The Rubber Barons - Standard Oil Sought to Block Jeffers' Program
MUNRO, DAVID A.
The Rubber Barons - Standard Oil Sought to Block Jeffers' Program Companies Propagandized Against New Synthetics By DAVID A. MUNRO 'T'HE Rubber Question went abruptly out of public discussion *...
...the countries which were partners in the Bismarckian system...
...But the most particularly annoying fact to Standard Oil is that Jeffers is concentrating his 43 per cent on the alcohol processes as much as possible...
...The peoples of small countries, in actual fact, are at the mercy of the big dogs, and must always be ready to abide by the will of the big dogs...
...But he is taking no chances...
...Whoever has touched his life has touched a great free spirit In the following article...
...Many of the load-mouthed demagogues in high places in the eighteen fifties had no understanding of the real issues involved, just as many today do not, as the American nation faces another great crisis...
...The one hopeful side of the picture is Union Carbide, which will make synthetic with an Alcohol Process...
...But they do not need to respect small dogs...
...But in my humble opinion America' stake in this war is greater than any nation's...
...The closest to a pilot plant was the Shell • plant, but this used chlorine which is not now available...
...Oil company engineers have not liked to have to mention it, but they have been forced to admit, in testimony taken by the Gillette Committee, that the oil process for making rubber has never been "piloted...
...For Lincoln had glimpsed the glory of the United States moving forward as a single nation, subduing the Northwest and the Far West, with its ships ploughing the oceans...
...Union Carbide units are going on steam every few weeks now, but first finished rubber is scheduled for March 15...
...Peace no less than justice is day by day creation...
...A perfect and peaceful world for all time, ruled by never-to-be-revised laws, will never exist...
...The Celanese pilot plant, according to recent publicity,is jointly financed by Celanese and U. S. Industrial Alcohol, a Rockefeller company...
...How Standard Oil got in with both feet and attempted to monopolise rubber production has been indicated in the case of the Wood River, 111., plant which was to have added 45,000 tons -to the synthetic rubber capacity of the United States...
...In the eighteen fifties the United States needed a sterling leader as much as it did in the seventeen seventies...
...If we answer "yes" we can strive for peace...
...Joe Louis in the ring or against Mr...
...And the pivotal significance of Kansas and Nebraska in the struggle of free labor versus slave labor, with abolitionists opposed to slavocrats and Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Young Republicans, representing the militant new industrial society against the feudal system of Tory Democrats—all converged upon Abraham Lincoln to find national expression in his sane, balanced, soil-flavored yoke...
...This company was put down for a mere 20,000 tons when the Gillette Committee began its hearings...
...War broke out in 1914 because the General Staffs in Berlin and Vienna hoped that England and Italy would remain neutral, and therefore they thought they were strong enough to challenge France and Russia...
...To make clear this point let us assume that active desire to enforce peace had existed in the United States, England, France, and Russia in the summer of 1938, when Hitler was threatening Czechoslovakia...
...we have to take another step on the road of sacrifices...
...We have to think of equality in right and not •equality in might One of our more intelligent political writers,' Mr...
...Thus when a dispute arises between a so-called Great Power and a lesser Power, most men and women—especially those of the Great Power—think as a matter of course that the small country which dares to challenge the national sovereignty of the Great Power, is guilty of an insolence which should be punished...
...There are many other processes, but all of them have encountered even greater opposition than Union Carbide...
...Following the expose of this expenditure before the Gillette Committee, plus the further expose showing the method as untried, the WPB quietly canceled the project last week...
...But as» soon as it is a question of our own "sovereing.ty" we always find out that it is a sacrosanct right which nobody is entitled to restrain...
...The partners of all those international systems...
...It is interesting to imagine on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, how he in sharpjand clear phrases might have presented the basic facts of this plain truth to all of the American people, with the knowledge that idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based upon a solid foundation of social and political realism...
...They must go before a judge or an arbitrator who will decide who is right and who is wrong...
...And as Lincoln's eyes saw more clearly he grew stronger in spirit and greater in stature...
...And released from its fetters the United States thundered ahead on steel rails from Maine to Florida, from New York to Chicago through Kansas to California...
...It was a bitter struggle and grim...
...J The project (hailed, of course, as hare-brained) to seize and Scrap 7.000,000 autos is half-Army (Robert P. Paterson) and half-Oil Company (Harold L. Ickee...
