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107 Chapter 4 The Nadir of Rubber Crop Research, 1928–1941 In the spring of 1930, U.S. Army major Dwight Eisenhower embarked on a monthlong expedition that took him from his Washington, DC, desk job through the IRC’s guayule operations in California, Texas, and Mexico. In his diary entries from that five-thousand-mile journey, Eisenhower described his encounters with seedy hotels, surly border guards, seemingly endless hot and dusty roads, and memorable “swarms” of Mexican women and children selling tortillas, tamales, and enchiladas.1 Eisenhower’s diary also tells of his repeated meetings with IRC officials and his growing conviction that guayule had to be part of any plan for American war preparedness. The confidential report that Eisenhower and his traveling partner, Major Gilbert Van B. Wilkes, submitted on 6 June 1930 (exactly fourteen years before D-Day) endorsed guayule almost unequivocally: it offered potential employment to thousands of needy Americans ; it could provide an alternative crop for American farmers whose overproduction of cotton and grain crops commonly brought low prices; it could help consumers through an overall reduction in the demand for imported rubber; and it could become a permanent addition to the rural economy in semiarid regions of the United States. Eisenhower and Wilkes further speculated that the United States could withstand a war that cut off rubber imports for twelve to eighteen months but warned that any crisis beyond that would require additional preparation. Because guayule required about four years to reach maturity , the time had already arrived for the United States to establish a domestically grown rubber reserve. Thus they endorsed a government commitment to support the maintenance of 400,000 acres (about 625 miles square) of guayule. If harvested on a rotating basis every four years, the scheme could contribute about 160 million pounds annually, or about one-fifth of the nation’s annual 108 Growing American Rubber consumption. Eisenhower and Wilkes accepted and echoed the scientific data and political considerations that IRC officials threw at them, including the idea that the government should support a minimum “reasonable” price for all rubber raised and milled in the United States. “Under real encouragement,” Eisenhower and Wilkes boldly concluded, “the production of guayule would develop rapidly into an important industry in the United States.”2 Yet despite these arguments, the memories of World War I, and the public attention that surrounded Thomas Edison’s search for an emergency source of rubber, the War Department did not act on Eisenhower and Wilkes’s proposals . Evidently, the report gathered dust in government filing cabinets, its existence forgotten or ignored until 1943, when the nation was in the depths of a real rubber crisis.3 In retrospect, the 1930s can be seen as the nadir in the quest for an American rubber crop, as other issues took center stage in the American political economy. Above all, alternative rubber crops had no chance whatsoever to compete with the depressed prices of imported Hevea rubber. From a postwar peak of $1.23 per pound in 1925, the price of rubber fell to a low of 4.6 cents per pound in 1931.4 Efforts to develop alternative rubber crops fell by the wayside in the 1930s, as the technological and agricultural limitations of goldenrod , milkweed, guayule, and other possibilities became ever more apparent. Edison’s goldenrod experiments continued for a few years after his death, but only in two small projects near Savannah. The IRC became increasingly desperate in efforts to protect its investments in guayule: it suspended guayule production in California and eventually even turned to Fascist Italy as a last hope to find a market for its product. Private- and public-sector experiments with other crops led nowhere. And even though synthetic rubber remained only a laboratory experiment for most American rubber producers, industry leaders presumed that it could be scaled up quickly should the need arise. Most Americans, however, could not even contemplate that the days of cheap and plentiful rubber from the East Indies might come to an end; they had the sense that American rubber sources were secure. By the end of decade, as war approached again, only a few (and often eccentric) enthusiasts still pushed for domestic and natural alternatives to the American dependence on imported rubber. The overall failure to prepare for an impending military conflict also shaped the neglect of domestic rubber crops during the 1930s. Understandably , American policy makers made domestic politics a higher priority during the decade. In terms...

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