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140 Chapter 5 Crops in War Rubber Plant Research on the Grand Scale On Sunday 7 December 1941, under the headline “U.S. Grows Own Latex,” the New York Times published an extensive article that touted guayule as the crop that could make the nation independent of imported rubber.1 The timing of this article was pure coincidence, as dozens of similar news stories had appeared in American newspapers and magazines from time to time over the previous two decades.2 The Times story hinted at the possibility of genuine rubber shortages linked to a war with Japan, and it implied that Congress should pass the Anderson bill that called for the planting of forty-five thousand acres of guayule under federal government control. The article did not suggest, however, that a rubber crisis, one ominous for the entire Allied war effort, was imminent. Yet events of that very day proved otherwise. With the attack on Pearl Harbor , the Japanese launched a wave of campaigns that led to seizure of the rubber industry’s plantations, warehouses, and ships across the Pacific and Southeast Asia. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 cut off the United States and its Allies from at least 95 percent of their rubber supply. Within a matter of weeks, the United States had no access to its largest agricultural import, a natural commodity vital to its industrial, consumer, and war economy. Despite decades of warnings from Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch, and many others, the worst-case scenario finally had come true. Within days of Pearl Harbor, American leaders revived their hopes that a domestic agricultural solution to the imminent rubber shortages could be Crops in War 141 found. Old and discarded plans and proposals to grow domestic rubber crops suddenly became current again. Most centered on guayule, the one crop that had a track record of feasibility. Other plants also received renewed attention, including goldenrod, milkweed, cryptostegia, and rabbitbrush. In addition, a new candidate appeared on the scene, as kok-sagyz, or the Russian dandelion, seemed to offer an especially promising solution to the crisis. Common citizens presented various other plants as panaceas, including such unlikely possibilities as poinsettia, leafy spurge, wild potatoes, Osage orange, elderberries, and more. And as will be seen in the next chapter, others demonstrated that common grain crops readily could be converted into synthetic rubber, making every American wheat and corn farmer a potential rubber producer. War and agricultural science had seemingly come together at last to unlock the potential of domestic rubber crops. In contrast to the isolated, small-scale, and ephemeral projects that Edison and other rubber crop enthusiasts had pursued in the 1920s and 1930s, the advent of global war demanded a more aggressive and comprehensive approach. The federal government became far more involved in agricultural and industrial policy than it had been earlier wars, stepping into areas where private industry could not meet the challenge.3 Whereas World War I had brought an ambiguous relationship between science and the war effort, previous barriers had been torn down by the early 1940s. Many Americans now placed their faith in the scientific community’s ability to find a domestic agricultural solution to the rubber crisis, which simultaneously enhanced the career prospects of thousands of scientists. As John Collyer, president of the B. F. Goodrich Company, put it during the depths of the rubber crisis, university scientists and engineers were the “military Commandos and Rangers” needed in effort to win the Second World War.4 In the end, synthetic rubber derived from petroleum, not domestic rubber crops, brought the most significant changes in the political economy of rubber. In today’s environment, in which there are searches for high-tech and synthetic solutions to every problem, that result does not seem so surprising. It is worth remembering, however, that World War II was the dawn of much of this thinking. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor , the soil was the first place to look, and many Americans sought a natural, sustainable, and domestic source of rubber. A vast national commitment to mobilize science, industry, and agriculture ensued under the rubric of the Emergency Rubber Project (ERP). Created in March 1942, the ERP emerged as something like the Manhattan Project of the plant sciences, comparable to some degree in terms of scale, urgency, and interdisciplinary scope. Between 1942 and 1945, over one thousand American plant pathologists, plant physiologists, geneticists, agronomists, entomologists, [18.118.12.101] Project MUSE...

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