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237 8 / An “American” Industry, 1919–1930 By 1930, the American dyes and pharmaceuticals industry had reached a stage of development sufficient to prevent another deep crisis if nations again disrupted international commerce. The industry satisfied policymakers ’ basic expectations for its role in the national defense, and, after a decade of learning and consolidation, the leading firms usually turned a profit. Americans, however, depended on the exceptional advantages of the steep tariffs and confiscated set of patents to hold their position in the U.S. market, and German firms recovered many of the international markets where Americans had ventured during the war. At the end of the 1920s, the representatives of the Synthetic Organic Chemicals Manufacturers’ Association (socma) reported to a congressional committee that the industry made a relatively small percentage of the total number of dyes consumed in the United States. The American industry, they said, produced “90 per cent of the poundage . . . 80 per cent in value . . . [and] 25 per cent of all of the different varieties.” Using synthetic dyes as a frame of reference, the extraordinary efforts to build an American industry had yielded satisfactory if not stellar results by 1930. Expanding the narrative beyond synthetic dyes and pharmaceuticals to the larger sector of synthetic organic chemicals, however, provides a story with a different arc. The synthetic organic chemicals industry underwent a profound transition in the 1920s, and the German ruler by which Americans had measured their progress during the war became increasingly irrelevant. While dyes remained a notable segment of the industry, the sector expanded and changed, and entirely new product categories and new raw materials redefined the boundaries of the industry. Decades of work had created an enormous technical advantage for the German firms in dyes and pharmaceuticals , but in the newer developments, the Germans had little or no head start on American rivals, and the two sides competed with relative parity. On the most elemental level, the chemistry shifted from the aromatic , ring-molecule, benzene-based organic chemistry to the aliphatic, 238 / an “american” industry chain-molecule, ethylene-based organic chemistry. Petroleum and natural gas became the new source material for synthetic organic chemicals, beginning to supplant coal, the traditional “German” raw material. The product set expanded from relatively small batch quantities of synthetic dyes and pharmaceuticals to bulk, or commodity, production of lubricants, solvents, antifreeze, lacquers, and plastics that particularly sold well in the American consumer society of the 1920s. Automobiles, especially, helped to “Americanize ” the synthetic organic chemicals industry. Instead of looking backward , where Americans saw only German progress and American failure, Americans in the industry looked forward to a future with rapid expansion in plastics, synthetic alcohols, petrochemicals, and thousands of products with industrial and consumer uses. Significantly, in 1928, the value of the new synthetic organic products exceeded the value of products derived from coal tar. “Continued progress in this [aliphatic] field of chemistry,” wrote the chemists of the U.S. Tariff Commission , “will probably raise the United States to a position comparable to that held by Germany before the war in the manufacture of coal tar chemicals .” From 1921 to 1927, they noted, the coal tar part of the U.S. industry had tripled in size; the aliphatic part had grown thirteen times over. Synthetic dyes and pharmaceuticals filled niche markets. Even high-volume products like indigo or aspirin were dwarfed compared to commodity organics. Many of the new products found a market in the American automobile industry , an advantage the Germans were less able to exploit, partly due to a smaller European market for automobiles. The shift to commodity aliphatic chemicals coincided with other important developments in the chemical industry, including new technologies on both sides of the Atlantic and the expansion of chemical engineering in the United States. Technologies that allowed high-pressure and hightemperatureprocessingpermittedawidervarietyofreactions .TheGermans’ Haber-Bosch process for synthetic ammonia (1913) set the stage for other high-temperature, high-pressure syntheses. In 1923, BASF followed up their Haber-Bosch success with their first high-pressure, high-temperature synthesis of an organic commodity product, synthetic methanol. In the United States, the new technologies and the birth of petrochemicals spurred further development of chemical engineering, as firms faced the challenge of manufacturing and handling with precision enormous quantities of chemicals, often at those high temperatures and pressures. Starting with the German firms, this chapter centers on the major players in the U.S. market in the 1920s. Because synthetic organic chemicals remained deeply embedded in the transatlantic...

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