Descent Into Hell
(Chapter 5)

by Thom Metzger

1.

The Dope Fiend is an amalgam of many elements from American culture of the early 20th century. But no force was so crucial to its final form as the so-called Yellow Peril. This national convulsion is one of the best-known and obvious examples of racist hysteria in American history, as the population of an entire continent was cast as barely human, alien, threatening, tainted: a kind of racial contagion. As archetypal invading Others, Asians, especially Chinese, were resisted, feared, and maligned with a virulence that echoes to the present time.

It would appear that Americans have always had a deep need for racial enemies: an Other to project fear, suspicion, hate and envy onto, a quasi-human scapegoat figure against whom Americans define themselves. To be an "us," there has to be an inferior "them." It's almost as though this culture has a profound uncertainty of what it is, so the need for an image of what it isn't becomes overwhelmingly important.

Réne Girard, in his discussion of the sacrificial victim, argues that all cultures select the scapegoat from outside. "Between the victims and the community a crucial social link is missing."[1] Perhaps the victim is not literally from the outside, but some characteristics — racial, ethnic, sex, social class, religion — set the victim apart from the dominant culture. What's necessary for this process to function is that the victim is on some level not human in the same way that the sacrificers are. The conquerors of the New World certainly struggled with the question of the natives' humanness; the Roman Catholic Church was forced into the debate, deciding whether the Indians even had souls. The enslavement of thousands of Africans was also facilitated by this same notion. If an African and a European were human in the same way, then certain moral impediments would stand in the way of wholesale cultural annihilation. More recently, Nazi propagandists depicted their cultural enemies as vermin: rats, snakes, insects, carrion birds. Jews were not human in Nazi ideology in the same way that so-called Aryans were, thus making their enslavement and eventual destruction a matter of interspecies, not intercultural, conflict.

2.

In the U.S., it was common to treat Asians as fundamentally different than those of European "blood" or "germ plasm." Well before substantial Asian immigration into the U.S., traders and (more often) missionaries promoted extreme misrepresentations of the Chinese in their homeland. In the early 1800s, Protestant missionaries — partly as a way of drumming up more financial support for their efforts, and partly as a result of simple racism — described the Chinese as deep in the thrall of Satan. In particular, sexual perversion and excesses filled the pages of their reports. Fevered accounts of "orgies of idolatry" in which pagan rites were thinly disguised sexual frenzies, the participants exhibiting a "diabolical ecstasy," were common.[2] Heathen religion and sexual debauchery were indistinguishable for the missionaries: "Girls scarcely twelve years old were given up to the beastly passions of men. Parents prostituted their daughters; husbands their wives; brothers their sisters — and this they did with a diabolical joy."[3] Terms such as "vile," "polluted," and "debased" abound. Young white girls were never safe when in Chinese society, which might lure them with "pictures, songs and aphrodisiacs" into "the Gates of Hell to perform abominable acts."[4] The use of demonic imagery is not incidental; it is one of the characteristics of the American scapegoating process. Like the Puritan spiritual warriors in New England, missionaries to China saw themselves fighting a nearly omnipotent foe, a universal polluting essence. "Its corrupting and debasing influences pervade all classes of society. Forms of vice which in other lands sulk in dark places, or appear only in the midnight orgies of the bacchanalian revelers, in China blanch not in the light of noonday."[5] One editor reported that the Chinese butchered young girls in order to "drink certain fluids from their bodies." Also, "grains of rice steeped in freshly cut gall bladder" were used for "magical, medicinal purposes."[6] Echoing the archetypal European slur on Judaism — that Christian children were captured and tortured in "Jewish-Satanic" rites — a report in the North China Daily News alleged that Christian children were being kidnapped in Shanghai, and their eyes and "private parts" were being sliced out to make "mysterious drugs."

Much of this lurid rhetoric reappeared in almost identical form once the Chinese began to emigrate to the U.S. But in addition, a new layer of anxiety appeared: the fear and resentment that Chinese workers were a threat to "native" American laborers' livelihoods.

As the Chinese began entering the U.S. in the 1850s, they had a major impact on the American labor market, especially on the West Coast. In various jobs requiring long hours of heavy toil — laundry, mining, farm work, railroad construction — they succeeded, and often surpassed white workers. Putting in longer and more productive hours, Chinese laborers were soon perceived as a serious threat. And opium — which many Chinese workers smoked, and which contributed to their greater stamina and tolerance for grueling labor — was painted in the popular press as a menace to "American manhood." It's important to note that by most objective accounts, the Chinese in America were and continue to be a far more law-abiding group than most others. Actual arrests for robbery, rape, murder, etc. were consistently lower than for the general population, even with the slanders and hysteria influencing the police and courts. Still, because American labor unions felt deeply threatened by Chinese efficiency and hard work, they began a campaign to halt further immigration and to marginalize the roughly 100,000 Chinese who were in the U.S. by the time the Exclusion Act was passed by Congress in 1889. Led by its president, Samuel Gompers, the AFL carried out a decades-long vilification campaign against the Chinese. In 1902, Gompers co-authored a booklet called Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat Versus Rice; American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism — Which Shall Survive? In this work, he argued that "The racial differences between American whites and Asiatics would never be overcome. The superior whites had to exclude the inferior Asiatics by law, or if necessary, by force of arms. The Yellow Man found it natural to lie, cheat, and murder and 99 out of 100 Chinese are gamblers."[7] By 1906, Gompers' rhetoric contained all the elements of American fear and hatred that drove eugenicists and later exploiters of drug-hysteria. "Maintenance of the nation depended on racial purity," he declared.[8] And regarding the archetypal den of drug iniquity, he wrote: "What other crimes were committed in those dark fetid places when those innocent victims of the Chinaman's viles [sic] were under the influence of the drug, are almost too horrible to imagine. There are hundreds, aye, thousands, of our American girls and boys who have acquired this deathly habit and are doomed, hopelessly doomed, beyond the shadow of redemption."[9] Though originating in crass economic motives, Gompers' seething fears took on a clearly religious tone. This was not just a struggle for jobs, but a war for the American soul.

Responding to such battle cries, Congress banned the importation of opium by Chinese, though allowing Americans this right for another 20 years. In 1890, another law prohibited Chinese from processing smoking opium, but continued to allow "native" entrepreneurs this right until 1909, when opium smoking was banned altogether. Why such a discrepancy? More than one scholar[10] has argued that opium was seen as a "secret weapon," a tool that gave the Chinese greater ability and stamina, affording them an "unfair advantage" over American workers.

3.

The Yellow Peril took a number of forms. For the purpose of better understanding the development of the Dope Fiend, four areas will be my focus: disease, race-mixing and sexual threat, slavery, and opium use.

The Chinese — both in Asia and the U.S. — were associated with filth and diseases on countless occasions. And both of these concepts were crucial to the belief that Asians were a threat to America protoplasmic purity. In numerous reports during the Exclusion Act debates, medical metaphors were used — some so sloppily that it's impossible to tell whether the writers were referring to social, moral or physical pestilence. As the germ theory became known to the average American, it came to dominate thinking about the Chinese, whose settlements were referred to as "huge festering ulcers," nests, hives, dens, and cancers. And the "infectious diseases that germinate in the filth of that malodorous quarter" were feared to be spreading to nearby native communities.[11] Leprosy was a favorite disease with which to compare Chinese culture: "the Mongolian Blight."

From medieval anti-Jewish propaganda to the first vampire film, Nosferatu; from Old Testament ritual surrounding the spread of pestilence to the paranoia and hate-mongering that accompanied the early days of AIDS, plagues are frequently blamed on a foreign, "unnatural," presence. The Chinese menace was similarly explained in Dr. Arthur Stout's Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Cause of Decay of a Nation. This 1862 report conflates racial-mixture fears, crackpot medical theories and sheer nonsense.

According to Stout, "hereditary diseases" such as consumption, scrofula, syphilis and insanity were rife among the Chinese, and their foul habit of smoking opium contributed to the problem. Allowing the Chinese (and blacks, too) to stay in America would be like permitting "cancer" to eat away at the body politic. The "Divine Excellence" of the Anglo-Saxon race must not be polluted by "Asiatic horrors," Stout declared. "Until Islamism and Paganism alike sink into oblivion, and Christianity enters, like sunlight unto chaos, to illuminate and revivify this ancient world... we cannot permit Asiatics to enter."[12] Stout was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. The AMA's evaluation of this report was in full agreement. "The evils likely to result from the combined intermixture of races and introduction of habits and customs of a sensual and depraved people in our midst, with hereditary vices and engrafted peculiarities" were more than sufficient cause to keep all aliens out.[13] Nine years later, Dr. Stout sounded the warning cry again, in even more clamorous terms:

Better it would be for our country that the hordes of Genghis Khan should overflow the land and with armed hostility devastate our valleys with sabre and the firebrand that these more pernicious hosts in the garb of friends should insidiously poison the well springs of life, and spreading far and wide, gradually undermine and corrode the vitals of our strength and prosperity.[14]

Besides leprosy and cancer, syphilis was a disease commonly blamed on Chinese contamination. More potent, more virulent than ordinary syphilis was the Chinese Pox or "Canton Ulcer." This "foul contagion," explained the editor of The Medico Literary Journal in 1878, "is progressively tainting the Anglo-Saxon blood."[15] J. Marion Sims — president of the AMA and world-renowned for his gynecological experiments — asserted that every Chinese slave-prostitute "breeds moral and physical pestilence." On the West Coast, "even boys eight and ten years old have been syphilized by these degraded wretches."[16] The implication here, that the literal and metaphorical bloodstream was being poisoned, is obvious. So-called Chinese Afflictions were thought to be the result of a millennia-long history of "beastly vices, resistant to all the efforts of modem medicine."[17]

Fear of sexual disease is often, on a deep level, really a fear of genetic corruption. Sims' obsession with women's genital organs and the "seed" of young boys reflects a profound anxiety regarding America's reproductive abilities. These same fears surfaced again in the literature of "addiction;" many doctors fretted about opiates ruining the reproductive organs. "Generative functions are depressed by opium, and in chronic poisoning the menses cease and men become impotent. Passower has demonstrated that the abuse of morphine may occasion atrophy of the female organs."[18]

American children were particularly at risk from the "scourge of the hordes of China." Chinese servants were introducing their "loathsome diseases" and "debasing habits" into American homes. Compounding this threat, they were allowed to "wash and dress little white girls."[19] Asian immigration was likened to the "introduction in our school and nurseries of some new and horrible disease that defied treatment."[20]

