Fiends and Foes
A History of Drug Policies and Racism in the United States
University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities Dr. D.G. Barthe, PhD
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Opium 6
1.1 Brief history of opium 6
1.2 History of Chinese immigrants in the United States 9
1.3 Prohibition of opium 11
Chapter 2: Prohibition 15
2.1 Temperance unions and Prohibition 15
2.2 Prohibition and immigrants 19
Chapter 3: Cocaine 23
3.1 Jazz 23
3.2 African-Americans and cocaine 26
Chapter 4: Marijuana 30
4.1 Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics 30
4.2 Marijuana and Mexican immigrants 34
Conclusion 37
1
Introduction
In the trials that followed the Watergate scandal, it was revealed that President Richard Nixon used a taping system in the White House installed in the interest of recording his
conversations for posterity. Only he and a few staff members knew of the taping system and Nixon had kept it a secret so that the people he was speaking to, either in person or on the phone, would really speak their minds.1 When the court ordered Nixon to release the tapes, he was reluctant, but agreed to release written summaries of the conversations. Throughout the trials, even after nineteen people had pleaded guilty to offenses that were linked to the Watergate scandal, Nixon maintained that he had done nothing wrong and even maintained that he should stay in office.2 But the support for Nixon was fading away when the Supreme Court ordered him to release all the tapes and transcripts and the public began to learn that Nixon had been a part of planning the activities surrounding Watergate from the beginning. Moreover, in several conversations one could hear the President speaking about raising blackmail money and avoiding perjury, despite of him maintaining his innocence. Finally, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.3
Nixon wasn‟t the first president to record his conversations: every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had, though Nixon was the last. Unlike his predecessors, Nixon employed a taping system that was automatically triggered if somebody started talking, resulting in more hours of conversation on tape than all previous Presidents combined.4 Not all the tapes have been released to the public yet, mostly due to sensitive information, but the tapes that have been released paint a portrait of Nixon as a deeply paranoid racist. Among the groups that Nixon perceived as his primary adversaries were anti-war activists, Ivy League intellectuals and Jews.
1
Luke A. Nichter. “Play, Pause, Stop, Record: Why Presidents Taped. The Case of Richard Nixon,” Nixontapes.org, accessed April 8, 2016, http://nixontapes.org/origin.html.
2 “The Watergate Story. The Government Acts,” Washington Post Politics, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/part2.html.
3 “The Watergate Story. Nixon Resigns,” Washington Post Politics, accessed April 11, 2016,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/part3.html.
4 Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter, The Nixon Tapes (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), x.
See also Ken Hughes. “A Rough Guide to Richard Nixon‟s Conspiracy Theories,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, accessed April 11, 2016, http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/a-rough-guide-to-richard-nixons-conspiracy-theories. Later, when it became clear that Daniel Ellsberg (whose parents were Jewish but was himself a Christian Scientist) had leaked the Pentagon Papers with assistance from anti-war activists, Nixon saw his paranoia manifested into a true political crisis. He knew Ellsberg‟s guilt was clear, but he was convinced that there had to be others involved. Nixon knew he couldn‟t go after Ellsberg too viciously; he did not want the media (who he also hated and feared) to make Ellsberg into a martyr. Nixon wanted to leak all the information there was in the investigation into the Pentagon Papers to the press to destroy Ellsberg‟s reputation, even though this was a crime. Eventually, because of Nixon‟s meddling, Ellsberg‟s prosecution ended in mistrial.
2
Nixon‟s prejudices are apparent in his taped conversations. In one of his recorded exchanges, Nixon speaks with John D. Ehrlichman, his political adviser, and H.R. „Bob‟ Haldeman, Chief of Staff, about the legalization of marijuana, which Nixon vehemently opposed. Nixon equates homosexuality, marijuana and moral depravity, summoning images of the fall of classical Greek civilization to buttress his bigotry and topping it all off with an anti-Semitic flourish just for good measure:
You don‟t glorify it John any more than you glorify, uh, uh, uh, whores…What do you think that does to eleven and twelve year old boys when they see that?...Well by God can I tell you it outraged me. Not for any moral reason. Most people are outraged for moral reasons, I, it outraged me because I don‟t want to see this country go that way…You ever see what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them… You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general: these are the enemies of strong societies. That‟s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff, they‟re trying to destroy us. You know it‟s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them?5
Of course, Richard Nixon‟s bigotry and racism did not end with homosexuals and Jews. Nixon had no shortage of scorn for the Irish, the Italians or for African-Americans. He states clearly his belief in essentialist ethnic stereotypes in a conversation Nixon had with Charles W. Colson, Special Counsel observing that
…all people have certain traits. The Jews have certain traits. The Irish have certain - for example, the Irish can‟t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I‟ve known gets mean when he drinks. It‟s sort of a natural trait. Particularly the real Irish…The Italians, of course, just don‟t have their heads screwed on tight.6
In another taped conversation between Nixon and his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, he takes issue with Secretary of State William P. Roger‟s, fairly progressive, opinions on
African-Americans, observing that
Bill Rogers has got somewhat – and to his credit it‟s a decent feeling – but somewhat, sort of, a sort of blind spot on the black thing because he‟s been in New York. He says, well, „They are coming along, and that after all, they are going to strengthen our
country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart‟ So
5 “Oval Office Conversation 498-5. Meeting With Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. May 13, 1971.” Common
Sense for Drug Policy, accessed April 8, 2016, http://www.csdp.org/research/nixonpot.txt.
6
Rob Stein. “New Nixon Tapes Reveal Anti-Semitic, Racist Remarks.” The Washington Post, December 12, 2010.
3
forth and so on. My own view is I think he‟s right if you‟re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it‟s wrong if you‟re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that‟s the only thing that‟s going to do it…7
It was Nixon‟s paranoia, combined with his clearly racist beliefs, that led to his „War on Drugs‟. Although Nixon promoted his „War on Drugs‟ under the banner of a public health concern, in 1994 John Ehrlichman refuted this narrative. It was not in the interest of public health that Nixon promoted his policy of repression but, instead, the War on Drugs was conceived primarily as a cynical policy of hyper-criminalization targeting left wing activists and African-American communities. Speaking to journalist Dan Baum, Ehrlichman recalled that
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I‟m saying? We knew we couldn‟t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.8
In a 1969 speech, The Great Silent Majority of My Fellow Americans, he accused anti-war protestors of wanting America “to lose in Vietnam” and that, by this, they invited “defeat and humiliation.”9 Nixon himself wanted to get out of Vietnam too, but on his terms, saying that it wouldn‟t be good for the South-Vietnamese people to withdraw immediately because of the threat of the North taking over the South. By starting the War on Drugs he could gain control over both this group of dissenters as well as over the African-American community that had opposed his Presidency and for whom he harbored racial animosity. With all that said, Nixon was certainly not the first to utilize drug prohibition as a means of repressing ethnic and racial minorities.
