WRECKAGE, HELL, AND MADNESS: AMERICAN DRUG FILMS

WRECKAGE, HELL, AND MADNESS: AMERICAN DRUG FILMS
AND THE IMAGE OF THE USER, 1923-1937
A THESIS IN
History
Presented to the Faculty of the University
Of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of
The requirements for the degree
MASTER OF ARTS
by
CHRISTOPHER RYAN WILSON
B.A., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2011
Kansas City, Missouri
2015
UMI Number: 1591091
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WRECKAGE, HELL, AND MADNESS: AMERICAN DRUG FILMS
AND THE IMAGE OF THE USER, 1923-1937
Christopher Ryan Wilson, Candidate for the Master of Arts Degree
University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2015
ABSTRACT
This paper is an exploration of the discursive, cultural transformations images of drug
use and drug users have taken though some of America’s early film history. By exploring and
unpacking the imagery and other expressive qualities of films centering on the topic of drug
use, this paper attempts to examine important cultural discussions Americans have had
regarding drug users though the 1920s and 1930s. It can be found that drug users have
historically been portrayed in film as the archetypal “other”, designated as such through
characteristics of class, ethnicity or sexuality. In this way, exploring representations of drugs
and drug users through fictional media allows for a deeper understanding of America’s everdeveloping relationship with narcotics users as well as with various marginalized groups.
Focusing on an examination of change over time (the 1920s to the 1930s), this paper
analyzes several films from each decade in order to develop an understanding of how
different generations of Americans assign cultural value to those associated with drug use.
Social changes are the driving force in these representations and they are nearly always
prescribed by a sense of fear or alienation toward a specific ethnic or minority group. This
societal discomfort then manifests in the cultural representations seen in film and fiction—
and is the subject of this paper.
iii
While these different sorts of cultural representations are a constant in American film
history, they are not consistent in how they manifest. Examining and explaining what
accounts for changes over the time is the chief focus of this research project.
iv
The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences
have examined a thesis titled “Wreckage, Hell, and Madness: American Drug Films and the
Image of the User, 1923-1936,” presented by Christopher Ryan Wilson, candidate for the
Master of Arts degree, and certify that in their opinion is worthy of acceptance.
Supervisory Committee
Matthew Osborn, Ph.D., Committee Chair
Department of History
Dennis Merrill, Ph.D.
Department of History
John Herron, Ph.D.
Department of History
v
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..........................................................................................................................iii
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1
2. CONFRONTING VICE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY ...................... 6
3. THE TWENTIES: EARLY FILMS AND THE IMAGE OF THE USER ................ 11
Influences of the Long Nineteenth Century ................................................. 13
Early Signs of Transition ............................................................................. 16
4. THE THIRTIES: AN END TO PROHIBITION, MARIJUANA,
AND THE AGE OF THE DEVIANT ....................................................................... 19
Age and Gender Transition .......................................................................... 26
5. CONCLUSION: THE IMAGE OF THE USER ........................................................ 31
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 35
VITA .................................................................................................................................... 37
vi
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
By the late 1910s, St. Louis Born actor Wallace Reid was a prominent face in early
American cinema. While en route to film The Valley of the Giants in early 1919, Reid injured
himself in a train wreck and, so in order to keep up with a demanding film schedule, was
prescribed large doses of morphine by a doctor to keep his pain at a tolerable level. Reid soon
became addicted to the powerful drug and—as addiction rehabilitation programs were yet to
exist—shifted to casual heroin use to keep up with an ensuing opiate addiction. This
eventually led to a fatal overdose in 1923 at the age of 31.
Following his death, Reid’s wife Dorothy Davenport, took it upon herself to produce
one of the first Hollywood movies to fall under the category of an American “drug film”,
Human Wreckage, released in the spring of 1923. A silent picture, the film centered on the
court case of a young man called Jimmy Brown. Jimmy was a clean-cut young white boy,
probably middle class and in his late-teens, who became a victim to “dope” (almost certainly
opium/heroin) use. After becoming a strung-out addict, Jimmy is caught stealing a pocket
watch to fund his habit. Ethel McFarland, the wife of a local, prominent attorney, hears of the
local young man’s plight and persuades her husband to take on his defense. During trial, the
judge acquits Jimmy of all charges, as he finds him to have not been “morally responsible”
for his behavior. Mr. McFarland, who finds himself driven to the verge of hysteria during the
trial and the ensuing battle to stamp out the local dope ring, is given morphine by a physician
friend of his—and he too becomes an addict.
The plot then takes a dark turn. McFarland is soon seen getting his drug dealers offthe-hook in trials in order to keep his access to drugs secure. A now clean Jimmy Brown,
1
who following his acquittal gained employment as a hard working taxi driver, hears of
McFarland’s fall from grace. One evening he happens to pick up a passenger he recognizes
as the local drug kingpin and kills them both in an intentional collision with a train. His
selfless and noble objective was to save the lawyer from his habit and finally put an end to
the local dope ring. After hearing of Jimmy’s death, Mr. McFarland cleans himself up, kicks
his habit and goes back to the business of prosecuting drug pushers. The film’s final scene is
the most iconic. The film’s architect and producer Dorothy Davenport appears and makes a
plea to the American people to aid her in ending the narcotic menace in the United States in a
sweeping crusade. No doubt inspired the death of her husband, silent film start Wallace Reid.
Probably the very first widely-released drug film in American history, Human
Wreckage encapsulates several important themes for many films of the genre that come after
it. The conjecture and fear in Human Wreckage is that the scourge of addiction will move
past (and through) the laboring class and threaten those in the economically productive
middle and upper classes – wreaking havoc on the lives of respectable boys and men like
Jimmy Brown and Mr. McFarland. The projected fear is this: that drugs will destroy society
for the affluent, white, protestant middle class and, thereby, the fabric of America itself.
Racial overtones are evident as well. Movie posters advertising the film depicted the
dealers with stereotypical Asian attributes—complete with a Fu Manchu moustache and
yellow-tinted complexion. This coupled with their substance of choice—opium—would
imply their racial status. It is not to be looked over, as well, that in the same year of the film’s
release the United States Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 in an effort to,
“preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.” This act imposed harsh, immigration
restrictions – in the form of numerical quotas – on immigrating nationalities considered to be
2
of inferior ethnic and racial stock especially targeting groups from southern and eastern
Europe. The post-World War I legislation greatly expanded the list of undesirable
newcomers that had first begun to be complied in the 1880s when Congress passed the
Chinese Exclusion Act that barred immigrants of color arriving from the Middle Kingdom,
ostensibly connected by Anglo, “orientalist” cultural constructions to organized crime and
opium dens in California and other western states.
