“The Federal Government in 1841 authorized a bounty, which allowed for the payment of not more than $280 per ton for American water-retted hemp, provided it was suitable for naval cordage. Many of the planters prepared large pools and water-retted the hemp they produced. But the work was so hard on Negroes that the practice was abandoned. Many Negroes died of pneumonia contracted from working in the hemp-pools in the winter, and the mortality became so great among hemp hands that the increase in value of the hemp did not equal the loss in Negroes.”
– From HempFood.com, American Hemp Culture Verbatim; quoting from History of Agriculture in the Northern United States: 1620-1860, by P.W. Bidwell and J. I. Falconer, 1941; Page 365
For centuries the processing of the raw hemp plant was labor intensive. In various parts of the world the hemp crop is left in the field to partially rot and/or is put into a water pit to make it easier to separate the pulp from the fiber.
Thomas Jefferson had been growing hemp on his plantation, which was worked by slaves. But he was troubled that the processing of the hemp stalks was, as he wrote in his journal, “so laborious, and so much complained of by our laborers, that I have given it up.”
Jefferson began to tinker with ideas of how hemp could be less “laborious.” In December of 1815 he wrote in a letter that a, “method of removing the difficulty of preparing hemp occurred to me, so simple and so cheap. I modified a threshing machine to turn a very strong hemp-break, much stronger and heavier than those for the hand.” His hemp-break machine was granted the first U.S. patent.
Jefferson’s invention didn’t amount to much. Over the years other hemp processing machines were invented. A Philadelphia man named David Myerle purchased the patent for a machine developed by a Boston man named Robert Graves, and in 1838 Myerle opened a hemp processing plant in Louisville, Kentucky, which was the center of America’s hemp farming industry. Graves’ company sold hemp rope to the U.S. military, which helped satisfy the 1842 Congressional mandate to use as much domestically produced materials as possible. In 1841 a Virginia man named Andrew Caldwell made a machine that separated hemp fiber and made yarn. A New Yorker named G.F. Schaffer took out a patent in 1861 that was used on both hemp and flax. Unfortunately, none of these machines was very successful, and hemp was still being imported from Russia. One reason for this continued reliance on Russian hemp was that the foreign hemp was water-retted, which created stronger fiber, while U.S. hemp was more often retted by leaving it in the field to partially rot by way of the elements.
For a number of reasons it was important to develop a machine that sped up the processing of hemp. As mentioned, hemp that was left in the field to partially rot before it could be separated into pulp and fiber created weaker fabric than hemp that was produced by the drying and water pit retting method, which purposefully partially rotted the stalk to separate the hurd from the fiber. Processing hemp from freshly harvested hemp into useable material could take from months to more than a year. Creating a machine to improve the process would ideally both speed up production and lower the cost.
American slaves were used to perform the labor-intensive farming required to grow, harvest, and process hemp. This was especially true with the hemp farms in Kentucky.
After the slaves were freed, the cost of hemp farming and processing greatly increased. There were regional hemp farming industries that started up after the release of the slaves, including in California and the Midwest, but these quickly died off as cotton, petroleum, and trees became more popular for materials formerly derived from hemp: fabric, oil, fuel, and paper. Unfortunately for the forests of the planet it was in the 1800s that tree pulp became the most popular ingredient in the manufacture of paper. The newer western states being added to the Union were sources of petroleum, forestry, and minerals, and also provided ideal land to grow cotton.
Another reason hemp lost favor was that, since the late 1800s, the military forces of various countries were replacing their sailing ships with engine-powered ships made of steel. In the U.S., it was the “Iron Clad” steamships the Monitor and the Merrimac. Those ships were the dawn of a whole different shipbuilding industry, one that relied on mass quantities of iron ore and coal mined from deep in the ground, and not from hemp grown from the soil. This also meant replacing hemp rope with metal chains and cable. Although the military use of hemp for clothing, parachutes, cordage, and rope continued, much of the hemp began to be imported from the Philippines.
As mentioned, the cost of harvesting and processing hemp rose dramatically after the end of slavery. This greatly impacted the hemp farming industry. Fewer acres of hemp were being grown, and the cotton industry became industrialized with machinery that did much of the hard work formerly done by slaves. Because Britain was importing cotton grown on American plantations worked by slaves, Britain had an economic interest in the Civil War. This is one reason why the British were supplying weaponry to the Confederate army.
Before the 1800s, cotton fabric made up less than ten percent of fabric produced in America. Cotton became more common as a fabric after the invention of the 1793 cotton gin styled on the Eli Whitney design (as opposed to earlier cotton processing machines). Over the next several decades, America’s yearly production of cotton went from thousands of tons to hundreds of thousands of tons. The number of slaves being used on the plantations also dramatically increased from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Because of the dramatic increase in petroleum drilling 1860s, combined with a huge downturn in the hemp farming industry as cotton took over, by the late 1800s, petroleum kerosene became a popular lamp fuel, and then petroleum gasoline became the most popular fuel for the new invention called the “combustible engine” (even though the engines were designed to run on ethanol made from plants). With less hemp being grown, tree pulp became the number one material for paper (and America’s forests have suffered ever since, with over 95% of the old growth forests being clearcut). The emerging railroad system also greatly reduced the use of hemp fabric-covered wagons, which also used hemp seed oil for axle lubricant, lamp fuel, and wood sealant. The growing use of electric light bulbs reduced the use of lamp oil (and whale fat).
