Who Orchestrated the Prohibition of Marijuana?

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It makes sense that the boss would be calling the shots. Anslinger himself told David Musto in 1970 that Morgenthau wanted a ban on marijuana—in response, supposedly, to pressure from law enforcement in a number of states. West thinks Morgenthau wanted a ban on the plant but for reasons he didn’t want publicized. The transcript of the congressional hearing on prohibition shows that it was a Treasury Department production from start to finish.

In a paper on the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that ran in the Archives of General Psychiatry (and was reprinted by Tod Mikuriya in Marijuana Medical Papers), Musto wrote, “The hearings before the House were held in late April and early May. They were curious events. The Treasury’s presentation to Congress has been adequately described many times, although no retelling has equaled reading the original transcript.” 

Circumstantial Evidence in Morgenthau Bio

A biography of Henry Morgenthau Jr., by Herbert Levy (Skyhorse Publishing, 2010) provides indirect support for Dave West’s hypothesis that Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury was the prime mover behind the federal ban on marijuana.

Morgenthau’s father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was a millionaire real estate investor who had backed Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and then became the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey. Henry Sr. bought a 1,000-acre spread along the Hudson River which, under Henry Jr.’s management, produced apples and dairy products, but did not make money.

In addition to being a gentleman farmer, Morgenthau Jr. subsidized a journal called the  American Agriculturist. He was a lifelong friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s, and served as the “advance man” when FDR ran for governor of New York in 1928. Morgenthau helped FDR implement policies that benefited New York State farmers, and Roosevelt’s pro-farmer reputation helped him win the presidency in ’32. 

One of Levy’s key sources is Morgenthau’s eldest son, Henry the third. In the spring of 1932, according to Henry III, “Roosevelt dispatched [my father] on a swing through the Middle West and Southern farm belt to gather opinion on the causes and cures for the agricultural depression and on the Roosevelt candidacy. ‘My trip is going fine,’ he reported to the boss. ‘I am meeting a lot of interesting farm leaders. Most are Republicans but are ready to vote for you, if given the opportunity.’”

Morgenthau aspired to be Secretary of Agriculture but Roosevelt gave that job to one of those erstwhile Republicans Morgenthau had recruited, Henry Wallace of Iowa —a gentile, Levy notes. Morgenthau became head of the Farm Credit Administration. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the FCA in 1933 “refinanced farm mortgages, inaugurated a series of ‘rescue’ loans for second mortgages, developed techniques for persuading creditors to make reasonable settlements, set up local farm debt adjustment committees, and eventually established a system of regional banks to make mortgage, production and marketing loans and to provide credits to cooperatives.”

The United States was still a country of small and medium-sized farms, with 30 percent of the workforce employed in agriculture. The farmers were suffering because of low commodity prices, and some were calling for a “Farmers’ Holiday.”

   Lets call a Farmer’s Holiday,

   a Holiday let’s hold.

   We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs,

   And let them eat their gold.

FDR’s New Deal undercut the radicals’ momentum with an Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) that would pay farmers to take acreage out of production and to destroy large quantities of wheat, cotton, hogs—surplus commodities. It was a quick but temporary and morally questionable fix.

Another way to raise commodity prices was to reduce the gold value of the dollar, which could be achieved by the Treasury Department buying gold at a higher price than was set by statute. Dean Acheson, Acting Secretary of the Treasury, argued vehemently that the administration did not have the legal right to take the country off the gold standard. According to Schlesinger, “The Attorney General supported Acheson… A few days later Morgenthau showed Roosevelt a longhand memorandum from his general counsel Herman Oliphant suggesting various ways by which the President might buy gold through his executive power… Oliphant, digging into the recesses of his memory, into the recesses of his memory, recalled a Civil War statute which permitted the government to buy gold at changing prices; combined with the Reconstruction Finance Act, this seemed to give the President the power he needed.”