...But Edward G. Seubert, president of Standard of Indiana, was forced to admit in a letter requested by the Gillette Committee that of the $13,557,000 total cost only $1,711,750 was in second-hand equipment and that $5,104,580 was "for materials requiring priority...
...The Rubber Barons - Standard Oil Sought to Block Jeffers' Program Companies Propagandized Against New Synthetics By DAVID A. MUNRO 'T'HE Rubber Question went abruptly out of public discussion * ten days ago, but the fight over rubber has grown rather than diminished in intensity...
...SW ST In a civilized society, when a private dispute arises, the interested parties have no right to resort to arms...
...More to the point would be asking what price our national sovereignty...
...Transport of men and materials was taking to steel rails and wheels...
...PVERYONE of us is ready to make short work of the "sovereignty" of other people...
...But it is obvious that nations, like plants and human beings, grow...
...The present war broke out in 1939 because Hitler, having "secured Mussolini's alliance and Stalin's neutrality, and banking on American neutrality, thought that he was in a position to challenge the British and the French...
...We like to speak of Lincoln as the great Emancipator in thinking of the liberation of Negro slaves...
...And factories were superseding handicraft systems, bringing a vast increase of cheap textiles to augment the wealth of the world and the progress of humanity...
...We do not need to assume that all nations must have equal strength...
...And so Lincoln declared, in his speech of nomination for the Senate in 1858: "A house divided against itself cannot stand...
...If they have not, they must submit to the Germans . . . There is no salvation in that line of thought . . . Luxemburg, Austria, Holland, Denmark must have exactly the same freedom, the same dignity, the same security as England or Russia...
...But Lincoln was a much greater emancipator than that It was the whole American nation he liberated to measure itself and take its stride as a leader in the general progress of the world...
...then the German-Austrian alliance of 1879...
...And so the grandeur of Abraham Lincoln is godlike as one sees him in his true perspective—a backwoodsman, self-educated, self-made, honest, but vacillating, a dreamer, a pioneer in overalls, epitomizing the spirit of the new America stepping out in the race among the nations of the industrial age...
...But who has been pulling the strings has never been too clear...
...Even if Hitler's basic claims had been right, the procedure of threats and blackmail which he had adopted, would automatically have set the coalition for peace in motion against him...
...They have to be content if only their would-be national sovereignty is not too brutally trampled upon, and if some diplomatic face-saving devices can avoid too great scandals...
...The Populists thought Abe "one of us," and each year the GOP bigwigs pay tribute to their great first President But through it all—through all the conflicting prejudices—the greatness of Abraham Lincoln emerges...
...If we answer "no," let us stop talking cant about peace...
...It means international anarchy, and international anarchy can only bring about war...
...WILLIAM JEFFERS has been able to resist the attacks upon " him because of a kind of political miracle...
...It had been carried on in the newspapers, on the Hill, and in foreign capitals without any sign of self-consciousness whatsoever...
...Fresh emergencies will always demand readjustments in traditional situations...
...He is waiting to see actual rubber...
...The fight that had wracked Washington for the previous weeks had been very much un-secret...
...Nor can we afford to accept all the peoples of the world as judges in any dispute which might affect our legitimate national interests...
...Meanwhile the country rolls on tires of reclaimed rubber and on tires retreaded with reclaimed "camelback...
...Claude McKay, well-known Negro poet touches a few Lincoln aspects for our time...
...They are "great powers" and I am not...
...then the Triple Alliance of 1887...
...The publicity forced it to be jumped immediately to 40.000, then 80,0000...
...If the reactionary Southern states had won in the Civil War, this nation might have remained cramped and stagnant and backward as Czarist Russia...
...Equality of strength does not exist and cannot exist among nations any more than it does among men...
...WF we accept this outlook in our international relations...
...if disputes have to be settled by right and not by might, there must no longer be any difference between Greater and lesser Powers...
...He may even be unfair...
...A Free Spirit ABRAHAM LINCOLN died on a cold, gray morning in April, 1865...
...In the "final Baruch total, Union Carbide was allocated 240,000 tons...
...Out of War Years Lincoln — Apostle of a New America By CLAUDE MeJLAf A BE Lincoln's greatness as a man and as Presi-dent has been glorified by the pregnant bigness of his time...
...A (previous Standard Oil cancelation was made in the Gary plant, after $3,500,000 had been spent on the project...
...by constant endeavor, through trial and error...
...The umpire may make mistakes...
...It is a different story with the Great Powers...
...but never to enforce the peace...
