Hemp for Victory
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Hemp for Victory is a black-and-white United States government film made during World War II and released in 1942, explaining the uses of hemp, encouraging farmers to grow as much as possible.
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History
The film was made to encourage farmers to grow hemp for the war effort because other industrial fibers, often imported from overseas, were in short supply. The film shows a history of hemp and hemp products, how hemp is grown, and how hemp is processed into rope, cloth, cordage, and other products.
Before 1989, the film was relatively unknown. The United States government denied ever having made such a film. The United States Department of Agriculture library and the Library of Congress toldTemplate:Citation needed all interested parties that no such movie was made by the USDA or any branch of the US government. Two VHS copies were recovered and donated to the Library of Congress on 19 May 1989 by Maria Farrow, Carl Packard, and Jack Herer.
The only known copy in 1976 was a 3/4" broadcast quality copy of the film that was originally obtained by William Conde in 1976 from a reporter for the Miami Herald and the Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church of Jamaica. It was given in trust that it would be made available to as many as possible. It was put into the hands of Jack Herer by William Conde during the 1984 OMI (Oregon Marijuana Initiative). The film 20 years later is now available anywhere on the Internet.
As it was made by the US Government, it is public domain and is freely available for download from the Internet Archive.
The film, as well as clips shown, was referenced to in an episode of 10 Things You Don't Know About on marijuana and its history.
Book
Hemp for Victory is also the title of a book about hemp, published 2006 in London by Whitaker Press (ISBN 0-9549939-0-X). It is the work of several authors active in the hemp world, including Kenyon Gibson, Nick and Cindy Mackintosh, Woody Harrelson, Mina Hegaard and Sam Heslop.
Sequel
In 2008 efforts were made to make a sequel of the movie by UK-based production houses as a series of short films. It was developed as a three film series of 60 minutes each. The first part is starred by David Hayman and Jack Herer. The second part released at the 2009 Seattle HempFest had Steve Levine and Andrea Hermann on the speaker panel.
The conceptualization of the film was done primarily through inputs from Smithsonian Online, Greenpeace, Ferrero, MardiGrass, Robert WestTemplate:Dn, Dr Tapan Kumar Pradhan, Howard Marks, Vote Hemp, John Hobson (Hemcore), Hillary Benn, Marc Deeley and other research institutes.
See also
- Cannabis College
- The Emperor Wears No Clothes
- Legal history of cannabis in the United States
- List of films in the public domain
- Reefer Madness, 1936 film
- United States home front during World War II