Not only sexual diseases were associated with the Chinese, but also vile, unnatural, sexual practices. The threat of "300 million obscene yellow rascals" descending on the U.S., rapacious and insatiable "fiendish almond-eyed heathens" whose only goal was to deflower white girls: this slander predates American black-man-as-rapist hysteria and is later echoed in Nazi propaganda which showed slavering, taloned, dark-skinned Jews ravishing pure, "Aryan," frauleins. Newspapers printed endless stories sodden with race-mixing fears. Horace Greeley made no attempt to hide his revulsion: "The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order."[21]

Tales were widely published of "John Chinaman" attending Sunday School in order to get at white women. One teacher, who apparently escaped with her chastity intact, had, however, "her health broken down" by the overpowering reek of her Chinese students.[22] The New York World, beneath the headline "Two Mongolian Mino-taurs — Shocking Debauchery of Innocents," told of naive adolescents lured into prostitution by Chinese laun-drymen. Again and again American newspapers inflamed fears and hatred with lurid descriptions of white girls falling under the spell of opium and "Asiatic wiles." The New York Times in 1873 published a full page expose of the city's Chinatown. It concentrated on Chinese "denizens continuously gambling, feasting on rodents, living in filth, and worshipping hideous idols." When a reporter asked the operator of an opium den about the "handsome but squalidly dressed young white girl" in his establishment, he replied "with a horrible leer 'Oh hard time in New York. Young girl hungry. Plenty come here. Chinaman always have something to eat, and he like young white girl, He! He!'"[23]

Thomas Edison, as developer of the kinetograph, was the first to exploit stereotypes of Chinese on film. His company produced a 1½-minute film called Chinese Opium Den in 1894. Ten years later he produced Rube in an Opium Joint, likely the earliest surviving film depicting drug use. Other exploitation and fear-mongering films followed: Morphia — The Death Drug, Drug Traffic, Secret Sin, The Devil's Needle, Black Fear, The Girl Who Didn't Care, and The Devil's Assistant— all made before 1920.[24]

Curiously, the theater itself was often seen as a place of drug-drenched sexual danger. "Hundreds of respectable girls" were supposedly drugged in dark movie houses by white slavers armed with secret poison needles. Other places where crowds congregated — amusement parks, street cars, music and dance halls — were also rumored to be haunted by hypodermic-wielding pimps.[25]

According to the tradition, New York's Chinatown prostitutes were predominantly white. The racial mixing stirred up a panicky response in law enforcement men, such as New York's police commissioner William McA-doo, who described Chinatown prostitutes as "the most wretched, degraded, and utterly vile lot of white women and girls that could be found anywhere."[26] On the West Coast, too, fears that Chinese were corrupting American youth ran high. San Francisco physician Winslow Anderson wrote of witnessing the "sickening sight of young white girls from sixteen to twenty years of age lying half-dressed on the floor or couches, smoking with their 'lover.' Men and women, Chinese and white people mix in Chinatown smoking houses."[27]

Folklore had it that the drug itself was equivalent to illicit sex: "many females are so much excited sexually by the smoking of opium during the first few weeks that old smokers with the sole object of ruining them have taught them how to smoke."[28]

The allegedly common practice of female slavery in American Chinese communities was also widely discussed. The New York Times in 1905, for instance, ran the story "Rescuing Angel of the Little Slaves of Chinatown," complete with illustrations of beautiful "brothel inmates" and Chinese procurers whipping them with the cat-o-nine-tails. The piece focused on the work of missionary Helen F. Clark, who "risked the murderous threats of enraged highbinders" in "the nether region of squalor and vice." Sensational tales of abduction, torture and moral decay dovetail neatly with the common association of Chinese and opium use. Sentimental at times, and occasionally dumb with disbelief, the Times reporter described the plight of a young slave girl in New York's Pell street.

One day Miss Clark discovered little Ah Foon, discovered her in an opium den on a hank of matting by the side of her opium-soaked mother, who was molding pills for a score of depraved Chinamen to smoke. She was only seven years old and she was used for a runner for the opium joints.[29]

In "Chinese Slavery in America" Charles Holden too linked the debased sexual practices of the Chinese with their use of opium. And like the author of "Rescuing Angel," he seemed to take a perverse delight in describing bizarre tortures: "The life of the slave is a chapter telling of total debasement and ill treatment. The mission managers have found girls who have been burnt with red-hot irons, dragged about by the hair and had their eyes propped open with sticks."[30]

More common, however, was the image of women debauched by opium, willing sex-slaves to the bestial Chinese. Hamilton Wright, one of the most important figures in the legal attack on Asian drugs, noted that "one of the most unfortunate phases of the habit of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabiting with Chinese."[31]

Facts contradict this propaganda. Most white opium smokers were people of means: socialites, theatrical folk, financiers and other professionals. Though the habit was frequently associated with the criminal underclass, until the early 20th century it was still often a "gentleman's vice. White opium smokers of this period were generally described as 'sporting characters.'"[32]

A final thread in this knotted skein was pure American show biz. Chuck Connors, one of New York's most-quoted celebrity reconteurs, made a living in the 1890s as a "lobby gow," or tour guide, taking groups of well-heeled slummers into Chinatown. Novelists, royalty, and theatrical people, as well as run-of-the-mill wealthy gawkers, paid handsomely for an in-depth look at this "Chinese hell." There, Connors would spin tales of depravity and sin, identifying random passersby as "notorious Tong hatchet men," and women seen in upper story windows as "slave wives." Contributing much to the popular notion of the Chinese narcotic threat, he'd finally bring his charges to a fake opium den tricked out in the utmost of squalid Chinese decor. A man, named Georgie Yee, posed with a white woman as hopeless addicts. As a titillating climax to the tour, Yee would begin gibbering and jigging around the "den" — Connors explaining to his goggle-eyed guests that Yee's insanity was a direct result of the "demon opium." Lulu — Yee's consort — lounged lasciviously, as a potent reminder of how far white women could fall when they meddle with opium.[33] The fact that the entire episode was fabricated for tourists did not diminish its impact. The guests would flee back to their safe white enclaves and tell everyone they knew that they'd seen with their own eyes the effects of the demon flower.

Sexual degradation, filth, disease, threats of racial degeneration, miscegenation and madness: taken together these elements formed a powerful, and long-lived, image in the American psyche. The Chinese — as carriers of the narcotic plague — stand as the first incarnation of the Dope Fiend, prototypical threat to American Purity.

4.

The sacrificial creature, or scapegoat, is one of the most ancient and deeply rooted figures in human consciousness. Whether animal or human, the scapegoat serves two crucial functions: the relief of intolerable anxiety, and the ritual purging of guilt. Few people in the industrialized world still believe in literal religious sacrifice, yet the archetypal patterns continue because the archetypal needs remain. The repression of unacceptable thoughts, desires, and impulses will continue as long as there is human culture. And one of the most basic results of this repression is the selection, condemnation and destruction of the scapegoat.

The term was coined in 1530 by biblical translator William Tyndale, his Anglicization of the Latin term caper emissarus. In Leviticus 16, we find a thorough description of this best-known sacrificial creature:

When Aaron has finished performing the ritual to purify the Most Holy Place, the rest of the tent of the Lord's Presence, and the alter, he shall present to the Lord the live goat chosen for Azazel. He shall put both of his hands on the goat's head and confess over it all the evils, sins and rebellions of the people of Israel, and so transfer them to the goat's head. Then the goat chosen for Azazel shall be presented alive to the Lord and sent into the desert to Azazel in order to take away the sins of the people.[34]

This section of the Old Testament is concerned with ritual purity. Complex instructions are given to maintain the unpolluted status of Hebrew religious practice: dipping fingers into blood, ceremonial bathing, and the burning of animal fat, skin, meat and intestines.

The goat was, of course, later associated with the Devil in many traditions; Biblical scholars assume that the Azazel referred to here was a desert demon, or "the collective figure for all the desert spirits."[35] One element of this dynamic should be kept in mind: the best sacrificial creature, the one ordained by God, is also the most demonic. Christ, the lamb of God, bearer of the sins of humankind, is foreshadowed by Azazel's demonized goat. This is an excellent example of what Thomas Szasz calls the "cosmic recycling of vice into virtue, evil into good." The pattern of transformation goes in both directions: "to be a saint, one must start as a sinner." To be the Lord of all demons, one must start as the Greatest of Angels.[36]

Heroin, the most highly praised commercial medication of its time, fell to the status of the most reviled substance on earth within a few decades. The fact that most Americans are ignorant of heroin's birth and early halcyon years is no coincidence. Just as Satan's time as the Lord of Light, second only to God in greatness, is little-discussed now by those who believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so heroin's early life has been to a large degree erased from popular consciousness. Heroin as primal menace looms from the mists, its origin shrouded in rumor and half-truths. Knowledge of its development in the most modern pharmacological lab in the world works against the notion of the drug as filthy, polluting essence. Still, this conversion from white to black, from wonder drug to demon drug, conforms to the scapegoating pattern that can be found in most cultures, from prehistoric times to the present. As Europe and the U.S. passed through the Enlightenment and the

Industrial Revolution, many overtly religious sacrifices were discarded or transformed. With the widespread decline in "irrational" Christianity came an increased faith in "rational" science and technology. Nonetheless, people still needed scapegoats, and found them wherever they could.

For instance, consider the electric chair, first used only seven years before the introduction of heroin. In my book Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair, I argue that capital punishment — particularly new execution techniques — serves the same function as ancient human sacrifice. The unacceptable, the "uncivilized" drives and wishes and ideas of a culture, are projected onto the criminal and then ritually expunged by taking his life. William Kemmler, the first man executed by the electric chair, was vilified during his trial as a drunken "hatchet fiend." Fifteen months later, as he was strapped into the electric chair, legal authorities and newsmen alike praised him as a scientific and societal paragon, transformed by the "godlike power" and "heavenly might" of electricity.[37]

Opium in the Middle Ages, alcohol in various forms, tea in China, sassafras during the 1500s, coffee and even tobacco smoke (inhaled or blown up the rectum in "gaseous clysters") were all at one time touted as cure-alls. Now they are highly suspect, if not strictly forbidden. Heroin leads the parade of substances once praised and now condemned. But as with other panaceas, its malign status is more a result of cultural upheaval than basic pharmacology.