...Every one of us is prepared to sacrifice on the altar of peace, not his own throat but the throats of all ¦his wife's relations...
...John D. Rockefeller...
...And the first was approved by the Jeffers office, according to the statement of Col...
...And those eyes saw clearly that if this nation were dominated by the feudalism of the South, that the United States arteries would harden and its expansion checked...
...Not all the business and political interests engaged in the knifing now going on underground are now known, bat the characteristic signs of giant Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) moving in for the kill have already been observed...
...And if arbitration decides that the United States of America is wrong, are we prepared to maintain that' the United States of America must abide by that decision and give the Republic of Liberia its rightful due...
...We cannot freeze the world once and forever to force peace...
...He was possibly not a great executive at alL Perhaps he didn't fully understand, mystic that he was, all the great issues of the conduct of the war and peace...
...He 'would not have gone to war because he knew that he would have been defeated if he had...
...and Mussolini when he pledged himself to fight side by side with Hitler...
...Men and women who in dead earnest pledged themselves to go to the rescue of their neighbor if the latter were victims of assault and who intended to keep their word at any cost,—those men and women would renounce an important share of their "personal liberty...
...The international system for the enforcement of peace has to act not as the judge who decides the case, but as the policeman who...
...Britain and France—always renounced a share of their sovereignty in so far as they pledged themselves to do certain things and to abstain from certain other things...
...Only recently was it given the go-ahead...
...The committee of arbitrators would have taken into account all Hitler's grievances, would have passed judgment on them and would have devised the measures to be taken to remedy those which were not groundless...
...Publicker of Philadelphia has an alcohol process said to be even better than Union Carbide's, but only by dint of strong pressure put on through the Gillette Committee has Publicker been able to get the necessary priorities for a piiot plant...
...But the peaceful settlement of disputes presents so many and such overwhelming advantages that, even admitting the possibility of blunder and acts of partiality, people prefer to take these chances rather than face the evils of perpetual violent strife...
...Because there was no longer in Europe around Germany a coalition of powers which could not be challenged by anyone...
...American steam ships sailed the seven seas to China, Africa...
...It was to be dealt with...
...For in Lincoln's time the world after hundreds of years of relatively backward economic existence, was just on the threshold of the Age of Steam...
...A committee of arbitrators would have been chosen, half by Hitler and half by Czechoslovakia, which would have been presided over by an umpire chosen either by the first arbitrators or by the International Court at the Hague...
...But if the rule of arbitration has to control international disputes, that is...
...In the recent ruling of Economic Stabilizer James F. Byrnes, Jeffers was allowed 43.6 per cent of his 1,100,000 ton rubber program...
...At the start of the campaign, carefully planted stories began to appear picking up and highlighting the threatened shortage of aviation gas, and then the submarine menace . But no matter bow early and tentative the stories were, the writers always seemed to understand that aviation gas was shorter and submarines were more menacing because Jeffers insisted on "bulling" through with the Rubber program...
...Therefore, if we want to enforce peace, we have to accept a limitation on our national sovereignty...
...He took the job to make America independent of the foreign sources of rubber—and that is what he is doing...
...If we are not willing to curtail the national sovereignty of our own country but expect all other countries to curtail theirs as soon as we want them to do so—then it is idle to go on asking what price peace...
...If we are prepared to pay this price for peace, we can go on discussing the other conditions which are imperative for peace...
...and Stalin when in 1939 he pledged himself to remain neutral while Hitler was fi.ghting against Poland...
...The committees of arbitrators, chosen case by case, will form their decisions according to the demands of each case...
...In Washington where the political seismographs are set for that kind of thing, the experts have learned that Jeffers has political power in is own right He gets a flood of fan mail...
...But a dispute between Germany and Czechoslovakia had arisen...
...Yet he disassociated himself from the impetuous John Brown and Horace Greeley and all those whose actions would have resulted in a split nation, leaving the South immersed and smug with its backward system...
...in all cases forces both parties into- court and sees to it that they abide by the rule of law...
...Gangsters renounce no particle of their own personal liberty...
...And as long as the Bismarckian system stood on firm foundations, peace was secure...
...The connection was that the same equipment •was used to make aviation gas that went into a rubber plant and also that valves and fittings for corvettes were the same as those for the synthetic rubber factories...
...Standard Oil has done -its best to get first place in allocations of equipment and money even though all it has to offer is an untried process...
...His press conferences are assiduously attended by the best of the Washington corps...
...and the Central Powers and the Entente Powers during the First World War...
