Elizabeth Washburn Wright (known in much international documentation as Mrs. Hamilton Wright) was an anti-opium campaigner in the United States during the early twentieth century, a passion which she carried with her to lead the United States' anti-opium campaign of 1908 alongside the famous Bishop Charles Brent. She was the first woman in the history of the United States ever granted plenipotentiary powers abroad. She represented the interests of the United States at the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee (OAC), and also worked with Stephen G. Porter and her counterparts at the OAC to create the organization that would eventually become the International Narcotics Control Board. With her counterparts in the international community, Dame Rachel Crowdy and Helen Howell Moorhead, she is considered an "honorary gentleman" of what had been dubbed the "Gentlemen's Club" of the international narcotics control regime. Where Bishop Brent (who introduced Wright to the President) was open about his religious frameworks as a facet of his occupation, Wright's religious Christian motivations were rarely mentioned, but were indeed one of her primary motivations in seeking the complete ban on the international opium trade. Rachel Crowdy, once while speaking to a crowd, placed Wright's efforts alongside those of Marie Curie as an example of women who paved history. Wright was involved in nearly every facet of the fight against opium in the early twentieth century, especially in playing a key role in the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) alongside Levi G. Nutt and Stephen Porter. She knew and often debated against most everyone involved in international diplomacy related to narcotics enforcement in her era, and especially used her connections to campaign for her cause, positioning herself in key positions to effect change.
Her hatred of opium was a passion that she shared with her equally-obsessed opium-despising husband, Hamilton Wright, the famous United States Opium Commissioner for two successive Presidents of the United States, the man who was primarily responsible for the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Some scholars write that she was uninterested in opium before she met her husband. Yet other scholars write that the Commissioner was uninterested in politics until he met his wife, who came from a well-connected political dynasty of firebrand abolitionist Republicans. But there can be no doubt that their intellectual partnership included pursuing the total abolition of slavery, from Empires.
Hamilton Wright was the lead for the American delegation to the International Opium Commission held in Shang Hai in 1908. The instructions from Theodore Roosevelt was for America to show solidarity with China, in order to open up their markets for free trade. Hamilton, at this conference, discussed in detail Great Britain's opium monopoly revenues, but did not delve deeply into France, the Netherlands or Portugal. At the next conference in 1912, First International Opium Convention at the Hague, Great Britain introduced a broader category called narcotics, of which cocaine and morphine were to be added, and mentioned to all members that they will only proceed with signing a this global treaty if the broad category of narcotics can be ratified for regulation and prohibition. Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, British delegate gave the speech arguing that opium suppression would be useless if “still more pernicious drugs” from monopolies like Germany, replaced opium. Great Britain's report says the resolutions on morphia/cocaine were introduced by the British delegation and prefaced by his speech. However, his use of the phrase monopoly, was incorrect, as it should not be applied to companies like Merck or Bayer, who just have very effective production practices.
The convention provided:
The contracting Powers shall use their best endeavours to control, or to cause to be controlled, all persons manufacturing, importing, selling, distributing, and exporting morphine, cocaine, and their respective salts, as well as the buildings in which these persons carry such an industry or trade.
The primary objective of the convention was to introduce restrictions on exports; it did not entail any prohibition or criminalisation of the uses and cultivation of opium poppy, the coca plant, or cannabis. According to Raymond Leslie Buell, the 1912 Opium Convention largely failed at achieving its intended goals, as the agreement reached was vague and left the enforcement of opium restrictions in national control.
Two more subsequent conventions at the Hague were attended by Hamilton Wright, but he was not able to attend the critical Third Conference at the Hague, as the new Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, relieved him of his duty. Shortly after the third conference, Kaiser Wilhelm II signed the permissions for Austria-Hungary to go to war with Serbia, which set off the sirens for World War I. Some scholars speculate that it was because of Great Britain's attack on Germany's legal pharmaceutical companies that set off the ignition for war.
Dr. Hamilton Wright died after an automobile accident in wartime France. Other records blame pneumonia. Whichever is correct, neither records say assassination. But Elizabeth knew what he had threatened: not merely a drug trade, but an imperial revenue system.
Her fury was against the opium empires that had reason to fear her husband’s work, and systems she could see as slavery’s imperial cousins. Whether or not they caused Dr. Hamilton Wright’s death, they had built a world in which human dependency was monetized, defended, and called civilization. If Hamilton had named opium as a slavery-class question of international law, Elizabeth spent the rest of her life making sure the empires could not bury the question with him.
And after Hamilton died, Elizabeth treated the cause as unfinished family business, as Mrs. Hamilton Wright. Three months after his death, the US declares entry into World War I against the central powers. It was the right move, to push forward the Empire holdouts from the past three opium conferences.
Hamilton died in 1917 from wounds he sustained while serving in the Medical Corps during World War I. She nevertheless outlasted his own legacy by working against opium around the world for the rest of her life, nearly another four decades.
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Biography
Wright was the daughter of William D. Washburn, part of the flour and railroad aristocracy of the 1850's. On the part of flour, her family created the companies that would eventually become General Mills and Gold Medal Flour, and as well were competitors for many years to the Pillsbury company, until her father's company was absorbed into it. Her father was also a member of the United States Congress, serving from 1879 to 1895. By the 1880's, her father had become one of the wealthiest men in Minnesota. Wright grew up in a mansion called "Fair Oaks," that is no longer standing, but the grounds are part of the Washburn-Fair Oaks Mansion District today. The mansion was designed by E. Townsend Mix, and the gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Despite the fact that she was born and raised in Minnesota, her family had deep connections to the state of Maine, where she would spend the summer months of her youth in a house called "Topside," in a town very near The Norlands. Archival materials of Washburn's youth can still be found at the living history museum located here, called the "Washburn-Norlands Living History Museum."
In 1909, she was present in Shanghai for the International Opium Commission, living in Shanghai at the time with her husband, who was the American delegate to the Commission.
She also represented the United States in the 1920's as the first US Assessor to the Opium Advisory Committee (OAC) of the League of Nations, despite the fact that the Congress of the United States had not ratified membership in the League. While on the committee, she presented herself with an attitude which what the British representatives would label her: far too passionate – but they also used other words to describe her personality in their private telegrams. Specifically, the British representatives on the committee thought that she was: "incompetent, prejudiced, ignorant, and so constituted temperamentally as to afford a ready means of mischief-making." However, despite their privations about Wright, she remained a part of the committee for half a decade, acquiring the position as one of the two most significant Americans of the era to engage with the League regarding narcotics, the other being Richmond Pearson Hobson.
Five years after she had left her position with the League, the United States Congress then, in disagreements with certain findings of the League, sent her to the Philippines on a fact-finding mission, to compare the success of the complete abolition of opium in the Philippines to the programs of the opium monopolies in Southeast Asia, such as the Opiumregie and the Opium Regie. She reported that opium was being smuggled into the Philippines from Iran, Yunnan, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and the foreign concessions of Amoy.
Written works
The Color of Mudken, The Atlantic (1910)
One Way of Governing Malays, North American Review (1908)
The Opium Question, Outlook Magazine (1909)