Growing American Rubber

Price: $49.95  

Subtitle: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security
Author: Mark R. Finlay
Subject: Science and Technology
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4483-0
Pages: 360 pages, 24 illustrations
Publication Date: March 2009
Series: Studies in Modern Science, Technology, and the Environment series

Praise for Growing American Rubber

"Mark Finlay’s research has been extensive and is unlikely to be duplicated any time in the near future. He writes with fluency and great narrative verve and he successfully weaves together the biological, technological, economic, political, and military strands of a complex story." —Philip J. Pauly, author of Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America

"This is a good story, well-told. The range and variety of resources that Finlay has explored is first-rate. As we now debate the sustainability of natural resources, the themes of this book could not be more relevant."—David E. Wright, professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University

"At last, the humble rubber plant takes center stage, vividly demonstrating the interdependence of agriculture and industry in twentieth-century America. A remarkable and timely book!"—Deborah Fitzgerald, author of Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture

Growing American Rubber explores America’s quest during tense decades of the twentieth century to identify a viable source of domestic rubber. Straddling international revolutions and world wars, this unique and well-researched history chronicles efforts of leaders in business, science, and government to sever American dependence on foreign suppliers. Mark Finlay plots out intersecting networks of actors including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, prominent botanists, interned Japanese Americans, Haitian peasants, and ordinary citizens—all of whom contributed to this search for economic self-sufficiency. Challenging once-familiar boundaries between agriculture and industry and field and laboratory, Finlay also identifies an era in which perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic came under review.

Although synthetic rubber emerged from World War II as one solution, the issue of
ever-diminishing natural resources and the question of how to meet twenty-first-century consumer, military, and business demands lingers today.

MARK R. FINLAY is a professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University. He is the author of numerous articles on the history of “chemurgy,” the intersection of agriculture and industry.