In this thesis, I intend to argue that, although Richard Nixon amplified the repression, drug prohibition has always been used by American elites to facilitate the repression of ethnic and racial minorities in the United States. To make this argument, I intend to critically
examine the way the prohibition of opium was used to marginalize Chinese immigrants, how
7
Stein, “New Nixon Tapes.”
8 Dan Baum. “Legalize It All. How to Win the War on Drugs.” Harper‟s Magazine, last modified April, 2016,
accessed April 8, 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.
9
Rick Perlstein, ed., Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 187.
4
alcohol prohibition targeted working class Irish, German and Italian immigrants, as well as Catholics, how the prohibition of cocaine was used to marginalize African-Americans and how the prohibition of marijuana was used to marginalize Mexican-Americans.
The choice to structure this thesis in this manner stems from the chronology of the timeframe of every respective drug prohibition: the Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States around the 1850s and opium prohibition went into effect in 1914. While
European immigrants, such as the Irish, German and Italian immigrants, started coming to the United States in big numbers a short time before the Chinese immigrants, alcohol prohibition did not go into effect until 1919, thus I will discuss the temperance movement second. Third, the association between African-Americans and cocaine emerges around the 1900s and cocaine prohibition went into effect in 1914 but perpetuated into the jazz age of the 1920s and became a major component of the contemporary War on Drugs. I will discuss marijuana prohibition and its association with Mexicans last since marijuana prohibition went into effect only in 1937. This is an important subject to examine because it explains the racist
significance of the War on Drugs that is still going on to this day.
Richard Nixon was a true racist who set out to start the War on Drugs to specifically repress African-Americans and anti-war protestors. However, the racist motives behind the War on Drugs was a fact that was missed by many Americans because Nixon presented it to them as a public health concern. This strategy was not new: in this study, I will demonstrate that many drug laws in America have been connected to a racial or ethnic minority group at some point and that for decades on end, the media (newspapers in particular), have been deceived by public officials to present stories to the public that were simply untrue in order to invigorate the support for their goals to prohibit drugs. Through manipulation of the media, politicians have created an atmosphere that has been utterly hostile towards ethnic and racial minorities, and it is my hope that this thesis will help to raise awareness of the true origins of this terrible, racist, and feckless, regime of drug prohibition.
Because the media has been so important in shaping the public‟s mind and creating support for the drug laws, this thesis will make extensive use of newspaper articles ranging in time from historical articles written during the period that drug prohibition laws were made, as well as more contemporary sources (as appropriate). These newspaper articles provide an important insight into historical attitudes, especially with regards to attitudes towards minority racial or ethnic groups. Laws are not made in vacuums and by interrogating journalistic sources, it is also easier to understand why law makers could make the laws on the grounds
5
that they did: racist politicians made racist laws because there was public support for racist laws.
Also, this thesis will draw on books and articles that are written by a number of historians and journalists. In particular, it will draw on the work of Douglas Valentine and Alexander Cockburn, whose writings I have utilized to undergird the arguments made in this thesis. A lot has been written about the War on Drugs and drug prohibition, yet only recently have scholars begun to make the explicit connection between racism, past drug laws and Nixon‟s War on Drugs before. It is my hope that this work will contribute meaningfully, and positively, to that emerging dialogue.
6
Chapter 1 Opium
From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, large groups of Chinese immigrants came to the United States to work. The Chinese worked for lower wages than American-born workers, which did not earn them any sympathy with their new countrymen. Over time, as more and more Chinese workers went to America, an anti-Chinese sentiment arose that caused the American government to take action against Chinese immigration to the United States through legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In this chapter I intend to argue that, although there were already measures taken to curb Chinese immigration to
America, white American elites, through government action and legislation, marginalized and criminalized Chinese immigrants, and Chinese-Americans, through a legal regime of opium prohibition.
1.1 Brief history of opium
Opium, or rather the opium poppy, has been cultivated for many centuries. Although opium poppies are thought to be indigenous to what the Romans called „Asia Minor‟ (present-day Turkey) the Arabs took the poppy to the East, as far as China, Persia and the Indian
subcontinent. Still, it was the Greeks who first discovered the merits of opium juice, which was more valuable than the seeds, the oil and the capsules, which had all been cultivated previously. After this discovery of the extensive medicinal benefits of opium, its cultivation commenced on a large scale such that by the time the Christian era began, knowledge of the opium plant was widespread.10
The use of opium, a drug with monstrous potential for abuse, was never limited to medicinal purposes but by 1600, the popularity of opium began to increase, for medicinal as well as recreational purposes. About a century later, Dutch traders brought shipments of Indian opium to China and Southeast Asia and also introduced the Chinese to the custom of smoking opium, rather than ingesting it. It was not long thereafter that the Chinese emperor Yongzheng decreed that the trade and use of opium be limited to medicinal purposes. This did not lead to the decrease of opium use he was hoping for, however.11
10 Dr. Watt, “History of Opium, Opium Eating and Smoking,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland 21 (1892): 329, 330.
11
“Opium Throughout History.” PBS Frontline, last modified 1998, accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heroin/etc/history.html.
7
The British East India Company, who already gained control over several opium-growing districts in India, still brought two thousand chests of opium a year to China and by the end of the eighteenth century had established a monopoly on the opium trade. In China, the opium problem became much worse, a circumstance that compelled the emperor Jiaqing to ban opium altogether in 1799 though this ban did not have the intended effect. The black market in opium made it even more profitable to smuggle opium into China and when countries such as England and America began to notice that the products they bought from China were outweighing what China bought from them, they counteracted this by increasing their opium sales in China. This caused the First Opium War between England and China, a conflict wherein China was defeated.12
It was in 1804 that a German pharmacist named Friedrich Sertürner came across the active ingredient in opium: an alkaloid that he named „morphine‟ in honor of the Greek god of sleep and dreams. In 1843, Doctor Alexander Wood pioneered the glass syringe and found that injecting a patient with morphine through a syringe was a far more potent method of delivery than other ways of administering the drug.13
The First Opium War was concluded with a series of treaties between England, among others, and China. However, after a few years, the European powers, unhappy with both the terms of the treaties and the Chinese government‟s failure to adhere to them, revisited the issue which manifested as the Second Opium War. Once again, China was defeated and was forced to sign new treaties, this time with England, France, Russia and the United States. After the Second Opium War, in 1860, the import of opium into China was once again legalized.14
Even though the opium trade was going well, at the end of the nineteenth century the use of the drug was becoming an increasingly bigger problem in the west. In 1874 an English researcher discovered that by heating morphine, he could purify it into diacetylmorphine, the drug that is today better known as heroin and which is far more addictive than opium, with a much higher potential for abuse. In 1878, the British parliament passed the Opium Act in
12 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.”; “Milestones: 1830 – 1860. The Opening to China Part 1: the
First Opium War, the United States and the Treaty of Wangxia, 1839 – 1844,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/china-1.
