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226 Chapter 8 From Domestic Rubber Crops to Biotechnology In 1934, Alvin Hansen, a leading New Deal economist, asked famed USDA plant explorer David Fairchild about the prospects of producing rubber in the United States. Fairchild’s response was probably not the direct answer that Hansen was seeking: “What do you mean by rubber? What is your idea of possibilities ? When are you talking about? Tomorrow? Next week? Fifteen years hence?” He continued: If you could tell me what the price of rubber will be fifteen years from now; or if rubber and not something else will be used to cushion the tires of automobiles; or if flying will have so developed that there will be a million or so miles of abandoned thoroughfares; or whether there will be a revolution in the Dutch East Indies and Malaya and the culture of rubber there abandoned; then perhaps I could predict with more certainty that somehow or other Americans would work out the cultivation of one or other of the various rubber producing plants which we know can be grown in this country.1 Fairchild’s answer reveals a few of the complications that accompanied the long struggle for a domestic rubber crop. Had American rubber companies and political leaders chosen to develop a domestic rubber strategy at the end of World War II, they certainly could have. The hundreds of scientific and technical experts who worked on the ERP (and under the guard towers of Manzanar) had made considerable progress on increasing the yield and quality of American-grown rubber products. Investigations of blight-free strains of Hevea, intended to restart a rubber industry in the Western Hemisphere, were also on the verge of breakthrough discoveries. Within just a few years, the United States had gone from the world’s number-one rubber-importing From Domestic Rubber Crops to Biotechnology 227 nation to its premier rubber exporter. The United States also controlled over 90 percent of the world’s capacity to produce synthetic rubber and the potential to control know-how in that field for decades to come.2 Yet American political and industrial leaders abandoned the search for rubber self-sufficiency, persuaded as much by social and cultural circumstances as by the agricultural, scientific, and technical problems associated with the possibility. Thus the struggle for domestic rubber crops collapsed in the postwar world. In view of the economic and geopolitical complexities involved, rubber crop enthusiasts’ visions of flipping on the switch of a new bio-based industry proved illusory. New cultural attitudes also played a role, for many Americans felt supremely confident of the nation’s economic, political, scientific, and technological might in the aftermath of their victories over Germany and Japan. Along with penicillin, plastics, DDT, and, of course, the atomic bomb, synthetic rubber contributed to the illusion that American scientists and engineers had developed mastery over the natural world. World War II’s crash projects created the impression that if enough capital and infrastructure were allocated into a problem, American experts could extract a solution. These projects also suggested that if science helped win this war, then the next war would be won in laboratories, especially those that focused on physics and chemistry. As articulated in Vannevar Bush’s blueprint for postwar research, Science: The Endless Frontier, the time had come for a greatly expanded federal role for research in the basic sciences. This report—released in mid-1945, just as officials were liquidating the ERP—made clear that policy makers now conceived of frontiers far different from the nineteenth-century agriculturally centered expansion. Indeed, the resultant National Science Foundation (NSF), established in 1950, distributed 95 percent of its monies to physicists, chemists, and engineers; only 5 percent of its funds were left for all of the life and social sciences. Farmers and botanists seemed of minor importance in comparison with the contributions of chemists, physicists, and others who came to dominate the scientific and industrial economy of the late twentieth century. Postwar agricultural research shifted to relatively unheralded programs that enhanced foods and other products for the convenience of the American consumer. Its geopolitical implications were also relatively minor, focusing on the search for markets for continued surpluses of basic commodities and the transfer of American agribusiness methods to allied nations in the developing world.3 If the beginning of this history confirms historian Richard Drayton’s observations about the centrality of agricultural products in the rise of the Western industrial and imperial powers, as well...

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