Chasing the Scream

by Johann Hari

  Anslinger went to confront Big Mouth Sam—a “squat, black-haired and ox-shouldered” immigrant—and said, “If Giovanni dies, I’m going to see to it that you hang.36 Do you understand that?” Big Mouth tried to reply, but Harry insisted: “And if he lives and you ever bother him again, or any of my men, or try to shake any of them down any more, I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

  After that, Anslinger became obsessed with the Mafia, at a time when most Americans refused to believe it even existed. This is hard for us to understand today, but the official position of every official in U.S. law enforcement until the 1960s—from J. Edgar Hoover on down—was that the Mafia was a preposterous conspiracy theory, no more real than the Loch Ness Monster.37 They reacted the way we would now if a law enforcement agent preached Trutherism, or Birtherism, or the belief that Freemasons are secretly manipulating world events: with bafflement at the idea that anyone could believe something so silly.38

  But Harry had glimpsed the Mafia in the flesh, and he was convinced that if he followed the trail from Big Mouth Sam to the thugs above him and the thugs above them, he would be led to a vast global web, and perhaps even to an “invisible world-wide government” secretly controlling events.39 He soon started keeping every scrap of information he could find on the Mafia, no matter how small or how trivial the source. He snipped small stories from pulp magazines and stored them away: one day, he thought, he would use this information.40

  As soon as the First World War started, Harry tried to sign up for the military, but he was blind in one eye—his brother had hit him with a rock years before—and was turned down. But since he spoke fluent German, he was offered a position as a diplomatic agent in Europe, and before long he was traveling on a boat to London, through a fog that had left the British Isles invisible and lost. From there, he traveled on to Hamburg41 and The Hague42, where his job was to ferret out information from local diplomats and to deal with local Americans in trouble. Several discharged American sailors were brought to him to be shipped home because they had become addicted to heroin. Harry stared into their skeletal faces43 and found that the hatred he felt as a small boy was only swelling. This, he promised himself, would be stopped.

  At the very end of the war, as it was becoming clear to everyone that the Germans had lost, Harry was sent on his most important mission so far: to take a secret message to the defeated German dictator. The way he later told the story, Harry was dispatched to the small Dutch town of Amerongen, where the Kaiser was holed up in a castle and planning to abdicate. Anslinger’s job was to pose as a German official and convey a message from President Woodrow Wilson: Don’t do it. The United States wanted the Kaiser to retain the imperial throne, to prevent the rise of the “revolution, strikes and chaos”44 it feared would follow from his sudden departure.

  The Dutch guards at the gates of the castle ordered Harry to show his credentials. “Show me your credentials,” he snapped back in his fiercest German. Frightened, assuming he was one of the Kaiser’s men,45 they let him through.

  Anslinger managed to get the message through—but it was too late. The decision had been made.46 The Kaiser quit. For the rest of his life, Anslinger believed that if he had gotten the president’s plea through only a little earlier, “a decent peace might have been written,47 forestalling any chance for a future Hitler gaining power, or a Second World War erupting.” It was the first time Harry felt that the future of civilization hung on his actions, but it would not be the last.

  He traveled across a Europe in rubble. “The sight of a large city in ruins,48 without a house seen standing, creates a feeling that is hard to describe,” he wrote in his diary. Bombed bridges lay as wreckage.49 Factories were either destroyed entirely, or had all their machinery ripped from them, and often dumped along the roadsides, twisted and useless, like metal ghosts of the time before. There were enormous shell-holes, and acres of barbed wire. Whatever you imagined before, he wrote, “magnify the imagination by twenty times.”

  But what shook Harry most was the effect of the war not on the buildings but on the people. They seemed to have lost all sense of order. Starving, they had begun to riot; the cavalry had been sent to charge against them, and entire streets were on fire. Harry was standing in a hotel lobby in Berlin50 when Socialist revolutionaries suddenly fired their machine guns into the lobby, and blood from a bystander splattered onto his hands. Civilization, he was beginning to conclude, was as fragile as the personality of that farmer’s wife back in Altoona. It could break. After this, and for the rest of his life,51 Harry retained a deep sense that American society could collapse into wreckage just as quickly as Europe’s had.