Drugs entrapped Jimmy Brown and Mr. McFarland. If Brown had not fallen prey to
the “dope rings”, he perhaps might have lived a productive and long life. McFarland in turn
could only be liberated from the villainous drug dealers by Jimmy Brown’s martyrdom.
Hollywood disseminated these lessons at a time when the federal government sought not
only to contain the immigrant hordes, but when Congress also set its sights on the drug trade
itself. Emulating Progressive era efforts to criminalize the production and sale of alcohol,
reformers in the 1920s gained support for the nation’s first prohibitive drug laws that
criminalized possession of opiates and marijuana – identifying those substances as a danger
to the public well-being.
Drug films such as Human Wreckage portrayed white, middleclass professionals
sympathetically as victims who fell to the predatory practices of the narcotics industry. In a
second subcategory of user films, prominent in the following decade, the addict is more often
than not a character drawn from the fringes of the American Dream: an irresponsible youth,
a racial or ethnic minority, a coarse working-class stiff or impoverished individual, or a man
or woman who has somehow or another violated social norms and fallen from grace. Indeed,
user films of the depression era – including the 1938 classic Refer Madness—more
3
frequently cast the user as a “homegrown” deviant of weak moral character with little regard
for society or law.
Celluloid drug users in the 1930s seem to be almost predestined to enter into a life of
dysfunction and crime. They are often youthful, subject to fits of rebellion against established
norms – and a danger to society that must be contained. They often possess considerable
promise but choose instead to indulge themselves in sensory pleasures, throwing away the
chance to assume respectable places in their communities. Here, the problem is less about the
substances and more about the sort of person drawn to them. Moreover, these people are
viewed as dangerous to others, because they are capable of bringing out the worst in others of
weak moral fortitude. For this reason, the person must be incarcerated (and totally removed
from functional society) or forced to come to terms with their addictions and their character
flaws. No longer are users viewed as people in need of aid or guidance but, rather, in need of
punishment and compulsory adjustment. Here, drugs are not the enemy, immorality is.
This paper explores the early twentieth-century history of America’s relationship with
drug use through the lens of popular culture, specifically through early American cinema. To
analyze the changing cultural representations of users from the late 1920s to the onset of
World War II, it juxtaposes two sets of user films. Human Wreckage (1923), The Drug
Traffic (1923), and A Place that Kills (1928) stand out as examples of the victim genre.
Marijuana: Weed with Roots in Hell (1936), Reefer Madness (1936) and Marijuana:
Assassin of Youth (1937) constitutes a second group, but position the drug user as social
deviant. While drug users continued to find cinematic representation from the 1940s to the
present, and Hollywood spun out additional varieties of drug users, the 1920s and 1930s
produced the first wave of American drug movies—which set the standard for the drug user
4
genre. Whether they portrayed drugs users as sympathetic mainstream victims, or agents of
moral in turpitude and degeneracy, they sought to persuade the American public that both
drugs and drug users posed a clear and present danger to a rapidly changing society. At the
same time, these films both reflected and helped to contribute to broader cultural discourses
on the meanings of youth, family, gender, religion, class, race and ethnicity.
Relatively little scholarly work has been done on cinematic representations of drug
use. The value of film as a cultural lens into the history of America’s encounter with
narcotics is immense. Of all media, films provide perhaps the most informative window into
American popular culture, and the key here is imagery. Movies can depict characters,
settings, and ideas in tremendous representational detail (and in only fleeting moments) and
convey notions of relevance in very explicit ways. Visual acuity (particularly when combined
with the use of forms of language) can provide a sensory experience and create very
powerful take-away messages. This has been the true value of filmmaking from its
conception. In the early to mid-twentieth century, American filmmaking can be seen as a
vital part of the popular culture. Since the Hollywood film industry in its earliest days did not
practice market segmentation – singling out subcultures of consumers for specific films,
many of these films were produced to appeal to a very wide swath of the American public.
5
CHAPTER 2
CONFRONTING VICE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
The rise of filmmaking as an industry in America coincided with the rise and decline
of the Progressive Era, a time in which reform-minded Americans sought to expand the
power of local, state, and federal governments to address the social ills that accompanied
rapid industrialization. The challenges seemed immense. The rise of urban jungles teeming
with non-English speaking immigrants whose adherence to unfamiliar religions and embrace
of labor unionism struck the native born middle and upper classes as dangerously unAmerican. Recessions and bank failures rocked the nation’s economic stability. While many
Progressive reformers sympathized with the plight of the underpaid and overworked urban
masses, many also sought to devise new mechanisms of social control in order to regulate
their behavior and make them conform to middle class norms. Thus, along with legislation
to make workplaces and homes safer and more sanitary, Progressives sought to stamp out
prostitution, sterilize the mentally infirm, and combat other forms of what they viewed to be
social deviancy. Perhaps most notably, many Progressives lent their support to the on-going
temperance movement, popular in both rural and urban communities, and to imagine a
modernized, more productive America delivered from the evil of alcoholic beverage. Once
the eighteenth amendment passed in 1919, also known as the Volstead Act, reformers and
other guardians of morality turned their sights on other addictive substances, including
opiates and marijuana (in spite of its relatively non-addictive state).
6
This heightened sense of social morality also spurred many lawmakers and public
thinkers to push for social changes focusing on the family. In place of the Social Darwinist
practices of the past that had minimized the role of government in daily life, Progressives
believed in the efficacy of activist government. Many believed that a successful way of
strengthening the status of working class individuals would come from fostering, largely
through municipal government programs, the functionality of the family unit. Allowing for
shorter workdays, public assistance programs, establishment of juvenile courts, and more
accessible and effective medical services were all sought after progressive reforms designed
to bolster the family as a foundational stone in American society.
One special point of concern for family welfare advocates was the increasing amount
of leisure time that protective labor legislation and workplace technology had afforded
American workers. To ensure that children and parents devoted their free time to wholesome
activities, municipalities —particularly in the nation’s largest urban centers—developed and
enhanced parks and public spaces, adopted anti-gambling laws, and enacted laws to separate
school zones from centers of adult entertainment like bars and bawdy houses. Of particular
interest was the growing number of movie houses that dotted America’s urban landscape.
Going to the movies became something that, seemingly, everybody did. 1 Films, which were
not yet feature length, captivated audiences and took on topics ranging from the everyday, to
cartoonish, to the deviant. They might even feature dramas about drug abuse and drug
abusers.
1
Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928
(New York: Scribner, 1990), 187.
