Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security

Introduction

1 Introduction On the same day that the New York Times reported on page 6 that the Nazis had slain seven hundred thousand Polish Jews, a different headline appeared above the fold of the front page: “Lehman Ends Tennis; Shoes to Rubber Pile.” As part of his commitment to respond to the U.S. rubber crisis, New York governor Herbert Lehman and his family had donated tennis shoes and other household items to the nation’s scrap-rubber drive.1 As the juxtaposition of these stories demonstrates, no domestic issue generated more attention or caused more public anxiety in early 1942 than looming shortages of rubber. For decades, many Americans had been as concerned about foreign control of rubber as people are today about petroleum. The situation proved especially grave in 1942. Government officials had no real plan to obtain and fairly distribute rubber. Vital for war production, military operations, and sustaining the civilian standard of living, rubber was the nation’s most valuable agricultural import . The United States consumed about 60 percent of the world’s rubber, some six hundred thousand tons each year, yet it produced virtually none. About 97 percent of the nation’s supply came from lands in Southeast Asia that had fallen to Japan after Pearl Harbor. Government officials had prepared for this possible calamity in only haphazard and halfhearted ways, stockpiling barely enough rubber to get through the year. Prospects for 1943 were far worse. In response, officials launched scrap-rubber drives and unveiled several desperate programs to find alternate rubber supplies, including a rushed development of Latin American sources, an ambitious increase in the production of synthetic rubber, and a renewed effort to develop domestically grown rubber crops. This was not the first time that some Americans had argued that domestic rubber crops such as guayule, cryptostegia, goldenrod, and kok-sagyz (also 2 Growing American Rubber known as the Russian dandelion) could serve vital national security needs. Thirty years of hard lessons had taught that an industrial nation was only as strong as the weakest link in its chain of strategic materials. In particular, it became clear that the nation’s reliance on imported rubber carried a fundamental economic and military vulnerability. The 1911 Mexican Revolution had shown that local political upheavals could quickly disrupt the flow of imports. World War I had proved rubber a vital and strategic commodity in wartime, and shortages had contributed to the Central Powers’ defeat. During the 1920s, American anger over the rubber policies of Winston Churchill and other British leaders had demonstrated that tensions over raw materials could disrupt the consumer economy even in peacetime. These crises had sparked efforts to grow and collect rubber from plants in California, Arizona, Florida, and elsewhere—schemes that gained national attention when Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and others touted domestic rubber crops as vital for the nation’s economic development and military preparedness. With synthetic rubber still an unproved technology , the search for rubber focused on plant species that could develop into a natural and reliable domestic source of rubber. Although many diplomats and military-preparedness experts of the 1930s had issued explicit calls for Americans to develop a domestic rubber crop, few listened to their ominous warnings. The rubber issue resurfaced in the national consciousness immediately after Pearl Harbor. As much of the Pacific fell under Japanese control, wartime shortages exposed all the penuriousness and shortsightedness of the past. Even in wartime, many Americans citizens rose to criticize their leaders for the “rubber mess” and their failure to prepare for the emergency.2 Support for rubber crop research galvanized rapidly, and in March 1942 the federal government funded the Emergency Rubber Project (ERP). An effort that resembled the Manhattan Project in its scale, scope, and urgency, the ERP enlisted over one thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians in rushed yet thorough research on guayule and other alternative domestic rubber crops. Thousands of politicians, scientists, and ordinary citizens also poured their energy into the effort. Over time some of the ERP’s drawbacks became apparent , and domestic rubber crops became embroiled in increasingly intense political debates and scientific controversies. In the end, none of the alternative crops, nor synthetic rubber derived from grain, nor even the apparent panacea—synthetic rubber derived from petroleum—proved to be a viable long-term solution for this quandary. To this day, the United States still relies on a potentially risky combination of imported natural rubber and synthetic rubber derived largely from imported...