13 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.”
14 “Milestones: 1830 – 1860. The Opening to China Part 2: the Second Opium War, the United States and the
Treaty of Tianjin, 1857 – 1859,” United States Department of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/china-2.
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response to the perception that opium consumption was getting out of hand. At the same time, the United States imposed a tax on both opium and morphine.15
These measures caused heroin use and addiction in the world to steadily decline. It is not long thereafter that America also prohibited the importation of opium for the purposes of smoking. This prohibition prepared for the Shanghai Conference of 1909 where the United States wanted to talk about legislation to limit the sale of opium to China. At this conference the United States pled to an international delegation that opium was an evil substance that caused immorality.16 America was not the only one who wanted to get rid of opium: in 1912 the first Hague Convention was held and signed by many other countries. In contrast to the Shanghai Conference, the Hague Convention was also concerned with drugs like morphine, cocaine and heroin and in many ways laid the foundation for many drug policies around the world.17 In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in Congress. This act was aimed at opiates and cocaine, but did not directly prohibit them. Instead, it was “an act to provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.”18 It meant that doctors could not dispense the drug freely anymore: they had to keep a list of who they gave the drug to, and why. Many users could thus not get their drug via a legal route anymore and were forced to buy it illegally, allowing for a flourishing black market to arise. Violations of the new act resulted in a fine of as much as two-thousand dollars, or as much as a five-year prison sentence.
Still, for all the problems with opioid abuse in the west, opium smoking had acquired a special significance in China where “opium smoking was not merely about the physiological absorption of an alkaloid, but rather a means of social communication with complex symbolic meanings”.19
Opium was originally a luxury item in China that was associated with wealth and power since only the imperial family (or those with connections to the Chinese ruling class) could afford it. Indeed, for those who did not belong to the imperial family but could
15 PBS Frontline, “Opium Throughout History.” 16 Ibid.
17 “The 1912 Hague International Opium Convention,” United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, last modified
January 23, 2009, accessed May 11, 2016, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/the-1912-hague-international-opium-convention.html.
18 “Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, 1914,” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, accessed May 25, 2016,
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1910/harrisonact.htm.
19
Frank Dikotter, et al., “Narcotic Culture: A Social History of Drug Consumption in China,” The British
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afford opium, like wealthy merchants, smoking opium became a way to signify a privileged social position. Offering opium to one‟s guests meant that one was affluent, if not aristocratic. By the middle of the eighteenth century, opium consumption by elites became very ritualistic and complex. From the preparation to the taste, everything about the process of smoking opium was taken into account.20
Because the use of opium was associated with both wealth and power, it gradually became more and more important for the common people of China, too. Because of its status, more people wanted to use opium and eventually could, because opium was getting cheaper and more readily available. From the nineteenth century onward “opium smoking also became a mark of hospitality among less privileged social groups, where opium was never used alone: consumption was shared, and smoking was an occasion for social intercourse.” 21
This could be done at home, but opium houses were also becoming more common. When large numbers of Chinese began arriving in the US in the middle of the nineteenth century, these immigrants brought their custom of smoking opium along with them.
1.2 History of Chinese immigrants in the United States
In the 1850s large groups of Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States. They worked in goldmines, agriculture and factories, as well as on railroads in the west. This large influx of Chinese workers caused tension in the United States. Most of the Chinese
immigrants came to America to work but sent their money home to their families, who, in China, had a lower standard of living. This combined with the fact that the Chinese
immigrants had to pay off their debts to the person that had paid for their passage to America caused the Chinese immigrants to ask for a lower wage than other American workers. As a result, more jobs were filled with Chinese workers instead of American workers, who were growing increasingly dissatisfied and started resenting the Chinese workers for taking their jobs.22
This resentment fostered an anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States that led to a series of federal acts designed to curb Chinese immigration. The first act was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which restricted labor based immigration from China to America for the next ten years. Any Chinese citizen that wanted to immigrate to the United States had to
20
Dikötter, et al., “Narcotic Culture,” 319, 320.
21 Ibid. 320.
22 “Milestones: 1866 – 1898. Chinese Immigration and the Chinese Exclusion Acts,” United States Department
of State, Office of the Historian, accessed April 18, 2016, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration.
10
prove they weren‟t doing so because they wanted to work there, which meant that virtually no Chinese could immigrate to America because the act stated that “skilled and unskilled
laborers and Chinese employed in mining” were barred from entering the US. Additionally, the Exclusion Act meant that Chinese immigrants who already lived in America had to have special certifications if they needed to re-enter the country and “Congress refused State and Federal courts the right to grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, although these courts could still deport them.” 23
After the Chinese Exclusion Act had expired in 1892, a new act was passed to renew the restrictions: the Geary Act. This act still restricted Chinese
immigration to the United States but also required Chinese residents in America to have a certificate of residence with them at all times. Deportation loomed over those immigrants who did not have such a certificate. The Geary Act was made permanent in 1902 and wasn‟t repealed until 1943, leaving in place a limit of 105 Chinese immigrants to enter America. Chinese immigrants who were already in America could now finally seek naturalization.24
The anti-Chinese sentiment contributed to ghettoization and Chinese immigrants, and Chinese-Americans, began to live together in neighborhoods where they could eat, drink and feel as if they were in China; these neighborhoods were often dubbed “Chinatowns.” The oldest, largest and most famous of these Chinatowns was in San Francisco, California. A city within a city, San Francisco‟s Chinatown was almost entirely self-sufficient.
Local politicians in San Francisco were not very happy with the emergence of these new neighborhoods. In their opinion, Chinatown was a nuisance and above all damning for the real estate prices in surrounding neighborhoods. When a hurricane hit San Francisco in 1906, a series of fires broke out in Chinatown, leaving nothing but destruction behind. The local politicians saw their chance to build something else in its place, but the people of Chinatown argued successfully that rebuilding it in traditional Chinese style would attract more tourism to the town.25
This approach worked: San Francisco‟s Chinatown began to attract the attention from tourists who were interested in everything from the food to the architecture, and everything in between. But as time went on, tourists also came to value San Francisco‟s Chinatown, as well as the Chinatowns in other cities, for their vice: gambling, prostitution and opium dens. In 1895, when opium was still legal, one writer for The Arizona Republican in Phoenix “has for
23 “Chinese Exclusion Act (1882),” National Archives, Our Documents, last modified 1989, accessed April 18,
2016, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47.
