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Chapter 2: Domestic Rubber Crops in an Era of Nationalism and Internationalism
- Rutgers University Press
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45 Chapter 2 Domestic Rubber Crops in an Era of Nationalism and Internationalism In November 1922, eight days after British rubber producers announced a new plan to restrict rubber exports and raise rubber prices, an official in the U.S. Department of War fired off a memo to his colleagues that decried the British action as “one of the most violent economic wars” the country had ever faced.1 The British rubber producers’ scheme, known as the Stevenson Plan, came to be one of the most significant issues in American foreign and trade policy of the mid-1920s. It also sparked another burst in the American search for a domestic rubber crop, for the episode demonstrated that economic tensions could upset American rubber markets nearly as dramatically as a military conflict. Just as World War I had taught the lesson that the United States had come perilously close to economic disaster because of its dependence on chemicals and other imports from Germany and elsewhere, the Stevenson Plan revealed that even America’s allies could disrupt the American rubber supply and thereby imperil the entire consumer economy. The war also left many Americans convinced that they could solve almost any challenge to the nation’s economic leadership, including shortages of imported rubber. As the Stevenson Plan became an important issue in the early 1920s, many responded to the new rallying cry, “America Should Grow Its Own Rubber.” Several agricultural scientists, botanists, and chemists did their part to respond to this issue of geopolitical significance. In the economic boom times of the 1920s, however, leadership in this area also came from industrial leaders Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone, men whose influence in public affairs extended far beyond the realms of their business interests . Other Wall Street interest groups, including those who hoped to revive the IRC and the guayule industry, also saw the 1920s as an opportunity to 46 Growing American Rubber develop an American rubber crop. George Carnahan, for instance, suggested that the IRC’s guayule project in Arizona would become “the most important agricultural experiment ever carried under purely American auspices.”2 In the end, however, government officials rebuffed the IRC’s proposals to invest in guayule as a new American crop and strategic resource, and the scientific community did not make a commitment to solve the problem. As a result, and despite all the preparedness rhetoric that surrounded the Stevenson Plan, the decade ended with the nation still vulnerable to a potential wartime rubber crisis. Military and Geopolitical Concerns Amid the bitterness and instability at the war’s end, internationalists lobbied President Wilson in Paris and insisted that the industrial world’s access to raw materials was a prerequisite for economic and political stability. American leaders such as Bernard Baruch, William C. Redfield, and Herbert Hoover pushed for a greater degree of free trade, based on the assumption that access to foreign markets would improve the standard of living worldwide and thus increase the demand for American products.3 Thus they recommended that rubber become a topic at the Paris Peace Conference, where they wanted the United States to insist that American firms would have access to the rubber of Britain and the Netherlands without restriction.4 The issue of Mexican rubber also arose in the aftermath of war, as some lobbyists traveled to Paris in 1919 to bolster American demands for access to the raw materials of Mexico.5 During the Harding and Coolidge administrations, an important cadre of economic planners, led particularly by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, saw an opportunity to adapt the experience of wartime mobilization to the postwar world.6 Throughout the decade, a wide range of academic institutions , Washington think tanks, and international organizations considered the connections between raw materials and warfare. In the words of one of the scholars who emerged as a leader in this field, Brooks Emeny, the lessons of World War I were clear: military victory was no longer determined by the size of the nation, its population, its national wealth, or size of its armies, but “rather by its capacity for industrialization.” Because industrialization was linked to the unequal distribution of raw materials, Emeny maintained, a nation’s security depended on the degree of its self-sufficiency and unimpeded access to raw materials.7 The U.S. military also understood the implications of World War I and took steps to improve its access to critical raw materials. The National Defense Act of 1920 assigned to the...