Why Did America Forget About Hemp?
A Short History of Hemp in America
By Avery Martz | Updated August 2026
From the Hemp History & Context Blog
The Short Answer
Ask an American fifth grader to name the major cash crops of colonial America and you'll probably hear tobacco, rice, and cotton, but one important crop will probably be missing: hemp.
Hemp was an important source of fiber used to make rope, rigging, sailcloth, canvas, clothing, textiles, and paper. Some colonies promoted or required its cultivation and even accepted hemp as commodity payment for taxes.
During the early 20th century, industrial hemp became legally and culturally entangled with marijuana. Cannabis prohibition made little distinction between plants grown for intoxicating drugs and low-THC plants grown for fiber, and American hemp production largely disappeared.
When World War II disrupted supplies of imported natural fibers, the federal government temporarily reversed course and encouraged American farmers to grow hemp again. After the war, hemp faded from American agriculture until federal policy began changing with the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills.
Today, hemp can once again be grown legally in the United States. But after generations of prohibition, Americans have rediscovered hemp primarily as a source of cannabinoids rather than as an agricultural and industrial crop.
The history of hemp in America isn't really the story of discovering CBD. It's the story of forgetting our roots.
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Hemp in Colonial America
Hemp arrived in colonial North America during the 17th century and became an important agricultural commodity because of the enormous demand for strong natural fiber.
Before synthetic materials, ships required tremendous quantities of rope, rigging, sails, and canvas. Clothing and other textiles required fiber. Paper required pulp. Hemp could provide all of these things.
Several colonies promoted hemp cultivation, and some required farmers to grow it to ensure an adequate supply. Hemp was valuable enough that in some places, processed hemp could even be accepted as payment for taxes. In colonial economies where hard currency was often scarce, useful commodities could function as money and hemp was useful enough to qualify.
Many prominent early Americans grew or processed hemp. Benjamin Franklin operated one of the earliest printing presses in Philadelphia and produced hemp-based paper at his mill, which was used for both currency and government documents. Franklin favored hemp blends because they absorbed ink cleanly and produced durable, long-lasting sheets.
This is probably the origin of one of the most persistent pieces of American hemp folklore: that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written on hemp paper. The surviving final documents were not. They were engrossed on parchment, prepared animal skin chosen for important documents because of its durability. Earlier drafts were written and printed on paper at a time when hemp was one of the fibers used in papermaking, so some may indeed have been drafted on hemp paper.
Hemp was also useful in agriculture. It grows rapidly, develops a dense canopy that competes with weeds, and can be incorporated into crop rotations to improve soil quality. There was nothing particularly mysterious about hemp's importance to early Americans. It was a useful crop that produced a useful material.
How Hemp Became Marijuana
During the early 20th century, American attitudes toward cannabis changed dramatically.
Cannabis became associated with intoxication, crime, insanity, and social disorder. The newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics and other prohibition advocates promoted increasingly sensational claims about marijuana, while newspapers and popular media amplified them. The resulting moral panic survives today in propaganda such as Reefer Madness.
Industrial hemp was caught in the same campaign.
This happened during a major technological transition. Companies such as DuPont were developing synthetic materials, including nylon, that could replace natural fibers in some industrial applications. Hemp therefore faced increasing legal pressure at the same time it faced competition from a rapidly expanding synthetic-materials industry.
Synthetic-fiber manufacturers and cannabis prohibitionists had an expedient alignment of interests. Prohibitionists wanted cannabis suppressed, while manufacturers of competing materials had little reason to defend hemp as an agricultural commodity.
The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 effectively suppressed cannabis cultivation, including industrial hemp, regardless of whether a particular crop was capable of producing meaningful intoxicating effects.
Hemp ceased to be understood as an ordinary fiber crop and became legally and culturally inseparable from marijuana until the United States suddenly needed it again.
Hemp for Victory
World War II provided an unusually practical demonstration of why Americans had grown hemp for centuries. The war disrupted access to imported natural fibers at precisely the moment the military needed enormous quantities of durable material. Synthetic fiber manufacturers were not able to keep up with demand, and hemp had properties that made it a superior product under certain conditions.
In 1942, the federal government launched the Hemp for Victory campaign, encouraging American farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. As much as 400,000 acres of hemp were cultivated to supply strategically important fiber.
For a brief period, growing hemp wasn't suspicious. It was patriotic.
When the war ended, foreign supply chains returned, synthetic materials continued expanding, and the government's enthusiasm for domestic hemp production disappeared. Hemp again fell under the broader legal and cultural prohibition of cannabis.
The wartime revival became a historical footnote, and within a few generations Americans largely forgot why the crop had once been important enough for their government to ask farmers to grow it.
Why Hemp Is Still Useful
The world no longer depends on hemp for naval rope and sailing canvas, but many of the physical and agricultural properties that made the crop valuable haven't changed.
Hemp grows quickly and can produce substantial quantities of fiber and biomass within a single growing season. Unlike trees grown for pulp, another crop can be planted the following year rather than waiting decades for the resource to regenerate.
Its dense growth can suppress competing weeds without herbicides, while its root system and biomass make it potentially useful in crop rotations. Hemp has also been studied for phytoremediation - the use of plants to remove or stabilize contaminants in polluted soils.
Its natural fibers can be used in paper, textiles, insulation, and building materials. They are renewable and biodegradable, characteristics that have become increasingly relevant as petroleum-derived synthetic materials accumulate in landfills and shed persistent microplastics into the environment.
Hemp isn't a miracle crop, but some of the problems hemp historically helped solve haven't disappeared. We still need fiber, pulp, building materials, productive crop rotations, and renewable sources of industrial raw material.
A Second Revival?
After decades of prohibition, American hemp began returning slowly.
The 2014 Farm Bill allowed state departments of agriculture and institutions of higher education to establish industrial-hemp research programs under defined circumstances. For the first time in decades, hemp began returning legally to American fields.
The 2018 Farm Bill went substantially further, removing hemp from the federal definition of marijuana and establishing a broader framework for commercial production.
Hemp was once again an American agricultural commodity. But it returned to a culture that had spent generations understanding hemp and cannabis primarily as drugs.
The emerging industry therefore focused heavily on the flowers and the chemicals they contained. CBD became the defining product of the first modern hemp boom. As cannabinoid markets evolved, hemp also became a legal source material for concentrated, converted, and semi-synthetic intoxicating cannabinoids.
The stalk and fiber that had once made hemp economically important remained comparatively obscure.
We Rediscovered Cannabis, Not Hemp
Nearly a century of cannabis prohibition changed more than the legal status of hemp. It changed what Americans thought the plant was for.
Historically, hemp was understood primarily as an agricultural raw material. Modern America encountered it again through CBD, THC, dispensaries, and the continuing debate over recreational cannabis.
Hemp is often treated as a less profitable, legally awkward version of recreational cannabis—a crop whose value depends primarily on what can be extracted, concentrated, or converted from its flowers.
We have spent so long defining hemp by what it doesn't contain that we've largely forgotten why we brought it here in the first place: It is a tremendously useful agricultural material.
The reasons to grow hemp have changed. The properties that made it useful have not.
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