"The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric," Rene Gi-rard writes in Violence and the Sacred. "The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself."[38]

By a kind of sympathetic magic (using violent "treatment" to cure a violent "disease"), the most fearful members of a society strive to inflict the same pain that the supposed perpetrator has caused. Old Testament talion law is not so much about fairness or restoring moral balance as it is about undoing defilement. An act of antisocial violence contaminates every member of society; and eye for an eye gives the feeling of cleansing all taint. In the emotional heat of social chaos, members of the group seek an easy answer to their complex problems. Most social crises stem from tangled roots. Understanding these, let alone digging them out, is too difficult for most. A simple solution is desired. Even if the actual social chaos is not tamed, the feeling of chaos is reduced by acts of ritual violence. If Girard is correct, then violence directed at the sacrificial victim makes it both cursed and sacred. By blaming the scapegoat, society implicitly attributes to it miraculous or superhuman abilities. And by its expulsion or death, it evidences supernatural powers — healing the community's wounds.

The level of violence, the pitch of emotion accompanying the scapegoat ritual, is directly proportional to the level of phobic doubt that pervades a society. Dissent, factionalism, changes in racial and ethnic makeup, new beliefs (whether religious or scientific), technological innovation, economic uncertainty: all of these contribute to an intolerable sense of anxiety and turmoil. They often result in the demand for a scapegoat.

The period of heroin's demonization is often thought of as pure and idyllic. The so-called Gay Nineties, the Aughts and Teens have been sentimentalized by film and popular fiction. But, in fact, this time was one of great fear and disruption in the U.S. Beside racial alarm and hygienic hysteria, a new discord convulsed the body politic: the Red Scare.

5.

In the year following World War One, the United States was gripped by a "national psychoneurosis."[39] Enemies were everywhere — or so the press screamed in ominous headlines. Wild-eyed anarchists, socialist saboteurs, bushy-headed Reds, Bolshevik revolutionaries bent on the wholesale destruction of the U.S. government: such were the specters which haunted the American psyche in 1919 and '20. The threat supposedly affected all aspects of national life, but the areas of labor and education were most rife with the "Red menace." The scare lasted little more than a year, culminating in the infamous Palmer Raids, with their sweeping abrogation of civil liberties and due process. But during that time, dozens were killed, thousands imprisoned and deported for alleged crimes against the state and the national soul. Most importantly for the story of heroin's fall, the Red Scare left Americans lusting for new scapegoats.

Emotions were still high after the defeat of Germany, and the threat of wartime saboteurs and sedition still haunted the country. A desire for normalcy and tranquillity also fed the mania for a national purge. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution raged, frightening the U.S. enough to send in its troops for the suppression of this threat to the status quo. Simultaneously, American radicals showed great enthusiasm for the revolution and Soviet goals. Bombs, sent through the mail, killed a few Americans, and one exploded on Wall Street in September of 1920. Riots flared — racial in Washington D.C., and union-related in Seattle and elsewhere. A number of new patriotic groups sprang up, or blossomed again: The

American Defense Society, National Security League, National Civic Federation, Better America Federation, Allied Patriotic Societies, National Patriotic Council, and the United States Patriotic Society. The American Legion was only surpassed by the KKK (reborn in 1915) in promoting patriotism. Klan membership exploded to 4,500,000 by 1924. Along with the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Hearst newspapers, the Klan howled for "100% Americanism." School textbooks were combed for unpatriotic messages, mandatory loyalty oaths were instituted for teachers, and calls for stricter immigration laws grew even more strident. The Klan's agenda was proclaimed clearly in 1926. It sought to eradicate "every girl-ruiner, every home-wrecker, every wife-beater, every dope-dealer, every moonshiner, every crooked politician, every pagan papist priest, every hyphenated-American, every lawless alien."[40]

Wide-spread outbreaks of labor unrest contributed to the air of anxiety. A steel strike, a coal miner's strike, and even a walk-out by Boston policemen convinced many Americans that the unions were conspiring to bring the country to ruin. The press — sniffing blood — pounced on these stories and ran amazingly biased reports. Calling radicals "assassins and madmen," "human scum," "crime-made beasts" and "vermin," the newspapers whipped American mobs to a frenzy. Editorial cartoons showed strikers as troglodytic rapists, wild-haired maniacs and murderers pouring liquid poison into the so-called Chalice of State.[41] But perhaps most important were the manipulations of public sentiment by a few self-serving capitalists. The owners of the coal mines and steel mills affected by the strikes had much to gain by painting union leaders as a toxin in the bloodstream of America. Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, gained national fame and a path to the White House by repressing the Boston police strike. And A. Mitchell Palmer, the man who's most closely associated with the Red Scare, almost managed to parlay the national paranoia into a nomination for the presidency.

Born into a Quaker family, Palmer early on displayed a curious mixture of religious belief and cynical self-promotion. For political services rendered during Woodrow Wilson's run for the White House, he was rewarded with various posts. After serving as the Alien Property Custodian (he was instrumental in wresting control of the American Bayer plants and patents away from the parent German company), he was named attorney general. Noting the adoring press coverage that other Red-baiters had gotten, he instituted a series of raids against so-called Bolsheviks which stand as one of the nadirs of American justice. Hunting down aliens whom he believed to be a threat to the body politic, Palmer had thousands rounded up without arrest warrants, and held (without representation, hearing, or even charges) for days incommunicado. In filthy, ill-lit mass detention chambers with little food, miserable sanitation and at times no heat, the prisoners waited at Palmers' pleasure. When all was said and done, only a handful of real "radicals" were convicted or deported. Hundreds of those rounded up had absolutely nothing to do with "Bolshevistic" organizations. One ship was sent to the U.S.S.R. full of undesirable aliens; a few domestic true believers were convicted of fomenting division and strife. But a year later, when the country began to wake from its spell of paranoia, the purpose of the raids remained unclear.

To Palmer, however, this purge was not just a way of garnering publicity. He truly believed, or he convinced himself, that Reds were an infection in the bloodstream of America. In describing enemies caught in the raids, Palmer's social hygiene prejudices are obvious: "out of the sly and crafty eyes of many of them leap cupidity, cruelty, insanity, and crime, from their lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features may be recognized the unmistakable criminal type."[42]

It was not just a group of criminals who menaced the U.S. These were a genetic threat. Repeatedly — in newspapers, government proclamations, anti-labor propaganda — we can see this obsession with purity. One cartoon from the period shows Uncle Sam rooting out the virulent weeds of insurrection: fuzzy-headed, buck-toothed, "slope-browed," subhumans who sprout and breed and spread. Though Palmer focused most of his vitriol on social and political enemies, the "malicious racial cancer" was one ingredient in this stew of hate and fear. It may seem a great leap from the U.S. in 1920 to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but there are a number of similarities between the Palmer raids and the persecution of the Jews. Both were predicated on racial/ethnic purification, both scapegoated a minority for expulsion, both were executed by agents of a legitimate national government, both now seem to be acts of madness. Of course, the Nazi atrocities caused far more suffering and death, but this may be attributable more to the degree of social disruption in Germany than to American law and decency.

The newspapers of William Randolph Hearst were another foul wind stoking the furnaces of hysteria. Hearst is generally credited with developing "yellow journalism." So powerful was his influence at the turn of the century that historians place the responsibility for the Spanish-American War squarely on his shoulders. Huge headlines, garish colors, wild and sensational illustrations, sentimentalism and paranoia in equal doses: the Hearst papers contributed much to the panicky atmosphere that choked the U.S. in the early 1900s. When Hearst's papers weren't detailing grisly lust-murders, illicit affairs, or tragedy and scandal, they were sounding a shrill alarm against the "yellow peril" of Asian immigration and the dangers of "voodoo satanic music" (jazz).

Promoting a kind of Unified Dread Theory, Hearst's fear-mongering also included a long and unrelenting campaign against the "Dope Evil." Soon after the Red Scare abated, Hearst had his papers begin devoting a great deal of space to the threat of this new alien influence. In the 1920s and '30s he pushed his editors to publish articles that linked drugs with sordid crimes. Sensationalistic, overwrought, full of factual errors and bald fabrications, these articles had a major influence on the public's image of the Dope Fiend. Besides the "slant-eyed" heathen Chinese, Hearst targeted Mexicans for racial slander. After Pancho Villa took 800,000 acres of valuable land from him, Hearst had his papers run endless variations of the Mexican-as-drug-addled-menace tale. Interestingly, the term "marijuana" (previously Mexican slang for the plant) was promoted by Hearst as a way of associating the demon weed with Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before Hearst's hate campaign, the herb was sold in American pharmacies as Cannabis In-dica or Indian Hemp. Screaming headlines warned readers of "Frankenstein monsters," "Bloodlust," "unparalleled viciousness" and "voodoo-satanic music" driving Fiends into bestial rampages. The so-called crime wave which Hearst's papers attributed to drugs included not only rape and murder but such outrages as blacks stepping on a white man's shadow, looking directly at white women, and laughing at whites.[43]

In one of the most overblown anti-drug screeds of the period, Dope: the Story of the Living Dead, Winifred Black wrote at length about the danger to the "white race" that opiates posed. Also known as Annie Laurie, Black worked for the Hearst chain for years, writing an advice column for the lovelorn. She's generally accepted as the first newspaper sob sister, precursor of all the Beatrice Fairfaxes and Miss Lonelyhearts. More importantly, she wrote hundreds of columns for Hearst on the "Dope Problem." Often accompanied by a photo of Black — a jowly, scowling schoolmarm — these articles were, by sheer volume and repetition, highly influential. "Unseen and Insidious, Drug Habit Creeps In," "60 Percent of All Convicts are Addicts," "Danger in Parole: Weak-kneed Judges at Fault," "Winifred Black Declares Dope Parley Farce," "Drug Ring Havoc," "U.S. Drug Slave Nation Says Authority," "Paradise Alley is Fetid Hell-Hole of Lost Souls." Her articles recycle the same cliche and sentimental pabulum aimed especially at female readers.

Dead — of morphine — the president of one of the biggest and best women's clubs in this city.

