Passage: Hemp for Victory, 1942

“'Hemp for Victory' was the title of a 1942 USDA film urging farmers to grow cannabis hemp as a patriotic duty. The same government denied the film's existence in the 1980s.”

The film: Hemp for Victory, produced by the USDA in 1942, thirteen minutes long, distributed to American farmers across the Midwest. Its message: grow cannabis hemp for the war effort. The Philippines had fallen to Japan, cutting off the supply of Manila hemp critical for military rope, rigging, and parachute webbing. The government needed domestic production. It distributed 400,000 pounds of cannabis seed to farmers and made a film encouraging them to grow the plant.

The denial: When Herer began citing the film in Emperor, the USDA denied it had ever been made. Library of Congress records did not list it. Archivists told researchers there was no such film.

The recovery: Maria Farrow and Carl Packard searched the Library of Congress holdings and found it in 1989. Herer announced the discovery. The Library of Congress subsequently acknowledged the film's existence.

Why this passage matters: The Hemp for Victory sequence is Huxley's most compressed argument. It is not a conspiracy theory, it is a documentary record. The US government produced a film urging patriotic cannabis hemp cultivation in 1942. Four years earlier, the same government had passed legislation eliminating the same crop on the grounds that it was a dangerous narcotic. After the war, the same government returned to prohibition.

The contradiction is on film. The film is in the Library of Congress. The government denied the film existed. Then acknowledged it.

Herer assembled documents, and the documents made the argument. This sequence, the film's existence, the government's denial, the discovery, the acknowledgment, is the structure of the book in miniature.

Sources

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