...The minor nations of Europe may be democratic, educated, progressive, as Czechoslovakia undeniably was, but do they have 100.000 tanks...
...What each government in the new world order should do if peace is to be enforced, is to assume its share in the task, not of passing judgement on all international disputes, but of enforcing the rule of law in all international disputes...
...The only-difference which will exist will be the difference between the Power which is right and the Power which is wrong, be it the United States of America or, let us say...
...On these points there is no disagreement...
...When the emergency arose they should give up every other activity and face the risk of fighting, of being wounded or even being killed in order to be loyal to their pledge...
...Yet there was then neither a League of Nations or any talk of collective security...
...AFTER 1870, Western and Central Europe enjoyed peace for more than forty years...
...And the answer would be war, and war again, and war forever...
...Sample: Jeffers was cheered by the Baltimore audience when he spoke of Army and Navy loafers, and the letters that came in, overwhelmingly favorable, even from Army officers, con-.yinoed him that this was a further victory for the rubber program...
...Bradley Dewey, Deputy Rubber Director, last week, on "the recommendation of the Petroleum Administrator for War...
...He is cheered wherever he goes to speak...
...The United States of America will always be vaster, more populous and wealthier than Italy or Switzerland...
...WT is not fashionable or perhaps wise in social * thought to identify a nation and its people as one in their evolution...
...Jeffers has been asked to speak at the opening of the successive butadiene plants and the styrene plants, but he has consistently refused...
...Not even a mankind consisting of gods could take on such an immense burden of responsibility...
...We have to realize that tt is idle to flourish the flag of peace among nations, if international anarchy, arising from unlimited national sovereignty, is not done away with not only as far as other peoples are concerned but also as far as we ourselves are concerned...
...This company, known to be far along both in the development of aviation gas and synthetic rubber, was frozen out...
...But the North possessed the new ideas and weapons and the forces of progress were on its side...
...At that epoch the slavocrats of the South with its impossible romantic attitude of life aspired to the leadership of the nation...
...1942...
...Unless there be such a law we are again in the jungle . . . The conception of "great powers" is purely and simply that of the bully...
...Supposedly this was to he a ''conversion'' project...
...Such a system could not be challenged by France or Russia or both...
...World War or World Order...
...They may accept some brakes on their own sovereignty when danger of a clash between their own sovereignty and that of other Great Powers arises...
...We must forget the old slogan, "my country right or wrong" and we must follow the teaching of Schurx...
...But from these points one is not entitled to draw ie conclusion that national sovereignty must remain unrestricted and that therefore there is no way 4f avoiding international anarchy and consequent war...
...This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free...
...T*0 be sure we cannot pledge ourselves never to have any differences with anybody...
...AN early story in the series printed in PM indicated that Henry Wallace and Milo Perkins were fighting vainly against Jeffers' insistence on carrying out the letter of the Baruch Report in the matter of domestic rubber production...
...Decent men and women put brakes On their personal liberty in order not to live at the mercy of the gangsters...
...The tragedy of mankind is that the peoples and their rulers are always prepared to restrain their own sovereignty in order to wage war or to threaten war or to shelter themselves against the danger of war...
...China is bigger and more populous* than Japan, but if Japan could outslug China, Japan would establish its claim to be a Teat power...
...Both these projects had been defunded by Bruce K. Brown, Assistant Deputy Petroleum Administrator for War, in testimony before the Gillette Committee...
...Except for Jeffers near daily insistence that America could have its rubber program and its corvettes, no one seems to have raised the logical doubt that these two programs, neither of which is a major item in the total of war production, were mutually exclusive...
...National sovereignty" is for a country what "personal liberty" is for the .individual...
...In Reconstruction days...
...India and Europe...
...There will be no escape from war...
...Jeffers, because of this wide support among big people and little, feels that the "airing" has ac- -complished its end and that he has played the game politically (right...
...Every international treaty puts brakes on the national sovereignty of the contracting parties...
...Nor can we.think that all governments of the world have to sit in permanent judgment on all disputes that may arise everywhere in the world...
...Similarly both Seagram and Celanese have only recently been given materials for pilot plants...
...Yet there were signs on every side that the burgeoning new age needed a new outlook, new blood, a new system of popular education, which the South did not possess and could not create...
...P^ATURALLY the Rubber Director is not in any position to .. know that Standard Oil intended to hog the synthetic rubber program so that it could be artfully fumbled during the War Years, then scuttled in favor of some new international agreement After the War...