Dead — of heroin — a writer known and beloved in every home in Illinois, a woman of refinement and culture.[44]

Dope, Black's book, is a delirious mixture of horror-mongering and breezy newspaper style. "Degradation, filth, disgrace, shame — what are these things but words, once you have grown to know the fitful fluttering of the black candle in your diseased brain?" The "living dead" are "ragged, dirty, half-insane, and absolutely helpless." And the menace to women was far worse than for men. The female "walking corpse doesn't comb her hair. She forgets her daily bath. She does not laugh. She is haggard, yellow-skinned, dull-eyed."[45]

Speaking directly to the female Dope Fiend, she conjures a picture of not only literal bad hygiene but eugenic degradation too. "You are back again in the dark and the dirt and the rags, with a black man on one side of you, stretched on the same couch and a yellow man too." The worst scenario Black can conceive is a race-mixing orgy, all social order broken down, all genetic barriers in ruins, the pure protoplasm of white women menaced by black and yellow pollutants. "Don't make any mistake about it — there's a dope peddler in your neighborhood — a Mexican, a Japanese, a Chinese, a negro."[46]

Picking up the racist anti-dope torch and carrying it well into the 1950s was Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Though his obsession was more with marijuana (which he dubbed "the assassin of youth") than opiates, Anslingers' 32-year tenure as the nation's dope czar carried on the efforts of the social-hygienic crusaders of the early 20th century.

Tough, forthright, bearing an uncanny facial resemblance to Benito Mussolini, Anslinger was appointed head of the Bureau in 1930. A low-level diplomat during World War One, he came to the position with little experience in drug enforcement and none in medicine. His admirable record in the diplomatic corps was not his chief qualification to head the federal assault on narcotics, however. A deeply held belief in the menace of various ideologies (Communism, anarchism, socialism) enamored him with many congressmen. Equally important was the stamp of approval placed on him by W.R. Hearst.

To call Anslinger a racist is perhaps misleading. He made no statements regarding the inferiority of blacks, or argued that aliens had a devolutionary effect on the American gene pool. Still, the gospel he preached was heavy, near to collapse, with the burden of racist imagery. In 1937, for instance, he told Congress that "Negroes and Mexicans, and entertainers" were more likely to be Dope Fiends than whites. And their music — swing and bebop — was directly influenced by drugs. He told credulous congressmen that this "satanic music," in conjunction with drug use, lured white women into "sexual relations with Negroes." His hatred of jazz seemed to at times border on the pathological. He ordered his agents to keep files on a wide variety of musicians, from cutting-edge beboppers (Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk) to middle-of-the-road entertainers. Even such mainstream performers as Milton Berle and Andre Kostelanetz were secretly investigated for links to the Dope Evil. Anslinger's dream was a nationwide sweep of jazzmen, a once-and-for-all cleansing of this "syncopated taint." Likely impressed by the dispatch, if not the ruthlessness of the Palmer raids, Anslinger planned and plotted to round up in one dragnet all the blacks who threatened America's well-being with their "voodooistic" music.[47]

The anti-Bolshevik ideology that dominated his thinking in the 1920s was transformed, or merged with, the anti-narcotic beliefs crucial to his later policies. Anslinger appears to have ingested the Red Scare mind-set whole, and made it integral to his thinking. More than anyone else, America's extreme punitive stance toward drug use can be traced to Harry Anslinger. In his three decades as head of the F.B.N. he never once wavered from his belief that "severe mandatory prison sentences for first convictions" were the only defense against encroaching social pollutants.[48]

World War One and the Red Scare were a turning point for American consciousness, especially pertaining to foreign influence. Before the war, the usual explanation for America's drug appetite was to blame irresponsible doctors or the "American disease": extreme hurry and striving, a high-pitched and fast-paced life. But after the anti-German sentiment of World War One, after the Palmer raids, after Hearst's propaganda machine went into high gear and anti-Chinese slanders had thoroughly permeated American thinking, the blame for drug use was no longer placed on the citizens of the U.S. Scapegoats were needed; foreign powers and unscrupulous alien infiltrators were now labeled as the cause of America's drug use. Self-appointed narcotics experts — such as Hamilton Wright and congressman Stephen Porter — placed guilt on the malign influence of outsiders. From South America came cocaine. Heroin was a "German invention," shouted congressman Henry Rainey; and in the wake of the World War One, the term "German" evoked instant fear and suspicion. China sent crude opium. North Africa provided hashish. In short, the U.S. was surrounded by dangers on all sides. If America's "sacred germ plasm" was to be preserved, then constant vigilance, war-like self-defense, and perpetual surveillance would be necessary.[49]

Dope Fiend iconography can be traced to a wide variety of sources. But if responsibility for its final form and widespread dissemination is to be given to one person, it must be Richmond Pearson Hobson. According to William Weir, Hobson "single-handedly created the 'dope fiend,' a propaganda masterwork that ranks with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."[50] Racism, fear-mongering, pseudo-science, eugenic mania, self-aggrandizement, skillful manipulation of the media: these were all woven deeply into the career of Richmond P. Hobson. Interestingly, he wrote of the need for a "final solution" to the drug problem a year before Mein Kampf was published.[51] This is not to suggest that Hobson was an influence on Hitler, or was a crypto-fascist. My point is that both

6.

American Dope Fiend paranoia and the German scape-goating of the Jews have significant connections. Two very different cultures, two distinct economic and political situations produced a surprisingly similar response during the same period.

Hobson began his career as a crusader speaking and writing against alcohol, which he claimed was a "protoplasm poison." The origin of his entire anti-dope philosophy can be found in his early anti-liquor work. Alcohol and the Human Race is a useful place to begin examining the various components that went into his thoughts, especially regarding the effects of drugs on procreation. Repressed sexual fears leak through in a hundred places in the book, like a relentless sea of reproductive anxiety surrounding a tiny boat. Sexual essence is epitomized as protoplasm — which he vaguely defined as composing the "physical machinery of all life and the evolution of all life in plants, animals and man." For Hobson, protoplasm was both physical and metaphysical, the essence of racial identity. In one place he described it as "sacred." Elsewhere, it is a mysterious "opaque jelly." He warned against a "destructive attack upon the glands of reproduction in men," conflated syphilis, gonorrhea and alcoholism, fretted about the fate of "the tender tissue associated with reproduction in male and female," and sounded the alarm against "withering blights on the germ plasm" which were "truly terrifying."[52] It doesn't require a professional psychological analysis to detect the sexual anxiety implicit in these claims, especially when we consider his admonitions about "brute Negroes" who "commit unnatural crimes" on white women.[53]

Hobson's book is a repetitive, pseudo-scientific attack on alcohol in all forms — blaming the Demon Rum for almost all of humankind's ills, including war, sexual perversion, venereal disease, lack of patriotism, political tyranny, "mob spirit, violence, rioting, incendiarism, anarchy, wanton destruction," low worker productivity and racial degeneration.[54] Like the Nazi racial philosophers who traced genealogies, Hobson argued at length that the blighting effects of liquor extended out to the fourth generation: "Thus having both parents and all four grandparents free from the poison and only one great-grandparent on one side alcoholized, nevertheless this generation was still degenerate." The effects were not merely physical disease, though. Hobson blamed the corrupting influence of alcohol for "mental deficiency, hysteria, convulsions, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness, idiocy or insanity," and claimed that drinkers often became "impulsive degenerates, criminals, profligates and moral imbeciles."[55]

For Hobson, it was always immorality and spiritual decay that lay at the heart of any social problem. Even as a youngster, stiff-necked Puritanism frequently colored his actions. He entered the U.S. Naval academy at age 14, and was nicknamed "Parson" for his sanctimonious attitudes and overpious behavior. His arrogance was manifested early and continued throughout his life. Though highly successful at organizing various anti-dope leagues, he tended not to work well with others. More than one writer has commented on his egotism and "powerful desire for individual recognition."[56]

A recent graduate from Annapolis, Captain Hobson made a name for himself during the Spanish-American War. When the Spanish fleet was at anchor in Santiago harbor, Hobson volunteered to take command of the coal-carrier Merrimac and scuttle it to keep the fleet bottled up. He was convinced that the Spanish gunners couldn't hit "anything smaller than the ocean."[57] Unfortunately, he overestimated their racial inferiority. The collier was sunk where it would do no good, and the brave American was fished out of the water. When Spanish Admiral Pascual Cervera greeted him and offered him liquor, Hobson made a fine show of refusing. Released from captivity a month later, Hobson returned to the U.S. a hero. Touring the country, he was exactly what a war-frenzied America wanted: a tall, handsome, soldier-hero "looking much like one of Frederick Remington's popular pictures of heavy-mustached cowboys."[58] At a welcoming ceremony in Chicago, a female cousin of Hobson's turned up and gave him a much-remarked-upon public kiss. Soon he was kissing hundreds of star-struck young women as he went from town to town. George Jean Nathan, of The Smart Set, claimed that Hobson was "the most dashing figure of romance for American women until the coming of Valentino." Completing his conversion into a popular culture icon, a candy-maker created the "Hobson Kiss" — a chewy confection that sold briskly wherever the hero appeared.

Hobson soon found that being a hero made him an instant expert. Marrying the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street banker, he was ready for the next, higher, step into public life. In 1906 Hobson won a congressional seat from his native Alabama and soon was working toward a total national ban on alcohol. In 1914, he was the first to call for a constitutional amendment for prohibition. Though defeated, Hobson's efforts set the stage for the coming victory of the Drys.

Andrew Sinclair provides an excellent analysis of the deepest motivations driving the anti-liquor crusaders. In Prohibition: the Era of Excess, he argues that the

emotion which they exploited was fear: the fear of sin and God; the fear of race against race and skin against skin; the fear of venereal diseases; the fear of idiot children; the fear of violence suppressed by conscience and loosed by liquor; the dark sexual fears of civilization.[59]

And no one exploited these fears better than Richmond P. Hobson. He conceived of the history of mankind as the history of alcohol, no force having a greater impact on evolution and the achievement of "higher civilization":

In America we are making the last stand of the great white race, and substantially of the human race. If this destroyer can not be conquered in young America, it can not in any of the old and more degenerate nations. If America fails, the world will be undone and the human race will be doomed to go down from degeneracy into degeneracy til the Almighty in wrath wipes the accursed thing out.[60]

Hobson remained in the public eye for decades: the most well-known and well-received speaker on the subject of "protoplasm poison" and its analogue, racial degeneration. After achieving little of note in the House, he was defeated in a run for the Senate in 1914 and devoted the rest of his life to the crusade against bodily corruption. Allying himself with the powerful Anti-Saloon League, Hobson traveled from city to city as the star lecturer. "Alcohol is killing our people at the rate of two thousand a day, every day of the year," he told overflow audiences. Never constrained by facts or the need for documentation, Hobson made up statistics as he spoke. "One of five children of alcohol consumers is hopelessly insane." "Ninety-five percent of all acts and crimes of violence are committed by drunkards." "Nearly one half of all deaths that occur are due to alcohol." "One hundred and twenty-five million white men today are wounded by alcohol."[61]

Hobson's brag, that he was the highest paid lecturer in the U.S. (after William Jennings Bryan) is likely true. Between 1914 and 1922 he was paid $171,250 by the Anti-Saloon League. Hobson made $700 a week, plus $100 for every extra lecture he did.[62] He gave essentially the same speech, "The Great Destroyer," hundreds of times. But Hobson was not in the purity-and-pollution business just for the money. He believed his ceaseless propaganda. Giving the same speech, spouting made-up facts, looking out at thousands of eager faces in the audience, Hobson carved the tenets of his faith deeper and deeper into his own heart.

