Harry J. Anslinger - Early Life, Marriage

Early Life, Marriage

Anslinger's father, Robert J. Anslinger, was born in Bern, Switzerland and had worked in that country as a barber. His mother, Rosa Christiana Fladt, was born in Baden, Germany. In 1881, the family emigrated to the United States. Robert Anslinger worked in New York for two years, before settling in Altoona, Pennsylvania. In 1892, the same year his son Harry was born, Robert Anslinger went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Harry Anslinger later claimed that he had witnessed a scene that affected his life. When he was 12, he heard the screams of a morphine addict that were silenced only by a boy returning from a pharmacist to supply the addict with more morphine. Anslinger was appalled that the drug was so powerful and that children had ready access to such drugs. (However, the experience did not stop Anslinger, while acting as the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, from authorizing a druggist near the White House to fill a morphine prescription for an addicted Senator Joseph McCarthy).

Anslinger enrolled at Altoona Business College at the age of 17. He also went to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1913, he was granted a furlough so he could enroll at Pennsylvania State College, where he studied in a two-year associate degree program in business and engineering.

In 1917 Anslinger married Martha Kind Denniston, niece of Andrew W. Mellon (Sept 1886 – Oct 10, 1961). In 1930, at age 38, he was appointed as the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. At the time he was renting an apartment at 16th & R Street in Washington, DC for $90 per month. He lived with his wife Martha and son Joseph L. Anslinger (May 24, 1911 – Nov 1982), who were 44 and 18, respectively.