7
Keeping in line with Progressive notions of morality for the sake of the social good,
in 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that films were to be regarded with a legal state of being as
commerce and not art. As such, this kept them, until the 1950s, from being protected by the
First Amendment and left producers subject to the whims of local city and state ordinances
which could demand edits or ban a film in its entirety. Of course, censorship boards were not
keen on allowing crimes, violence, and sexually suggestive themes to reach the eyes of
impressionable youths. Instead, they took action to see that movie theaters were places where
families could go to counsel their sons and daughters about the horrors of all forms of vice.
Largely because of this, filmmakers had to be very careful about how they portrayed
characters engaging in any form of vice.
While production companies carefully adhered to the censor’s guidelines, they also
invented cinematic ways to exploit them. Films that addressed—or exploited—societal fears
often proved to be immensely popular and lucrative. Hollywood filmmakers thus produced
movies in a way that allowed them to occupy the moral high-ground, even as they enticed
audiences with forbidden fruit—i.e. here is a graphic film about sex; however, in the end, the
main characters, and thereby the viewer, learn valuable lessons about sexually transmitted
diseases and the benefits of abstinence, so really this particular film is for the social, moral
good. The “lessons” to be learned from any given film created a fine line many filmmakers
chose to walk when it came to featuring more lurid themes in their pictures.
The Great War and Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to make the world safe for
democracy provided the federal government a laboratory for experimentation in propaganda
and social control. While Wilson preached what historian Thomas Knock has called
“progressive internationalism,” the Committee on Public Information used mass media to
8
whip up a patriotic fervor, denounce all things German, and advertise a public ethos of onehundred percent Americanism. The cult of conformity spilled into the postwar era, when
disillusionment with Wilson’s wartime idealism and the specter of the Russian Revolution
heightened fears of the immigrant “other,” domestic “Reds,” pacifists, and feminists.2 A
postwar recession and massive labor unrest further fed general public alarm. The infamous
Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, which featured the deportation of suspected reds, created a bold
tone of nationalistic fear of foreigners or anything seen as un-American.3
Fear of the ethnic other, and of a startling array of ill-defined social deviancies,
carried well into the following decade as the nation experimented with Prohibition, radically
restricted immigration, and continued to root out suspected Bolsheviks and moderate
socialists alike. But it was the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, initially popularized by the
release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915 that best exemplified the intolerance of
the era. Scholars estimate that once the Klan adopted modern marketing techniques to sell
their brand name, membership rose to a total of three to eight million Americans. Equally
important, the revitalized Ku Klux Klan pursued a new mission with a much broader purpose
than it had during the negro-phobic Reconstruction years. This time around the Klan set its
eyes on a much wider variety of socially constructed “others”—Catholics, Jews,
Communists, Anarchists, Eastern Europeans, as well as all racial minorities. Wayward
husbands and wives, abortionists, and bootleggers filled out the list. This was an urging by
2
Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest For a Few World Order (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 9.
3
Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 306.
9
many in the country to find a more “traditional” American, in which simple, small-town
values (and not lofty, global mindsets) would return the nation to stability.
For all of the differences that distinguish the Progressive era and the conservative
1920s, one striking commonality stands out—a shared perception that vice and social
deviancy, in virtually all forms, was something un-American and needed to be eradicated.
These were the years of federal prohibition, a strengthening of many anti-narcotics laws
(which had their roots in Progressive reforms), and new, conforming social values. These
were pervasive changes but there was, of course, pushback.
10
CHAPTER 3
THE TWENTIES: EARLY FILMS AND THE OPIATE VICTIM
A few months prior the release of Human Wreckage in 1923, a less widely-known
film The Drug Traffic debuted.1 These two films have many parallels centering on the dark
underbellies of 1920s American life. The Drug Traffic focuses on the life of a medical doctor
(Steve Maison) who is “burning the candle at both ends” trying to keep up with the demands
of the stress-filled existence of a young physician. Finding himself in desperate need of a
way to keep up with an increasingly demanding lifestyle, one day, in a fit of extreme anxiety
before performing an operation, Dr. Maison gives himself a dose of prescription medication
in order to keep stimulated and alert. This soon becomes habitual and the doctor loses control
and abandons his career to focus on getting high. Soon after the drugs have seemingly
transformed the tortured mind of Dr. Maison and he is caught burglarizing his own hospital
and lands himself a stint in jail. Anguished by the realization that he has turned his life of
virtue into one of crime and ruin Maison realizes the tremendous and ghastly consequences
that first dose of narcotics and attempts to quit cold-turkey. Though he puts up a strong fight
through night terrors and sickness, the withdrawal symptoms eventually take his life at the
end of the film. 2 This dark and tragic ending met by the film’s antihero speaks to the
seriousness of Maison’s choices and the overriding fear filmgoers had when it came to the
perceived destructive force of narcotics abuse.
Many of the cultural tropes first deployed in Human Wreckage reappeared in The
Drug Traffic. Both films feature upper-class, well respected members of their communities
1
Eric Schaefer Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), 223.
2
Variety, 26 Apr 1923, p26.
11
who have managed to fall victim to narcotic drugs. Both male protagonists—Mr. McFarland
and Dr. Maison—have stable and productive places in society. In fact, they are cast as being
about as selfless as any two individuals can be. They are sacrificing their own selves by
becoming worn down by stress, anxiety, and exhaustion, all for the sake of others. They are
victims of a need for drugs in order to operate with their day-to-day lives in which they are,
by just about anyone’s gauge, heroic individuals. They are victims of their own virtue to such
an extent that each man would rather break social convention and even the law than risk
allowing harm to come to others. So it should be no surprise that by the end of each of these
films, both men are martyrs. Fear of losing individuals like these men was a pervasive tone in
early drug films.
While the films dramatized the common fear that upstanding citizens might selfdestruct if they succumbed to drug use, they also played on larger fears that the nation’s
social fabric might be weakened and destroyed by the presence of alien peoples and moral
degeneracy. What seemed at risk in either case was the middle class way of life and the
Protestant value system of hard work, fair play, and moral strength that underpinned it.
McFarland and Maison were not men with nothing to lose. Nor did their loss go unnoticed
by society. They could have succumbed to their addictions in a random urban alleyway
where nobody would have taken notice. Quite the opposite was true. These two men did not
just have an individual responsibility to themselves and their bodies to keep clean. Nor was it
even a matter of personal or family accountability. Rather, these two men—an attorney
ridding a population of criminals and a doctor saving the lives of other Americans—willingly
took on a larger-than-life societal mission. They stood as guardians of social cohesion and
middle class standards of morality and decency. For the better good of their communities and
12
their nation as a whole, they had to show accountability as the sort of figure American
society should be represented by.