To call Hobson a racist is not very useful, as his brand of racial philosophy was far more complex than the average American prejudices of his time. In Hobson's thinking regarding race, he had absorbed much of the fear and hatred of the post-war Deep South. However, this doesn't explain completely the degree to which Hobson associated drug and alcohol use with "racial degeneracy." He was in favor of disfranchising blacks. Hobson spoke repeatedly about "the white man" being "further evolved" than blacks. He argued that white America needed to "clothe society with the mantle of protection, producing a race consciousness of this new peril." Hobson preached a gospel of instinctive "self-preservation, of race pride, of true patriotism" in which the "home, the state, the race," would protect itself against alien "scourges." Allied with the science of his day, his racism was more persuasive and long-lived than the crude name-calling that often characterizes racist propaganda.[63]

A bizarre notion of evolution and human destiny pervaded Hobson's thinking. He developed his concept of genetic progress — a "top brain/bottom brain" split — with little, if any, real scientific support. Still, Hobson repeated the theory endlessly and it was picked up and promoted by other writers. According to this theory, higher human functions were in the "top brain" or "shrine of the soul," while animalistic, anarchic, drives were in the "lower brain... where reside all the selfish instincts and impulses."[64]

Hobson made no clear distinction between alcohol and other drugs. For him, liquor was a "narcotic," so it was no leap at all to transfer the earlier warnings against alcohol to opiates. Thus a "narcotic promptly degenerates the red man, throws him back into savagery [and] will actually make a brute out of a Negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes." More appalling, in Hobson's view, was the dire result of white men indulging. "Starting young, however it does not take a very long time to speedily cause a man in the forefront of civilization to pass through the successive stages and become semicivilized, semisavage, savage, and, at last, below the brute."[65]

Devolution and degeneracy were a threat most acutely felt in the U.S. because "we believe this American civilization to be the highest type, yet the United States is the most dope-ridden nation of all." Serious measures needed to be taken to prevent a slide into protoplasmic barbarism and to ensure "the unimpeded progress of America, of the race itself."[66]

This is not merely a genetic mandate, but the will of God Himself. Hobson's anti-dope rhetoric was laden with religious imagery. For every American, the war against dope was not mere individual struggle, but affected "his family, his country, the evolution of human life and the destiny of Man and the will of God in Creation."[67]

Hobson referred to drug use as "sin," recommended "preaching" the "gospel of narcotic abstinence," and proposed a strange theory of cure: "The grace of God provides the impulse that sends the blood current back into the upper brain to restore destroyed tissue and reawaken the higher impulses." And echoing the angel-to-devil motif we've repeatedly seen, he claimed that a drug "once supposed to be the 'water of life'" was in reality a lethal poison, a deadly threat to the "sacred germ plasm."[68]

Hobson's campaigning was perhaps more effective than he'd hoped. Three years after Congress defeated his anti-alcohol resolution, it passed the Volstead Act. Hardly different than the measure he'd proposed, it outlawed the manufacture, sale and transport of liquor in the U.S. Suddenly, Hobson was robbed of the enemy he'd built his life around. Having taken the role of prophet (Time later called him the "Joshua in the Jericho of Dope."[69]) he needed a new foe. Less than a year after Prohibition went into effect, he made his first formal move against dope, publishing a 25-page booklet, The Perils of Narcotics.

By 1923, drugs had become Hobson's primary interest; that year he organized the International Narcotic Education League and was immediately elected president. One of his earliest attempts to rouse public furor against the "dope evil" was a proposed "saturation attack on the nation's youth." Hobson asked Congress to publish 50,000,000 copies of his pamphlet at public expense. Congress declined, the cost being prohibitive.

During the 1924 presidential campaign, Hobson was more successful, pressing the candidates to support his plans. Both parties included anti-dope planks in their platforms. Two years later he formed the Narcotics Defense League and the World Conference on Narcotics Education. In 1927 Hobson formed the World Narcotics Defense Association. Besides his own organizations, he convinced other groups — such as the National Federation of Women's Clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Elks, Moose and a number of Masonic Lodges — to join the crusades against heroin.[70] After the anti-German hysteria of World War One had abated and the Red Scare had been to a certain degree forgotten, Americans were eager for a new enemy. Hobson's efforts provided a convenient menace for clubs and organizations which felt a need for a new, or a more compelling, reason for being. Noncontroversial — who would defend the demon heroin? — dope provided an easy target.

Living well, spending freely, Hobson devoted much of his effort to fund-raising. He received money from various philanthropic sources, including Josiah Lilly, and after his death, Lilly's sons. Besides fighting heroin, Hob-son and the pharmaceutical giant worked together to have the cocaine removed from Coca Cola. Hobson also solicited funds from Henry Ford. But because Ford insisted that tobacco be added to the list of demonic substances, and Hobson as a Southerner refused, no Ford money was forthcoming. Though the Depression put a serious crimp in his fund-raising, Hobson managed to spend the rest of his life fighting the evils of heroin. By the time of his death (in 1937), his efforts had paid off. Heroin was utterly demonized, and a new drug, canna-bis, was rising in public consciousness to take its place as the new menace.

Through speeches, lobbying, efforts to change textbooks, his own publications, interviews, sermons and magazine writing, Hobson more than any other person succeeded in fusing forever the notion of opiate "addiction" and violent criminality.

The image Hobson created was complex. On one hand he claimed that opiates gave the user an exaggerated sense of self. "Under the influence of the drug he becomes a heroin hero. He will do anything, he will dare anything. Or without it, he will do anything to get it."[71] At the same time the user is a degraded wretch. In order to supply his need he will

lie, steal, rob if necessary, commit murder. Heroin addiction can be likened to contagion. Suppose it were announced that there were a million lepers among our people. Think what a shock the announcement would produce! Yet drug addiction is far more incurable than leprosy, far more tragic to its victims, and is spreading like a moral and physical scourge.

There are symptoms breaking out all over our country and now breaking out in many parts of Europe which show that individual nations and the whole world are menaced by this appalling foe...marching to the capture and destruction of the whole world.

Most of the daylight robberies, daring holdups, cruel murders and similar crimes of violence are now known to be committed chiefly by drug addicts, who constitute the primary cause of our alarming crime wave.

Drug addiction is more communicable and less curable than leprosy. Drug addicts are the principle carriers of vice, diseases, and with their lowered resistance, are incubators and carriers of the streptococcus, pneumococcus, the germ of flu, of tuberculosis and other diseases.

Upon the issue hangs the perpetuation of civilization, the destiny of the world and the future of the human race.[72]

Worse even than contagion, degeneration, murder and rape, according to Hobson, was the threat that heroin posed to the youth of America. He repeated endless reports of children snared by the demon drug. Heroin "catches the boy and girl between 16 and 20, or even younger, like the young bird before it has learned to fly." Only one taste and a minor lawbreaker becomes a "desperado of the most vicious type." The metaphor of contagious disease appeared especially often when he wrote about children. "With the spread of heroin over the land, an army of our youth has turned into daring criminals. Each one multiplying himself by bringing other youths into addiction."[73]

The image of the festering social sore spewing infectious germs recurs endlessly, sounding more like a sen-sationalistic horror story than a rational examination of a societal problem. Hobson's claims, at times, beggar belief. For instance, black users "degenerate to the level of the cannibal." The title of his 1933 book, Drug Addiction: A Malignant Racial Cancer echoes the xenophobia and hysterical dreads of Hobson's contemporary and spiritual ally, H.P. Lovecraft. "The Crawling Chaos," "The Lurking Fear," "The Unnamable" — these might be Hob-son's terms. In fact, they're grotesque horror stories which appeared on newsstands at exactly the same time that Hobson was railing against "lepers," "moral and physical scourges," "perverts," "degenerate Negroes," and "racial cancers." It may be coincidence that Hobson began his anti-dope career the same year that Weird Tales appeared first on the newsstands, but there are remarkable similarities between his propaganda and the stories and illustrations in America's premier magazine of fear, disgust and titillating gore. Hobson called heroin a "Frankenstein monster" created by German scientists. And the defining image of his 1927 broadcast, "The Living Dead," clearly evokes the atmosphere of the Gothic tale.[74]

The year before, Sara Graham-Mulhall, strongly influenced by Hobson's hysteria, expounded at great length about "opium vampires" in her book Opium: the Demon Flower. "Human monsters" preyed on innocent white girls, "American born, daughters of good families, young women of intelligence and breeding." Even Hobson's assertion that religious conversion may be the "addict's only hope of freedom" echoes the vampire myth.[75]

Hobson's fear-mongering reached its zenith in ludicrous tales of opiates "inclosed in hot dog sandwiches and ice cream cones" and heroin-laced toiletries. "In using any brand of face powder regularly, it is a wise precaution to have a sample tested for heroin." Archetypal images of American youth and innocence are endlessly exploited; in an interview he told the unsubstantiated tale of a mother injecting her eight-year-old son with morphine, merely because the "addict" has a mania to create more "addicts." Girls lured into drug-slavery by the use of opiate "headache powders," gun-wielding teenaged maniacs, "snow gangs" terrorizing schools and rampaging through peaceful little towns: these are the images that Hobson incessantly repeated in the media. Not surprisingly, he seldom cited sources for his outrageous claims.[76]

Depending, apparently, upon whim, he variously claimed that there were 200,000, one million or even four million "drug addicts" in the U.S. Equally unreliable was his assertion that "90 percent of the crime committed" in Los Angeles was "traceable to narcotics." One of his most grievous manipulations of statistics was the frequently repeated claim that there'd been a 900 percent increase in "drug addiction" between 1919 and 1920. This was based on an increase from one to nine percent of the drug-using population of Sing Sing prison. This, obviously, was hardly a broad or representative sample to base such sweeping assertions on. Nonetheless, others took up the claim and it entered the drug-addiction mythology of the day. Even the journal of the AMA — not well known at this time for objectivity or unbiased reporting — publicly chastised Hobson for "distortions and exaggerations."[77]

Ultimately, though, it's not Hobson's disregard for statistical accuracy or scientific process that so corrupted his work. It is the fact that he was first and foremost a religious zealot. Using the "say it often enough and people will believe it" technique, he devoted the last 20 years of his life to promoting an image of drug use that shows no sign of weakening, even a half-century after his death. His ideology of purity came before fact; his racist doctrines took precedence over clear-headed analysis; his bizarre theories of evolution and brain physiology had greater import for him than rational examination of evidence; his panic-stricken psycho-sexual dogma was far more compelling to him — and his followers — than would have been the testimony of 1,000 actual opiate users. More similar to a Roman Catholic inquisitor — rooting out spiritual evil — than a scientist, Hobson has a distinguished place in the pantheon of American propagandists.

