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112
Book Reviews
Kentucky hemp history
A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky. James F. Hopkins. Foreword by Thomas D. Clark. The University Press of Kentucky, 1998 (1951), 244 pages w/ 8 pages of B/W plates.
I knew I had
arrived when, leaving Shelbyville in Shelby County, and heading toward Lexington
on the old State Road 60 (long-since a back road, superseded by Interstate 64),
I encountered the first intersection: the marker identified the crossing road as
"Hemphill Road."
Yes, of course, Shelby County
Kentucky! I rifled through the manila folder on the passenger seat for the
dog-eared photocopy and flipped to the map. I was in the heart of old Kentucky
hemp country. Weren’t my chances pretty good of finding a copy of
"Hopkins" at an antiquarian in this University of Kentucky-Lexington
town? That, at least, was the hope with which I rationalized turning south from
Indianapolis rather than bee-lining it for home in Wisconsin, during February of
1994.
The proprietor of the Black Swan
bookstore took the words from my mouth when all I said was, "I’m looking
for a copy of Hopkins..."
"History of Hemp in
Kentucky," he finished my sentence and my hope crashed. "You’d be
about third on the list. Do you want me to put you down?"
Sure. (I think you just did.) About
how much would it go for, do you think?
"100 plus." (Two years
later I would receive a postcard from the Black Swan. They had a copy for $120.
The Kentucky Hemp Growers’ Museum and Library acquired it for their
collection.)
Then the proprietor said, "He’s
still alive, you know."
I did not even know that Dr. James F.
Hopkins lived in Lexington! He had been a history professor at the University of
Kentucky in the years after his doctoral dissertation became A History of the
Hemp Industry in Kentucky. I had presciently copied the coveted work late
one night on the company machine, from the broken and tattered tome held in the
library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. I would, years later, spelunk
their "stacks" to unearth the history of the hemp industry in
Wisconsin, destined to become "Fiber Wars: The Extinction of Kentucky
Hemp." And here he was alive and in Lexington and in the phone book!
I called from the Black Swan and
changed clothes in the gas station. If I was going to meet Dr. Hopkins, it would
be as Dr. West. Clothes can be about respect.
Sales of the University of Kentucky
Press’s re-issuance of A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky
should number the hemp activists in the world, as every one can be expected to
purchase for themselves a copy of this indispensable account of the vicissitudes
of the hemp industry in Kentucky and Tennessee during its halcyon period before
the Civil War and its decline thereafter.
Though many may buy, fewer will read,
as it is, admittedly, a fairly dry subject and the struggles of a local industry
to supply plant material to a narrow market is not Gone with the Wind,
though both the crop and its local industry may now be.
After its publication by the
University of Kentucky Press in 1951, and with the final complete demise of hemp
agriculture in the North America, "History of Hemp" became an obscure
chapter of American agricultural history, soon out of print. Dr. Hopkins had
moved on to other matters. His wife Bernice answered the door of their quaint
home in a tree-lined Lexington neighborhood and she actively joined our
conversation.
Of late, Dr. Hopkins said, it seemed
that interest in hemp was increasing again. Little did either of us know then,
how much! His memory of the details of his history was unimpeded at 83. We did
our subject good ser-vice in a conversation lasting over three hours on that
serendipitous afternoon. I think it was a Wednesday.
Hemp came to Kentucky by 1775,
Hopkins chronicled, when Archibald McNeill first planted it on Clark’s Creek
near Danville. When Kentucky became a state, an official inspector was
designated responsible for assuring the quality of hemp exported from the state.
The industry rose with the cotton
trade because five percent of the weight of a cotton bale was actually hemp in
the bale bagging and binding straps ("bale rope"). Only hemp had the
strength to withstand the pressure of the compressed bales. (The greater the
compression, the more bales on the barge.) The prospects of the Kentucky
industry rose and fell with the fortunes of cotton. Optimism that hemp might
usurp cotton markets during the Civil War went unfulfilled. When the war ended,
cotton resumed. The great decline of this industry came after the war when steel
bands replaced the hemp bands, and cheap imported jute was substituted for the
baling cloth. A requirement that inland cargo barges use steel cables sundered
another hemp market.
Throughout the century, political
efforts by Kentucky legislators to encourage the domestic hemp industry in
Kentucky managed to raise tariffs on imported fibers. These came and went.