24 Ibid.
25 “San Francisco Chinatown,” The Bancroft Library, Berkeley, University of California, last modified January
31, 2005, accessed April 20, 2016,
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some time been looking for a favorable opportunity to give its readers a comprehensive conception of the evil that is being maintained – not only as a general nuisance but where the morals of the youth of Phoenix are corrupted by the existence of these Chinese dens.”26
The writer goes on to tell his readers that the Chinese should be removed from the inner city to the very outskirts, “where they will be less obnoxious.”27
– hoping that the youth of Phoenix would further remain untouched by the evils of opium.
1.3 Prohibition of opium
Chinese immigrants brought the custom of smoking opium socially with them to the United States but, in America, opium smoking was perceived entirely different: it was seen as an immoral act that only the most degenerate would indulge. Adding to this narrative of
degeneracy, the Chinese were also perceived as taking jobs from the native-born Americans, and morally corrupting (white) American youth. This lead to a movement for prohibition of the drug. The first city to take action against opium was San Francisco because, on top of the other ideas about opium and the Chinese, at the end of the 19th century “rumors began to circulate that the opium den houses were evil and that unsuspecting members of the
community – young women were used frequently as examples – were at risk for unknowingly heading down dangerous paths toward disrepute and drug addiction.”28
San Francisco‟s Opium Den Ordinance of 1875 was specifically designed to target the opium dens where opium was smoked. Opium dens became illegal in the city and operating or visiting an opium den became finable up to 500 dollars and one was at risk of a jail sentence of up to six
months.29 Making opium dens illegal gave the city of San Francisco an excuse to both criminalize Chinese immigrants who operated opium dens, as well as „protect‟ white citizens from the evils of opium addiction. The idea that white people had to be protected from the evils of smoking opium survived a few decades, as can be seen in newspaper articles written at the time.30
26 “Dens of Vice,” The Arizona Republican, September 21, 1895. 27 Ibid.
28
Stephen A. Maisto, et al., Drug Use and Abuse (Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2015), 32.
29 Ibid. 32.
30 See also Jay Robert Nash, The Great Pictorial History of World Crime (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
2004), 324 – 328; Jeffrey Scott Mcillwain, “From Tong War to Organized Crime: Revising the Historical Perception of Violence in Chinatown,” Justice Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 1997): 25 – 48; Raymond W. Rast, “The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco‟s Chinatown, 1882 – 1917,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 1 (February 2007): 29 – 60; K. Scott Wong, “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain,”
Chinese-American Literature 20, no. 1 (1995): 3 – 15; Mary Ting Yi Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White
Slavery and Woman Suffrage, 1910 – 1920,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (September 2009): 393 – 417; Barbara Berglund, “Chinatown‟s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Racialization in Nineteenth-Century
12
The editor of the Spokane Press in 1908 quoted Charles B. Wilden, a secretary of the California board of pharmacy, asserted that “women of high social standard in this city, and even boys and girls have fallen prey to the opium habit (that) is a result of the traffic in the deadly drug in the foul dens of San Francisco‟s notorious Chinatown.”31 Charles B. Wilden “has been engaged in a night and day war on the local Chinese opium dealers. To protect white women from the opium-sellers was one of the chief aims of the crusade.”32 There are three things of interest in this particular newspaper article: first, it is odd that this secretary is surprised that upper class white women have „fallen prey‟ to opium addiction. Historian David Courtwright observed that during “the nineteenth century the typical opiate addict was a middle-aged white woman of the middle or upper class”33, so this should have been known to Wilden. Second, his „crusade‟ is specifically directed at white women, boys and girls. All other races, and men, for that matter, are thereby excluded from his „savior‟. Third, it is contradictory that he, a secretary of the California board of pharmacy, would assert such a thing. The group that was most responsible for opiate use, and ultimately addiction, were the doctors and pharmacists who, many times too freely, dispensed opiates to their patients and clients.34
Another article is also concerned with the well-being of upstanding, moral women. In a newspaper from Washington, a writer asserts that “women who go about the task of
educating and Christianizing Chinamen take some dreadful risks”35 and that the Chinese opium dens “constitute a comparatively new danger to American morality and civilization.”36 He goes on to tell his readers that he finds it unbelievable that young women on missionary work are being trapped into a corner and are given opium, after which they lose both their morality and respectability forever. The Chinese can do this, in his opinion, because their influence is “insidious and their wiles so cunning as to be hard to withstand.”37
His
indignation over what happened to one woman that prompted him to write the article, leads him to make generalized conclusions about what happens to women who do missionary work in Chinese neighborhoods, as well as the Chinese in general.
San Francisco,” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005): 5 – 36; Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The
Assault on the East, ca. 1600 – 1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
31 “Fighting to Save Women From Chinese Opium Traffic.” Spokane Press, June 9, 1908. 32 Ibid.
33 David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 1.
34 Ibid. 2.
35 “The Sigel Case and the Real „Yellow Peril‟.” The Wenatchee Daily World, August 30, 1909. 36
Ibid.
13
Almost thirty years after San Francisco‟s Opium Den Ordinance a nationwide law was created that prohibited the smoking of opium: the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. The
importation of non-medicinal smoking opium was thereby prohibited while leaving other forms of opium untouched.38 At the time there were Chinese immigrants who used opium, as well as other groups of people, mainly white men and women. A major difference lay in the way opium was used by these different groups: in general, it were the Chinese immigrants who smoked opium, while white men and women tended to take opium in a liquid form. Chinese immigrants who smoked opium were often referred to as „yellow dope fiends‟, while “white users were politely termed „habitués‟.”39
Prohibiting the smoking of opium with no further consequences for taking opium in another form was thus a law that was quite
specifically aimed at the Chinese immigrants. Five years of uneven legislature went by before the government decided to change the laws surrounding opium: this was when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Act, targeting all forms of opium.40
As noted before, it was mostly white middle or upper class women who were addicted to opiates in the nineteenth century. “But from roughly 1895 to 1935 these were supplanted by a different kind of user. Lower-class urban males…became increasingly conspicuous and were identified in the public mind with the problem of opiate addiction.”41
So, while opium and opium addiction had been common in the United States for a long time and had been associated with different groups of people, it was the Chinese who bore the brunt of the blame for opium addiction in general. In 1910, editorialist F.V. Fitzgerald invoked the specter of the „yellow peril‟ to describe the danger posed to American society by Chinese immigration.
