction had been common in the United States for a long time and had been associated with different groups of people, it was the Chinese who bore the brunt of the blame for opium addiction in general. In 1910, editorialist F.V. Fitzgerald invoked the specter of the „yellow peril‟ to describe the danger posed to American society by Chinese immigration.

By far the greatest of the evils of the yellow peril is the introduction of the drug habit, a curse of oriental civilization. Because of their location as a gateway to the Orient the western states have suffered most from this accursed affliction. For a score of years they have been more and more in the power of the curse, until today the number of American drug fiends along the Pacific coast is appalling.42

Despite Fitzgerald‟s insistence that opiate addiction was afflicting “more and more,” opium addiction in the US seems to have reached its peak in 1890 before a steadily decline

38 “Effective Drug Policy: Toward a New Legal Framework.” Common Sense for Drug Policy, King County Bar Association, Drug Policy Project, last modified 2005, accessed June 14, 2016, www.csdp.org/research/effectivedrugcontrol.pdf. 39 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), 70. 40 Ibid. 70, 71. 41 Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 1. 42 F.V. Fitzgerald, “Drug Habit in Salt Lake,” The Salt Lake Tribune, September 11, 1910. 13 thereafter. By 1910, the exact opposite of Fitzgerald‟s claims were true but that did not dissuade him from advancing this racist narrative that criminalized the Chinese community for their custom of opium smoking.43 While there were many factors attributing to opium addiction in America, it were the Chinese immigrants who were scapegoated. Because opium smoking was seen as an immoral vice, the Chinese immigrants were portrayed as evil, cunning men who would make every white woman addicted to opium as soon as they had the chance. Most Americans already did not have the Chinese immigrants in high regard, so attacking them on their opium smoking custom and blaming them for general opium addiction was another way to marginalize an already vulnerable group in American society. Stigmatizing and criminalizing their behavior added to the already existing anti-Chinese sentiment and this made it even harder for the Chinese immigrants to build up a normal life in America. Thus, making a drug that was in a high degree associated with Chinese immigrants illegal, made it easy for the American government to criminalize a minority group.

43 Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 2. 14

Chapter 2 Prohibition

Chinese immigrants were attacked for a custom that the white, mainly Protestant, elites of American society saw as an immoral vice: the smoking of opium. Similarly, those same white, mainly Protestant elites, attacked the white, mainly Catholic Irish, Italian, and German immigrants for a custom they brought with them: the drinking of alcohol. The newcomers challenged many conservative notions of morality and propriety and many conservative Americans were disinclined to sit around and allow such affronts in what they perceived as their country. In this chapter, I intend to argue that prohibitory laws surrounding alcohol were for a large part directed at European immigrants in order to control them and keep them marginalized from white, middle class, American society.

2.1 Temperance unions and Prohibition Efforts to prohibit alcohol in the United States commence in the beginning of the 19th century when housewives and others saw the devastating effects of alcohol, particularly on men. They worked long hours and when they got off work, they drank to relax but drinking was often associated with domestic violence. Also, many men would waste their whole paycheck on alcohol, leaving nothing for their families. Ironically, these men drank because it made them manlier, but when it came to providing for their families and protecting them, the alcohol suddenly took that away. 44 Beer had always been popular, but improvements of the distilling process soon made spirits more popular, as well as hard cider. Beer had, on average, 5% alcohol, but distilled spirits had as much as 45% and hard cider about 10%, causing the men to get drunk faster by their unchanged drinking behavior.45 Back then, daily life in America was very much entrenched with alcohol and between 1800 and 1830 alcohol consumption reached its ultimate peak: five gallons per capita annually.46 There also seemed to always be a good reason to drink, and if there wasn‟t, people would find a reason to drink. Even doctors prescribed alcohol as a cure for certain ailments. The dissatisfaction surrounding alcohol was growing and many people thought it needed to change. These people, especially women and clergy, started speaking out against alcohol, advocating temperance and abstinence, not prohibition per se. This divided the country: on the

44 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. PBS, 2011. 45 W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 8, 9. 46 Ibid. 8. 15 one hand there were people who saw alcohol as an evil that needed to be dealt with, and on the other hand there were people who liked their drink and didn‟t like being told what to do by others.47 Despite that, temperance unions started to gain ground in many places in America and even managed to curb the alcohol consumption to about two gallons per capita annually after 1830.48 The first temperance movement that had an impact on American society was the Washingtonian movement. This movement was founded in 1840 in Baltimore and asked people who drank to sign a pledge of total abstinence. Many men did: not only to make their wives and children happy, but also because it showed self-respect and honor.49 But the Washingtonians were not the only ones to advocate abstinence: the clergymen of the Protestant church first began advocating temperance in their sermons and later they took it a step further by preaching abstinence. Also, the women‟s suffrage movement advocated in favor of temperance and abstinence, among other things. In 1851 the temperance movement gained some success regarding alcohol prohibition: Maine became the first state to prohibit both the manufacture and the sale of alcohol. This, however, did not last: in 1856 the law was repealed.50 Just before the Civil War the prohibition efforts tempered. Needing to cope with the hardship of war, many people started drinking again and didn‟t want to think about temperance or abstinence. Also, in need of extra income after the war, the government started taxing alcoholic beverages, so a full prohibition was not what the country needed.51 After the Civil War large groups of immigrants started coming to the United States. They came from Ireland, Germany and other countries in Central and North Europe. Among other things, they brought with them their habit of drinking, which was looser than the drinking habit of many Americans at the time. This habit, but especially the immigrants‟ unwillingness to let the custom go, caused tension in the United States: as native-born Americans, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought they knew best how Americans should behave and above all thought that „real Americans‟ didn‟t need alcohol. Moreover, many of the German immigrants set up breweries once they got to the United States, causing the beer

47 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 48 Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic, 8. 49 Ruth M. Alexander, “„We are engaged as a band of sisters‟: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840 – 1850,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988): 766. 50 “Prohibition Nationwide,” PBS Prohibition, last modified 2011, accessed April 25, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/prohibition-nationwide/timeline/. 51 Amy Mittelman, Brewing Battles: A History of American Beer (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 24. 16 consumption to rise drastically. This all went against what the temperance unions were advocating and they almost saw their efforts going to waste.52 But the temperance movements were relentless. These movements were primarily made up of women who, by doing this work, finally got a chance to work outside the house. While working outside the house still was not something a respectable woman could do, fighting for this idealistic cause was not looked down upon. In 1873 the Women‟s Crusade targeted saloons and saloon owners, urging them to close up shop or at least stop selling alcoholic beverages. They did not have much political power and without this power, one of the only ways to convince people of their ideals was to pray. The Women‟s Crusade did exactly that: they would organize pray-ins in front of saloons and taverns and would do this for hours on end. They also organized demonstrations and held petition campaigns.53 In the smaller cities this approach seemed to have effect: some saloon owners stopped selling alcohol while others closed their saloons entirely. But the bigger cities turned out to be bigger challenges. Here the women were received with disdain: saloon guests mocked the women by drinking as fast as they could and shouting blasphemous slurs at them and saloon owners often sprayed the women with cold water or beer before letting them stand outside in the cold. The women‟s crusade began in Ohio and successfully expanded westward, closing saloons on their way and persuading many saloon owners to stop selling alcohol. But the idealistic crusade turned out to be too much work for the women, who were still expected to take care of everything that went on at home. Also, the progress made was progress that was not backed by any laws: over time many saloon owners started selling alcohol again and many saloons reopened.54 Frances Willard took a different approach and instead of peaceful protest in front of saloons, she advocated women‟s and children‟s rights, especially their right to education, and provided women a place to work outside the home while still being able to take care of their chores at home. In 1879, she became the second president of an organized temperance movement: the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union. Unlike many of her predecessors in temperance movements, Frances Willard advocated complete prohibition. Not just nationwide, but globally. Under her presidency the organization grew quickly and gained

52 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 53 “Temperance and Prohibition,” The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, The Department of History, last modified 2016, accessed June 13, 2016, https://prohibition.osu.edu/womans-crusade-1873-74. 54 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 17 ground everywhere they went.55 Under her presidency the WCTU also set up an educational program for children: the Scientific Temperance Instruction. This program was specifically designed to teach children about the evils of alcohol, as well as narcotics, and to make them afraid of the substances.56 This way, when the children were old enough to vote, they would surely vote in favor of prohibition. The textbooks did not mention alcohol as a medicine, taught the children that alcohol was a poison and that they should be totally abstinent. Those who opposed the Scientific Temperance Instruction argued that it was not in fact scientific, that it did not advocate temperance but abstinence and that it had no instructional value. They were against the fact that the textbooks stated “doubtful theories as attested facts, propound[ed] principles that were partly false, and present[ed] conclusions opposed by the results of the latest and most accurate scientific research” and “criticized the instruction and the endorsed textbooks for exaggeration and for attempting to bring about moral reform under the guise of science.”57 Despite the critique, the program was taught in schools until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.58 While the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union had a lot of success over the years, another prohibition movement had even more: the Anti-Saloon League. Before the Anti- Saloon league emerged, temperance movements were predominantly made up of women. But, as mentioned before, women did not have a lot of political power. The Anti-Saloon League was made up of men and they had the power to get more done. They did not want to be a political party because their sole purpose was to advocate the ban of alcohol and this approach worked. Gaining more and more power, the Anti-Saloon League grew out to be a well- organized movement, even establishing their own publishing company. They became so powerful and influential that politicians wanted to be on their side because they knew it would be politically damaging if they weren‟t. Working together with the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union they started pressing for an amendment on the American Constitution, one that would ban every aspect of the liquor trade in all states. In 1913 Congress passed an amendment that would help the prohibitionists reach their goal: a nationwide income tax. Because of the revenue that would now come from this tax, the government didn‟t need the taxes on alcoholic beverages. After another few years of intense lobbying, the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League finally got their way: in January of

55 “Frances Willard (1839 – 1898).” Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, Women Working, 1800 – 1930, last modified 2016, accessed June 13, 2016, http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/franceswillard.html. 56 Norton Mezvinsky, “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1961): 50. 57 Ibid. 52, 53. 58 Ibid. 54. 18

1919 Congress finally passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale, manufacture and use of alcohol in the United States, except for medicinal use.59 But eventually, the government and prohibitionists learned, it came down to the enforcement of the law and this was no easy task. People who wanted to keep drinking became creative in ways to hide their alcohol, hiding it, for instance, in a hollowed out cane. The bootlegging business exploded and became very profitable, while the government did not have the money or the manpower to be everywhere and check if the law was being followed. Furthermore, in cities all across America illegal bars, or speakeasies, sprouted up in people‟s homes and alcohol flowed freely here. After a while it even seemed to become fashionable to break the law and drink alcohol. While alcohol consumption did decrease, it wasn‟t as much as the government had hoped. It became apparent that Prohibition didn‟t work: a law wasn‟t going to prevent people from drinking alcohol and instead it fostered a culture of illegality and crime.60 After fourteen years of Prohibition, the 21st amendment was ratified in 1933, repealing the 18th amendment.61

2.2 Prohibition and immigrants One of the main goals of the prohibition movements was to make America a morally upstanding society and alcohol did not fit that goal. While many Americans adopted temperance or abstinence, there was a new group of people that thought more loosely about alcohol consumption. These were immigrants, mainly Catholics from Ireland and Germany, but also immigrants from other parts of North and Central Europe. They stood in the way of the prohibition movements‟ goal, in their opinion at least, and were therefore targeted as being un-American and morally defective.62

59 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 60 “Teaching With Documents: The Volstead Act and Related Prohibition Documents,” National Archives, accessed June 13, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/volstead-act/. 61 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 62 See also Kenneth T. Andrews and Charles Seguin, “Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890 – 1919,” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 2 (September 2015): 475 – 510; Kevin W. Caves, “The Bottle and the Border: What Can America‟s Failed Experiment with Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s Teach Us About the Likely Effects of Anti-Immigration Legislation Today?” The Economists‟ Voice 9, no. 1 (January 2012): 1 – 4; Andrew Moore, “The Arc of Reform? What the Era of Prohibition May Tell Us About the Future of Immigration Reform,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 28, no. 521 (2014): 521 – 554; Erik Grant Luna. “Our Vietnam: The Prohibition Apocalypse,” DePaul Law Review 46, no. 483 (1997): 483 – 568; Edward Behr, Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996); Kenneth D. Rose, American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016); Elliot Robert Barkan, ed., Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2013). 19

One of the earliest measures regarding alcohol that was essentially an anti-immigrant measure was the change in price of liquor licenses from fifty dollars a year to three hundred dollars a year in Chicago in 1855. Also, this measure forbade taverns to be open on Sunday: the only day most people did not have to work. This measure was thought up by Mayor Levi Boone, who was part of a political group known as the Known-Nothings. The Know-Nothings were nativists who were openly anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Levi Boone knew he couldn‟t stop immigrants from coming to the city, but he could do something that would take away a little pleasure. He hoped that, by increasing the price of liquor licenses, most of the German tavern holders would get out of the city and with the Sunday closing rule he knew many of the German and Irish immigrants who liked to drink on their day off, could not do so. Most saloon keepers ignored the Sunday closing rule and were thus arrested or fined. As a result, the immigrants united and on the day of the first trial against a German saloon keeper, the immigrants formed an armed group that was ready to fight the police. A riot broke out that resulted in one man being killed and many more wounded. Boone‟s decision to harass the German and Irish immigrants of Chicago proved to be an unwise decision: in the elections of 1856 German and Irish immigrants united once again and came to vote in great numbers, causing the Know-Nothings to lose. The cost of the liquor licenses went back to fifty dollars a year and taverns and saloons could once again be open on Sundays.63 Because of the enormous groups of immigrants coming to the United States, the demographic began to change. In cities like Chicago this meant that by 1855 immigrants made up almost half of the population.64 Being used to their English-speaking, mostly Protestant land, many Americans felt uneasy about the changes and thus became accusatory towards the immigrants. This was expressed in attacking their customs, like refusing to learn the English language, but mainly their drinking behavior. Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political groups, like the Know-Nothings, were often fervent supporters of the prohibitionist cause because they saw “foreign culture as a threat to American society” as well as the immigrants as “a group likely to drink and as a demographic obstacle to a dry nation”.65 Thus supporting the prohibition efforts was, in their eyes, an excellent way to punish the immigrants that morally corrupted America.

63 Ron Grossman, “Chicago‟s Lager Beer Riot Proved Immigrant‟s Power,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2015. 64 Ibid. 65 Andrew Moore, “The Arc of Reform?: What the Era of Prohibition May Tell Us About the Future of Immigration Reform,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 28, no. 3 (2014): 526. 20

From the prohibitionists‟ point of view, Germans were for a large part responsible for corrupting the morals of the United States. Many Germans that came to America set up breweries and opened saloons, at which they were very successful. In the years between 1850 and 1910, the per capita beer consumption increased by 1000 per cent and the number of saloons, often owned by breweries, skyrocketed.66 They even set up their own organization called the United States Brewers‟ Association in 1862, at first to deal with the new Internal Revenue Act, but later this was expanded to other parts of their trade. The Brewers‟ Association used German as their primary language of communication. These German brewers saturated the land with beer and saloons and grew out to be the “first organized opposition against the temperance movement that had ever appeared on the field.”67 The temperance organizations were shocked to see how powerful the Brewers‟ Association became and set out to work even harder towards their temperance goal, this time more specifically going against the German-Americans. The fact that so many Germans that came to America either opened saloons or started up breweries, that in turn opened a lot of saloons, and above all made the beer consumption in America rise drastically, were all things the native born Americans saw as going against everything they worked hard for to establish. Temperance organizations used this as a tool to convince other Americans that the immigrants were destroying the moral fabric of America and thus alcohol prohibition was needed. One newspaper reported on this, saying that anyone who voted in favor of the breweries, voted in favor of Germany. The writer was convinced that the German breweries used every means necessary to “„buy‟ legislators, congressmen and senators in the United States”68 to accommodate their most favorable outcome, which was to stop Prohibition from happening. He also stated that “America‟s two greatest enemies are Germany and „booze‟”69 and called upon his fellow Texans‟ patriotism to make the right choice when it came to voting in the upcoming elections: vote for America, not for Germany.70 He concluded by saying that the voters should not be biased by any sort of friendship they might have with a German, while he almost pressured his readers into voting for America. So, in order to achieve his preferred goal, Prohibition, he wrote an article that

66 Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1950), 116. 67 Ibid. 63. 68 H.E. Caldwell, “Says Hudspeth Is a Republican; Has Opposed Democratic Policies,” El Paso Herald, July 26, 1918. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 21 was openly anti-German and highly patriotic, in the hope that people would support his cause instead of the breweries‟ cause. This article is almost certainly inspired by the anti-German sentiment that arose during America‟s involvement in World War I. The war in Europe was an important tool of temperance movements to further attack on the German immigrants in America and urge native born Americans to vote dry. While America did not get involved in the war until 1917, the German attack on the British submarine Lusitania in 1915 triggered boycotts of “German restaurants and cafes in New York … and [they] lost most their business as a result of anti- German sentiment”.71 In Nebraska a collective of temperance unions, such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union, also utilized the anti-German sentiment to get American people to vote in favor of Prohibition:

We appeal to every voter in Nebraska and to every resident of the state who loves his country to unsheathe his sword and fight until every German brewery and every pro- German influence in our politics are driven from our land. … and nominate and elect a governor and legislators who believe in American institutions first – men who will wipe out the liquor business as a war measure, and for the promotion of clean politics and good morals.72

Eventually, the prohibitionists got their way with the ratification of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act. Liters of alcohol were poured onto the streets, breweries shut their doors and sold whatever stock they could sell, saloons shut their doors and every member of the working class thus lost their place to relax and enjoy their leisure time. While the anti-immigrant sentiment faded after a while, the prohibition movement had successfully utilized it to convince America that it were the immigrants with their out of hand drinking habits and their eagerness to sell beer to the people destroyed the moral fabric of American society and caused all sorts of social problems. Prohibition was, according to them, the only way to stop this trend.

71 “New York Cafes of Germans Are Hit by Boycott,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 22, 1915. 72 W.T. Thompson, et al., “Campaign Lie No. 2 Nailed,” The Commoner, August 1, 1918. 22

Chapter 3 Cocaine

Before Prohibition took effect, the media was full of accounts of African-Americans that became violent through cocaine. With the Harrison Narcotics Act, the drug was prohibited, but the fact that cocaine was in a high degree associated with African-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century gave opponents of jazz music a stepping stone to blame jazz for drug abuse in general. In this chapter I intend to argue that the prohibition of cocaine was a means to criminalize African-Americans and that the trend of blaming them for drug abuse perpetuated into the jazz age.

3.1 Jazz The jazz age brought with it new challenges for social behavior among Americans. The shadow of Jim Crow was cast over the entire country after 1896 and white elites in the United States were segregating the country from buses to bathrooms to bandstands. Almost anywhere those two separate publics did mix under the same roof, the venue was strictly segregated, by law. Jazz, in America, represented a proposition in direct opposition to this status quo: “Jazz was a biracial music” that was created in a society that was “violently opposed to biraciality.”73 This social reality, combined with the fact that jazz music was such a radically different proposition from the music that came before it, caused the emerging jazz scene in the 1920s to encounter bitter resistance from more conservative Americans, including outright racists and white supremacists, who wanted to enforce the Jim Crow laws as they were intended.74 Theodore Kosloff, a Russian-born American dancer, once remarked on the Jazz scene in 1922 that “America is fast approaching a terrific „morning after‟ disgust for her present spree of hugging, sensual, negroid, graceless dancing known as „jazz‟. „Jazz‟ should never have lived. It has no fundamental basis of appeal. It is an excitant only, the „Haig and Haig,‟ the cocaine of physical movement.”75 This criticism echoes that of many of jazz‟s opponents‟ who insisted jazz caused immorality, was barbaric, even demonic, and led people away from classical music, which they saw as the only respectable form of music.

73 Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 177. 74 Ibid. 178. 75 “Jazz Dance is Cocaine of Physical Movements, Says Theodore Kosloff,” The Bridgeport Times, June 9, 1922. 23

Often there were racist motivations at play among jazz‟s critics: jazz culture provided opportunities for interracial relations and this was something that was looked upon with sheer disdain. Black jazz musicians were often barred from playing at the more respectable venues because of the Jim Crow laws, while white jazz musicians could play there without a problem. With Prohibition firmly in place and black jazz musicians not being allowed to play at the respectable venues, jazz for a large part disappeared into the speakeasies that were run by gangsters, who both allowed alcohol to be consumed and black musicians to play. Brothels, of the sort common to Storyville, New Orleans‟ red-light district (and also in other cities), became regular venues for black jazz musicians.76 Conservative, white, Americans also condemned jazz because they saw it as unintelligent music. “Jazz appeals to the shallow minded and the unthinking, the lazy and the shiftless, because it requires no attention. It comes to you whether you will have it or not. If you miss any of it, it doesn‟t matter; there is no loss,”77 wrote one writer in a newspaper. In his opinion, jazz was “one of the most pernicious influences”78 in music and spread “its blighting effect to the very woof and fiber of our social, moral, ethical and esthetic fabric.”79 He went on to tell his readers that he did not believe that this „vulgar‟ music really had a future, that it was aggressive and that “there [was] a direct connection between jazz and bad morals.”80 He based this last assertion on the rhythm of jazz: he believed that it was animalistic, causing people to dance in an animalistic fashion that would be “suggestive and even indecent.”81 He was certainly not the only one to have this opinion of jazz: many opponents of jazz saw the musical genre as leading to immorality. Another person who thought of jazz as being something despicable was Reverend Doctor Percy Stickney Grant. In another newspaper a writer describes a sermon that explained the evil of jazz in terms of “utter degradation by drink, drugs and sex, abandonment, also extravagance, domestic destruction, suicide and fatal accident.”82 Like the previous writer, Dr. Grant saw jazz as something animalistic, a kind of music that made people want to dance in inappropriate ways and with that destroyed the symbolism of romance that dance was supposed to have. He even went as far as to claim that jazz was responsible for fading morality, that it was essentially the embodiment of evil and that it was telling young people to

76 “The Devil‟s Music: 1920s Jazz,” PBS Culture Shock, accessed May 25, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/jazz.html. 77 Constantin von Sternberg, “On the Influence of Jazz,” Evening Public Ledger, August 31, 1920. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 “Dr. Grants Assails Jazz as Leading Back to the Jungle,” The Evening World, January 30, 1922. 24 let go of idealism and dreams, and to only live in the „now‟. He concluded his sermon by saying: “If jazz is our national anthem, then the Devil‟s crying argument, „Go to Hell,‟ is our national slogan”83, which shows the depth of his disgust for jazz music. Despite the opposition, jazz gradually gained popularity in America perhaps, in part, due to its ability to challenge the very racist attitudes expressed by its opponents. Prominent New Orleans Creole Jazzman, Dr. Sydney Bechet, recalled to Alan Lomax that when conservative New Orleans Creoles of his parent‟s generation first heard jazz music, they

passed the opinion that it sounded like the rough Negro element. In other words, they had the same kind of feeling that some white people have, who don't understand jazz and don't want to understand it. But, after they heard it so long, they began to creep right close to it and enjoy it. That's why I think this jazz music helps to get this misunderstanding between the races straightened out. You creep in close to hear the music and, automatically, you creep close to the other people. You know?84

Jim Crow existed explicitly to prevent whites and non-whites from “creeping close” and due to the fact that black jazz musicians were often banned to the less desirable establishments in the cities, jazz culture became associated with vice, including drug use, precisely because the producers of this culture were being racially marginalized. The racial marginalization of back jazz musicians and the association of jazz with drug use was largely spurred on in the 1920s by the media. White elites, through their proxies in the media, created an imaginary narrative wherein there were four million addicts in America (at the same time that the U.S. Public Health Service reported there were only 110,000), presumably because of jazz, and also carefully cultivated an image of a “typical wild-looking jazz musician who is a „hophead‟.”85 While some jazz musicians indeed used drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin,86 there is no evidence that suggests they used it any more or less than the average American. The general public, however, took over the generalized view that jazz was interchangeable with drugs and opponents of jazz used it as leverage to prove their point that jazz was truly something despicable. However, linking drugs to African-Americans, and ultimately jazz, was not something new: it had been done before jazz was even around. The

83 “Dr. Grants Assails Jazz as Leading Back to the Jungle,” The Evening World, January 30, 1922. 84 Jazzman Sydney Bechet, quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, (London: Pan Books, 1952), 98-99 85 Charles Winick, “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians,” Social Problems 7, no. 3 (1959): 240. 86 Ibid. 242. 25 close link between African-Americans and cocaine might even be why linking jazz to drugs in general was an obvious connection that many people would see as being self-evident.87

3.2 African-Americans and cocaine In 1914 the title of a New York Times article was “Negro Cocaine „Fiends‟ Are a New Southern Menace. Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to „Sniffing‟ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition.”88 The article, written by Edward Huntington Williams, a well-known and respected doctor at the time, explained how cocaine made wild beasts of African-Americans, who immediately became addicted to the drug and went on killing sprees because of the hallucinations and delusions the drug caused. Furthermore, he wrote that the “cocaine sniffing negro”89 became bulletproof after sniffing cocaine: even a bullet to the heart would not stop him from finishing his attack. An attack he would most likely carry out with a gun, since Williams was sure of the fact that cocaine also made its user an excellent marksman. He blamed prohibitory laws surrounding alcohol for the rise of cocaine users, which in turn was responsible for the rise in violence. The upper class could still get their liquor but the lower class was too poor to buy alcohol and thus substituted it with another intoxicant, cocaine. He concluded that a „negro‟ drinking alcohol was bad, but a „negro‟ sniffing cocaine was worse and that the “the evils of alcoholism – its effects upon the individual, or upon the community – are not to be compared with the horrors of cocainism”.90 It is quite surprising to see an upstanding physician choose alcohol over cocaine, however devastating they both are, in an age when nationwide Prohibition was just around the corner. That aside, what most catches the eye is the overt racism uttered in this article. In his article he makes the false observation that African-Americans would gain superhuman strength after using cocaine: an allegation so absurd it is unbelievable it was made by a doctor. Then he also makes it seem like all lower class African-Americans were cocaine users

87 See also Jay Robert Nash, The Great Pictorial History of World Crime (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 329 – 332; John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Merrill Singer and Greg Mirhej, “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz,” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 5, no. 4 (2006): 1 – 38; Charles Winick, “How High the Moon – Jazz and Drugs,” The Antioch Review 21, no. 1 (1961): 53 – 68; Gerald H. Tolson and Michael J. Cuyjet, “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30, no. 6 (2007): 530 – 538. 88 Edward Huntington Williams, “Negro Cocaine „Fiends‟ Are a New Southern Menace. Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to „Sniffing‟ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition,” New York Times, February 8, 1914. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 26 and that all of them immediately became addicted and violent. His reputation was good enough that many people would believe him, causing them to not only believe false things about the drug cocaine, but also about its effects on African-Americans and more general: about the whole African-American race. That „cocaine-sniffing negroes‟ were responsible for a lot of crime was becoming a common opinion. In another newspaper article, a writer was of the opinion that people who sold cocaine to African-Americans should be sentenced to life in prison since the African- Americans were responsible for the bulk of the crimes committed in the South.91 Another writer was of the opinion that cocaine was so addictive that every African-American who took it became a worthless worker and would commit any crime to support his habit.92 Article titles like “Crazed by Cocaine, Negro Runs Amuck.”93 or “Sunday Duel Was Feature. Policeman and Cocaine Crazed Negro Fire Revolvers at Each Other Across the Street.”94 were not at all uncommon. The red thread through all these titles and their corresponding articles is the generalized view of African-Americans who use cocaine and become insane and violent because of it. One newspaper article, titled “Boy Hoodlums Responsible for Recent Epidemic of Robberies, Says Chief of Police Mathew Kiely. … Negroes are Held Most Dangerous.”95, explained that the age of criminals is lowering and that something needed to be done about that, but that they needed to focus their attention on African-Americans because they were the most desperate of criminals. The writer asserted that it were particularly the lower-class African-Americans that were addicted to cocaine and that, under the influence, “they know neither fear or [sic] caution.”96 He goes on to tell his readers that they are just as likely to kill a man as they are to commit robbery. Criminal white men do rob women, but they never hit or injure them when they do. With the African-Americans that was different: they will more easily hit or injure a woman then they would a man. Furthermore, the writer asserted that African-Americans that used cocaine were “brutes, not clever criminals” and that they were responsible for 99% of the purse-snatchings in the city.97 As written before, the writer of the article concerns himself with the fact that the age of criminals was lowering, yet he puts a lot of emphasis on the fact that cocaine-using African-Americans were the most dangerous. In

91 “Cocaine and the Nigger,” The Aberdeen Weekly, September 11, 1908. 92 “Cocaine,” The Herald and News, July 9, 1909. 93 “Crazed by Cocaine, Negro Runs Amuck,” Daily Press, April 20, 1909. 94 “Sunday Duel Was Feature,” The Daily Gate City, March 27, 1911. 95 “Boy Hoodlums Responsible for Recent Epidemic of Robberies, Says Chief of Police Mathew Kiely,” The Republic, December 27, 1903. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 27 asserting this, he does not give his readers any sense that what he is saying is based on actual facts rather than opinions. All through the 1900s and 1910s it was so common to link African-Americans to cocaine and violence, that an article about flies spreading typhoid was titled: “Deadliest Living Thing. Common House Fly More Dangerous Than a Cocaine-Maddened Negro with an Automatic Revolver – Man Must Kill the Fly, or the Fly Will Kill the Man.”98 Many newspapers at the time were filled with sensationalistic stories about „negroes‟ and cocaine, one more unbelievable than the other. Every story about cocaine was inseparably linked to African-Americans, each time filling their reader‟s minds with false information and adding to the trend of discrediting all members of the race. The articles did not try to hide their racist beliefs: if anything, they would display them as overtly as possible. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 was, among others, thought up by Hamilton Wright, America‟s first drug czar, a man who believed, like so many others, that the use of cocaine was “a direct incentive to crime” and that it “temporarily raised the power of a criminal to a point were in resisting arrest there is no hesitation to murder.”99 He also believed that cocaine was a particular problem in the South, where he believed mostly lower-class African-Americans used the drug.100 Amidst the scare of cocaine, President Theodore Roosevelt had appointed him to take care of cocaine problem. Hamilton Wright was a racist that believed all the stereotypical assumptions about African-Americans and cocaine: it made them violent, gave them superhuman strength and “prompted them to rebel against white authority.”101 By moving to prohibit and criminalize the use, possession and sale of cocaine and opium, Wright essentially killed two birds with one stone: on the one hand there was now an excuse to criminalize „the cocaine-sniffing negro‟, as well as an excuse to criminalize the „opium-smoking Chinamen‟. A few years after the newspaper articles were written, a shift took place in the perceived scapegoat: the prohibitory laws surrounding alcohol were often blamed for the rise in drug use, but when the jazz age began it was suddenly the musical genre that was to blame for this trend. Doctor Bernard F. Rhees recognized that drug use had increased since Prohibition went into effect, but still used jazz as a scapegoat for it since “the jazz spirit of excitement, which seems to grip the younger generation, is responsible to a large extent for

98 “Deadliest Living Thing: Common House Fly More Dangerous Than a Cocaine-Maddened Negro with an Automatic Revolver – Man Must Kill the Fly, or the Fly Will Kill the Man,” Donaldsonville Chief, July 13, 1912. 99 Edward Marshall, “Uncle Sam Is the Worst Drug Fiend in the World,” The New York Times, March 12, 1911. 100 Ibid. 101 Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 71. 28 the recruiting of addicts.”102 His opinion fits perfectly into the trend of associating jazz with drugs. The article suggests that a popular belief at the time was that Prohibition had caused a spike in drug use, yet this doctor spins it around and blames jazz for the spike. The fact that all through the 1900s and 1910s cocaine had been in a high degree associated with African- Americans and that the Harrison Narcotics Act was in a big way associated with this scare meant that the shift in perception could take place. The generalized ideas about what cocaine did to African-Americans found their way into the minds of people who in turn linked these ideas to jazz music. Jazz was not only associated with cocaine, but also with drugs like marijuana and heroin. As mentioned before, this image was largely spurred on by the 1920s media who portrayed jazz musicians as typical marijuana smokers. But the drug marijuana was also in a high degree associated with Mexican immigrants, something the next chapter will explore.

102 “Blames Jazz, Instead of Dry Act, For Increased Use of Drugs,” The Evening Star, March 30, 1922. 29

Chapter 4

Marijuana

The media can be a powerful tool to control the way people perceive certain drugs and groups of people. Politicians and law-makers often made use of media-fueled fears to gain support for the criminalization of certain minority groups in society, like the Chinese and African- Americans. The process towards prohibiting marijuana was no different. In this chapter I intend to argue that Harry J. Anslinger‟s campaign to prohibit marijuana was fueled by the need to maintain his job on the one hand, and by racist beliefs on the other, while making use of the anti-Mexican sentiment that was fueled by the mainstream (white) media.

4.1 Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, today known as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), was established in 1930. The first commissioner of the FBN was Harry J. Anslinger who led the bureau until 1962. With Prohibition failing and budget cuts hovering over his agency due to the Great Depression, he knew that his agency needed something else to do. Busying themselves with just cocaine and opiates was not enough, so the first and foremost drug he wanted to prohibit was marijuana.103 It had since the 1910s been associated with Mexicans, African-Americans and violence and Anslinger used the negative attention to launch an all- out attack on marijuana. He did this mainly through media where he

told the stories of this evil weed of the field and river beds and roadsides. [He] wrote articles for magazines; [his] agents gave hundreds of lectures to parents, educators, social and civic leaders. In network broadcasts [he] reported on the growing list of crimes, including murder and rape. [He] described the nature of marijuana and its close kinship to hashish. [He] continued to hammer at the facts.104

What most people didn‟t know at the time was the fact that the information he gave out on marijuana was disinformation designed purely to scare the public. Before he became the commissioner of the FBN he had claimed that marijuana was not a harmful drug, but he had changed his mind because he knew that his agency would be taken over by the chief of the Secret Service Division if it remained small, forcing Anslinger

103 Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America‟s War on Drugs (New York: Verso, 2004), 21. 104 Harry J. Anslinger, The Murderers: The Story of the Narcotic Gangs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 38. 30 out of his position.105 His approach of utilizing the media to make America afraid of the drug worked: if they hadn‟t been afraid before, they were after Anslinger‟s incitements. Evidence of the hysteria over the „killer weed‟ is reflected in movies like Assassin of Youth, Marihuana and, probably best known, Reefer Madness. All these movies exaggerate the effects of marihuana and warn their viewers that even smoking one „reefer‟ can make one a murderous felon. The conclusions of these films were based on false information that originated with Anslinger. The evidence he presented before Congress to invigorate his case was for the most part taken from newspapers, instead of actual scientific research. He also made it extremely difficult for researchers to acquire marijuana for scientific studies and whenever it was available, Anslinger would dismiss all outcomes that suggested that marijuana was not harmful and had no addicting qualities. The only studies he would accept and show to the public were those that backed his own negative ideas about marijuana and partly built his case against marijuana on these studies.106 107 Twenty-nine states had already banned marijuana by the early 1930s.108 But this was not enough for Anslinger: he wanted a federal law. In 1937, Congress finally passed the act Anslinger had been fighting for: the Marihuana Tax Act. This act did not mean that the sale of marihuana was immediately prohibited, much like the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, but “put a tax of one-hundred dollars an ounce on any sale or transfer of the drug, and ma[de] such sale or transfer illegal without proper registration and approval from the [Federal] Bureau [of Narcotics]. Possession without proper authorization [could] bring a prison term.”109 This meant that virtually nobody could possess, sell or transport marijuana, except with a license.