  In 1926, he was redeployed52 from the gray wreckage of Europe to the blue-watered island of the Bahamas, but Harry was not a man looking for a reason to relax. This was the height of alcohol prohibition:53 Americans wanted to drink, and smugglers wanted to sell to them, so whisky was washing through these islands like water. Harry was outraged. The bootleggers were West Indian and Central American, and he believed they were filled with “loathsome and contagious diseases”54 that would spread to anyone foolish enough to drink the booze they handled.

  “Just give me a high-powered rifle.55 I’ll stop the bastards,” one of Harry’s colleagues said, and in this spirit, Harry announced to his bosses that there was a way to make prohibition work: Use maximum force. Send the navy to hunt down smugglers along the coasts of America. Ban the sale of alcohol for medical purposes. Massively increase prison sentences for alcohol dealers until they were all locked up.56 Wage war on booze until it was only a memory.

  In just a few years, Harry made the leap from being a competent if frustrated prohibition agent in the Bahamas to running a Washington, D.C., department. How did he do it? It’s hard to tell, but it must have helped that he married a young woman named Martha Denniston who was from one of the richest families in America, the Mellons. The treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, was now a close relative—and the prohibition department was part of the Treasury itself.

  From the moment he took charge of the bureau, Harry was aware of the weakness of his new position. A war on narcotics alone—cocaine and heroin, outlawed in 1914—wasn’t enough. They were used only by a tiny minority, and you couldn’t keep an entire department alive on such small crumbs. He needed more.

  With this in mind, he had begun noticing stories in the newspapers that intrigued him. They had headlines like the one in the July 6, 1927, edition of the New York Times: MEXICAN FAMILY GO INSANE.57 It explained: “A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors who say there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.” The mother had no money to buy food, so she decided to eat some marijuana plants that had been growing in their garden. Soon after, “neighbors, hearing outbursts of crazed laughter, rushed to the house to find the entire family insane.”

  Harry had long dismissed cannabis as a nuisance58 that would only distract him from the drugs he really wanted to fight. He insisted it was not addictive,59 and stated “there is probably no more absurd fallacy” than the claim that it caused violent crime.

  But almost overnight, he began to argue the opposite position. Why? He believed the two most-feared groups60 in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead. He had been told, he said, of “colored students at the University of Minn[esota] partying with female students (white) and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy.”61 This was the first hint of much more to come.

  He wrote to thirty scientific experts asking a series of questions about marijuana. Twenty-nine of them wrote back62 saying it would be wrong to ban it, and that it was being widely misrepresented in the press. Anslinger decided to ignore them and quoted instead the one expert who bel
ieved it was a great evil that had to be eradicated.

  On this basis, Harry warned the public about what happens when you smoke this weed. First, you will fall into “a delirious rage.” Then you will be gripped by “dreams . . . of an erotic character.” Then you will “lose the power of connected thought.” Finally, you will reach the inevitable end point: “Insanity.”63 You could easily get stoned and go out and kill a person,64 and it would all be over before you even realized you had left your room, he said, because marijuana “turns man into a wild beast.”65 Indeed, “if the hideous monster Frankenstein66 came face to face with the monster Marijuana, he would drop dead of fright.”

  A doctor called Michael V. Ball got in touch with Harry to counter this view, saying he had used hemp extract as a medical student and it only made him sleepy. He suspected that the claims circulating about the drug couldn’t possibly be true. Maybe, he said, cannabis does drive people crazy in a tiny number of cases, but his hunch was that anybody reacting that way probably had an underlying mental health problem already. He implored Anslinger to fund proper lab studies so they could find out the truth.

  Anslinger wrote back firmly. “The marihuana evil can no longer be temporized with,”67 he explained, and he would fund no independent science,68 then or ever.

  For years, doctors kept approaching him with evidence that he was wrong, and he began to snap, telling them they were “treading on dangerous ground”69 and should watch their mouths. Instead, he wrote to police officers70 across the country commanding them to find him cases where marijuana had caused people to kill—and the stories started to roll in.

  The defining case for Harry, and for America, was of a young man named Victor Lacata. He was a twenty-one-year-old Florida boy known in his neighborhood as “a sane, rather quiet young man”71 until—the story went—the day he smoked cannabis. He then entered a “marihuana dream”72 in which he believed he was being attacked by men who would cut off his arms, so he struck back, seizing an axe and hacking his mother, father, two brothers, and sister to pieces.

