Review Article

Synthetic and temperate rubber inthe interwar years and during theSecond World War

Growing American rubber: strategic plants and

the politics of national security

By Mark Finlay. Studies in Modern Science, Technology,

and the Environment. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii 317. Hardback42.50/US$49.95, ISBN 978-0-8135-4483-0.

Plant breeding and agrarian research in Kaiser-

Wilhelm-Institutes, 19331945: calories,

caoutchouc, careers

By Susanne Heim. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of

Science 260. New York: Springer, 2008. Pp. x 222.Hardback 103.50, ISBN 978-1-4020-6717-4.

Hells cartel: IG Farben and the making of

Hitlers war machine

By Diarmuid Jeffreys. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.

Pp. 406. Hardback 20.00, ISBN 9780747580928.

Reviewed by William G. Clarence-Smith

Department of History, SOAS, University of

London, UK

E-mail: wc2@soas.ac.uk

doi:10.1017/S1740022809990374

All three books reviewed here are written within

national perspectives, and yet they make a consider-

able contribution to global history, reflecting the

inherently universal nature of so widely traded a

commodity as rubber. Mark Finlays book is

devoted to the American quest for temperate rubber,

and also explores the exploitation of agrarian raw

materials to make synthetic rubber. Susanne Heims

book, well translated from a German publication

dating from 2003, has the parallel German search

for temperate rubber as its main case study. As

for Diarmuid Jeffreys retelling of the story of IG

Farben, synthetic rubber lies at its heart. The three

authors thus say relatively little about the tree that

is usually taken to be the first link in the rubber

commodity chain, Hevea brasiliensis. Instead, they

investigate the search for alternatives to tropical rub-

ber, in a context of war and preparation for war.

Authoritarian regimes turned to synthetic and tem-

perate rubber from the early 1930s, whereas, for lib-

eral democracies, the major stimulus came when

Japan seized Southeast Asias Hevea trees, between

December 1941 and March 1942.

Research in the fields of synthetic and temperate

rubber has often been portrayed as the domain of

unworldly chemists and botanists, but all three authors

reveal a deeply politicized process. In the case of the

USA,Mark Finlay shows how immensely wealthy indi-

viduals, with a bee in their bonnet about rubber, were

able to exert considerable influence over public ser-

vants. He is also sensitive to the complex interplay

between federal and local authorities, and between

rural and urban America. Heim and Jeffreys show

how German scientists and managers gradually

became implicated in Nazi crimes against humanity,

and argue that they got off lightly after the end of the

war, in part by playing the role of the nave boffin.

Finlay primarily investigates attempts to discover

rubber plants that would thrive in the United States.

These plans appealed to a number of constituencies:

isolationists seeking security in an increasingly vio-

lent world; economic nationalists denouncing the

blackmail of British and Dutch traders and plan-

ters; and representatives of depressed rural constitu-

encies. Finlay richly illuminates the complex and

cross-cutting ideological, military, political, and eco-

nomic strands of this ultimately unsuccessful cru-

sade. He draws attention to the now forgotten

chemurgist movement, fostering reliance on home-

grown agricultural raw materials for purposes of

national security. The most notable supporters of

171

Journal of Global History (2010) 5, pp. 171176 London School of Economics and Political Science 2010doi:10.1017/S1740022809990374

the cause, in terms of money, time, and publicity,

were the inventor Thomas Edison, the tyre entrepre-

neur Harvey Firestone, and the automobile mogul

Henry Ford.

Guayule (Parthenium argentatum) emerged as

the most promising cultivar for the United States,

after truly indigenous plants (notably goldenrod

and rabbitbrush) had failed to live up to initial

hopes. The guayule shrub grew wild in the dry lands

of north-central Mexico, with some small stands

in western Texas. The American Intercontinental

Rubber Company (IRC) began as a profitable collec-

tor of wild guayule in Mexico, but was hit hard by

the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the subsequent

collapse of world rubber prices. However, the IRCs

Mexican operations remained profitable in many

years during the interwar period, and exports to

the USA boomed in 194245, responding to a gener-

ous fixed price. Finlay, who has consulted the com-

panys papers, could have said more about its

Mexican operations, and he fails to explain why

nearly two-thirds of the stock was held by a Dutch

holding company by the early 1940s.