Influences of the Long Nineteenth Century
Many of the signaling fears found in these first two films can be seen to have their
roots in the cultural transformations of pre-WWI America. Stemming largely from medical
and psychological communities, a sort of sweeping social and cultural malaise was thought to
be disturbing many Americans—particularly so when it came to socially important men of
status and power. With the rapid changes in life and authority that came along with the
transformations into modernity so too did questions about moral fortitude and personal
accountability. And many critics of the era worried about a diminishing ability of the
bourgeoisie to cope with the world around them. Fear of modernity came from the
questioning and rejecting of traditional societal norms that roughly coincided with the ending
the 19th century. As the country became industrialized, urbanized, and professionalized and
personal freedom and individualism became more apparent many began to fear the effects
such drastic changes may have on individuals and society as a whole.
Many of these concerns centered on a novel psychological condition that
contemporaries of the era labeled neurasthenia. This term was term first used in the 1820s to
define a condition in which the physical nerves of the body were thought to mechanically
become deteriorated through trauma and emotional stressors. Later, by the end of the century,
the understanding shifted to a metaphorical understanding of “nerves” and how one’s
symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, depression, or some physical ailments (headache, nausea, etc.)
could be the result of an emotional fit or disconnect. Exactly how one was believed to fall
victim to neurasthenia was a fascinating combination of class status and—as thinkers like
13
Sigmund Freud and George Miller Beard believed—the ramifications of the recently
transformed modern civilization. The condition became most associated with upper-class
individuals, living sedentary lifestyles, and who worked stressful professional careers. The
modernized, industrialized world had thereby managed to create a sort of crisis of manhood.
Men, who filled these new sorts of psychologically taxing professionalized careers, where the
most likely to directly their effects, leaving them vulnerable to episodes of neurasthenia.
What became an, “anxious desire to flee ‘morbid self-consciousness’ often fed on
itself and generated further immobilizing introspection.”3 People were bombarded with news
of the consequences of neurasthenia epidemic in popular presses, instances of insanity and
suicide—as seen to be tied to this new nerve disorder—were believed to be rising, all why
many wondered why this would be in this rich new world of modernism and innovation.4
Even for those not afflicted with nervous disorders, the existence of such ailments proved
captivating and fit nicely into their system of beliefs about the world around them. Most
Americans traced the sudden rise of neurasthenia to societal and social factors, but believed
that the disease most often struck those with susceptible egos.5 These were those individuals
most surrounded by modern, stressful professions. Though many saw this damaging
condition as afflicted by new technological forces, they neglected to see the changes in terms
of life and culture. As opposed to “universal historical process”, which many thinkers
3
T. J. Jackson Lears No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 18801920 (New York: Pantheon Press, 1981), 50.
4
Ibid
5
Lears, No Place of Grace, 51
14
believed America to be in the midst of—with some accuracy—the microcosm they were
witnessing really existed in a cultural shift or a broad sort of gentrification.6
One of the preeminent fears of this sort of condition was a susceptibility to drug use
as a way to cope through forms of narcotic self-medication. This epidemic of identity crises
projected notions that drug use was, “a threat to an identity based independent, autonomous,
subjectivity” and the individual using or addicted to narcotics became, “a threat to older
formulations of individual human agency.”7 By the turn of the century and continuing into
the 1920s, the drug addict was seen as someone with an “affliction of the will”8 which could
be attributed to these problems caused by changes in the modern notion of self and
circumstance.
What this resulted in was a fear of a lost generation—particularly when it came to
men and manhood. There was an idea that the powerful, the wealthy, and the socially
important could become effete and weak resulting in the crumbling of entire social structures.
Some in the medical community became concerned that, along with this new wave of
neurasthenia, came a weakening of one’s psychological constitution. Addiction, thereby,
could be an all the more serious matter for society as it was hypothesized to be particularly
prone to increasing in is population of affluent, neurasthenic men.9
This is certainly part of the projected fear when looking at the stories of Mr.
MacFarland and Dr. Maison. Though much of the social discord around neurasthenia had
6
Ibid
7
Timothy Alton Hickman “Mania Americana: Narcotic Addiction and Modernity in the United
States, 1870-1920”, Journal of American History. Vol. 90, Issue 4.
8
Ibid
9
Ibid
15
waned by the early 1920s the connections and fears were certainly still present in these early
drug user films. Each narrative centers on the overachieving professional male whole stressfilled modern lifestyle erodes their character. They demonstrate classic neurasthenic episodes
which result in such weak moments of will power that narcotic use becomes a viable option
and consumes them. Drug use demonstrates the fragility of human agency.
Early Signs of Transition
Towards the end of the 1920s there is a slight shift seen in the way drug films are
portraying these anxieties over modernity and social change. A Place That Kills was released
in 1928. This film’s plot centers on fears urban America and what it can do to those from
more traditional parts of the country and spends most of its plot contrasting rural America
with the dangers of the country’s urban core. The 1920s census had shown that, for the first
time in U.S. history, more than 50% of all Americans lived in communities that census takers
defined as cities. The evils related to large immigrant populations and temptations became
associated with urban vice and became projected to the forefront of cultural and societal
dialogue.
The “place” in A Place That Kills is an unnamed metropolis visited by a young man
called Eddie. Eddie is leaving the rolling green hills of his parent’s farmland and moving to
the city for two reasons: a quest for good employment and to find his older sister who
traveled to the city some time before Eddie and lost touch with the family. Before his move,
Eddie’s mother is enthusiastically endorses both objectives. Tearful good-byes are exchanged
between Eddie, his family, and his high school girlfriend Maryjane (the irony is not lost, I am
certain). While there is an undercurrent of concern that the city is a place where many young
16
people go and never return, the excitement level is high and it seems opportunities are a
plenty for Eddie.
Once Eddie arrives in the city, he takes a job at a department store and soon finds a
new romantic partner, Fanny, with whom he works. She introduces him to “headache
powder” which he then discovers to be part of her “dope” (likely cocaine) supply she gets
from a local dealer known as Snowy. It soon becomes clear to the audience that addiction is
likely after ingesting just a single dose or two. Now hooked on the powder Eddie and Fanny
move on to harder opiates and morphine as their appetites become less easy to satisfy. They
lose their jobs, Fanny resorts to prostitution and they become more deeply piped in to the
local drug circuit. One day, while visiting a local opium den, Eddie runs into his estranged
sister (Gracie). The den is then raided and while Eddie is able to escape, Gracie finds herself
in jail for possession. The film’s climax involves Fanny learning that she is pregnant and
being rejected by Eddie who calls her and the would-be baby both “dope fiends”. Fanny, in a
fit of emotion, then jumps off a pier, committing suicide. After reading about her death in a
newspaper, Eddie finds the same dock and jumps off himself. Before the credits the screen
says “How many mothers—how many sweethearts are waiting for the boys who will never
come home? What can you do about it?” 10
The most striking plot tool in this film is undeniably the use of space and geography.
