Hemp for Victory: The Film the Government Denied

“In 1942, the USDA produced a film urging American farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. By the 1980s, the government denied the film had ever existed. Two activists found copies in the Library of Congress.”

In 1942, with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines having cut off the United States' primary supply of Manila hemp, a critical material for military rope, rigging, and parachute webbing, the USDA produced a thirteen-minute documentary film titled Hemp for Victory. It urged American farmers to grow cannabis hemp as a patriotic duty. It explained cultivation methods, harvesting techniques, and fiber processing. It showed footage of hemp fields and processing facilities. It distributed 400,000 pounds of cannabis seed to farmers across the Midwest.

By the 1980s, when Jack Herer began citing the film in Emperor, the government denied it had ever been made. USDA archivists told researchers there was no such film. Library of Congress records did not list it. The official position was that Hemp for Victory did not exist.

Two cannabis activists, Maria Farrow and Carl Packard, spent considerable time searching the Library of Congress holdings. They found copies of the film, registered to the USDA, in 1989. Herer announced the discovery at a press conference. The Library of Congress was subsequently pressured to acknowledge the film's existence and enter it into its publicly accessible catalog.

The film is now publicly available. It runs thirteen minutes. It shows American government officials enthusiastically promoting the cultivation of the same plant that was classified as a Schedule I narcotic with no legitimate use five years after the film was made.

This is the temporal paradox at the center of Herer's argument: not that hemp was always suppressed but that it was suppressed selectively, prohibited in 1937, promoted in 1942 for the war effort, prohibited again in 1946 when the war ended. The scheduling decision, when placed alongside this history, becomes harder to justify as a pharmacological judgment. Whatever drove the 1937 legislation, it was not the same motivation as the 1942 urgency, and the 1946 return to prohibition followed neither pharmacological nor agricultural logic.

Sources

• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)
• Wikipedia, Hemp for Victory
• USDA Film Archives