Finlay concentrates instead on the IRCs dogged

project to use Mexican seeds to cultivate guayule in

the American south-west, and eventually beyond

Americas borders as well. The company jealously

guarded its virtual monopoly of genetic material

and know-how, and sought to develop a guayule

nucleus around Salinas, in southern California.

However, scientists faced the twin problems that

guayule took five years to mature and that it could

not be tapped like Hevea, but had to be uprooted

and completely crushed to extract the latex. More-

over, the first processing mill opened in the Salinas

valley in early 1931, just as world rubber prices

were collapsing. Washington repeatedly refused to

provide tariff protection or subsidies, and withdrew

subsidies from research. The IRC, facing mounting

losses, thus turned to more questionable ventures.

From 1930, the company touted its services to

authoritarian regimes, including Nazi Germany and

the USSR. Contracts were signed with Fascist Italy,

which planted guayule in southern Italy, Libya, and

Eritrea. Indeed, the IRC complained bitterly when

the British naval blockade prevented it from expor-

ting seeds to Italy after June 1940.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,

the American government set up the Emergency

Rubber Project (ERP) in March 1942, employing

over a thousand scientists and agronomists for a

massive research programme. Finlay strikingly

describes this as a kind of Manhattan Project of

the plant sciences (p. 141). The ERP bought up

the IRCs remaining loss-making guayule operations

in California, including the seeds that had been des-

tined for Fascist Italy. Californian farmers con-

tracted themselves to supply guayule to ERP

processing plants, but major tensions arose when

guayule began to encroach on valuable irrigated

land, traditionally planted with salad and other

vegetables.

Encouraged by Quakers and scientists from

the California Institute of Technology (Caltech),

interned Japanese-Americans also turned to guayule.

Finlay recounts the poignant story of how these

detainees worked with a tiny budget and skimpy

facilities on marginal lands at the Manzanar intern-

ment camp, in the Owens Valley of eastern

California, meeting with much official and unofficial

hostility. Despite all the obstacles, and to the

immense embarrassment of the American authori-

ties, Japanese-American scientists and agronomists

proved more successful in growing and processing

guayule than the lavishly funded and equipped

employees of the ERP. Scant recognition or rewards

were forthcoming, although Japanese-American suc-

cess with guayule probably contributed to an easing

of conditions in the camp.

Finlay further shows that, from 1942, the Ameri-

cans became serious about another plant, kok-saghyz

(Russian dandelion, Taraxacum kok-saghyz). This

Central Asian weed, cultivated by the Soviets since

the early 1930s, had to be uprooted, but it had the

great advantage over guayule of maturing within a

year. After receiving seeds from the USSR in 1942,

the ERP and others hoped to grow the dandelion in

the northern United States, and in neighbouring parts

of Canada. However, disillusion quickly set in

because germination rates were poor, yields were

far below Soviet claims, and colossal amounts of

labour were required to tend kok-saghyz plants and

harvest their roots.

As both indigenous and foreign cultivars failed to

prosper within the borders of the United States, che-

murgists were obliged to seek out foreign territories,

as far as possible ones in which Americans exercised

influence or control. Finlay has illuminating sections

on the disastrous saga of the Madagascar rubber

vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) in Hati, put forward

as a form of aid to this American semi-colony. This

poorly planned and executed programme ended up

by supplying tiny amounts of rubber at US$564 per

pound, at a time when Sri Lankan Hevea rubber

fetched a mere 28.5 cents per pound. Finlay also

refers to American cultivation of Hevea in Latin

172 jjR E V I E W A R T I C L E

America, the Philippines, and Liberia, and even

Hawaii and southern Florida. Indeed, he might

usefully have given somewhat more detail about

these experiments.

