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  • Plants and the Insecure Nation
  • Andrew Friedman (bio)
Mark R. Finlay . Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xiii + 317pp. Notes, illustrations, tables, and index. $49.95.

Attempts at the industrial-scale growth of rubber plants in the Americas often fail to produce one crucial thing: rubber. Histories struggle with this fact. Greg Grandin spent some 370 pages in his recent book Fordlandia, the seventeen-year chronicle of Henry Ford's rubber plantations in Brazil, mostly to tell the story of rubber not grown.1 Ever since Henry Wickham swiped the 70,000 Brazilian Hevea seeds that helped form the basis for the imperial rubber plantations of Southeast Asia, "American rubber" has been something of an oxymoron. British and Dutch planters stripped Hevea from its ecosystem and its natural predators in Brazil. They rooted it in a similar climate in Malaysia and Indonesia and, with the help of booming U.S. demand, forced the plant's growth at a scale and density impossible in its original habitat. With the cheap prices and massive output, the rubber game in the Americas was never the same.

This difficulty of the American rubber history is exacerbated by the fact that all histories of plants face an uphill methodological struggle. Every history defends its argument, but the histories of plants must carry the second burden of defending their topic. Why rubber? Why this plant? At best, plant histories cast a time-worn historical event in a new analytical glare. When the Nazis seized the Netherlands in World War II, they sliced off the Allies from the world's supply of quinine grown in Java. As a result, "more U.S. soldiers died from malaria during the war in the Pacific than from Japanese bullets and bayonets."2 The good plant history can rewrite a war. Grandin skirted the "why" issue by hanging his hat in the hall of great men: the titan Ford and his Faustian hubris facing down the complex local agendas and environments of the Amazon. By contrast, Mark R. Finlay, in Growing American Rubber, builds his history on the scaffold of "national security."

Historians will likely read these two books together—centered as they are on similar characters and crops, finding tension in the material droughts that paced the era of the automobile and world war. But Finlay cares about the rubber. He returns this substance with an industrial sheen to its rightful place [End Page 520] in the land. Rubber comes from plants. He wants readers to know which ones. The result is a compelling vegetal biography of this oft-invisible raw material stream and its national roads not taken. Early in the twentieth century, as the auto industry boomed, the United States depended on a mix of Hevea rubber grown in Southeast Asia, wild sources in Brazil about to be exhausted, and guayule rubber raised by U.S. companies in Mexico, whose plantations came under attack during the Mexican revolution. In 1922, the British, reeling from World War I debt, tied their rubber exports to fixed prices under the controversial Stevenson Plan. Looking to stabilize the American supply, barons like Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone worked with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, then pioneering ways to use the state to support American capitalism, to explore global rubber resources and to grow rubber "on or near American territory" (p. 57). Thomas Edison joined their search, soon taking the helm of the Ford- and Firestone-funded Edison Botanic Research Corporation. Despite these marquee names, from the Great Depression to World War II, low prices and a careless official mindset left the nation exposed. When the Japanese seized Singapore in 1942, severing the U.S. from 95 percent of its supply, the need for rubber scaled to panicked heights.

The federal government started the Emergency Rubber Project (ERP) and pumped money into a colorful array of domestics—the woody shrub guayule, the vine cryptostegia, the five-foot wildflower goldenrod, the Russian dandelion kok-sagyz, the yellow-blooming rabbitbrush, and the lonely desert milkweed. Another option was synthetic rubber derived from grain alcohol, fought for by Iowan Guy Gillette on his powerful senate...

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