The city, as a place where people go—even with the best intentions—is portrayed as a place
where vice was unavoidable, where the young and the helpless would be inevitably drawn to
lives of unseemly behavior and general immorality. The city is where the least desirable
characters of society played out their lives of destruction. Eddie went from the green, lush
10
Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 227.
17
countryside where things wholesome and holy and ended up falling prey to the darkness of
city life in a relatively immediate fell-swoop.
In part this film mirrored the views of supporters of the Porter Bill—which went on
the become law in 1929. This bill sought to establish asylum of “segregation” in the
hospitalization of drug addicts and develop “narcotics farms” for incarceration and treatment
of drug users at the same facilities. Much of the Porter Bill’s key design laid in getting
addicts out of the cities and into more rural parts of the nation—the first such facility being
opened in rural Kentucky. The resulting removal of drug users from metropolitan areas was
thought to get them out of the urban slums associated with drug use. Additionally the
removal of users was also thought to quarantine the contagious effects drugs and drug users
where thought to possess—i.e. keep them from turning others into addicts in such high
concentrated areas of population.11
While, to some extent, the idea of a drug addict as a victim is becoming broader in
something of a medical sense (with the need for something like hospitalization), the notion of
the addict as an active criminal is also taking shape here. While the protagonists are clear
featured and victimized by the city and all of its enchantments, this film, centering on young
men and women, sex, and drug-addled poor choices, does represent something of a transition
for a new wave of drug films that would follow it—featuring a new tone and narcotic.
11
David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1973), 206.
18
CHAPTER 4
THE THIRTIES: AN END TO PROHIBITION, MARIJUANA,
AND THE AGE OF THE DEVIANT
By the end of the twenties, official and popular assessments of what demarcated a
harmful substance had shifted. A federal ban on the production and sale of alcohol began in a
Progressive-era surge of excitement and yet the results were anything but a sweeping or
successful reform. What agencies and lawmakers saw, instead, was a mass of excessive—and
now unlawful—drinking, pitiful attempts at municipal police control, and countless closings
of bars and nightclubs only to find them re-open in different locals overnight in the same
neighborhoods. Major cities found themselves facing all-out revolts against the Eighteenth
Amendment, with drinkers and bootleggers openly thumbing their noses at the government’s
veiled sense of authority.1 And eventually those in power began to see not only the
hopelessness of keeping America dry, but began to morally object to the goal itself.
Four-time governor of New York and 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al
Smith became the first “wet” contender for the nation’s highest elected office in nearly a
decade—prohibition having been a seminal piece of both parties’ platforms for years. Smith
symbolized the beginning of a change in American politics and culture. Although he
miserably lost in his bid for the presidency largely because of his Catholicism, Irish heritage,
and long-standing relationship with political machines in New York City, his call for a
relaxation or full repeal of Prohibition laws resonated with many, particularly in urban
America. By 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed. It had become obvious
1
Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan Prohibition in New York City, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2008) 227.
19
that enforcing such a sweeping piece of legislation was impossible to enforce and that is was
an ignorant move from its earliest conception as it, in a single act, turned millions of
otherwise law-abiding drinkers into criminal substance-abusers. In the end, Prohibition had
failed—rather miserably, of course—and government bodies and rank-and-file reformers
alike shifted their focus away from regulating drink.
The repeal of prohibition, however, did not signal an end to the efforts to regulate
drugs. Since the Harrison Act of 1914 and its extended reach throughout the 1920s, narcotic
opioids and other psychoactive substances had been banned from personal possession or use.
This included any derivative of opium or coca that had always been available in many family
medicine cabinets. Deprived of access to pharmaceutical-grade drugs, users turned to
morphine or heroin abuse to keep their dependencies’ fed and were at once labeled addicts
and victims of dependency—despite having had their habits formed and fed by physicians for
decades. What laws like the Harrison Act did not address, however, was the use of cannabis.
And, with the regulation of opiates established, and the noble experiment abandoned, this
drug, under its many pseudonyms—Marijuana, pot, grass, refer, dope—became a major
focus in the eyes of those concerned with limiting or ending drug use in America.2
Cannabis came to America in its earliest waves through the Mexican border in the
pockets of migrants in the early years of the twentieth century. By the late twenties and early
thirties tens of thousands of these Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans worked the
agricultural lands of California and Texas and had gained employment in the railroad yards
in the Midwest in cities such as Chicago and Kansas City. At the same time, cannabis use
2
Caroline Jean Acker, Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use In
the United States, 1800-2000, (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 165.
20
spread east and north from coastal cities like New Orleans where West Indies seaman
introduced the drug to U.S. populations. Throughout the 1920s major marketing campaigns
by the nation’s largest cigarette companies had popularized the concept of inhaling
substances to many for the first time and aided in the user-friendliness of smoking marijuana.
The import became a common fiber to see haphazardly growing all over any city with a rope
factory or hemp farm anywhere in the vicinity—which is how the term “weed” began—and
its wide availability made it a cheap, accessible way for many young and poor populations to
get high. 3
How the drug first began to become associated with criminals is nearly predictable at
this point. State lawmakers, politicians, and district attorneys saw crime-ridden, minorityinhabited city districts which, in their eyes, housed less-than-desirable laborers. Whether it
was Mexicans in the urban Southwest or blacks in gulf ports, these populations became
associated in the white, middle class imagination with crime and deviant social behavior. Not
unlike the crackdowns on Asian communities and opium dens in the depression years of the
1870s, many in the 1930s began to see a direct association with “less-civilized” and
misunderstood minority pocket-populations. Instead of correlating such crime, which always
has ways of festering in poor communities, with a lack of social functions, the target became
weed and the weed was given a new nickname to highlight its deviant Hispanic roots—
“cannabis” became “marijuana”. By the 1930s the drug began to be identified with black
urban youths as well who were also part of the emerging jazz subculture, openly selling and
consuming the “reefers” on Harlem street corners.
3
David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World, (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 43.
21
Not unlike previous generation’s crackdown on opium dens, local and state officials
began to view the control of marijuana-using populations as a law enforcement issue.
Starting as early as 1906, states in the Deep South and Southwest began passing restrictive
possession laws which criminalized the drug. Moving east and north from there, many other
states followed suit and by the mid-thirties, every state in the union had some sort of
restrictive or prohibitive law on the books when it came to this new and evil weed. In 1936
policemen in New York City confiscated and destroyed 40,000 pounds of the plant growing
within the limits of the metro.4
In only a few decades fear of this substance and young minority groups had managed
to grasp the attention of concerned citizens, reporters, church leaders, social workers, and
lawmakers. In their eyes, it seemed, this new sort of user was no longer a desperate, white,
upwardly-mobile individual battling with substances still legally obtained from doctors. This
user was different, being cast as a youthful, poor, degenerate who is openly opposed to
civility and at battle with traditional ways of American life. This new drug menace became
the focal point of many exploitation films of the 1930s which helped to cultivate popular
perceptions that cannabis and its users were a threat to societal order—views that largely held
until the counterculture of the 1960s. The films were in many ways outlandish, and, today
would be seen as laughable accusations of what cannabis culture really must have been like
in the thirties. However, at the time, they conveyed in disturbing and violent imagery what
many Americans feared most about the “weed with roots in hell”.
As with the Progressive Era and the drug films seen throughout the 1920s, the
central fear in this new generation of films revolves around the disintegration of the family.
4
Ibid
22
However, now the fear has shifted from the breadwinning patriarch to the youngest and most
vulnerable family members. Part of this problem came with fears generated though youthcentric media forms outside of movies. Even before films began to feature plot lines based on
the horrors of pot use, many Americans gained their only perception on the existence of
marijuana through song. In 1934 and 1935 respectively Cab Calloway’s hit “Reefer Man”
and Gertrude Michael’s single “Sweet Marijuana” became very popular numbers broadcast
countless times over the radio.5 New and frightening youth subcultures were forming and
many of them seemed to have emerged from an interest in minority culture and their
perceived habits of drug use.
Notions were set that this drug set something of a generational divide between young
and old Americans. Was there something about this new drug that lured the young into lives
of reckless abandon? Was there a sweeping flaw in society which made this particular
generation of youths susceptible to narcotic use? These sorts of questions were the roots the
fears that surged through media outlets and popular culture. No longer, people feared, was
marijuana a folk remedy used solely by Mexican migrants or contained to jazz circuits and
inner-city blacks. By the mid-1930s, once again, popular discourse signaled a danger to the
status quo of white Americans, and thereby the traditions and future of the country itself.
Time and again, what pot films in the thirties center on is a fear of young people—
especially young women—and the choices they make. 1936 saw the release of one of the first
such movies: Marijuana: Weed with Roots in Hell. This film tells the story of a young
woman called Burma Roberts. Burma is an upper-class high school student who lives with a
sister and mother—and has an absent father. Burma feels inferior to her sister Elaine as she is
5
Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 229.
23
older, married to a rich local businessman, and seems to be the apple of their mother’s eye.
Escaping from a world where she feels unappreciated, Burma begins to frequent dance halls
where she eventually meets her future love interest “Dick” and a local pot dealer “Tony”
(clearly portrayed as an ethnic “other” with a dark complexion, dark mustache, and heavy
accent). Tony holds a barbeque at his beach house, which Burma attends, and the kids all
have a night of drunken dancing and partying. Eventually, someone passes around a joint and
it gets pushed upon Burma. As soon as she begins to feel the effects of the drug, she begins
to laughs manically and uncontrollably, and proceeds to run to beach with Dick. The two
engage in skinny dipping and sex—while others are presumed to be doing the same thing
around them. She becomes pregnant, gives the baby up for adoption, and she and Dick start
living with Tony, both becoming pot and heroin addicts as well as a dealers. Burma is then
dealt two life-blows. Dick is killed soon after in a bad drug deal and she discovers that the
adoptive parents of her birth-child are her now-very-wealthy sister Elaine and her new
husband. She overdoses, killing herself.
The next year, in 1936 probably the most famous exploitation film of all time is
released. Reefer Madness also tells the story of high-school-aged youths who get tied up in a
world of pot-induced mayhem. This film tells the story of Mae Coleman. She is a young
woman running a pot-peddling operation out of her home with her boyfriend—it is very clear
that he is not her husband and the two are living in sin—Jack. The two frequently hold potparties and invite local college and high school students to attend, both to have fun and find
new young people to turn onto the drug and make new clients—once addiction sets in, of
course. A local boy named Jimmy goes to one such party and part of the way through the
evening takes Jack on a pot-run from his supplier. He’s driving high and hits and kills a
24
pedestrian. Jack takes the blame as long as Jimmy promises to keep Mae’s apartment out of
the court proceedings, as to spare her any investigation—this is the last time anyone featured
in the films gets away with their behavior. The film continues, featuring marijuana-crazed
rapes, murders, suicides, and forced institutionalization for anyone who comes out of it alive
as they have been driven mad by the drug and its lifestyle.
The following year in 1937, a film titled Marijuana: Assassin of Youth was released
featuring many of the same themes. It focuses again on high school girls, this time called
Joan and Barry and her younger sister Marjorie. The plot centers on the death of their
grandmother, who left Joan a fortune so long as she is able to fulfill a “morality clause” in set
in the final will. Joan’s cousin, Linda, is a known pot-pusher and is snubbed by their
grandmother, who has left her nothing. Angry and wanting to take revenge out on Joan and
Marjorie, she hatches a plan to get them hooked on marijuana as a way to see her lose on her
inheritance. Younger sister Marjorie does become a dope fiend and nearly stabs another
young girl to death while high at a pot party. A newspaper headline reporting the events
reads on screen, “Marijuana, scourge of our country, is reaching out like a mad killer,
mowing down the youth of our land, distorting their minds and leading them into lives of
degradation and crime.”
The film's title “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth” refers to an article of the same year
by the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry J. Anslinger that
appeared in The American Magazine and was reprinted in Reader's Digest in 1938. That
article briefly mentions several stories from the commissioner’s "Gore file" of tragedies
allegedly caused by marijuana. The movie's tone echoes those of Anslinger's cautionary tales.
As with such publications, marijuana films of the thirties exaggerated the hallucinogenic and
25
savage behavior-inducing qualities of the drug. The entire function of such exploitative
movies, after all, was to capture fears and interests held within popular discourse of the time
of their release.6
Age and Gender Transitions
Societal fears that gripped the nation as these films were produced differed greatly
from those only a decade or so before. And the behavior of film companies and even
Hollywood as a whole exemplified these changes. Movie studios of the 1930s turned to
issues based around morality, particularly theologically-based morality. 1933 saw the first
entry by the Legion of Decency—a Roman Catholic based morality group—into the film
industry. They judged with the pocketbooks of their congregations and placed national
boycotts on films deemed to be unacceptable by their standards a pressured studios to
produce films with more morally sounds plots or ones which taught lessons highlighted in the
Catholic religion.7 Moreover, with the election of FDR and his enactment of the National
Recovery Act through New Deal legislation, government and business had never before been
so closely linked, particularly in terms of thinking in regards to curing social ills. Many
hoped this new union would further, “bring the movies under the scrutiny of Washington’s
bureaucrats.”8
More than anything, what government agencies and morality groups agreed on was
the need to know the impact that immoral or deviant acts in film had on American children.
Also in 1933 an academic report was released which meant to highlight the effects the film
6
Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 230.
7
Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies, (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 149
8
Ibid 150
26
industry had on the developing minds of American youth. The Payne Study, a lofty academic
project paid for by private donations, echoed the voices of the Catholic Legion and the NRA
assessors. The end result: films codes would be enforced (the Hayes Codes) and the time of
pre-code filmmaking in America had come to a close.
Payne Fund was created in order to produce the study which was conducted by
Professor W. W. Charters, a psychologist and Director of the Bureau of Educational
Research at Ohio State University. Charters was interested in whether or not films had a
direct effect on the developing personalities of children. He hypothesized that films might
affect the levels of violence or sexual behavior seen in children and blur their ability of to
distinguish fact from fiction.9
Much of Charter’s research centered on analyzing the “subconscious” minds of
children by asking them questions about how they slept and what they dreamed about after
viewing films of one sort or another. The nine-volume study was published with no real
broadly based conclusions and little to suggest that the minds of America’s youth were being
warped en masse by the sordid themes coming out of film studios.10
This, however, did not stop the ramifications of the Payne Study simply existing—
Charter’s own outspokenness alongside those in the public eye who funded the study were
able to point at the need for such a study as being proof enough that something needed to
change. The ambiguous findings of the study were discussed far less that the reasons the
Payne Fund had for producing them in the first place. And the, “cautious academic findings
were forgotten when Henry James Forman publish a one-volume summary entitled Our
9
Ibid 152
10
Ibid
27
Movie Made Children” the next year.11 Forman toured the country with his sensational
accusations of filmmakers and their effect on a generation of children now bound be
criminals and harlots.
Children were seen as fragile, blank canvases which would be stained and soiled
forever at the mere introduction of disorderly or adult thoughts. Much of this had its roots in
child-centric thoughts which could still often play a pervasive part of the childrearing
discourse.
There are many other over-arching fears expressed in this collection of films as well.
First we have the casting choices—Burma, Elaine, Mae, Joan, Marjorie, Linda—it is of no
little consequence that all of the films have a prominent female lead. Marijuana is said to be a
drug of some frightening new youth culture and this a very precarious notion for many
Americans as, since the 1920s—the age of a new female youth culture, flapper fashion,
women smoking and drinking, and more liberalized sexual norms—adding a drug that is said
to only hyper-inflate such antisocial behavior becomes a terrifying notion to parents and
traditional Americans. As well, released in the heart of the Great Depression, these films
show terrifying images of what unbridled hedonism and consumption would inevitably result
in—a generation void of family, morality, concern, tradition, or control.
These characters are less victimized by drug use than they are internally and
personally susceptible to the lures of narcotics because of weak character and immoral
natures. They were not virtuous doctors who needed to stay awake and hyper-alert for the
sake of performing life-saving operations. Instead they are cast as deviant, defiant brats
incapable of forming close bonds with morally-minded friends and family. So, they escape.
11
Ibid
28
They travel to the drug dens of their cohort, they forget the ties to their previous—often
middle-upper class lives—and seek instead a life of consumption. The constant pursuit of
pleasure is seen to leave the young users in states of sloth. They have no determination, no
drive, and place no value on life. Again, while they always come from families of means,
they treat life as a game and end up at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. It is almost
as if they were born supposed to be there and that their former lives of opportunity and
wealth came by some sort of mistake. There is a very overt and specific threat to the overall
ability and productivity of white, middle-class America in these films. Pot has the power to
suck the life-blood out of a person and render them useless to society as a whole—and this is
why it is so dangerous. The problem is not about the addictive qualities of the drug and the
drug user’s lifestyle; rather, it is about the moral flaws in those who, because of their own
wicked and selfish views of the world, find the pleasure in such abnormal behavior. Because
of their inherent morality flaws, they are damned. They are sent either sent to live and breed
illegitimate children in the slums—where, after all, those who choose not to work deserve to
be—or they meet early, well-deserved ends.
Another fascinating caveat in this generation of drug films comes from the
introduction of the “gateway-drug” hypothesis. Many of the marijuana users in these films
find themselves eventually doing “hard” drugs such as heroin or cocaine—drugs having been
made illicit a generation prior. It was, however, documented in 1937 in congressional
hearings on a Marijuana Tax Act, again by Drug Czar Harry J. Anslinger, that this was not
the typical behavior of a “marijuana addict” and while he felt the drug was dangerous for a
whole host of reasons, such snowballing behavior into other substances was not one of
29
them.12 All the same, due to the conjecture within drug films of the era depicting this sort of
gateway-drug scenario, this became part of the popular discourse. A mid-thirties publication
by The White Cross (a temperance organization of the early and mid-1900s) even went so far
(with no scientific evidence to support such claims) as to proclaim that tobacco smoking
could easily lead to cannabis, which could then lead to opiates such as heroin abuse.
Assertions that marijuana could lead as a gateway to harder drugs persisted as a reasonable
hypothesis until they were finally scientifically put to rest in the 1970s.13
What all of the publications and projected fears about marijuana in the 1930s
eventually led to was the 1935 Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act. The purpose of the act was
to make the law uniform in the various states with respect to controlling the sale and use
of narcotic drugs, including marijuana. The Commissioners on Uniform State Laws intended
to effectively safeguard and regulate narcotic drugs throughout all of the states. For the first
time marijuana was included in laws at a federal level. As well, the Marihuana Tax Act of
1937 was passed which set further restrictions and regulations on the sale of cannabis—
though many argue that this was passed not only out of fears of drug use, but also due to a
constructed act to reduce the size and power of the hemp industry.
12
13
Acker, Altering American Consciousness, 215.
Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 240
30
CONSLUSION: THE IMAGE OF THE USER
Exact numbers do not exist with regards to just how many people might have had
access to these and other such films throughout the interwar period. However, there is
evidence to suggest that these films did become quite popular in many of the movie theaters
that were popping up all over the country at the time. For example, when Marihuana: Weed
with Roots in Hell made its debut in Minneapolis in the autumn of 1936, it made an
exceedingly high first week take-in of $8,000. When it moved to Chicago in 1938, the same
film took in $23,000 during a three-week run—which can roughly be translated as forty-five
thousand tickets sold.1 These and similar figures from other places and parts of the country
would suggest that these early drug films are deeply rooted in the culture of their rather vast
audiences.
During the years of WWII, as with most industries, film production slowed its typical
products and, with it, their production of exploitation fears centering on drugs and users.
However, it would come back in full-swing with issues of containment, conformity, and anticommunism (all staples Americans thought aided them in winning the War). Subversion of
the new “juvenile delinquent” and 1950s youth culture—rock and roll, comics, hipster
fashion, etc.—in the postwar generation captivated societal discourse. Classroom films
featuring threads of social hygiene would become widespread and continue to impress upon
young people “evils” of drug use, aligning users with a starkly anti-American sentiment. The
roots which would carry forward this message into the postwar years was set from these early
examples of American drug films and the cultural conceptions of the user they were built
from. In fact, many of these same notions of the user would be carried forward until the
1
Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 235
31
1970s when scientific and various counterculture movements unveiled more open-minded
understandings of drug use that would enter into mainstream social consciousness.
In just a few years, from the 1920s and into the 1930s, incredible changes took place
in how cultural images of drug use and drug users were used to project notions, fears, and
messages of a greater societal conceptualization of this particular form of social deviancy.
Many of these changes can be explained—at least in part—by many of the social factors
previously outlined. However, the similarities are of note as well. The dichotomy of “good
drugs”, or the ones socially accepted for recreational or medical use, contrast with “bad
drugs” in a way that is not, historically, the same across-the-board. Different drugs fall in and
out of favor and concerns, and eventually laws, then follow suit. But, in this context, the
actual substance is largely irrelevant. The image of who uses them is a tool, a societal coping
mechanism to project notions of control over what is perceived as a disastrous state of affairs.
In reaction, people can then be greatly affected from the fallout from these notions—
regardless of how legitimate they are—relatively easily with the result being things like antiimmigrant legislation or the filling up prisons. However, trying to control or dictate social
trends and cultural influences is like trying to catch smoke.
What is clear is that these films connected exaggerated concerns over drug use to
larger societal fears. These fears were used as a tool to both perpetuate discomfort with
existing uncertainties—shifts in the meaning of masculinity, minority status, the corruption
of the family and traditional femininity—as well as to project terrible trends of the future.
Film makers fed on the societal fears of the early twentieth century. This was a both a
subconscious and purposeful process. Some exaggerations stemmed from the known and
demonstrated fears of the era. Many others, however, can only be recognized with hindsight
32
as they were so subliminal and unintended that only change over time could bring them to the
surface. This was the goal of examining the drug films of the 1920s and the 1930s in two
separate spheres.
These generations of films encapsulated dialogue so persuasive and powerful that the
depictions of drug use and users within them can still be seen today. Modern portraits of
“junkies” and pleasure seekers in many forms of modern media entertainment—from
Trainspotting to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle to Breaking Bad—have direct ties to
the images which came from these first generations of drug films. The struggle of
modernity—the egoism, the status of the individual—encouraged a culture of personal
accomplishment, satisfaction and indulgence. This trend has not gone away. Modern
America thrives on commodification, consumption, and individual autonomy. Yet American
society as a whole still struggles with allowing such unrestricted pleasure seeking and
consumption to take place without seeing a dark, demonized outcome. This paradox results
in strict punishments for those who take their hedonism too far.
Those frequently seen to take it “too far” in our collective imagination, and stressed
by these early drug films, are those viewed as deficient in moral character. Time and again
drug users in film and fiction are cast as those who lack the resilience, determination, and
strength it takes to behave civilly by not giving into amoral and deviant behaviors like
consuming narcotics. This “weakness” is a dynamic thing, however, and is not always the
result of similar backgrounds or assumed identities.
For those living in the 1920s, a fear of deficient character came from influxes of
immigration and changing dimensions of manhood thought to be morally crippling
populations of America’s best and brightest. In this time of laissez faire government
33
supporting big business (the Edisons, Fords, and Firestones of the world) and achievement
being tied to success in a professionalized America, the worst thing a person could do is to
destroy the potential (through weak character and drug abuse) of an educated, professional
male who was the icon of the era, ushering in prosperity and change.
By the 1930s the world had changed—and for many, of course, not at all for the
better. No longer was the perceived goal of the average citizen to strike at success from a
professional class. This was too unrealistic. What was becoming increasingly clear, however,
was that cultural lines of sex, class and race were becoming more blurred than they ever had
before. This was perceived as being most threatening to those most susceptible to crises of
identity—children and young adults. The now embarrassing youth culture of the 1920s with
all of its hedonism at its forefront was seen as the dangerous result of unbridled immorality.
Children—particularly those from affluent families—needed to be kept firmly in line or the
result could be utter chaos for the country as a whole. Young women especially could not be
trusted to explore the darker parts of youth culture. This could only result, in the mind’s eye
of 1930s society, in the deterioration of womanhood and motherhood and thereby the
American family unit in its entirety.
Be them portrayed as victims of dope doctors or as scoundrels frequenting pot dens,
drug user films supplied an important piece of the plot for any story arch: fear. In a modern
world, users are the ideal “other”, being the bearers of an invisible need for vice. It can
transcend the lines of race, class, gender, and place. This is what is so particularly unnerving.
These films are fully constructed of such fear-based conjecture and represent how “the user”
has been developed in culture to perpetuate social changes as they are needed and desired.
34
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VITA
Christopher “Topher” Ryan Wilson was born on June 27, 1987, in Pleasant Hill, MO.
He lived here until his graduation from high school in 2005. After entering the University of
Missouri-Kansas City and after several changes in major he graduated with a Bachelor of
Arts, having studied history and educated, in 2011.
After working very briefly teaching at a local Kansas City high school, Mr. Wilson
began graduate work in the history department once again at UMKC. During this time he
served as treasurer and vice president of the UMKC History Graduate Student Association
and was also granted a teaching assistantship for several semesters. He also present original
research at the Diastole Conference.
Upon graduation, Mr. Wilson plans to continue work in academia and pursue a Ph.D.
program.
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