Susanne Heim approaches the problem of tempe-

rate rubber plants from the standpoint of the net-

work of research institutions making up the Kaiser

Wilhelm Society and Institutes in Germany, focus-

sing on the extent to which employees compromised

themselves with the Nazi regime. She rejects the sim-

plistic division between good scientists, who found

protected niches in which to continue pure research,

and contaminated individuals, who succumbed to

the temptations of Nazism. She also rejects the

notion that the Nazis were generally hostile to

science, and caused its rapid decline through the

expulsion or killing of Jews, the imposition of

Aryan physics and party placemen, and enforced

international isolation. Instead, she shows that

many scientists voluntarily entered into different

degrees of cooperation with the regime, and made

genuine scientific advances in the process. In parti-

cular, they seized the opportunity of the eastern con-

quests to acquire scientific materials as loot, and to

bring trained personnel back to the Reich. Many of

these German scientists built sparkling scientific

careers, which, in most cases, were only briefly inter-

rupted by defeat: after the war, some of them

went on to work on problems of Third World

development. Heim argues her case closely and con-

vincingly, although the details of internecine institu-

tional and personal squabbles become somewhat

overwhelming at times. Her position on the exploi-

tation of the eastern lands fits well with Mark

Mazowers recent fine analysis of Germanys Nazi

empire.1

The most innovative and disturbing case study

in Heims book is the central section on temperate

rubber. Some research on the Russian dandelion

began in 1938, when the Four-Year Plan sketched

out a programme of increasing autarky. However,

kok-saghyz only became a Nazi obsession as a

result of Hitlers attack on the Soviet Union in

June 1941. This reckless gamble both cut the

trans-Siberian railway lifeline that brought Hevea

rubber from Southeast Asia via Japan and hugely

increased military consumption of rubber. More-

over, synthetic rubber could not substitute for

natural rubber on large tyres, notably those fitted

on planes and lorries. Heinrich Himmler thus ela-

borated fantasies of producing up to 12,000 tons

of temperate rubber a year, and fought hard and

successfully for his SS to gain hegemony over the

sector. In the process, he co-opted scientists from

the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for plant breeding to

carry out research. They in turn gained access to

Soviet and Polish research materials on kok-

saghyz, inspected the main Soviet processing mill

in Uman (Ukraine), and employed trained perso-

nnel from the conquered east.

Most problematic of all, Himmlers dreams were

based on the ruthless exploitation of forced labour

in the eastern conquests. While peasants on occupied

collective farms had already been obliged to continue

cultivating kok-saghyz, as they had done before

under the Soviets, Himmler now ordered women

and children from partisan-infested areas to be

rounded up for this work. Grim childrens camps

were to be established on the fringes of kok-saghyz

areas, and Polish schoolchildren were to be enrolled

for rubber work. In 1944, in the Baltic States, with

the Nazi empire visibly crumbling, prisoners, juvenile

delinquents, orphans, the deaf and dumb, and Rus-

sian refugees fleeing Stalinism were all pressed into

service to cultivate and harvest the Russian dande-

lion. While Kaiser Wilhelm Institute scientists were

not directly involved, they did advise the Nazis on

how to optimize the output of agricultural workers.

Heim does not hazard an overall guess as to how

much rubber was actually produced, but it seems

clear that it was only a few hundred tons.

Paradoxically, it was in Auschwitz, that by-

word for the worst excesses of Nazism, that tem-

perate rubber saved the lives of a few Jews, who

would otherwise have been earmarked for extermi-

nation through work. The main agricultural

research station working on kok-saghyz was trans-

ferred to Auschwitz in early 1942, and skilled

Jews, mainly women, were recruited to do most

of the research work. Claudette Bloch, a gifted

French Jewish biologist, headed the team. She

was able to obtain relatively decent conditions for

inmates, who were allowed to reside on the pre-

mises. However, Heim argues that German scien-

tists and managers were not motivated by any

altruistic desire to save Jews, but simply wanted

to promote their careers, avoid being sent to fight

on the eastern front, and remain sheltered from

epidemics sweeping through the main camps. Con-

versely, the inmates did their best to slow down

and sabotage research on rubber, despite the con-

siderable risks that they were taking.

1 Mark Mazower, Hitlers empire: how theNazis ruled Europe, New York: The PenguinPress, 2008.

R E V I E W A R T I C L E jj173

It is hard to escape the overall conclusion that

these programmes failed, at least in economic

terms. At the end of the war, Finlay notes that

the American authorities set German prisoners of

war to the task of ripping out healthy guayule

plants. Similarly, Heim indicates that the Germans

dropped kok-saghyz like a hot potato once the

conflict was over. Nevertheless, Finlay reminds us

that the cultivation of the Russian dandelion lin-

gered on in the USSR, probably into the 1960s,

something about which very little is known. More-

over, he notes the unexpected revival of guayule

since 1997, after it was discovered that latex

gloves made from guayule did not cause the aller-

gies that Hevea inflicted on some people. He even

suggests that terrorists might spread fungal spores

in Southeast Asias Hevea stands, forcing industria-

lized nations to turn once again to renewable tem-

perate rubber plants, especially suitable because of

dwindling supplies of oil, gas, and coal. If this sce-

nario were ever to come about, scientists could

certainly fall back on numerous research findings

in dusty tomes.