7.

The efforts of Richmond P. Hobson and others like him were successful. In the years between World War One and the end of Prohibition, the gospel of the dope menace became the national orthodoxy: preached from pulpits, in the halls of Congress and state legislatures, on the radio and given increasing amounts of space in newspapers, especially the powerful Hearst chain.

Before Hobson had begun his crusade, the Federal government had estimated the number of "addicts" in the U.S. at 1,000,000.[78] This statistic, apparently a compromise between the Public Health Service and the Revenue Service, became the base of much anti-dope propaganda. With the added impetus of steadily mounting fear-mongering, the number of "addicts" rose, at least in public perception. Some voices of sanity and objectivity argued against the grossly inflated figures. For instance, Dr. Alexander Lambert called the numbers bandied about by the anti-dope forces "enormously exaggerated." But he was in a distinct minority. Estimates as high as 5,000,000 were published. In New York City alone, according to The World, there were 200,000 Dope Fiends. Frederic Wallis echoed this figure ten years later, claiming that there were "200,000 drug addicts of the underworld type" in New York City alone.[79]

How many opiate users were there really in the U.S. at this time? Lawrence Kolb and AG. De Mez concluded that the number of users had peaked between 1890 and 1909, and then began to decline to approximately 100,000 — nationwide — by the mid-1920s. David Musto also argues that opiate users in the U.S. peaked about 1900 at a number somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000. Then it declined through the first three decades of the century. New laws, more stringent enforcement, the death of many older users, the decline in iatrogenic dependence, and other factors caused the use of opiates in the U.S. to decrease, all the while dope-panic was rising to ever higher levels.[80]

In addition to the influence of anti-dope crusaders, the changing demographics for users also influenced the climate of opinion. Older, female, middle-class users were being replaced by an increasingly male, younger, group. In New York City, generally accepted as the place where newer Fiends began to appear en masse, many users were switching from morphine to heroin.[81] Roughly 20 years after its introduction, heroin overcame its parent drug in popularity — at least in New York. David Musto examined admission records for Bellevue Hospital and found that 1915 was the first year when heroin users outnumbered morphinists.[82]

In The American Disease, Musto traces the origins and early ramifications of narcotic control in the U.S. This work is unsurpassed for accuracy, thoroughness and objectivity. I recommend it to any serious student of the subject; there is no need here to go over in detail what Musto has examined so exhaustively. But a brief overview of the legal response to opiates will be useful before returning to a discussion of the full flowering of hysteria and panic surrounding drugs.

In the years leading up to World War One, there had been a rising clamor for a tighter grip on drugs. The U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was a serious blow to the patent medicine business, requiring labeling of all medicines which contained opiates or cocaine. Still, as the perception of a drug epidemic grew, voices shouted for increased control. Various international congresses and conferences were held in hopes that world-wide control of drugs could be achieved. Producer nations were pressured to clamp down. At this time, the U.S. drug policy was a glass house, and a number of Americans — notably Charles Brent and Hamilton Wright — were already throwing stones. Largely as a sign of good faith to other countries — putting its own house in order — the U.S. Congress passed the Harrison Act which went into effect in March, 1915. The law contained three major provisions. First was the requirement that producers and distributors of narcotics register themselves and provide records to the Federal government regarding their activities. Secondly, a tax was levied on all sellers and producers of controlled substances. Thirdly, the Act required that anyone not registered with the government needed a prescription for "legitimate medical purposes" in order to buy or possess the drugs in question. The user was thus placed in a position of dependence on the medical profession, which was in turn controlled by Washington. As the Harrison Act was nominally a revenue measure, Federal Treasury agents were charged with enforcement. By June of 1916, 124,000 doctors, 47,000 pharmacists, 37,000 dentists, 11,000 veterinarians and 1,600 producers and wholesalers were registered with the Bureau of Internal Revenue.[83]

Two results were soon noticed: users began to switch from sniffing heroin to injecting it, and the price of the drug increased 1,500 percent. In the years of legal heroin, the vast majority of users took the drug by sniffing. It was then of a very high purity, and the desired effect was obtainable without resorting to the needle. As supplies dried up, clandestine distributors began to adulterate the drug. In order to get the same effect, heroinists first began inter-muscular injection, then intravenous mainlining.

At the same time, the price of heroin increased by a factor of 15. According to one source, the cost of heroin on the street went from $6.50 an ounce to $100 an ounce as a result of the Harrison Act.[84] A writer for The New Republic reported that in 1916 the price of heroin went from 85¢ a dram to seven dollars a dram, and this was adulterated to the point where injection was necessary to get a satisfactory result. An additional pressure was the 1909 ban on smoking opium, which had sent habitue in search of an affordable substitute.[85]

Certain forces within the U.S. — local, state and federal — were sympathetic to the plight of heroinists. Used to cheap, safe and easily available drugs, they were suddenly thrown on the mercy of street dealers. Since 1912, there had been, on a small scale, clinics to provide opiates and cocaine to those with dependencies. In 1919, as the hysteria regarding drug use and "foreign elements" in the U.S. increased, the Internal Revenue Bureau recommended that more maintenance clinics be opened. The hope was that by providing drugs in a safe and regulated environment crime would be reduced and the impetus for the black market eliminated. Forty-four clinics opened eventually, in cities as varied as New York and Shreveport, San Diego, Cleveland, Memphis, Houston and Paducah, Kentucky. Unfortunately, these clinics rapidly fell afoul of public opinion and federal authorities. Though many were well run, serving thousands of users, others — such as the one in Albany, New York — were tainted by graft. But the primary reason for the clinics' short life was the rising anti-dope sentiment. At the height of the Red Scare, few people were willing to defend such a questionable practice as providing free drugs. Photos in newspapers of Dope Fiends lining up for their daily dosage offended the sensibilities of many Americans. Soon, the Narcotics unit of the Treasury Department began to shut them down. A variety of Supreme Court rulings also strengthened the anti-maintenance forces. The experiment was largely over by 1921.

In New York City, a number of public officials pledged allegiance to the anti-dope orthodoxy. Frederic Wallis, the city's Commissioner of Correction, summed up the mounting frenzy in "The Menace of the Drug Addict." Drug use, for him, was synonymous with crime. "All drug addicts are criminals, either actual or potential, and there is no limit to their atrocities." The gross excesses of law enforcement agents during the Palmer Raids were apparently of little import: "No measure is too radical or severe that would prohibit the manufacture and sale of habit-forming drugs." The nation, the most elevated members of the human race, had a mandate to stop illicit drug use at any cost: "The greatest menace confronting civilization today is drug addiction."[86] Dr. Dana Hubbard, an officer of the City Health Department, also sounded the warning: "Heroin used by a human being produces an unmoral savage."[87] Mayor John Hylan appointed an investigative committee to examine the supposed connection between heroin use among the young and anarchist bombings of public institutions and leaders.[88]

Not only New York, which did in fact have the highest number of heroinists in the U.S., but the entire nation believed that a "crime wave" driven by drugs was sweeping America. Almost every state in the union, and many cities, passed stringent anti-dope laws. Endless repetitions of the supposed link between opiate use and criminality bombarded the populace. But in the main, these were examples of circular reasoning: drugs were illegal, drugs users were arrested and sent to prison; therefore drugs caused crime.

In 1924, congressman Stephen G. Porter introduced a bill to ban the import of opium for the production of heroin. After hearings in which new misinformation was given a public forum (e.g.: "Heroin addicts spring from sin and crime," "heroin contains, physiologically, the double action of cocaine and morphine."[89]), Congress enacted a national ban on the manufacture of heroin. That same year, the last maintenance clinic was shut down. Thus, 26 years after it was introduced, heroin had made an almost complete transformation. The 1924 law prohibited heroin except under very limited conditions; it was still possible — though extremely difficult — for hospitals and physicians to use heroin. Not until 1956 was heroin's demonization complete. In that year, heroin was declared by the federal government to be contraband in any and all circumstances, subject to seizure by the police: utterly anathema.

8.

By the time Prohibition was repealed, dope and the Dope Fiend had become as firmly fixed in the American popular consciousness as the blood-mad red Indian, the cruelly brilliant German scientist, or the crazed Red saboteur. Looking closely at the newspaper illustrations and editorial cartoons of the 1930s and '40s provides insight into the emotional content of the dope menace as it took its final form.

The images fall into four categories: 1) animal/vermin, 2) mythological creatures, 3) human forms, 4) animated objects.

The first and most common representation of dope was as an animal. The snake with multiple heads, slant-eyed (echoing the fear of the Chinese), fork-tongued, ready to strike. The jackal who holds a beautiful woman between his savage teeth, whose furious eyes stare back at the reader unafraid and unrepentant. The bat with teeth bared. The raging King Kong-like ape. One image of dope-as-spider includes the dark-eyed, fanged "Jewish" face so common in Nazi propaganda. A sphinx-like cat whose eyes shine balefully, and the vicious dog represented dope. The last animal image to consider was the vulture, with his hook-like jaw, wrinkled neck, talons splayed, perched on a bone, feeding its brood of vul-turettes, he was an effective image for the drug menace ready to swoop down and pick the bones of the "living dead."

Next are the mythological creatures. Artists depicted dope as the Grim Reaper picking flowers in a field of skull-headed poppies (see page 143). His grin and sickle, his cowl and boney grasp, are the stuff of cliche. But the endless field of death's-head poppies was a new twist on a hoary image. Demons of course were used, with all the traditional trappings: beard, horns, hooves, bat wings, snakey tail coiled around goat legs, and in at least one version, the hooked nose so common in anti-Jewish slanders. With bulging eyes, claws and fangs, the dragon also stood for dope. And the witch of Halloween lore made an appearance, too.