105 Jonathan Erlen and Joseph F. Spillane, eds., Federal Drug Control: The Evolution of Policy and Practice (New York: The Haworth Press, 2004), 69, 70. 106 Jesse J. Ransom, “„Anslingerian‟ Politics: The History of Anti-Marijuana Sentiment in Federal Law and How Harry Anslinger‟s Anti-Marijuana Politics Continue to Prevent the FDA and Other Medical Experts from Studying Marijuana‟s Medical Utility,” Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, last modified April 20, 1999, accessed June 15, 2016, https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/8965561, 22. 107 See also Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III, “Stable Force in a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Foreign Policy, 1930 – 1962,” The Journal of American History 72, no. 4 (March, 1986): 908 – 927; Douglas Clark Kinder, “Bureaucratic Cold Warrior: Harry J. Anslinger and Illicit Narcotics Traffic,” Pacific Historical Review 50 (January 1981): 169 – 191; O. Hayden Griffin III, et al., “Sifting Through the Hyperbole: One Hundred Years of Marijuana Coverage in The New York Times,” Deviant Behavior 34, no. 10 (2013): 767 – 781; Benjamin Straight, The Two Finger Diet: How the Media Has Duped Women into Hating Themselves (New York: iUniverse, 2005); Susan C. Boyd and Connie Carter, Killer Weed: Marijuana Grow Ops, Media, and Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 108 William T. Hoston, Race and the Black Male Subculture: The Lives of Toby Waller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 103. 109 Anslinger, The Murderers, 38, 39. 31

Besides giving his agency something to do, Anslinger had an overt racist agenda. At one point Anslinger said that “there are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the United States, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”110 Linking marijuana to minorities was not something new, it had happened since Mexican immigration to the United States started to flare up, nor was linking marijuana to jazz music new, as can be seen in the previous chapter. But the fact that Anslinger believed in “enforcement and a punitive approach to narcotics”111 makes it more interesting: by criminalizing these drugs, he deliberately chose to criminalize all the minority groups he believed smoked marijuana. His racist agenda was an important part of why he was so popular.

The power of Anslinger‟s discriminatory beliefs depended not merely upon repeatedly asserting his comments, but such xenophobia was actively supported within institutional frameworks of popular culture, for example the popular press, and also at local level within moral reform groups such as temperance organizations and racist groups like the Klu Klux Klan. Anslinger was regarded as a popular public figure through radio and TV appearances and he was supported by the political elite for his extreme views.112

Instead of hiding the fact that he was a racist, Anslinger was open about it because he knew the public would support him.113 In his years as a narcotics officer, Anslinger quite frequently targeted black jazz musicians. In his opinion, African-American men “lured white women with jazz and marijuana.”114 Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington were among the jazz musicians that were arrested on drug charges.115 Louis Armstrong was among those arrested for possession of marihuana, but despite this he smoked the herb all his life. At one point he even wrote President Eisenhower a letter stating that marijuana should be legalized because it

110 How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Directed by Matthew Cooke. Tribeca Film, 2012. 111 John C. McWilliams, “Unsung Partner Against Crime: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930 – 1962,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 2 (April, 1989): 210. 112 Shane Blackman, Chilling Out: The Cultural Politics of Substance Consumption, Youth and Drug Policy (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), 14, 15. 113 See also Patrick R. Clifford, “Drug Use, Drug Prohibition and Minority Communities,” The Journal of Primary Prevention 12, no. 4 (1992): 303 – 316; James Swartz, Substance Abuse in America: A Documentary and Reference Guide (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2012); Rudolph Joseph Gerber, Legalizing Marijuana: Drug Policy Reform and Prohibition Politics (Westport: Praeger, 2004); Ross Coomber, et al., Key Concepts in Drugs and Society (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013). 114 Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 72. 115 Ibid. 72. 32 was so much less harmful than alcohol.116 He became one of the earliest advocates for the legalization of marijuana, but also stated that he primarily used the herb because it made him forget about the things that were done to him because of his race.117 Whenever he was arrested for the possession of marihuana, Harry J. Anslinger made sure his name was all over the press to harm his reputation.118 Anslinger was also responsible for mandatory minimum sentences, something that fitted well into his philosophy that incarceration was better than treatment. Together with Hale Boggs, a Democrat, Anslinger devised a system that would give first time drug offenders a minimum of two years for the possession of a Schedule 1 substance, which means that it is a drug with no medical benefits and with a high probability of addiction, being for instance marijuana and cocaine. If it was a second offense, the offender would receive five to ten years and ten to twenty years for a third offense.119 They made up five categories and every category says something about the (perceived) dangerousness of the drug as well as its medical properties. This law is known as the Boggs Act of 1951. The amount of years one gets after being sentenced for a drug offense have changed but every drug still has a mandatory minimum sentence attached to it. With marijuana being a Schedule 1 drug, the minimum sentence one gets for, for instance, possession is quite high: one year for a first offense, fifteen days to two years for the second offense and ninety days to three years for the third offense. Sentences are increasingly harsh for sale, cultivation and the sale of paraphernalia.120 With marijuana closely linked to Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, Harry J. Anslinger‟s efforts to prohibit the herb were essentially a means to criminalize different groups of minorities. With his anti-marijuana propaganda he gave out false information about the drug that caused nationwide hysteria and with his punitive approach to narcotics he devised a system that would put thousands of Americans in jails and prisons. The mandatory minimum sentences made sure they stayed there for at least a year. What started as a crusade to give his government agency protection from further budget cuts, ended as a racially motivated crusade to criminalize and convict mainly minority groups, as well as creating negative atmosphere toward these minorities.

116 James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 221. 117 “Tapes Show Louis Armstrong‟s Anger,” ABC News, last modified August 21, 2015, accessed May 23, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128672&page=1. 118 Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 72. 119 Ibid. 72. 120 “Federal Laws and Penalties,” NORML, last modified 2016, accessed June 22, 2016, http://norml.org/laws/item/federal-penalties-2. 33

4.2 Marijuana and Mexican immigrants Often referred to as „the loco weed‟, the American newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century were full of accounts that stated that marijuana made people, mostly Mexicans, violent and above all crazy to the point where they would kill another human being. Many newspaper articles stated that

the dry leaves of marihuana, alone or mixed with tobacco, make the smoker wilder than a wild beast. … after the first three of four draughts of smoke the smoker feels a slight headache, then he sees everything moving, and finally loses all control of his mental faculties. The next stage of the intoxication is full of terrors. Troops of ferocious wild animals march before the vision of the smoker. Lions, tigers, panthers and other wild beasts occupy his vision. These wild animals are then attacked by hosts of devils and monsters of unheard-of shapes. The smoker becomes brave and possessed of superhuman strength. It is at this stage of the debauch that murders are committed by smokers of the marihuana weed.121

One writer asserted that as far as the effects were concerned, Americans did not need to worry because “it is a rare thing for an American to become addicted to the use of marihuana”122 and that, in the rare event that Americans did get addicted, they got their drug from a Mexican: “One day while on a hunting trip he was induced by an old Mexican to smoke a cigarette of marihuana.”123 After which he went insane and tried to murder his wife, while otherwise a normal, upstanding man. This writer was not the only one to blame the marijuana addiction of Americans on Mexicans. Another writer wrote a similar article, in which he explained that two girls who visited a Mexican restaurant ended up addicted to the weed. One of the girls testified that her friend had forgotten her cigarettes and just when the girl was about to offer her friend a cigarette of hers, a Mexican man came up to their table and offered them a „Mexican cigarette‟.124 The assertions of these writers reflect what a common view was at the time: the Mexicans were responsible for marijuana addiction, a weed that was above all very dangerous. Exaggerating the effects of marijuana and blaming Mexican people for the „marijuana addiction‟ of Americans were only two things to make the American people dislike both the drug and the Mexicans. Other newspapers wrote stories about how marijuana provoked violence in Mexicans, including one that declared “marijuana, a wierd [sic] „jazz weed‟ frequently used by Mexican drug addicts,” which was “the source of much crime in the