Turning to synthetic rubber, Finlay has a fine

chapter on the neglected agrarian roots of the extra-

ordinary surge in North Americas output from

1942. In both the United States and Canada, agricul-

tural and forestry products were first turned into

industrial alcohol and then into butadiene, the chief

component needed to manufacture synthetic rubber.

Molasses from the Caribbean, especially Cuba, had

been the main feedstock for large distilleries on the

east coast before the war, but shipping problems

rendered molasses scarce. Farmers thus turned to

grain reserves that had built up in the depressed

1930s, as well as current output, and organized

themselves politically to demand a network of small

new distilleries in the mid-west. While the govern-

ment mainly resisted this demand, distilleries pro-

duced amounts of alcohol considerably above their

rated capacity, and proved to be the backbone of

synthetic rubber production until the last year of

the war. Indeed, farmers and distillers did much bet-

ter than the petrochemical industry, which needed to

husband resources to meet the armed forces

immense consumption of petrol, and which encoun-

tered a set of initial technical hurdles in producing

butadiene. That said, Finlay fails to point out that

general-purpose American synthetic rubber (GR-S)

was a copolymer of butadiene and styrene, and

that, even though much less styrene was required

than butadiene, the styrene had to be extracted

from coal or oil, making it impossible to produce

GR-S entirely from agrarian resources.2 He also

passes rather too quickly over the role of rubber

reclaimed from scrap in solving the American rubber

crisis.3

Heim does not discuss the use of foodstuffs as

raw materials for the manufacture of synthetic rub-

ber, even though the first section of her book con-

cerns the Nazi drive to attain agricultural self-

sufficiency: the research of various Kaiser Wilhelm

Institutes concentrated on animal breeding, fodder,

vegetable fats, fibres, and agricultural labour. She

does stress that Germanys eastern conquests, espe-

cially the Ukraine, failed to yield the vast food sur-

pluses that Hitler had envisaged. However, she

does not relate persistent fears of food shortages, in

a nation scarred by memories of blockade in the

First World War, to Germanys marked aversion to

producing synthetic rubber from foodstuffs. The

Nazis knew that the Soviets made inferior rubber

from butadiene alone, drawing mainly on potatoes

but also on some other foodstuffs, wood waste,

and oil.4 Germanys Italian allies, who produced a

copolymer of butadiene and styrene, turned beet

sugar into butadiene, even though their German

advisors counselled the use of coal.5 In Nazi Ger-

many itself, coal remained the crucial raw material

for manufacturing Buna rubber, together with a lit-

tle natural gas, as demonstrated in Peter Morris

authoritative thesis.6

Diarmuid Jeffreys focus lies on the production

of synthetic rubber and oil in Nazi Germany, but

2 Peter J. T. Morris, The American syntheticrubber research program, Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

3 J. M. Ball, Reclaimed rubber: the story of anAmerican raw material, New York: RubberReclaimers Inc., 1947.

4 Matthew J. Sagers and Theodore Shabad, Thechemical industry in the USSR: an economicgeography, Boulder, CO: Westview Press,1990, ch. 7.

5 Rolf Petri, Zwischen Konkurrenz undKooperation: die deutsche Chemieindustrieund das technische Aufholen Italiens, in RolfPetri, ed., Technologietransfer aus derdeutschen Chemieindustrie, 19251960,Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2004,pp. 25390.

6 Peter J. T. Morris, The development ofacetylene chemistry and synthetic rubber byI. G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft,19261945, D Phil thesis, University ofOxford, 1982.

174 jjR E V I E W A R T I C L E

he skates rapidly over the technical aspects and is

only moderately concerned with the economic

aspects, which Adam Tooze has recently integrated

into his masterly survey of the Nazi economy.7

Instead, Jeffreys writes lucidly about the tragic

moral decline of IG Farben, the scientifically inno-

vative chemical combine that monopolized syn-

thetic rubber production in Germany. After an

unnecessarily lengthy introduction on the origins

of the combine, he chronicles the series of compro-

mises that accompanied and followed the Nazis

rise to power. Arguably, this began with IG Far-

bens sacking of its Jewish personnel in Germany,

followed by the dismissal of its Jewish employees

abroad. To save its pioneering oil-from-coal plant

at Leuna, the company moved ever closer to the

Nazis. Through a set of contracts with the state,

IG Farbens fortunes thus became firmly tied to

rearmament and war. By 1937, the majority of

the companys cadres were in the Nazi party, and

many belonged to the SS. The death of Carl Bosch

in 1940 marked the passing of the last major fig-

ure who dared publicly to criticize the Nazis,

including Hitler himself.

The core of Jeffreys book concerns the lead-up

to the trial of IG Farbens leaders for war crimes

in 194748. In early 1941, the company decided

to build a massive synthetic rubber factory in

Auschwitz, with the plans later adapted for the pro-

duction of synthetic oil as well. Auschwitz lay

beyond the range of Allied bombers, benefited

from good rail and water communications, and

was close to plentiful supplies of coal, limestone,

water, and electricity, all of which were necessary

to produce Buna rubber. Moreover, the company

could draw on labour from the concentration

camp, which initially contained Poles but which

over time vastly expanded and took mainly Jews.

As serious problems arose with the quality of work

performed by inmates, IG Farben took the momen-

tous step of setting up its own satellite concentration

camp, to hasten the construction of its huge factory.

An estimated 35,000 people died in the process, and

yet the plant never produced any synthetic rubber or

oil for the Nazis, in part because inmates deployed

weapons of the weak to slow down and sabotage

construction. Jeffreys is particularly concerned to

establish what the leaders of IG Farben knew about

manifest abuses in the camp, which was run on a

day-to-day basis by the SS, and what they also

knew about the killing of those deemed unfit for

work. In the light of the evidence that he has accu-

mulated, he criticizes the light prison sentences

handed down by American judges to the personnel

from IG Farben in 194748, suggesting that growing

anti-Communism was partly to blame.

These three fine books, which go a long way to

showing how the global rubber commodity chain

responded to war and the threat of war, are all

based in large part on primary materials. More-

over, the archival documents studied often ema-

nate from private sources, rather than from the

state. Thus, Finlay has used the papers of Thomas

Edison and Henry Ford; Heim has benefited from

the archives of the Max Planck Society, which

took over from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society after

the war; and Jeffreys has tackled the records of

the successor companies to IG Farben, which was

broken up after the war. In addition, the authors

have sought out oral informants. Jeffreys has

made striking and novel use of the reminiscences

of British prisoners of war in Auschwitz, and cites

searing passages from Primo Levis account of

camp life. Finlay has obtained valuable informa-

tion from a Japanese-American detainee, Frank

Akira Kageyama, and other participants in the

American saga. Heim, in addition to her own

interviews, refers to the moving published testi-

mony of Claudette Bloch and other women who

worked in the Auschwitz research centre.

All three books provide helpful illustrations but

are irritatingly deficient in other aspects of presenta-

tion, albeit in different ways. The books by Finlay

and Heim are devoid of maps, while that by Jeffreys

only has one of the Auschwitz site. Finlay has no

consolidated bibliography or list of archival sources,

which makes it hard to track down abbreviated

references. Moreover, his overflowing endnotes

often make it difficult to determine exactly when

something happened. As for the endnotes in Jeffreys

work, they refer to whole pages, without numbers to

indicate the relevant block of text. Heims index

includes only personal names, and all three authors

have too much substantive text tucked away in foot-

notes or endnotes.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the

USSR remains the great gap in our knowledge of

synthetic and temperate rubber in this dramatic

period, even though it was the Soviets who pio-

neered the production of both types of rubber.

Scattered information does exist in various sour-

ces, and Heim provides helpful intelligence on

7 Adam Tooze, The wages of destruction: themaking and breaking of the Nazi economy,New York: Viking, 2007.

R E V I E W A R T I C L E jj175

kok-saghyz, derived from reports before and after

the German invasion of the USSR. Finlay also

sheds some light on this topic, as American scien-

tists collected publications and went to the USSR

to observe how their new allies dealt with the

Russian dandelion. Nevertheless, good mono-

graphs on the history of temperate and synthetic

rubber in this era of the Soviet Unions history

would enable global historians to gain a more

rounded picture of a commodity chain in crisis.

176 jjR E V I E W A R T I C L E