By far the greatest of the evils of the yellow peril is the introduction of the drug habit, a curse of oriental civilization. Because of their location as a gateway to the Orient the western states have suffered most from this accursed affliction. For a score of years they have been more and more in the power of the curse, until today the number of American drug fiends along the Pacific coast is appalling.42
Despite Fitzgerald‟s insistence that opiate addiction was afflicting “more and more,” opium addiction in the US seems to have reached its peak in 1890 before a steadily decline
38 “Effective Drug Policy: Toward a New Legal Framework.” Common Sense for Drug Policy, King County Bar
Association, Drug Policy Project, last modified 2005, accessed June 14, 2016, www.csdp.org/research/effectivedrugcontrol.pdf.
39
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), 70.
40 Ibid. 70, 71. 41
Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 1.
14
thereafter. By 1910, the exact opposite of Fitzgerald‟s claims were true but that did not dissuade him from advancing this racist narrative that criminalized the Chinese community for their custom of opium smoking.43
While there were many factors attributing to opium addiction in America, it were the Chinese immigrants who were scapegoated. Because opium smoking was seen as an immoral vice, the Chinese immigrants were portrayed as evil, cunning men who would make every white woman addicted to opium as soon as they had the chance. Most Americans already did not have the Chinese immigrants in high regard, so attacking them on their opium smoking custom and blaming them for general opium addiction was another way to marginalize an already vulnerable group in American society. Stigmatizing and criminalizing their behavior added to the already existing anti-Chinese sentiment and this made it even harder for the Chinese immigrants to build up a normal life in America. Thus, making a drug that was in a high degree associated with Chinese immigrants illegal, made it easy for the American government to criminalize a minority group.
15
Chapter 2 Prohibition
Chinese immigrants were attacked for a custom that the white, mainly Protestant, elites of American society saw as an immoral vice: the smoking of opium. Similarly, those same white, mainly Protestant elites, attacked the white, mainly Catholic Irish, Italian, and German immigrants for a custom they brought with them: the drinking of alcohol. The newcomers challenged many conservative notions of morality and propriety and many conservative Americans were disinclined to sit around and allow such affronts in what they perceived as their country. In this chapter, I intend to argue that prohibitory laws surrounding alcohol were for a large part directed at European immigrants in order to control them and keep them marginalized from white, middle class, American society.
2.1 Temperance unions and Prohibition
Efforts to prohibit alcohol in the United States commence in the beginning of the 19th century when housewives and others saw the devastating effects of alcohol, particularly on men. They worked long hours and when they got off work, they drank to relax but drinking was often associated with domestic violence. Also, many men would waste their whole paycheck on alcohol, leaving nothing for their families. Ironically, these men drank because it made them manlier, but when it came to providing for their families and protecting them, the alcohol suddenly took that away. 44 Beer had always been popular, but improvements of the distilling process soon made spirits more popular, as well as hard cider. Beer had, on average, 5% alcohol, but distilled spirits had as much as 45% and hard cider about 10%, causing the men to get drunk faster by their unchanged drinking behavior.45
Back then, daily life in America was very much entrenched with alcohol and between 1800 and 1830 alcohol consumption reached its ultimate peak: five gallons per capita
annually.46 There also seemed to always be a good reason to drink, and if there wasn‟t, people would find a reason to drink. Even doctors prescribed alcohol as a cure for certain ailments. The dissatisfaction surrounding alcohol was growing and many people thought it needed to change. These people, especially women and clergy, started speaking out against alcohol, advocating temperance and abstinence, not prohibition per se. This divided the country: on the
44 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. PBS, 2011.
45 W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
8, 9.
16
one hand there were people who saw alcohol as an evil that needed to be dealt with, and on the other hand there were people who liked their drink and didn‟t like being told what to do by others.47 Despite that, temperance unions started to gain ground in many places in America and even managed to curb the alcohol consumption to about two gallons per capita annually after 1830.48
The first temperance movement that had an impact on American society was the Washingtonian movement. This movement was founded in 1840 in Baltimore and asked people who drank to sign a pledge of total abstinence. Many men did: not only to make their wives and children happy, but also because it showed self-respect and honor.49 But the Washingtonians were not the only ones to advocate abstinence: the clergymen of the
Protestant church first began advocating temperance in their sermons and later they took it a step further by preaching abstinence. Also, the women‟s suffrage movement advocated in favor of temperance and abstinence, among other things. In 1851 the temperance movement gained some success regarding alcohol prohibition: Maine became the first state to prohibit both the manufacture and the sale of alcohol. This, however, did not last: in 1856 the law was repealed.50 Just before the Civil War the prohibition efforts tempered. Needing to cope with the hardship of war, many people started drinking again and didn‟t want to think about temperance or abstinence. Also, in need of extra income after the war, the government started taxing alcoholic beverages, so a full prohibition was not what the country needed.51
After the Civil War large groups of immigrants started coming to the United States. They came from Ireland, Germany and other countries in Central and North Europe. Among other things, they brought with them their habit of drinking, which was looser than the drinking habit of many Americans at the time. This habit, but especially the immigrants‟ unwillingness to let the custom go, caused tension in the United States: as native-born
Americans, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants thought they knew best how Americans should behave and above all thought that „real Americans‟ didn‟t need alcohol. Moreover, many of the German immigrants set up breweries once they got to the United States, causing the beer
47 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards. 48 Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic, 8. 49
Ruth M. Alexander, “„We are engaged as a band of sisters‟: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840 – 1850,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988): 766.
50 “Prohibition Nationwide,” PBS Prohibition, last modified 2011, accessed April 25, 2016,
http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/prohibition-nationwide/timeline/.
17
consumption to rise drastically. This all went against what the temperance unions were advocating and they almost saw their efforts going to waste.52
But the temperance movements were relentless. These movements were primarily made up of women who, by doing this work, finally got a chance to work outside the house. While working outside the house still was not something a respectable woman could do, fighting for this idealistic cause was not looked down upon. In 1873 the Women‟s Crusade targeted saloons and saloon owners, urging them to close up shop or at least stop selling alcoholic beverages. They did not have much political power and without this power, one of the only ways to convince people of their ideals was to pray. The Women‟s Crusade did exactly that: they would organize pray-ins in front of saloons and taverns and would do this for hours on end. They also organized demonstrations and held petition campaigns.53 In the smaller cities this approach seemed to have effect: some saloon owners stopped selling alcohol while others closed their saloons entirely. But the bigger cities turned out to be bigger challenges. Here the women were received with disdain: saloon guests mocked the women by drinking as fast as they could and shouting blasphemous slurs at them and saloon owners often sprayed the women with cold water or beer before letting them stand outside in the cold. The women‟s crusade began in Ohio and successfully expanded westward, closing saloons on their way and persuading many saloon owners to stop selling alcohol. But the idealistic crusade turned out to be too much work for the women, who were still expected to take care of everything that went on at home. Also, the progress made was progress that was not backed by any laws: over time many saloon owners started selling alcohol again and many saloons reopened.54
Frances Willard took a different approach and instead of peaceful protest in front of saloons, she advocated women‟s and children‟s rights, especially their right to education, and provided women a place to work outside the home while still being able to take care of their chores at home. In 1879, she became the second president of an organized temperance movement: the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union. Unlike many of her predecessors in temperance movements, Frances Willard advocated complete prohibition. Not just
nationwide, but globally. Under her presidency the organization grew quickly and gained
52 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards.
