The Drug That Bankrolled Some of America's Great Dynasties

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Westbrook Pegler, a vituperative critic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once wrote that the president’s attack on the ill-gotten gains of America’s wealthy was shameful hypocrisy given the fact that FDR’s “buccaneer” grandfather’s opium fortune had allowed Roosevelt and his family to enjoy “to the utmost … luxury and riches derived from the degradation and wretchedness of the Chinese people.”

The White House declined to comment and the issue fell out of the spotlight, but Pegler was right — and not just about the Roosevelts. In the mid-19th century, not only did the Chinese opium trade bring one of the wealthiest nations on Earth to its knees and convert Britain’s Queen Victoria into “history’s largest drug dealer,” but, a century before his grandson rose to power, it also made Warren Delano and the scions of several other prominent American families, very, very rich.

The 1700s were a boom time for China’s Middle Kingdom, a flourishing nation that tripled its population to 300 million and could pretty much dictate terms to its overseas trading partners. As James Bradley explains in The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, China sold massive volumes of tea and silk to Western nations, but it refused to buy much in return. “We possess all things,” one of its Manchu emperors told Britain’s King George III in 1793. “I set no value on objects strange and ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”

Delano’s Chinese escapades were not a great source of pride for his distinguished descendants.

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