Less fantastic human figures crop up also: the thug with cap and tie and jutting jaw, the "Chinaman" villain of film and pulp fiction (bald, slavering, grasping at white women with taloned hands). A fat man in spats, formal suit, white gloves and top hat often represented the "Big Man" of the dope ring: successful, wealthy, and untouchable by the law. His resemblance to John Bull may be an echo of American resentment regarding British involvement in the opium trade. A final human figure is the cave man, complete with club and fur breech cloth. The opposite of the Big Man, the Neanderthal was used to depict the stupidity of drug use, and the devolutionary effect that drugs had on the user.

Lastly, artists personified dope in illustrations by putting arms and legs and a skull-head on a bottle. In one picture, dope leads another skeletal figure (with smoking pistol) in an attack on American youth.

The symbolic content of these images is not simple. Dope and the Dope Fiend were paradoxically less than human (verminous) and greater than human (powerful, supernatural). The most common type of image was the animal, particularly the predator. This image fits in well with the generally accepted notion of the scapegoat: outside of the group, disconnected so that his death or expulsion will not necessitate revenge.

Creature of darkness: bat and snake. Eaters of carrion: jackal and vulture. Cunningly patient: the spider and cat. These images of the Dope Fiend play on our anxieties. The Grim Reaper, demons and dragons touch deep and irrationally parts of our psyche. And this is crucial. The war against the Dope Fiend was fought, and continues to be fought, largely in the realm of the irrational. Fact was often crushed by more compelling fiction; logical analysis was frequently buried under automatic emotional response. The use of these sensationalistic images, and the often irrational verbal expression of propagandists such as Hobson and Anslinger, had a far greater impact on the American notion of drug use than objective examination. Or perhaps a completely rational discussion of this topic is, in fact, impossible. Any edifice built on such an irrational foundation may be beyond reason. Like capital punishment, abortion, and gun rights, the subject of drugs may be one that is more about emotion and psychological need than fact. And this gives the symbolic content of the images even more importance.

At no point in this book have I argued that heroin's properties are entirely symbolic. Of course there are measurable physiological effects from the drug. But my concern is more with the nonrational, emblematic nature of heroin, which I believe to be far more important for our understanding of its place in our cultural pantheon than its chemical properties.

Some will disagree, claiming that "mere" symbolic content is trivial. But consider certain other highly-charged substances, for instance kosher wine and holy water.

Although it would be idiotic to look for the property of kosherness in wine, or for the property of holiness in water, this does not mean that there is no such thing as kosher wine or holy water. Kosher wine is wine that is ritually clean according to Jewish law. Holy water is water blessed by a Catholic priest. This creates a certain demand for such wine and water by people who want this sort of thing; at the same time, and for precisely the same reason, such wine and water are rejected by those who do not believe in their use.[90]

Holy water does have actual physical properties; it can quench thirst, put out a fire, irrigate a garden. But of course these are not the uses it is put to. Likewise, kosher wine can be used by non-Jews for purposes other than Jewish ritual (and in fact one brand of this type of wine is known among alcoholics and teenagers as "Mad Dog"). Consider also the cross — two pieces of wood fastened at their midpoint — and the furor that ensured when an artist dipped a cross in urine. An even more extreme example is the uses to which the American flag is put. One could argue that it's only a rectangle of colored cloth. Yet tempers flare, and politicians rail and foam, when the American flag is not treated with ceremonial respect.

Do most Americans say the flag is "just" a symbol? Hardly. Thousands have died for symbols: the swastika, the stars and stripes, the stars and bars, the fasces, the hammer and sickle, the cross, the crescent, the Star of David. Kiss a religious icon or a flag — or spit on it — and there's little to distinguish these two acts (mouth, saliva, intimacy). Yet the responses evoked by these two acts could hardly be less alike.

Similarly, I would argue, heroin is largely a symbolic substance: invested by cynical and well-meaning people alike with a heavy burden of meaning far beyond the chemical properties of a certain opiate alkaloid.

One of the most striking — and inarguable — characteristics of heroin is its ability to kill pain. Yet since 1956, heroin has been absolutely forbidden to American doctors and hospitals, even those treating patients in extreme and unrelenting pain. This is the case because of heroin's symbolic, not medical, properties.

America's highly ambiguous response to pain is made patently clear in its struggle against heroin. The "no pain, no gain" dogma was part of American orthodoxy long before body-builders took it up. The word "indolent" was often used to denigrate the drug user in the early 20th century. It now has, in general usage, a wholly negative meaning: lazy, self-satisfied, the opposite of the can-do, hard-working pioneer spirit. But in medical terminology it retains its original meaning: causing no pain. Heroin was likely named after heroic therapy, yet it posed a threat to the long-standing notion of salvation-through-pain. Often propagandists such as Hobson and Anslinger wove hellish imagery into their screeds — opiates as infernal torment. And certainly heroin users deprived of their drug experience intense suffering. Yet it seems to me that Hobson, Anslinger et. al. were concerned more about infernal pleasure then the torments heroinists endured. I'm convinced Dope Fiend crusaders were more appalled by the indolence of users than they were by its potential for causing suffering. And certainly their hateful imagery evidences little sympathy for men and women racked by the agonies of withdrawal.

Heroin's little brother, aspirin, was accepted wholeheartedly. It spawned numerous other over-the-counter pain killers which now sell in the billions each year. Strangely, American are seen by the rest of the world as big babies (who must have everything their way, who swallow millions of pills each year to blunt their minor sufferings) who are yet still deeply attached to the "no pain, no gain" philosophy.

Indolence, laziness, self-indulgence, irresponsible pleasure-seeking: most scapegoated groups in America have been slandered with these accusations. Blacks, Chinese, Spanish-speaking Americans, Indians, Irish, and southern Europeans were all at one time tarred with this brush. Dovetailing with these slurs was also the belief that these groups were "backward and uncivilized." Heroin, though at the time the ultimate in pharmacological progress, was quickly recast as an agent of regression, devolution, sloth and anti-American sentiment. Another link in this chain was the notion that "primitives" were more erotically indulgent than the so-called higher races. It's no surprise then that opiates were consistently associated with sex. White slavers, men of leisure and ladies of pleasure, Chinese pimps, black rapists — the sensa-tionalistic reports of the early 20th century frequently linked illicit sex and heroin. And as David Musto points out, "Inordinate pleasure caused by drugs, moreover, was seen to provide youth with a poor foundation for character development, and a resulting loss of independence and productivity."[91]

In contrast to "foreign" opiates, alcohol was perceived — once the forces of Prohibition were defeated — as native and natural. Dr. Stille summed up the idea this way:

It is true that opium is not likely to become popular among industrious races like the Anglo-Saxon, whose preference must always be far more the potent, though less permanent, stimulus of ardent spirits, the gross and mortal enjoyments of which are far more suitable to the character of the race than the divine luxuries of opium.[92]

Alcohol was, and still largely is, associated with the competitive spirit, action, manliness, and strength. Opiates in comparison were thought to engender narcissism, inefficiency, defeatist and self-centered behaviors, low productivity, regression and anti-social violence. Perhaps they also stir up such powerful emotion because they cut to the heart of the most American of notions: freedom. The Dope Fiend is a "slave," yet by his choice of drugs he proclaims his preference to opt out of the mainstream society. His refusal to place social good before personal desire brings to the surface many of the repressed contradictions in America's doctrine of freedom. Is choosing to be enslaved an act of freedom? Is the normative, status quo life just one more kind of slavery?

Similarly, the contradictions of male/female roles also can be found in symbolism of the "addict." Though the Dope Fiend was almost always pictured as being male, the drug habit itself was frequently tinctured with fe-maleness. Crusaders spoke of opiates unmanning a man, making him weak, dependent, and slavish. Certainly there was some holdover from the older stereotypical opiate user: the helpless, self-indulgent, middle-class woman. The "femaleness" of the Dope Fiend is only a flavor, one more ingredient in the symbolic stew. Like most enduring popular cultural figures, the Dope Fiend does not have a single source. Though aggressive, violent, immoral and powerful, there remains a shadow of the tainted female within him. And the preoccupation with the menace to white women, whether from blacks, Mexicans, Asians, or more generic degenerates, may be a perverse echo of the anxiety that "female taint" so often stirs up.

It would be simplistic to attribute American's obsession with the dark-skinned Other to one cause, or to use only one explanatory model, such as Freudian theory. Nonetheless, there are deep and long-standing wounds in the American soul. Guilt is one of the most difficult emotions to purge. It's possible that Americans' collective guilt — over slavery, over the genocide of the Indians, over the exploitation of immigrants — manifests itself as the dark-skinned Other. More than one writer has called the U.S. a haunted place, not literally haunted by ghosts, but by ghostly forces and memories, with regret and guilt flickering at the corner of the eye. They are impossible to lay to rest. Repression puts them down for a while, but they eventually return, stronger and in new forms.

The wild Indian — skulking in the forest, naked, face painted, as eager to rip off a white man's scalp as to press his dark finger prints on virginal white flesh. Is he a ghost returned to make our sleep uneasy? The black rebel — from Nat Turner to Superfly, strong, violent, attractive, menacing, refusing to submit to the white man's game. Though these figures of black independence were not produced directly by whites, certainly white oppression and exclusion were a major force in their development. Are they spectral manifestations of American guilt? The grasping, taloned, inscrutable Asian — the British fear him as Dr. Fu Manchu and Dr. No. America has given him no distinctive name, but we see him in collective dreams (films, novels, newspapers, comic books) reaching out to steal, ravish, and defile. In the 1990s a new version of the dark-skinned Other came forward: the Islamic "terrorist," crazed and suidically violent.

Black, red, brown and yellow; an uneasy mixture of indolence and supernal strength, stupidity and cunning, ugliness and sexual allure, childish spite and the decadence of old age; the image is that of a fiend. And the echoes, all the way back to the Black Shining Man (as the witch-haunted Salamites called the Devil), are remarkable.

First, the Dope Fiend as demonic menace is obsessed with recruitment. "A heroin addict has literally a mania to lead others into addiction and will make every effort to do so, having no pity even for children." warned Richmond Hobson.[93] Like the Dope Fiend, the Devil, too, is of course a tempter: secretive, threatening when he needs to be, sweet and wheedling when that serves his purposes. A newspaper editorial from 1925 merged the two into one: "And frequently, sinking to the lowest depths, his degradation takes the form of seeking with malicious Satanic ingenuity to inflict the drug curse upon others."[94]

In the popular iconography of the Devil, there is a pact. The terrified people of Salem testified against the Devil, "the grand Seignior of Hell, that mighty tyrant," claiming that he demanded they sign his book of damnation.[95]

The Devil, exhibiting himself ordinarily as a small black man, had decoyed a fearful knot of proud, froward, ignorant, envious and malicious creatures to lift themselves in his horrid service by entering their names in a book by him tendered unto them.[96]

Both the addict and the Devil, according to folklore, are powerfully seductive. "Just make your mark here-just one little taste of heroin." The dynamic is almost identical: an unholy covenant that binds the recruit to an eternity of torment. "The chief obsession of the drug addict," stated Dr. Mackin in 1919, "is to gain converts to the cult."[97]

Take the stealth of the Indian, the cruel genius of the "oriental," the literal black skin and figurative black heart of the African, mix well in a cauldron heated by political turmoil and environmental threat, and you have the image of the Devil who stalked New England in the 1600s. Take the same ingredients and similar atmosphere of social upheaval, and you have the Dope Fiend of the early 20th century.

The seducer and the victim of seduction are the same. Just as opiates were supposed to be a devolutionary force, creating degenerate beasts from ordinary citizens, so too the Devil — in his assault on the Puritan colony — was accused of "transforming those wretches into Brutes and Birds," as Cotton Mather reported.[98] And like the great army of addicts which Hobson claimed was spreading over America "more destructive and biologically more dangerous" than actual armed attack, likewise Satan's forces, "a vast power or army of Evil Spirits," had been gathered together to reclaim the Puritan outpost from the hand of God.[99]

Notes:

1. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins U.P.) 1977. p. 13.
2. Missionary Herald. LXXII. (1876) p. 30.
3. Gutzlaff, Charles, in: Chinese Repository I (1832) p. 126.
4. Williams, Samuel. The Middle Kingdom. (New York) 1848. p. 96.
5. Maclay, R.S. Life Among The Chinese. (New York) 1861. pp. 136-137.
6. Albany Farmer's, Mechanic's and Worfeingmcm's Advocate. April 10, 1830. n.p.
7. Hill, Herbert. "Anti-Oriental Agitation and the Rise of Working-Class Racism." Society. (10) January-February 1973. p. 52.
8. Ibid., p.46.
9. Ibid., p. 52.
10. Szasz, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry. (New York: Doubleday) 1974. Brecher, E.M. et al. Licit and Illicit Drugs. (Boston: Little Brown) 1972.
11. Miller, Stuart. The Unwelcome Immigrant. (Berkeley: U. of Cal Press). 1969. p. 9.
12. Ibid., p. 162.
13. Ibid., p. 162.
14. Ibid., p. 163.
15. Ibid., p. 164.
16. Ibid., p. 163.
17. Ibid., p. 163.
18. Terry, Charles and Mildred Pellens. The Opium Problem. (New York: Committee on Drug Addictions) 1928. p. 193.
19. Miller, Stuart. The Unwelcome Immigrant. (Berkeley: U. of Cal Press). 1969. p. 198.
20. Ibid., pp. 163-164.
21. New York Tribune, October 20, 1905.
22. Miller, Stuart. The Unwelcome Immigrant. (Berkeley: U. of Cal Press). 1969. p. 185.
23. Ibid., p. 184.
24. Kandall, Stephen. Substance and Shadow. (Harvard U.P.) 1996. p. 65.
25. Silver, Gary. The Dope Chronicles: 1850-1950. (New York: Harper and Row) 1974. p. 41.
26. Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex 1790-1920. (New York: Norton) 1992. p. 219. '
27. Courtwright, David. Dark Paradise. (Harvard U.P.) 1982. p. 78.
28. Kane, H.H. Opium-Smoking in America and China. (New York: Putnams) 1882. p. 8.
29. New York Times, October 30, 1905. pt. 4, p.4.
30. Holden, Charles. "Chinese Slavery in America." North American Review. September 1897. p. 294.
31. Wright, Hamilton. "Report: International Opium." in Opium Problem: Message, p. 45.
32. Krivanek, Jara. Heroin. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin) 1988. p. 55.
33. Sante, Luc. Lowlife. (New York: Farrar, Straus) 1991. pp. 128-129.
34. Leviticus 16: 10, 20, 21.
35. Williams, George. Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought. (New York: Harper and Brothers) 1962. p. 13.
36. Szasz, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry. (New York: Doubleday) 1974. p. 111.
37. Metzger, Th. Blood and Volts. (New York: Autonomedia) 1996. pp. 117, 134, 163.
38. Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. (Baltimore MD: John Hopkins U.P.) 1977. p. 8.
39. Murray, Robert K. Red Scare. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press) 1955.
40. Weir, William. In The Shadow of the Dope Fiend. (North Have, Connecticut: Archon) 1995. p. 40.
41. Murray, Robert K. Red Scare. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press) 1955. p. 97.
42. Palmer, A Mitchell. "Extent of the Bolshevik Infection Here." Literary Digest. LXIV. 1/17/1920. p. 13.
43. Herer, Jack. Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy. (Van Nuys, California: Hemp Publishing) 1985. p. 27.
44. Silver, Gary. The Dope Chronicles: 1850-1950. (New York: Harper and Row) 1974. pp. 120-121.
45. Black, Winifred. Dope: the Story of the Living Dead. (New York: Star Co.) 1928. pp. 15, 19, 23.
46. Ibid., pp. 14, 77.
47. Herer, Jack. Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy. (Van Nuys, California: Hemp Publishing) 1985. p. 68.
48. Musto, David. The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 212.
49. Ibid., p. 195.
50. Weir, William. In The Shadow of the Dope Fiend. (North Haven, Connecticut: Archon) 1995. p. 45.
51. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 41.
52. Hobson, Richmond P. Alcohol and the Human Race. (New York: Fleming Revell Co.) 1919. pp. 33, 46, 90, 104,109.
53. Hobson, Richmond P. Speech given to U.S. House of Representatives. December 22, 1914.
54. Hobson, Richmond P. Alcohol and the Human Race. (New York: Fleming Revell Co.) 1919. p. 182.
55. Ibid., p. 107-109.
56. Furnas, Joseph. The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum. (New York: Putnams) 1965. p. 316.
57. Weir, William. In The Shadow of the Dope Fiend. (North Haven, Connecticut: Archon) 1995. p. 24.
58. Furnas, Joseph. The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum. (New York: Putnams) 1965. p. 317.
59. Sinclair, Andrew. Prohibition: the Era of Excess. (Boston: Little, Brown) 1962. p. 46.
60. Ibid., p. 49.
61. Epstein, Edward. Agency of Fear. (New York: Putnams) 1977. p. 24.
62. Sheldon, Richard. Richmond Pearson Hobson: the Military Hero as Reformer. (Tucson: U. of Arizona thesis) 1970. p. 227.
63. Rumbarger, John. Profits, Power and Prohibition. (Albany, New York: SUNY Press) 1989. p. 177. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1920. p. 42. and Speech given to U.S. House of Representatives. December 22, 1914.
64. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 41.
65. Hobson, Richmond P. Speech given to U.S. House of Representatives. December 22,1914.
66. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 41.
67. Hobson, Richmond P. Alcohol and the Human Race. (New York: Fleming Revell Co.) 1919. p. 69.
68. Ibid., p. 109. Time, March 21, 1931. p. 52.
70. Weir, William. In The Shadow of the Dope Fiend. (North Haven, Connecticut: Archon) 1995. p. 43.
71. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 41.
72. Hobson, Richmond P. Alcohol and the Human Race. (New York: Fleming Revell Co.) 1919. p!91.
73. Hobson, Richmond P. "One Million Americans Victim of Drug Habit." New York Times. November 9, 1924. Part 9, p.4.
74. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 42. Graham-Mulhall, Sara. Opium: the Demon Flower. 1926. pp. 60-61. Weir, William. In The Shadow of the Dope Fiend. (North Haven, Connecticut: Archon) 1995. p. 43.
75. Randall, Stephen. Substance and Shadow. (Harvard U.P.) 1996. p. 106. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 42.
76. Hobson, Richmond P. "Heroin Heroes." Saturday Evening Post. September 20, 1924. p. 41. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 322.
77. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 326.
78. "Special Committee on Investigation Appointed March 25, 1918 by the Secretary of the Treasury: Traffic in Narcotics Drugs. (GPO) 1919. pp. 19-22.
79. Lambert, Alexander. "The Underlying Causes of the Narcotic Habit." Modern Medicine. (2) 1920. p. 8. Kandall, Stephen. Substance and Shadow. (Harvard U.P.) 1996. p. 78. Wallis, Frederic. "The Menace of the Drug Addict." Current History. (21) 1925. p. 743.
80. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 254.
81. "History of Heroin." Bulletin of Narcotics. (5) 4-6, 1953. p. 7.
82. Musto, David. "Early History of Heroin in the U.S." in: Addiction, ed. Peter Bourne. (New York: Academic Press) 1974. p. 178.
83. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 121.
84. Ibid., p. 102.
85. Kandall, Stephen. Substance and Shadow. (Harvard U.P.) 1996. p. 77.
86. Wallis, Frederic. "The Menace of the Drug Addict." Current History. (21) 1925. p. 740, 741, 743.
87. Trebach, Arnold. The Heroin Solution. (Yale U.P.) 1982. p. 48.
88. Musto, David. "Early History of Heroin in the U.S." in: Addiction, ed. Peter Bourne. (New York: Academic Press) 1974. p. 182.
89. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 201.
90. Szazs, Thomas. Ceremonial Chemistry. (New York: Doubleday). 1974. p. 4.
91. Musto, David, The American Disease. (Yale U.P.) 1973. p. 244.
92. Terry, Charles, and Mildred Pellens. The Opium Problem. (New York: Committee on Drug Addictions) 1928. p. 95.
93. Hobson, Richmond P. "One Million Americans Victim of Drug Habit." New York Times. November 9, 1924. Part 9, p.4.
94. "Death Among the Poppies." New York American. March 22, 1925. Editorial page.
95. Levin, David, ed. What Happened in Salem? (New York: Harcourt Brace) 1960. p. 97.
96. Mather, Cotton. Wonders of The Invisible World.
97. Terry, Charles, and Mildred Pelle