Cotton brokers often railed against the low quality of Kentucky baling hemp and
were willing to pay extra for the foreign bagging that had such significance to
them.
Despite the legislative
encouragements, the Navy’s hemp continued to come from Italy and Russia where
traditional practices, particularly water-retting, produced a better fiber.
Throughout its history, the Kentucky industry grappled with the need to
implement improved methods of handling the crop, of retting, and of rope
production. Perennial low prices compromised such undertakings.
In addition, the Black population
depended on the work that hemp provided in breaking and hackling the crop by
hand, as depicted on the Paris, KY, courthouse dome. It was the availability of
this labor that obviated Kentucky’s implementing technical advances, such as
the mechanization of fiber processing, later accomplished by the Wisconsin
industry, where labor was limiting. Fiber growing and processing moved north and
Kentucky would be, in the twentieth century, primarily the seed supplier.
Hopkins described in detail, the
efforts of one entrepreneur, David Myerle, to produce quality, water-retted hemp
for the Navy. He failed to meet the deadline of the contract more than once and
ultimately ended in financial ruin, his hemp seized by creditors. He persisted
nonetheless, moving on the Missouri, which became a major hemp producer, but
water-retting never caught on. For one thing, the odor and pollution from
retting ponds was objectionable to the community, and, for another, there was a
loss of slaves to pneumonia from working in the ponds during the winter. Myerle’s
experience would be repeated, but never with success. All this is chronicled in
Hopkin’s tome.
On that afternoon, we reviewed these
events of over a century earlier, and they begged the question, "Why hemp?
It was 1994, and I had barely thrust my toe (or tow) into the deep waters I
would soon be swimming in. I came with a different point of view, and Dr.
Hopkins was intent on my discussion of the crop as seen by a plant breeder. He
did not know that hemp was not marijuana. He had written, "Between the two
world wars hemp assumed a sinister aspect in the United States owing to a
growing use of the drug, marihuana, which is produced by the same plant from
which fiber is obtained." (pg. 213). It was, after all, the official line.
"People don’t smoke
hemp," I told him. "At least, not twice." It was a point no one
had ever made to him, his field was historiography, not biology. I discussed
plant genetic variation. When he asked why it interested me so, I talked about
hemp as weed control, as hemp people always must while others are peering deeply
into your eyes for signs of duplicity.
"Would you consider re-issuing
‘History of Hemp’?" Hopkins didn’t think there would be sufficient
interest. That was then. The new edition is now in paperback, with a durable
binding and an attractive photo of a hemp seed harvest. You can see it’s a
seed harvest by the spacing and diameter of the stalks. The back cover blurb is
back-shadowed with a photo of a Kentucky hemp brake in action. Thus, the two
aspects of the Kentucky industry—fiber and seed— are sensitively
represented. These pictures are also inside among the fifteen perfectly
reproduced images of the old industry. The paper is recycled, but not hemp.
Noted Kentucky historian Thomas D.
Clark has contributed the Forward. Blacks, Clark suggests, smoked the hemp.
Actually, as he tells it:
"Then, in the late 1930s there appeared a slight suspicion that the hemp plant had a narcotic or mind-altering chemical property. Soon after World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation appealed to the Department of History at the University of Kentucky to supply possible information about the smoking of hemp blooms and leaves in earlier years. There seemed to have been some on the parts of slaves, and later field laborers. A case of a slave smoking hemp in the neighborhood of Owensboro could be documented, but there was a vagueness about other instances."
Seems enough to
ban an entire crop, doesn’t it? That same year I met Hopkins, a newspaper
story on an eradication effort—no doubt a DEA press release recycled as news—informed
us that, "Hemp is the plant from which marijuana is extracted."
Hopkins’ book is not about the dark
hemp times in this century. And there is little in the study which would
recommend the crop to modern times, although Hopkins managed to end on a
wistfully optimistic note.
"At the end of World War II, the hemp industry in Kentucky appeared to have vanished. In time of stress, however, when fiber is needed and prices are high, it may appear again. Once more, perhaps, the distinctive odor of growing hemp will hang heavily in the summer air, and the fields of emerald green may once again add beauty to the Kentucky landscape."
It was five o’clock
and Dr. Hopkins was needing to rest. He would pass-on the following year. But he
said there was someone else in town I should meet, who was also interested in
hemp. He made a phone call.
Not far away and only a few minutes
later, the door opened and Joe Hickey said, "We can’t believe yer
here."