121 “Evil Mexican Plants That Drive You Insane,” The Times-Dispatch, March 9, 1913. 122 “War on Marihuana Smoking,” The Sun, May 26, 1907. 123 Ibid. 124 “The One Wicked Drug the Lawmakers Forgot,” The Ogden Standard-Examiner, December 24, 1922. 34 southwest.” The writer would further observe that eliminating marijuana would see crime among the “laboring class of Mexicans…appreciably reduced.‟”125 Another writer informs his readers that „the authorities‟ reported

that large quantities of the weed are being imported into Texas from Mexico and causing the Mexicans on this side to nerve themselves to all kinds of daring crimes. The lower class of Mexicans and Indians are obtaining and using quantities of the drug…While under the influence of the marihuana Mexicans are liable to commit murder and when arrested give the authorities great trouble.126

Much of the reason for American hostility toward Mexicans (and the sensationalist news about marijuana-smoking Mexicans going on killing sprees) was related to the waves of Mexican immigrants coming to the United States after the Mexican Revolution in 1910. While marijuana, at the time better known as cannabis, had been used for industrial purposes as well as medicinal purposes for a long time, using marijuana recreationally was largely introduced to the Americans by Mexican immigrants. The media made clever use of the fear that many Americans had for these new immigrants: they started condemning the herb, the Mexican immigrants and the alleged crimes they committed while under the influence. “The demonization of the cannabis plant was an extension of the demonization of the Mexican immigrants,” which was also spurred on by the fact that, as time went on, Mexicans kept coming to the United States during the Great Depression.127 This caused a lot of anger in most Americans: there were hardly any jobs available, so the fact that the Mexicans were now taking these jobs from them was a big source of displeasure.128 Nationwide marijuana prohibition took a long time to establish, but El Paso, Texas, was the first city to ban marihuana in 1914. Just like San Francisco‟s Opium Den Ordinance, this law gave the authorities “an excuse to search, detain and deport Mexican immigrants.” It was almost as if it was specifically designed to control the Mexican immigrants living in the city.129 Harry J. Anslinger also made clever use of this anti-immigrant sentiment. He knew that the public had been reading over and over again stories about terrible crimes committed by minorities while under the influence of marijuana. This combined with his own racist agenda gave him an opportunity to expand his narrative and gain support for his cause without

125 “„Jazz Weed‟ Source of Southwest Crime,” The Glasgow Courier, November 11, 1921. 126 “Is the Mexican Nation „Locoed‟ by a Peculiar Weed?” The Ogden Standard, September 25, 1915. 127 Malik Burnett and Amanda Reiman, “How Did Marijuana Become Illegal in the First Place?” Drug Policy Alliance, last modified October 9, 2014, accessed June 15, 2016, http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/how-did- marijuana-become-illegal-first-place. 128 Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 72. 129 Burnett and Reiman, “How Did Marijuana Become Illegal in the First Place?” 35 sounding like a lunatic. Also, he mobilized the media to continue to give out false information about marijuana, causing it to still be a Schedule 1 drug to this day, even though there is irrefutable evidence that shows that marijuana is not highly addictive and does in fact have medicinal properties.

36

Conclusion

The drug laws discussed in this thesis were created to criminalize and marginalize their corresponding associated ethnic and racial minority groups and Richard Nixon perpetuated this trend through his War on Drugs. His deep paranoia combined with his racist beliefs and the hatred for anti-war protestors made him think of a way to repress minority groups by doing something that had been done for a century: criminalizing them through drug law enforcement. By vehemently attacking mainly Catholic Irish and German immigrants, the temperance organizations gained support for their cause over the backs of others. These immigrants, who, in the eyes of the temperance movements, morally corrupted the nation with their drinking habits and with that, stood in the way of their idealistic cause, were also targeted as being un-American: „real‟ Americans did not need alcohol. The earliest measure that was designed to control immigrants in Chicago in 1855 grew out to a riot: the Lager Beer Riot. By controlling their drinking habits, the mostly Protestant Americans thought that they could control the immigrants, who were a threat to the society they had worked so hard for to establish. When the First World War started, no attempts were made to hide the fact that anti- German sentiment was used to target the German brewers and saloon holders in America. Eventually, the prohibitionists got their way with the ratification of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, which in turn fostered thriving bootlegging businesses all across America. Prohibitory laws surrounding opium were the outcome of the anti-Chinese sentiment that took the upper hand at the time. The media added to the anti-Chinese sentiment by portraying them as evil, cunning men who would lure white women into their opium dens to make them addicted and lose their morality, as well as respectability, forever. Despite existing laws, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Geary Act, politicians and Americans felt that more needed to be done in order to have an excuse to either put the Chinese immigrants in jail or deport them. The San Francisco Opium Den Ordinance is a perfect example of this, as well as the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. To prohibit one way of ingesting the drug and leaving other forms of ingestion out of harm‟s way, while it was precisely the smoking that was popular with the Chinese immigrants, shows that politicians and law-makers wanted to hit them harder than the rest of the, mostly white, users. After five years of uneven legislature the government finally changed this disparity with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. The Harrison Narcotics Act was essentially killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand, there was now a new excuse to further marginalize the Chinese immigrants and

37

Chinese-Americans and on the other hand there was an excuse to criminalize the African- American community, which was associated with cocaine in a variety of scandalous headlines. Not only was the politician involved in making the act, Hamilton Wright, a racist himself, he also perpetuated the images that the media had shown the public for years: the image of a „cocaine-crazed Negro‟ being violent and going on killing sprees. Also, the wrongful image of an African-American gaining superpowers and becoming bulletproof after using cocaine was an image that many Americans believed to be true because that picture had been painted by the media for almost two decades. Due to this negative image about the use of cocaine by African-Americans, the image that the jazz world was interchangeable with drug use and addiction was not a big leap for many people to take and it thus became the new scapegoat for drug use and addiction. Harry J. Anslinger was, like Hamilton Wright, a racist and used the media to make people believe marijuana was the most dangerous drug imaginable. Initially looking for an excuse to protect his agency from further budget cuts and to protect his position, he started an all-out offensive against a drug that he believed was smoked by all sorts of minority groups. African-Americans were among them, but the drug had also always been very much associated with Mexicans. When Mexican immigrants started coming to the United States after the Mexican Revolution and brought with them their custom of using marijuana recreationally, many Americans feared these customs. Coupled with the fact that these Mexican immigrants were competing with Americans for the scarce jobs that were available during the Great Depression, an anti-Mexican sentiment was allowed to grow. In order to control these Mexican immigrants, El Paso, Texas, was the first city in America to devise a law surrounding marijuana. Anslinger used racism, the anti-Mexican sentiment, and the media to prohibit marijuana and thereby devised a system that would systematically put minorities behind bars. The media, particularly newspapers, were in a way responsible for creating the fearful and angry public mood. Through stories completely divorced from the truth, they spread lies about drugs and minority group in order to create negative attitudes towards them. In turn, public officials like Anslinger made clever use of the hysteria created by the media to reach the goal he was striving for: the prohibition of marijuana (and a continued justification for his own job). Similarly, fantastical stories about the effect of cocaine on African-Americans found their way into the head of one of the creators of the Harrison Narcotics Act, giving him the excuse to criminalize a minority group he despised. This was a tried and true tactic that

