Fiends and Foes

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.

Load more