  The press, at Harry’s prompting,73 made Lacata’s story famous. If your son smoked marijuana, people came to believe, he, too, could hack you to pieces. Anslinger was not the originator of these arguments74—they had actually been widespread in Mexico in the late nineteenth century, where it was pervasively believed that marijuana made you “loco.” Nor was he the only one pushing them in the United States—the press loved these stories, especially the mass media owned by William Randolph Hearst. But for the first time, Anslinger gave them the backing of a government department that would broadcast them to the nation at full volume, with an official government stamp saying they were true. From the clouds of cannabis smoke, he warned, there were Victor Lacatas rising all around us.

  The warnings worked. People began to clamor for the Bureau75 of Narcotics to be given more money to save them from this terrifying threat. Harry’s problem—the fragility of his new empire—was starting to ease.

  Many years later, the law professor John Kaplan76 went back to look into the medical files for Victor Lacata. The psychiatrists who examined him said77 he had long suffered from “acute and chronic” insanity. His family was full of people who suffered from similarly extreme mental health problems—three had been committed to insane asylums—and the local police had tried for a year before the killings to get Lacata committed to a mental hospital, but his parents insisted they wanted to look after him at home. The examining psychiatrists thought his cannabis use78 was so irrelevant that it wasn’t even mentioned in his files.

  But Anslinger had his story now. He announced on a famous radio address: “Parents beware!79 Your children . . . are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.”

  Harry was sticking to this story whatever he was told—in part because, while he was asserting against a wall of skepticism that marijuana drove you mad, he was discovering something incredible. Everybody had mocked him when he said the Mafia existed. Where’s your evidence? they asked, witheringly. But now, through his agents, Anslinger was uncovering proof that the Mafia not only existed, but was bigger than anyone had imagined. He was building up a scrapbook80 containing the names of details of eight hundred mafiosi operating in the continental United States. His raids were proving him right,81 but the authorities still refused to believe him, preferring to look away, awkwardly. Some were corrupt;82 some simply didn’t want to disturb83 their 100 percent clean-up records by taking on such a difficult and messy crusade; and some were frightened. When the police chief of New Orleans,84 David Hennessy, started to dig too deeply into the Mafia, he was murdered.

  Anslinger began to believe all his hunches would turn out like this. He only had to defy the “experts” and keep pursuing his instinct until, finally, he would be shown to be more right than anyone could have predicted.

  He ramped up his campaign. The most frightening effect of marijuana, Harry warned, was on blacks. It made them forget the appropriate racial barriers85—and unleashed their lust for white women. Of course, everyone spoke about race differently in the 1930s, but the intensity of Harry’s views shocked people even then, and when it was revealed he’d referred to a suspect in an official memo as a “nigger,” Senator Joseph P. Guffey of Anslinger’s home state of Pennsylvania demanded his resignation. Later, when one of his very few black agents,86 William B. Davis, complained about being called a “nigger” by Harry’s men, Anslinger sacked him.

  Harry soon started treating all his critics this way. When the American Medical Association87 issued a report debunking some of his more overheated claims, he announced that any of his agents caught with a copy would be immediately fired. Then, when he found out a professor named Alfred Lindesmith was arguing that addicts need to be treated with compassion and care, Harry instructed his men to falsely88 warn Lindesmith’s university that he was associated with a “criminal organization,”89 had him wiretapped,90 and sent a team to tell him to shut up.91 Harry couldn’t control the flow of drugs,92 but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.

  It was clear from Harry’s writings that he was obsessed with Billie Holiday, and I sensed there might be a deeper story there. So I tracked down everyone93 who was still alive who had known Billie, to ask them about this, and one of them—her godson, Bevan Dufty—explained that his mother had been Billie’s best friend, and she believed Billie was in effect killed by the authorities. He had the remaining scraps of her writings on this in his attic, where they had been unseen for years. Would you like, he asked, to see them? When I put them together with Harry’s files, what her friends had told me, and the work of her biographers, I began to see this story more clearly.

  Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96

  His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.”

  The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, H
arry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.”

  Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106

  He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.

  In the end, the Treasury Department told Anslinger110 he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.

  Billie Holiday was born a few months after the Harrison Act,111 the first law banning cocaine and heroin, and it would become her lifelong twin.112 Not long after Billie’s birth, her nineteen-year-old mother, Sadie, became a prostitute,113 while her seventeen-year-old father vanished. He later died of pneumonia114 in the South because he couldn’t find a hospital that would treat a black man.