McCormick grows hemp

How is it that some plant, which has a multitude of uses, both medical and industrial, got so demonized that even an upstanding Republican like Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune got into trouble growing hemp? I don't get it. cColonels Hemp:

As crops throughout the midwest withered during the drought of 1936, the Chicago Tribune reported on one plant untroubled by the lack of water. "When we stopped to look at the test plot where the hemp is growing, we wanted to doff our straw hat and give this plant a little applause," wrote reporter Robert Becker. "It has grown remarkably in spite of intense heat and drouth [sic]. In fact, one of the boys was saying that during the week of the most severe heat the hemp kept pushing its head to the blazing sun." 



Becker's report showed up in a regular Tribune feature called "Day by Day Story of the Experimental Farms." This space kept readers up-to-date on two farms in the western suburbs that had been started (and publicized) by the Tribune in hopes of bringing innovation to the desperate farming industry.



Hemp, traditionally used to make products like rope, paper, and birdseed, was an obvious choice for the experimental farms. Though it had been cultivated in the U.S. since colonial times by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Americans weren't growing much hemp in the 1930s. But new technological advances, as well as its natural resistance to drought, made hemp potentially attractive to struggling farmers.



Less than a year after Tribune employees reported on the impressive properties of hemp, the drug czar of that day published an influential article in American Magazine. The story by Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, began: "The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marihuana."



It wasn't long before the Chicago Tribune's hemp crop was the focus of a federal drug investigation.

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