The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

How World War I Cost Us Hemp & the Forests

In 1917, the world was battling World War I. In this country, industrialists, just beset with the minimum wage and graduated income, tax, were sent into a tailspin. Progressive ideals were lost as the United States took its place on the world stage in the struggle for commercial supremacy. Is is against this backdrop that the first 20th Century hemp drama was played.

The Players

The story begins in 1916, soon after the release of USDA Bulletin 404. Near San Diego, California, a 50-year-old German immigrant named George Schlichten had been working on a simple yet brilliant invention. Schlichten had spent 18 years and $400,000 on the decorticator, a machine that could strip the fiber from nearly any plant, leaving the pulp behind. To build it, he had developed an encyclopedic knowledge of fibers and paper making. His desire was to stop the felling of forests for paper, which he believed to be a crime. His native Germany was well advanced in forestry and Schlichten knew that destroying forests meant destroying needed watersheds.

Henry Timken, a wealthy industrialst and investor of the roller bearing, got wind of Schlichten’s invention and went to meet the inventor in February of 1917. Timken saw the decorticator a a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind. Timken offered Schlichten the chance to grow 100 acres of hemp on his ranch in the fertile farmlands of Imperial Valley, California, just east of San Diego, so that Schlichten could test his invention.

Shortly thereafter, Timken met with the newspaper giant E.W. Scripps, and his longtime associate Milton McRae, at Miramar, Scripp’s home in San Diego. Scripps, then 63, had accumulated the largest chain of newspapers in the country. Timken hoped to interest Scripps in making newsprint from hemphurds.

Turn-of-the-century newspaper barons needed huge amounts of paper to deliver their swelling circulations. Nearly 30% of the four million tons of paper manufactured in 1909 was newsprint; by 1914 the circulation of daily newspapers had increased by 17% over 1909 figures to over 28 million copies.1 By 1917, the price of newsprint was rapidly rising, and McRae, who had been investigating owning a paper mill since 1904,2 was concerned.

Sowing the Seeds

In May, after further meetings with Timkin, Scripps asked McRae to investigate the possibility of using the decorticator in the manufacture of newsprint.

McRae quickly became excited about the plan. He called the decorticator “a great invention. . . [which] will not only render great service to this country, but it will be very profitable financially. . . [it] may revolutionize existing conditions.” On August 3, as harvest time neared, a meeting was arranged between Schlichten, McRae, and newspaper manager Ed Chase.

Without Schlichten’s knowledge, McRe had his secretary record the three-hour meeting stenographically. The resulting document, the only known record of Schlichten’s voluminous knowledge found to date, is reprinted fully in Appendix I. Schlichten had thoroughly studied many kinds of plants used for paper, among them corn, cotton, yucca, and Espana bacata. Hemp, it seemed, was his favorite: “The hemp hurd is a practical success and will make paper of a higher grade than ordinary news stock,” he stated.

His hemp paper was even better than that produced for USDA Bulletin 404, he claimed, because the decorticator eliminated the retting process, leaving behind short fibers and a natural glue that held the paper together. At 1917 levels of hemp production Schlichten anticipated making 50,000 tons of paper yearly at a retail price of $25 a ton. This was less than 50 percent of the price of newsprint at the time! And every acre of hemp turned to paper, Schlichten added, would preserve five acres of forest.

McRae was very impressed by Schlichten. The man who dined with presidents and captains of industry wrote to Timken, “I want to say without equivocation that Mr.
Schlichten impressed me as being a man of great intellectuality and ability; and so far as I can see, he has created and constructed a wonderful machine.” He assigned Chase to spend as much time as he could with Schlichten and prepare a report.

Harvest Time

By August, after only three months of growth, Timken’s hemp crop had grown to its full height – 14 feet! – and he was highly optimistic about its prospects. He hoped to travel to California to watch the crop being decorticated, seeing himself as a benefactor to mankind who would enable people to work shorter hours and have more time for “spiritual development.”

Scripps, on the other hand, was not in an optimistic frame of mind. He had lost faith in a government that he believed was leading the country to financial ruin because of the war, and that would take 40 percent of his profits in income tax. In an August 14 letter to his sister, Ellen, he said: “When Mr. McRae was talking to me about the increase in the price of white paper that was pending, I told him I was just fool enough not to be worried about a thing of that kind.” The price of paper was expected to rise 50 percent, costing Scripps his entire year’s profit of $1,125,000! Rather than develop a new technology, he took the easy way out: the Penny Press Lord simply planned to raise the price of his papers from one cent to two cents.

The Demise

On August 28, Ed Chase sent his full report to Scripps and McRae. The younger man also was taken with the process: “I have seen a wonderful, yet simple, invention. I believe it will revolutionize many of the processes of feeding, clothing, and supplying other wants of mankind.

Chase witnessed the decorticator produce seven tons of hemp hurds in two days. At full production, Schlichten anticipated each machine would produce five tons per day. Chase figured hemp could easily supply Scripps’ West Coast newspapers, with leftover pulp for side businesses. He estimated the newsprint would cost between $25 and $35 per ton, and proposed asking an East Coast paper mill to experiment for them.

McRae, however, seems to have gotten the message that his boss was no longer very interested in making paper from hemp. His response to Chase’s report is cautious: “Much will be determined as to the practicability by the cost of transportation, manufacture, etc., etc., which we cannot ascertain without due investigation.” Perhaps when his ideals met with the hard work of developing them, the semi-retired McRae backed off.

By September, Timken’s crop was producing one ton of fiber and four tons of hurds per acre, and he was trying to interest Scrips in opening a paper mill in San Diego. McRae and Chase travelled to Cleveland and spent to hours convincing Timken that, while hemp hurds were usable for other types of paper, they could not be made into newsprint cheaply enough. Perhaps the eastern mill at which they experimented wasn’t encouraging – after all, it was set up to make wood pulp paper.

By this time, Timken, too, was hurt by the wartime economy. He expected to pay 54 percent income tax and was trying to borrow $2 million at 10 percent interest to retool for war machines. The man who a few weeks earlier could not wait to get to California no longer expected to go west at all that winter. He told McRae, “I think I will be too damn busy in this section of the country looking after business.”

The decorticator resurfaced in the 1930s, when it was touted as the machine that would make hemp a “Billion Dollar Crop” in articles in Mechanical Engineering and Popular Mechanics.* (Until the 1993 edition of The Emperor, the decorticator was believed to be a new discovery at that time.) Once again, the burgeoning hemp industry was halted, this time by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.