Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security. By Mark R. Finlay. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. xvi, 317 pp. $49.95, ISBN 9780-8135-4483-0.)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this well-written and highly detailed work, Mark R. Finlay presents an agricultural, technological, and political history of U.S. rubber production from 1910 through the early 1950s. By focusing on this critical period of industrialization and militarization, Finlay expands our understanding of the evolution of the academic-military-industrial complex over the course of two world wars. In many ways, this is a story of failure and missed opportunities, illustrated by the author's meticulous reconstruction of attempts by government scientists and officials, industrialists, and academic researchers to bring rubber production to American shores while balancing a variety of scientific, economic, geographic, and political challenges. Essentially a hydrocarbon polymer, natural rubber can be obtained from various plant species, although early twentieth century scientists agreed that the richest and most high quality source was Hevea brasiliensis, a tropical tree indigenous to the Amazon River basin. While researchers and scientists continually looked for alternatives to Hevea brasiliensis, rubber shortages during World War I prompted the first systematic approach to cultivation in the United States by major industrialists such as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. A handful of promising botanicals, including guayule, goldenrod, cryptostegia, Kok-sagys, milkweed, rabbit bush, and pinguay were studied, although all resisted large-scale cultivation. The most promising species was guayule, a small shrub that yields quantities of rubber comparable to Hevea brasiliensis, although its four-to-five-year growth cycle made it unattractive to American farmers. At the same time, strong isolationist feelings in Congress, the potential for stockpiling, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's interest in increased hemispheric cooperation with Latin America resulted in no real policy or progress in rubber production during the interwar period. It was not until American entry into World War II that the federal government became fully engaged in researching alternatives to Hevea brasiliensis, by which time most of the world's natural rubber resources had been seized by Japanese military forces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".