53 “Temperance and Prohibition,” The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, The Department of
History, last modified 2016, accessed June 13, 2016, https://prohibition.osu.edu/womans-crusade-1873-74.
18
ground everywhere they went.55 Under her presidency the WCTU also set up an educational program for children: the Scientific Temperance Instruction. This program was specifically designed to teach children about the evils of alcohol, as well as narcotics, and to make them afraid of the substances.56 This way, when the children were old enough to vote, they would surely vote in favor of prohibition. The textbooks did not mention alcohol as a medicine, taught the children that alcohol was a poison and that they should be totally abstinent. Those who opposed the Scientific Temperance Instruction argued that it was not in fact scientific, that it did not advocate temperance but abstinence and that it had no instructional value. They were against the fact that the textbooks stated “doubtful theories as attested facts,
propound[ed] principles that were partly false, and present[ed] conclusions opposed by the results of the latest and most accurate scientific research” and “criticized the instruction and the endorsed textbooks for exaggeration and for attempting to bring about moral reform under the guise of science.”57
Despite the critique, the program was taught in schools until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.58
While the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union had a lot of success over the years, another prohibition movement had even more: the Saloon League. Before the Anti-Saloon league emerged, temperance movements were predominantly made up of women. But, as mentioned before, women did not have a lot of political power. The Anti-Saloon League was made up of men and they had the power to get more done. They did not want to be a political party because their sole purpose was to advocate the ban of alcohol and this approach worked. Gaining more and more power, the Anti-Saloon League grew out to be a
well-organized movement, even establishing their own publishing company. They became so powerful and influential that politicians wanted to be on their side because they knew it would be politically damaging if they weren‟t. Working together with the Woman‟s Christian
Temperance Union they started pressing for an amendment on the American Constitution, one that would ban every aspect of the liquor trade in all states. In 1913 Congress passed an amendment that would help the prohibitionists reach their goal: a nationwide income tax. Because of the revenue that would now come from this tax, the government didn‟t need the taxes on alcoholic beverages. After another few years of intense lobbying, the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League finally got their way: in January of
55 “Frances Willard (1839 – 1898).” Harvard University Library Open Collections Program, Women Working,
1800 – 1930, last modified 2016, accessed June 13, 2016, http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/franceswillard.html.
56 Norton Mezvinsky, “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 1, no.
1 (March 1961): 50.
57
Ibid. 52, 53.
19
1919 Congress finally passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale, manufacture and use of alcohol in the United States, except for medicinal use.59
But eventually, the government and prohibitionists learned, it came down to the enforcement of the law and this was no easy task. People who wanted to keep drinking became creative in ways to hide their alcohol, hiding it, for instance, in a hollowed out cane. The bootlegging business exploded and became very profitable, while the government did not have the money or the manpower to be everywhere and check if the law was being followed. Furthermore, in cities all across America illegal bars, or speakeasies, sprouted up in people‟s homes and alcohol flowed freely here. After a while it even seemed to become fashionable to break the law and drink alcohol. While alcohol consumption did decrease, it wasn‟t as much as the government had hoped. It became apparent that Prohibition didn‟t work: a law wasn‟t going to prevent people from drinking alcohol and instead it fostered a culture of illegality and crime.60 After fourteen years of Prohibition, the 21st amendment was ratified in 1933, repealing the 18th amendment.61
2.2 Prohibition and immigrants
One of the main goals of the prohibition movements was to make America a morally upstanding society and alcohol did not fit that goal. While many Americans adopted
temperance or abstinence, there was a new group of people that thought more loosely about alcohol consumption. These were immigrants, mainly Catholics from Ireland and Germany, but also immigrants from other parts of North and Central Europe. They stood in the way of the prohibition movements‟ goal, in their opinion at least, and were therefore targeted as being un-American and morally defective.62
59 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards.
60 “Teaching With Documents: The Volstead Act and Related Prohibition Documents,” National Archives,
accessed June 13, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/volstead-act/.
61 Prohibition: A Nation of Drunkards.
62 See also Kenneth T. Andrews and Charles Seguin, “Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics
of Prohibition Politics, 1890 – 1919,” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 2 (September 2015): 475 – 510; Kevin W. Caves, “The Bottle and the Border: What Can America‟s Failed Experiment with Alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s Teach Us About the Likely Effects of Anti-Immigration Legislation Today?” The Economists‟
Voice 9, no. 1 (January 2012): 1 – 4; Andrew Moore, “The Arc of Reform? What the Era of Prohibition May
Tell Us About the Future of Immigration Reform,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 28, no. 521 (2014): 521 – 554; Erik Grant Luna. “Our Vietnam: The Prohibition Apocalypse,” DePaul Law Review 46, no. 483 (1997): 483 – 568; Edward Behr, Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996); Kenneth D. Rose, American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016); Elliot Robert Barkan, ed., Immigrants in American History: Arrival,
20
One of the earliest measures regarding alcohol that was essentially an anti-immigrant measure was the change in price of liquor licenses from fifty dollars a year to three hundred dollars a year in Chicago in 1855. Also, this measure forbade taverns to be open on Sunday: the only day most people did not have to work. This measure was thought up by Mayor Levi Boone, who was part of a political group known as the Known-Nothings. The Know-Nothings were nativists who were openly anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic. Levi Boone knew he
couldn‟t stop immigrants from coming to the city, but he could do something that would take away a little pleasure. He hoped that, by increasing the price of liquor licenses, most of the German tavern holders would get out of the city and with the Sunday closing rule he knew many of the German and Irish immigrants who liked to drink on their day off, could not do so. Most saloon keepers ignored the Sunday closing rule and were thus arrested or fined. As a result, the immigrants united and on the day of the first trial against a German saloon keeper, the immigrants formed an armed group that was ready to fight the police. A riot broke out that resulted in one man being killed and many more wounded. Boone‟s decision to harass the German and Irish immigrants of Chicago proved to be an unwise decision: in the elections of 1856 German and Irish immigrants united once again and came to vote in great numbers, causing the Know-Nothings to lose. The cost of the liquor licenses went back to fifty dollars a year and taverns and saloons could once again be open on Sundays.63
Because of the enormous groups of immigrants coming to the United States, the demographic began to change. In cities like Chicago this meant that by 1855 immigrants made up almost half of the population.64 Being used to their English-speaking, mostly Protestant land, many Americans felt uneasy about the changes and thus became accusatory towards the immigrants. This was expressed in attacking their customs, like refusing to learn the English language, but mainly their drinking behavior. Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political groups, like the Know-Nothings, were often fervent supporters of the prohibitionist cause because they saw “foreign culture as a threat to American society” as well as the immigrants as “a group likely to drink and as a demographic obstacle to a dry nation”.65 Thus supporting the prohibition efforts was, in their eyes, an excellent way to punish the
immigrants that morally corrupted America.
63
Ron Grossman, “Chicago‟s Lager Beer Riot Proved Immigrant‟s Power,” Chicago Tribune, September 25, 2015.
64 Ibid. 65
Andrew Moore, “The Arc of Reform?: What the Era of Prohibition May Tell Us About the Future of Immigration Reform,” Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 28, no. 3 (2014): 526.
21
From the prohibitionists‟ point of view, Germans were for a large part responsible for corrupting the morals of the United States. Many Germans that came to America set up breweries and opened saloons, at which they were very successful. In the years between 1850 and 1910, the per capita beer consumption increased by 1000 per cent and the number of saloons, often owned by breweries, skyrocketed.66 They even set up their own organization called the United States Brewers‟ Association in 1862, at first to deal with the new Internal Revenue Act, but later this was expanded to other parts of their trade. The Brewers‟
Association used German as their primary language of communication. These German brewers saturated the land with beer and saloons and grew out to be the “first organized opposition against the temperance movement that had ever appeared on the field.”67 The temperance organizations were shocked to see how powerful the Brewers‟ Association became and set out to work even harder towards their temperance goal, this time more specifically going against the German-Americans.
The fact that so many Germans that came to America either opened saloons or started up breweries, that in turn opened a lot of saloons, and above all made the beer consumption in America rise drastically, were all things the native born Americans saw as going against everything they worked hard for to establish. Temperance organizations used this as a tool to convince other Americans that the immigrants were destroying the moral fabric of America and thus alcohol prohibition was needed. One newspaper reported on this, saying that anyone who voted in favor of the breweries, voted in favor of Germany. The writer was convinced that the German breweries used every means necessary to “„buy‟ legislators, congressmen and senators in the United States”68
to accommodate their most favorable outcome, which was to stop Prohibition from happening. He also stated that “America‟s two greatest enemies are Germany and „booze‟”69
and called upon his fellow Texans‟ patriotism to make the right choice when it came to voting in the upcoming elections: vote for America, not for Germany.70 He concluded by saying that the voters should not be biased by any sort of friendship they might have with a German, while he almost pressured his readers into voting for America. So, in order to achieve his preferred goal, Prohibition, he wrote an article that
66 Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition (Garden City: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1950), 116.
67
Ibid. 63.
68 H.E. Caldwell, “Says Hudspeth Is a Republican; Has Opposed Democratic Policies,” El Paso Herald, July 26,
1918.
69
Ibid.
22
was openly anti-German and highly patriotic, in the hope that people would support his cause instead of the breweries‟ cause.
This article is almost certainly inspired by the anti-German sentiment that arose during America‟s involvement in World War I. The war in Europe was an important tool of
temperance movements to further attack on the German immigrants in America and urge native born Americans to vote dry. While America did not get involved in the war until 1917, the German attack on the British submarine Lusitania in 1915 triggered boycotts of “German restaurants and cafes in New York … and [they] lost most their business as a result of anti-German sentiment”.71
In Nebraska a collective of temperance unions, such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman‟s Christian Temperance Union, also utilized the anti-German
sentiment to get American people to vote in favor of Prohibition:
We appeal to every voter in Nebraska and to every resident of the state who loves his country to unsheathe his sword and fight until every German brewery and every pro-German influence in our politics are driven from our land. … and nominate and elect a governor and legislators who believe in American institutions first – men who will wipe out the liquor business as a war measure, and for the promotion of clean politics and good morals.72
Eventually, the prohibitionists got their way with the ratification of the 18th
Amendment and the Volstead Act. Liters of alcohol were poured onto the streets, breweries shut their doors and sold whatever stock they could sell, saloons shut their doors and every member of the working class thus lost their place to relax and enjoy their leisure time. While the anti-immigrant sentiment faded after a while, the prohibition movement had successfully utilized it to convince America that it were the immigrants with their out of hand drinking habits and their eagerness to sell beer to the people destroyed the moral fabric of American society and caused all sorts of social problems. Prohibition was, according to them, the only way to stop this trend.
71
“New York Cafes of Germans Are Hit by Boycott,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, November 22, 1915.
23
Chapter 3 Cocaine
Before Prohibition took effect, the media was full of accounts of African-Americans that became violent through cocaine. With the Harrison Narcotics Act, the drug was prohibited, but the fact that cocaine was in a high degree associated with African-Americans at the beginning of the 20th century gave opponents of jazz music a stepping stone to blame jazz for drug abuse in general. In this chapter I intend to argue that the prohibition of cocaine was a means to criminalize African-Americans and that the trend of blaming them for drug abuse perpetuated into the jazz age.
3.1 Jazz
The jazz age brought with it new challenges for social behavior among Americans. The shadow of Jim Crow was cast over the entire country after 1896 and white elites in the United States were segregating the country from buses to bathrooms to bandstands. Almost anywhere those two separate publics did mix under the same roof, the venue was strictly segregated, by law. Jazz, in America, represented a proposition in direct opposition to this status quo: “Jazz was a biracial music” that was created in a society that was “violently opposed to
biraciality.”73
This social reality, combined with the fact that jazz music was such a radically different proposition from the music that came before it, caused the emerging jazz scene in the 1920s to encounter bitter resistance from more conservative Americans, including outright racists and white supremacists, who wanted to enforce the Jim Crow laws as they were
intended.74
Theodore Kosloff, a Russian-born American dancer, once remarked on the Jazz scene in 1922 that “America is fast approaching a terrific „morning after‟ disgust for her present spree of hugging, sensual, negroid, graceless dancing known as „jazz‟. „Jazz‟ should never have lived. It has no fundamental basis of appeal. It is an excitant only, the „Haig and Haig,‟ the cocaine of physical movement.”75 This criticism echoes that of many of jazz‟s opponents‟ who insisted jazz caused immorality, was barbaric, even demonic, and led people away from classical music, which they saw as the only respectable form of music.
73 Burton W. Peretti, The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 1994), 177.
74
Ibid. 178.