Neither could I. That very evening, a
reporter was coming to inter-view Joe and his then-associate in hemp, Dan
Wooten, about their "club", the "4-F’s Club" ("Future
Fuel and Fiber Farmers of America"). The new edition of the Hopkins book
contains a citation in its updated bibliography to this evanescent organization,
and a "proposal" modestly addressed to the President of the United
States in 1993. "Hemp is not marijuana," I told them. "That’s
not what the law says," they said. That night went late.
The 4F’s Club would eventually
become the re-vivified Kentucky Hemp Growers’ Cooperative Association. And Joe
would visit the Governor to say, "What about hemp, Gov?" whereupon
"the Gov" would appoint a Task Force initiating a succession of
tumbling dominos of hemp action from Colorado to Ontario to Vermont and Missouri
and California and Oregon and Minnesota and Wisconsin. Who’d I forget? Cam
Wood’s subsequent piece in Ace Magazine (Feb. 1994) opens with reference to
the Hopkins book and goes on to provide an account of a nascent revolution
sparked to life in a kitchen in Lexington.
Dr. Hopkins made yet another
contribution shortly before his death, when he passed to Joe the information
that the Woodford-Spears seed company, in Paris, Kentucky, had been a hemp seed
producer. We had a get-together later that year when I was introducing Joe
Strobel to Joe Hickey so the Kentuckians and Ontarians could share their
experiences and conspire. We planned some outings, including a trip to Paris,
where we could see the murals on the courthouse dome and stop by Woodford-Spears
to learn what they might know about the old seed.
Steve Spears was letting his sons run
the company now. But he had become recently quite curious about the boxes of
business correspondence, nary a piece of which had ever been discarded in the
company’s entire history and was piled high in the "tower." We found
him in back, sorting papers. These, it turned out, were letters to and from such
parties as the Rock River Hemp Mills in Wisconsin, dating from the first decades
of the century. (This actual letter can be viewed at the NAIHC website, www.naihc.org).
He had sorted stacks of these documents and he gave us each a handful which we
accepted greedily, giving each other looks like we had landed on a planet where
the natives were innocently adorned in diamonds, and generous.
He said, "You know we have the
old equipment out back."
Never was there such a group of happy
hempsters. The Woodford-Spears "find" turned out to be the King Tut’s
tomb of hempobilia, including old scutched fiber, probably left from the last
war crop. A hank of it hangs on my office wall as I write this. Indeed, they did
have the old equipment out back.
Steve Spears told us, "My sons
were bugging me to get that old stuff out of here. But I knew someday you would
come."
It’s been like that.
Kentucky’s hemp history runs deep
and has not ended. It is at least ironic, perhaps pathetic, that a state whose
agricultural base is an addictive drug (tobacco), which is responsible for
400,000 deaths a year, is today sanctimonious about growing a plant (hemp) which
once was its agricultural base and is not a source for a non-addictive drug
(marijuana), which has killed no one. Most peculiar, I’d say. A sad moment in
the history of the hemp industry in Kentucky, and elsewhere.
‘History of Hemp’ does not delve into
the later events and Dr. Hopkins was unaware, as was I in 1994, of how complex
it was to become. Hemp moved elsewhere, although Kentucky continued to grow seed
for Wisconsin until the end in 1957. We don’t know to what extent the improved
USDA varieties like ‘Chinamington’ had entered commercial usage. It is
unlikely that the industry would not have substituted the latest developments
for the "Common Kentucky" strains of yore. In any case, the only
remnant we have of these unique genetics are the feral plants around Shelby
County, down Hemphill and other old roads of a history denied, which are
annually the object of attack by DEA eradicators.
‘History of Hemp’ is not a book to
shed light on much that is current with hemp. Nor is it a book to explain how we
got into our current quagmire. That book hasn’t been written, and the clichés
are wrong. Dr. Hopkins does mention, in his conclusion, the rise of hemp growing
in Wisconsin and the War Emergency hemp production. However, the rise and fall
of the "unorthodox" industries (as B. B. Robinson called them at the
1938 Marihuana Conference) in Minnesota and Illinois, which were the subject of
the famed 1938 Popular Mechanics article, and the object of the FBN’s
marihuana enforcement effort that proved fatal to the hemp industry, are not
within the titular scope of this history. These industries began their expansion
in 1933, but were gone by 1939 and did not participate in the War Emergency.
They were unorthodox, chemurgic, and secretive. It would be of interest to know
from where they got the seed to plant over four times Wisconsin’s 1930s
acreage. The Kentucky seed producers would have had to ramp up production
substantially to fill orders for these new markets.
We know our current problems trace,
in part, to the US Government’s response to the unorthodox industries.
Something about them troubled the FBN to distraction. It was completely
distracted from all the evidence that fiber hemp differs from pharmaceutical Cannabis.
(If pharmaceutical houses had begun using "Cannabis americana"
it may explain the lost efficacy of their potions. The US Pharmacopoeia at one
time specified Cannabis from the East Indies for medicinal preparations.)
It was also so distracted that FBN agents never visited the Wisconsin industry,
focusing all the bureaucratic power given them by the Marihuana Tax Act to over
regulate these new hemp industries until they choked to death on the red tape.
One might question whether their interest had anything to do with either drugs
or fiber.
In 1994, another historian of hemp,
John Lupien, was completing his Master’s thesis at Pepperdine University as
"Unraveling an American Dilemma: The Demonization of Marihuana." He
has persisted in his quest for answers, burrowing deeper into the historical
records than anyone before him. Perhaps, when it appears, his history of hemp
will contain the final answers to what happened in 1937 and why. It’s not
something we will understand outside the full context of that decade. Hopkins’
book is not the place to look for answers to such questions. His is a tale of
halcyon days when hemp was simply a source of strong fiber, when the suggestion
that the crop somehow bore a surreptitious message to children would have been
met with the derisive laughter it deserves.
In 1994, we fervently agreed with
each other around Joe Hickey’s kitchen table that it would be great —however
improbable — for the University to re-issue Hopkins’ book. And, too, it
would be great if the Feds would get their boot off this crop.
1998: one down, one to go.
Dave West
Hemp in Canada
A Maritime Industrial Hemp Product Marketing Study.
Prepared by: Gardner Pinfold Consulting Economists Ltd. and Dr. Jim White of
InfoResults Ltd. Prepared for the Departments of Agriculture of the Canadian
provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. September 1998. 65 pages
The primary objective of this study
was to gather statistical and market information on hemp so as to provide
insight into the opportunities for hemp production and processing for the
Maritime provinces of Canada. With respect to this objective, the study
concludes that: "at this time substantial effort will be required to
develop a maritime industry for many of the markets claimed for hemp products
such as textiles, building materials, alcoholic beverages, livestock feed,
bedding and biomass fuels. The main reasons include insufficient processing and
value-added infrastructure and in-complete research and development
results." The study goes on to conclude that there may be more potential
for oil production, in the health food market, and for paperboard products.
This study is of primary interest to
the maritime provinces of Canada. However, for those who are from other parts of
the world, it may also be of some interest. One learns, for example, that 5,300
acres of hemp are grown in Canada in 1998. More remarkable are the assessments
of the production costs of hemp, which are provided. Pessimistic studies from
Australia (Shaun Lisson, 1998) and the Pacific Northwest of the United States
(Daryl Ehrensing, 1998), re-viewed in the June 1998 issue of this journal,
concluded that at current fiber and seed prices, hemp production is economically
not feasible. How-ever, this Canadian study cites a re-cent analysis of the
University of Kentucky suggesting that hemp farmers would enjoy greater profits
than producers of alfalfa, corn, barley or wheat.
The study further provides
interesting information on the world production of hemp fiber and tow, which was
at about 350,000 tons in the 1960s, reached a low of 50,000 tons in 1994 and has
been rising since then (69,000 tons in 1997). The existing North American market
for hemp is estimated to range between US $28 and US $ 30 million, with annual
increases of $8 to $10 million. The global market for hemp is now valued at
between $100 and $200 million annually. Perhaps the best is yet to come.
Hayo van der Werf
Hemp in South Africa
South African Hemp Feasibility Report. Commissioned by the Interim Task Team on Bast Crops On behalf of the Hemp, Flax, Sisal and Kenaf Cluster. Financed by the South African Bast Crop Consortium. By James Wynn, Director of the Southern Africa Hemp Council. July 1998 48 pages.
This study identifies and assesses existing markets, and lists current hemp research and development initiatives and contact persons across the world and in South Africa. It is of interest primarily to readers from South Africa.
Hayo van der Werf
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