With his thick mustache and piercing, deep-set eyes, General Amos Fries’ passion shone through as he spoke. In a 1921 lecture to military officers at the General Staff College in Washington DC, Fries lauded the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) for its wartime achievements. The US entered the chemical arms race “with no precedents, no materials, no literature and no personnel.”

Throughout the 1920s Fries began a mission to capitalize on the US military’s enthusiastic development of chemical weapons during the war, turning these wartime technologies into everyday policing tools. As part of this task Fries developed an impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas from a toxic weapon into a “harmless” tool for repressing dissent.

The 1920s became a golden age of tear gas.