The Billion Dollar Crop That Never Was

“In February 1938, Popular Mechanics ran the headline 'New Billion-Dollar Crop' over a story on hemp. The Marihuana Tax Act had taken effect four months earlier, on October 1, 1937. The article forecast a cash crop worth several hundred million dollars a year.”

The February 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics carried an article under the headline 'New Billion-Dollar Crop.' It described a machine, the decorticator, that stripped fiber from hemp stalks, and it forecast a cash crop worth 'several hundred million dollars' a year. Rope, twine, linen and paper pulp were among the products it listed, and it said hemp would displace imported fiber. It also noted that federal rules for hemp growers were being drafted.

The Marihuana Tax Act had been signed by President Roosevelt on August 2, 1937 and took effect on October 1, 1937, four months before the article appeared.

Jack Herer uses this timing as the most concrete evidence for his conspiracy argument: a mainstream magazine was celebrating hemp's industrial potential just after the law that taxed and regulated the crop took effect. He argues that the decorticator would have made hemp economically competitive with DuPont's nylon and with the timber industry's wood pulp paper, and that the Tax Act protected both industries from that competition.

The documents support less than that. The article does not mention synthetic fibers. DuPont's nylon patent was filed in April 1937 and granted in September 1938, and nylon was aimed first at the silk stocking market. The Act's text excluded mature stalks, fiber, oil and the cake from the seeds, so it did not name hemp fiber as its target, although its registration and tax requirements burdened growers, and hemp processors asked Congress for changes in 1937. Whether this adds up to conspiracy or coincidence is the question the book leaves open. Herer answers conspiracy, and the documentary record supports correlation at most.

The Popular Mechanics article is available in the magazine's archives. It is one of Herer's strongest exhibits because it is a mainstream trade publication's assessment of hemp's commercial potential, published just after the new law took effect. It also shows that the industrial case for hemp was being made in public, where any reader can check it.

Sources

• Popular Mechanics, New Billion-Dollar Crop (February 1938)
• Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (1985)
• Wikipedia, Marihuana Tax Act of 1937
• Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, 50 Stat. 551 (approved August 2, 1937)
• U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Taxation of Marihuana, hearing on H.R. 6906 (July 12, 1937)
• U.S. Patent 2,130,948, Synthetic fiber (granted September 20, 1938)
• Science History Institute, Wallace Hume Carothers profile
• Wishnia, Debunking the Hemp Conspiracy Theory, AlterNet (2008)