24
Often there were racist motivations at play among jazz‟s critics: jazz culture provided opportunities for interracial relations and this was something that was looked upon with sheer disdain. Black jazz musicians were often barred from playing at the more respectable venues because of the Jim Crow laws, while white jazz musicians could play there without a problem. With Prohibition firmly in place and black jazz musicians not being allowed to play at the respectable venues, jazz for a large part disappeared into the speakeasies that were run by gangsters, who both allowed alcohol to be consumed and black musicians to play. Brothels, of the sort common to Storyville, New Orleans‟ red-light district (and also in other cities),
became regular venues for black jazz musicians.76
Conservative, white, Americans also condemned jazz because they saw it as
unintelligent music. “Jazz appeals to the shallow minded and the unthinking, the lazy and the shiftless, because it requires no attention. It comes to you whether you will have it or not. If you miss any of it, it doesn‟t matter; there is no loss,”77
wrote one writer in a newspaper. In his opinion, jazz was “one of the most pernicious influences”78
in music and spread “its blighting effect to the very woof and fiber of our social, moral, ethical and esthetic fabric.”79 He went on to tell his readers that he did not believe that this „vulgar‟ music really had a future, that it was aggressive and that “there [was] a direct connection between jazz and bad morals.”80
He based this last assertion on the rhythm of jazz: he believed that it was
animalistic, causing people to dance in an animalistic fashion that would be “suggestive and even indecent.”81
He was certainly not the only one to have this opinion of jazz: many opponents of jazz saw the musical genre as leading to immorality.
Another person who thought of jazz as being something despicable was Reverend Doctor Percy Stickney Grant. In another newspaper a writer describes a sermon that explained the evil of jazz in terms of “utter degradation by drink, drugs and sex, abandonment, also extravagance, domestic destruction, suicide and fatal accident.”82
Like the previous writer, Dr. Grant saw jazz as something animalistic, a kind of music that made people want to dance in inappropriate ways and with that destroyed the symbolism of romance that dance was supposed to have. He even went as far as to claim that jazz was responsible for fading
morality, that it was essentially the embodiment of evil and that it was telling young people to
76 “The Devil‟s Music: 1920s Jazz,” PBS Culture Shock, accessed May 25, 2016,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/beyond/jazz.html.
77 Constantin von Sternberg, “On the Influence of Jazz,” Evening Public Ledger, August 31, 1920. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid.
25
let go of idealism and dreams, and to only live in the „now‟. He concluded his sermon by saying: “If jazz is our national anthem, then the Devil‟s crying argument, „Go to Hell,‟ is our national slogan”83, which shows the depth of his disgust for jazz music.
Despite the opposition, jazz gradually gained popularity in America perhaps, in part, due to its ability to challenge the very racist attitudes expressed by its opponents. Prominent New Orleans Creole Jazzman, Dr. Sydney Bechet, recalled to Alan Lomax that when conservative New Orleans Creoles of his parent‟s generation first heard jazz music, they
passed the opinion that it sounded like the rough Negro element. In other words, they had the same kind of feeling that some white people have, who don't understand jazz and don't want to understand it. But, after they heard it so long, they began to creep right close to it and enjoy it. That's why I think this jazz music helps to get this misunderstanding between the races straightened out. You creep in close to hear the music and, automatically, you creep close to the other people. You know?84
Jim Crow existed explicitly to prevent whites and non-whites from “creeping close” and due to the fact that black jazz musicians were often banned to the less desirable
establishments in the cities, jazz culture became associated with vice, including drug use, precisely because the producers of this culture were being racially marginalized. The racial marginalization of back jazz musicians and the association of jazz with drug use was largely spurred on in the 1920s by the media. White elites, through their proxies in the media, created an imaginary narrative wherein there were four million addicts in America (at the same time that the U.S. Public Health Service reported there were only 110,000), presumably because of jazz, and also carefully cultivated an image of a “typical wild-looking jazz musician who is a „hophead‟.”85
While some jazz musicians indeed used drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin,86 there is no evidence that suggests they used it any more or less than the average American. The general public, however, took over the generalized view that jazz was
interchangeable with drugs and opponents of jazz used it as leverage to prove their point that jazz was truly something despicable. However, linking drugs to African-Americans, and ultimately jazz, was not something new: it had been done before jazz was even around. The
83 “Dr. Grants Assails Jazz as Leading Back to the Jungle,” The Evening World, January 30, 1922. 84 Jazzman Sydney Bechet, quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, (London: Pan Books, 1952), 98-99 85
Charles Winick, “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians,” Social Problems 7, no. 3 (1959): 240.
26
close link between African-Americans and cocaine might even be why linking jazz to drugs in general was an obvious connection that many people would see as being self-evident.87
3.2 African-Americans and cocaine
In 1914 the title of a New York Times article was “Negro Cocaine „Fiends‟ Are a New
Southern Menace. Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to „Sniffing‟ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition.”88
The article, written by Edward Huntington Williams, a well-known and respected doctor at the time, explained how cocaine made wild beasts of African-Americans, who immediately became addicted to the drug and went on killing sprees because of the hallucinations and delusions the drug caused. Furthermore, he wrote that the “cocaine sniffing negro”89
became bulletproof after sniffing cocaine: even a bullet to the heart would not stop him from finishing his attack. An attack he would most likely carry out with a gun, since Williams was sure of the fact that cocaine also made its user an excellent marksman. He blamed prohibitory laws surrounding alcohol for the rise of cocaine users, which in turn was responsible for the rise in violence. The upper class could still get their liquor but the lower class was too poor to buy alcohol and thus substituted it with another intoxicant, cocaine. He concluded that a „negro‟ drinking alcohol was bad, but a „negro‟ sniffing cocaine was worse and that the “the evils of alcoholism – its effects upon the individual, or upon the community – are not to be compared with the horrors of
cocainism”.90
It is quite surprising to see an upstanding physician choose alcohol over cocaine, however devastating they both are, in an age when nationwide Prohibition was just around the corner.
That aside, what most catches the eye is the overt racism uttered in this article. In his article he makes the false observation that African-Americans would gain superhuman strength after using cocaine: an allegation so absurd it is unbelievable it was made by a doctor. Then he also makes it seem like all lower class African-Americans were cocaine users
87 See also Jay Robert Nash, The Great Pictorial History of World Crime (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
2004), 329 – 332; John C. Burnham, Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual
Misbehavior and Swearing in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Merrill Singer
and Greg Mirhej, “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz,” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance
Abuse 5, no. 4 (2006): 1 – 38; Charles Winick, “How High the Moon – Jazz and Drugs,” The Antioch Review 21,
no. 1 (1961): 53 – 68; Gerald H. Tolson and Michael J. Cuyjet, “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30, no. 6 (2007): 530 – 538.
88
Edward Huntington Williams, “Negro Cocaine „Fiends‟ Are a New Southern Menace. Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Blacks Because They Have Taken to „Sniffing‟ Since Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition,” New York Times, February 8, 1914.
89
Ibid.
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