In 1882 some manufacturers and merchants tried to revive the hemp industry by forming the American Flax and Hemp Spinners and Growers Association. This New York group lobbied the U.S. government to help fund the revival.
It wasn’t until 1915 that an efficient hemp-processing machine was invented.
“The time will come when wood cannot be used for paper any more. It will be too expensive or forbidden. We have got to look for something that can be produced annually.”
– George W. Schlichten
A German immigrant named George W. Schlichten was repulsed by the cutting down of America’s pristine forests for the creation of paper. After years of toiling he succeeded in doing what many people before him had tried to do. He designed and created a machine that sped up the processing of the hemp plant.
The “decorticator” was patented on July 1, 1915. The machine made it easy to process large amounts of hemp, separating the fiber, pulp, and seeds, and eliminated the labor-intensive retting stage. It had the potential of making hemp the number one agricultural product in the country for paper, fabric, and seed oil. It would once again make it easy to grow hemp for paper, and prevent the loss of forests while protecting the water systems and wildlife that depend on healthy forests.
As his machine was put to use in a mill owned by John D. Rockefeller, Schlichten apparently realized the value of his machine. When Rockefeller offered to purchase exclusive rights to Schlichten’s invention, Schlichten turned him down. Maybe that was a big mistake, not only for Schlichten, but also for the hemp industry and the environment. It was difficult to find investors during the financially stressful times the country was experiencing.
When Henry Timken, a wealthy businessman and owner of the Timken Roller Bearing Company, found out about Schlichten’s invention, he invited Schlichten to plant 100 acres of hemp on the Timken ranch in Imperial Valley, California. The crop became a news item and was filmed by Hearst’s media group that produced weekly newsreels for theatres.
E.W. Scripps, an owner of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, The United Press Syndicate, and a large newsprint company, caught news of this invention and invited Schlichten to his headquarters in San Diego. There, Schlichten met with Scripps’ assistants on August 3, 1917. In the meeting Schlichten spoke of how much damage was being done to the environment by cutting down trees for paper, and he spoke of how using hemp for paper would save the forests.
Unlike Hearst, Scripps was very interested in the decorticator as it could lower the cost of producing his newspapers since hemp pulp paper would be about 50 percent less expensive than paper made from tree pulp. As the owner of a bunch of newspapers, Scripps needed a whole lot of paper on a regular basis. Even though he had huge timber companies operating in the Northwest, Scripps saw that hemp could potentially greatly improve his company profits.
“I have spent many hours with G.W. Schlichten, the inventor of the decorticating machine. Friday and Saturday last I spent with him at the Timken Ranch in Imperial Valley, while a portion of his first crop of hemp was being run through his machine. I have seen a wonderful, yet simple, invention. I believe it will revolutionize many of the processes of feeding, clothing, and supplying other wants of mankind.”
– Henry Timken, in a letter to E.W. Scripps and his associate, Milton McRae; San Diego, CA, August 28, 1917
“The hemp hurd is a practical success and will make paper of a higher grade than ordinary news stock.”
– George W. Schlichten
But the decorticator and the ensuing problems with taxation and business in a financially difficult time, combined with bad advice, caused Scripps to lose money and interest in the possibility of developing tons of newsprint from hemp processed with the decorticator.
Without a financial backer, Schlichten’s interest in his own invention faded, and on February 3, 1923, he died a financially destitute man in California. In the late 1930s Schlichten’s patent on his invention had expired.
Other inventors had patented decorticator machines that were used in the government hemp farming programs of the 1940s, which I cover later in the book.
This scenario of the potential for the decorticator machines also became a possible threat to companies that would have lost money if hemp once again became a popular crop to grow for fuel, paper, chemicals, plastic, paint, oil, fiber, and fabric.
In 1938 the decorticator was written about in both Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering. These articles built great interest in the decorticator and what it could do to supply the needs of industry. How this article appeared and the source of information in the article is also another part of the twisted puzzle of the hemp industry and how it became criminalized.
“A machine has been invented which solves a problem more than 6,000 years old. The machine is designed to remove the fiber bearing cortex from the rest of the stalk, making hemp fiber available for use without a prohibitive amount of human labor. Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products... ranging from rope to fine laces. And the woody material remaining after the fiber has been removed contains more than 77 percent cellulose, and can be used to produce more than 25,000 products ranging from dynamite to cellophane.”
– From the article New Billion Dollar Crop, Popular Mechanics, 1938. The article largely was based on information written in an October 12, 1937 letter from H.W. Bellrose, president of the World Fibre Corporation to Elizabeth Bass, district supervisor of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics