The Emergency Rubber Project – A Report on Our Wartime Guayule Rubber Program

Excerpts from the Foreword: When the Japanese fanned out over the Southwest Pacific early in 1942, the United States lost practically its entire source of rubber imports almost overnight. Fortunately, the Nation had been somewhat forewarned. The prospect of war had been on the horizon ever since Germany had unleashed her war machine in Europe in 1939, and by the time of Pearl Harbor the Country had accumulated a stockpile of some 600,000 long tons of rubber against the possibility of just such an emergency. However, even the normal needs of the country required about that much rubber in a single year, so something had to be done at once to assure a continuing supply of rubber or an acceptable substitute sufficient to meet at least the military and essential civilian requirements. Synthetic rubber was still pretty largely in the test tube stage in this country, though a little of several different kinds was being manufactured and used, principally for various specialty purposes. Whether an enormous expansion of this production could be quickly achieved was not known and the utility of the product for tire manufacture, which consumes better than seventy percent of all rubber in this country, was not certain. That rubber could be produced from guayule was well known and guayule rubber had been in use in this country for upward of forty years. It was these circumstances which led the Government to launch a huge guayule growing program immediately upon the outbreak of war, at the same time that it was pushing construction of an enormous synthetic rubber production plant.