38 was not so dissimilar to the way that white American elites has marshalled anti-German sentiment to create public support for the cause of prohibitionists. Since „the Anslinger years‟ the drug laws in the United States have become increasingly stricter, and more oppressive. In many ways, Anslinger was responsible for the standard by which government administrations handled their drug enforcement. His view that drug criminalization was better than the treatment of addiction persevered through many administrations and it is only now, with the Obama administration, that treatment rather than criminalization is getting more attention. The refocus from criminalization to rehabilitation and treatment has not been absolute, however. The scheduling of drugs have remained the same, despite the call for revision. The mandatory minimum sentences have stayed in place and are responsible for thousands of Americans being locked up for minor drug offenses, such as the possession of marijuana. Insofar as the War on Drugs, like the previous laws surrounding drugs, was meant to contribute to the repression of minority communities, it has been wildly successful. Today, there is still a great disparity between the number of minorities incarcerated for drug offenses and the number of white Americans that are incarcerated. As Gabriel Chin has observed, while “African-Americans are not more likely to commit drug crimes than members of other races, they are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to prison…The War on Drugs, then, is a new occasion for the employment of traditional techniques of discriminating against racial minorities.”130 When one considers that African- Americans make up 14% of the regular drug users, but make up 37% of people arrested for drug offenses, Chin‟s contention seems obvious. When one considers that African Americans serve about as much time in prison for drug offenses as white Americans do for violent offenses, the ramifications of Chin‟s contention of systemic racism becomes absolutely clear.131 This racial disparity also means that minorities are being disenfranchised at a higher rate than white Americans: one out of thirteen African-Americans can‟t vote because of a felony conviction, while this happens to „only‟ one out of fifty-six non-black voters.132 There are four states, being Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia, that permanently deny people with a felony conviction to vote. Other states deny for instance people that are on parole or

130 Gabriel J. Chin, “Race, the War on Drugs, and the Collateral Consequences of Criminal Conviction,” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 6, no. 2 (2002): 254. 131 “Race and the War on Drugs,” Drug Policy Alliance, last modified 2016, accessed May 23, 2016, http://www.drugpolicy.org/race-and-drug-war. 132 “Felony Disenfranchisement,” The Sentencing Project, last modified April 28, 2014, accessed May 23, 2016, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-in-the-united-states/. 39 probation to vote, or only deny certain categories of ex-offenders the right to vote.133 Since it affects African-American men disproportionately, it is a concept professor of law and writer Michelle Alexander calls „the new Jim Crow‟ in light of the fact that in the Jim Crow era criminal conviction was introduced as a means to deny African-Americans their newly acquired voting rights.134 It is a well-known fact that America‟s drug war has caused mass incarceration. The total population in America makes up nearly 5% of the global population, yet has almost 25% of the total number of people incarcerated in the prison system.135 And, as noted before, this disproportionately affects minority groups such as African-Americans and Hispanics: of the total amount of people convicted for drug charges, 57% are either black or Latino, even though they use and sell drugs just as much as white people.136 More than 80% of the drug arrests happen because of possession only and these people go to prison with murderers and rapists sitting in the next cell.137 This trend is also caused by discriminatory legislation surrounding cocaine and crack- cocaine. Crack, a derivative of cocaine, gained quickly in popularity in the 1980s. Cocaine prices were high but crack cost only a few dollars per gram and could even be sold by a single dose, causing it to find detractors everywhere in the United States. There was a spike in powder cocaine use at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s and this spike was caused primarily by white people. This did not get much media attention, if any. But the use of crack soon became associated with African-Americans, who did not use the drug any more or less than other Americans, and this sparked a media outrage. The use of crack was not limited to urban neighborhoods where mostly low-income minorities lived, yet it was just these neighborhoods where the devastation of the „crack epidemic‟ became most visible. The sensationalist media made sure everybody in America knew about these neighborhoods and exaggerated the problems they caused, adding to the image of crack being a „minority drug‟.

133 “Fact Sheet: Felony Disenfranchisement,” The Sentencing Project, last modified April, 2014, accessed May 24, 2016, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felony-disenfranchisement-laws-in-the-united-states/. 134 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). 135 Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the World‟s Population and One Quarter of the World‟s Prisoners?” The Washington Post, last modified April 30, 2015, accessed May 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/30/does-the-united-states-really-have-five- percent-of-worlds-population-and-one-quarter-of-the-worlds-prisoners/. 136 “Drug War Statistics,” Drug Policy Alliance, last modified 2016, accessed May 26, 2016, http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-war-statistics. 137 Ibid. 40

Politicians were eager to step in and take care of the perceived problem because they knew the public would support them if they did.138 With the War on Drugs just starting, it had to be shown that the newly developed problem would be handled harshly and with intensity. Law enforcement efforts were concentrated in the low-income urban areas of cities and thus disproportionately affected minorities. “The conflation of the underclass with crack offenders meant the perceived dangerousness of one increased the perceived threat of the other. Urban blacks, the population most burdened by concentrated socio-economic disadvantage, became the population at which the War on Drugs was targeted.”139 To make matters worse, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, which, among other things, put in place a 100-to-1 disparity for the distribution of crack cocaine relative to powder cocaine. This meant that for 500 grams of cocaine, people would get the same sentence as they would get for only five grams of crack cocaine: a minimum of five years in prison.140 African-Americans were already disproportionately affected by the concentration of law enforcement in their neighborhoods and with the new act it also meant that they were put in prison at disproportionate rates. The 100-to-1 disparity was overturned when Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which reduced the ratio to 18-to-1. So, from attributing superhuman strengths to every black person who used cocaine to concentrating law enforcement efforts in low-income, urban neighborhoods because of the „crack epidemic‟: African-Americans have been the scapegoat for cocaine and its derivative for more than a century. It was another means to discredit them and ultimately criminalize them on the basis of their perceived custom. Because they had always been associated with drugs and bad behavior, it was only a small step to link them to drugs again, this time to crack-cocaine. The disparity in the number of minorities that are put behind bars in contrast to the number of white Americans that are put behind bars also stems from racial profiling. Racial profiling is “a practice law enforcement uses that is based on race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or perceived immigration status. Authorities investigate, stop, frisk, search, or use force against individuals based on subjective, personal characteristics, rather than on concrete

138 Jamie Fellner, “Race, Drugs, and Law Enforcement in the United States,” Human Rights Watch, last modified June 19, 2009, accessed May 25, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law- enforcement-united-states. 139 Ibid. 140 Deborah J. Vagins and Jesselyn McCurdy, “ACLU Releases Crack Cocaine Report, Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 Deepened Racial Inequity in Sentencing,” American Civil Liberties Union, last modified October 26, 2006, accessed May 25, 2016, https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-releases-crack-cocaine-report-anti-drug-abuse-act- 1986-deepened-racial-inequity-sentencing. 41 evidence or unlawful behavior. People of color are profiled while they drive, shop, pray, stand on the sidewalk waiting for work, or travel on airplanes, trains, and buses.”141 This does not only happen to African-Americans and Latinos, but all members of minority races, such as, for instance, Asians, Arabs and Muslims. Data provided by the American government shows that Hispanic, African-American and white drivers were stopped about as often by the police, yet the Hispanics‟ vehicles were searched 8.8% of the time, African-Americans 9.5% of the time and whites 3.6% of the time.142 This shows that the color of one‟s skin matters in the decision to search one‟s car. When it comes to race and drugs, in the United States, it can almost be said that it has always been better to have white skin (and to speak English and profess Protestant Christianity). For at least 150 years, people marginalized by (native-born, English-speaking and often Protestant) white Americans have been attacked, marginalized and criminalized and the trend of hiding racism, and ethnocentrism, behind drug laws perpetuates to this day.

141 “Race and Ethnicity in America: Turning a Blind Eye to Injustice,” American Civil Liberties Union, last modified December, 2007, accessed June 16, 2016, http://aclu.org/pdfs/humanrights/cerd_full_report.pdf. 15. 142 Ibid. 15. 42

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