...Here again we have to pay another price if we want peace...
...Are we prepared to admit that if any dispute arises between the United States of America and let us say the Republic of Liberia, that dispute, whatever its gravity, must be settled by arbitration...
...As soon as England broke away from the Bismarckian system, peace began to totter...
...Either we agree to this solution of the problem, or we have to accept international anarchy, and, consequently.war...
...Lasting Peace Impossible Without International Sovereignty By GAETANQ SALVE MEN I II AGREAT many persons would not stick to their guns if they realized all the implications of the statement that the United States must share in the task of enforcing peace in the new world order...
...Radicals flaunted Lincoln's Republican party card, and Southerners too found him a useful symbol (although for "peace" and "magnanimity...
...This supply seems sufficient for all motorists now allowed to purchase tires...
...The composition of the America population and its economy place this nation in a position of unaltemabie opposition to the Nazi idea of a "new order...
...Rubber Director William M. Jeffers is accomplishing too much too fast to suit those who, like Standard Oil, have made commercial capital out of keeping synthetic Rubber production from America...
...Big dogs need to respect other big dogs...
...Hitler would have been powerless against the forces of this coalition...
...A country cannot pledge itself in dead earnest to a system of "collective security" if it does not give up a good share of its "national sovereignty...
...Then in 1860 Lincoln challenged the South and decreed the complete exclusion of slavery from the new territories...
...And for Store than three-quarters of a century now appeals have regularly been sent heavenwards to the spirit of "Old Abe...
...Unrestrained national sovereignty is gangsterism among the nations...
...France and Russia when they formed the anti-German Entente...
...war, we must bear the logical consequences of our assumption...
...If we agree that the price of peace is readiness on our part to threaten the use of armed forces to prevent the outbreak of war, and even to make use of armed forces to punish the country which goes to...
...Unrestrained "national sovereignty" implies the right to threaten war and to go to war any time a country thinks that war will pay...
...Anyhow, whether one is a member of a coalition for war, or a member of a coalition for peace, one always has to give up a share of his own national sovereignty...
...That is the only decisive argument...
...But Wallace had previously -expressed himself as in favor of scuttling all domestic synthetic production and going back to dependency on the East Indies—and also on the Anglo-Dutch Rubber cartel, presumably...
...This is democracy in the plainest sense . . . The aim of the law is to prevent the big fellows from using their bigness to the detriment of the little fellows...
...the great American citizens of German descent, who last century gave us another password—a password worthy of a people consecrated to the ideals of both peace and justice: "To keep my country right if it is right, to make ? it right if it is wrong...
...As it was in the beginning, so it is today...
...And so in his first message to Congress he described the conflict as "a people'e contest, a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading objective is to elevate the condition of man .. ." And in his reply to Horace Greeley, who had attacked him on the issue of slavery, Lincoln said: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and is not to save or destroy slavery...
...Because Bismarck in order to solve the problem of German security, had created a coalition of powers: first the German-Austrian-Russian entente of 1873...
...No other choice is available...
...But the understanding is in Washington that he is counting only unbuilt plants in figuring this percentage...
...Prior to the consent decree of last spring, this wot the frank program of Standard Oil There are other indications that Standard Oil still is not interested in seeing the synthetic program carried out The long fight against the efforts of the farm lobby to produce rubber from grain was- a pretty much oil company, and Standard Oil effort to keep butadiene production under strict control...
...and Britain...
...And there is no doubt that as long as the force of arms—that is, the right of the stronger gangster—is entitled to settle disputes, the Great Power is always right when it deals with a lesser Power...
...But the essence of our civilization is that they are debarred from using their power against my rights...
...There is a difference of mentality between the peoples of the so-called lesser and those of the so-called Great Powers...
...New York Herald Tribune...
...And Lincoln himself had no illusions about the situation, for he possessed the mind of a seer...
...But more than any other Western man he was a symbol of a democratic people, of a growing good society...
...And if development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed...
...Perhaps it was the inner revelation, the hidden mysticism of the profound mind that urged him on to emerge as the great American apostle of the Industrial Revolution...
...Now Lincoln's eyes must have gazed far beyond the horizon into the expansion and the future of the United States...
...When we are told to-day that in the post-war world there must be some limitation of "national sovereignty," we have to ask ourselves whether this statement means that solely the sovereignty of the vanquished countries, or also that of the victorious countries must be limited...
...The spinning jenny, the power loom and the cotton gin had been invented...
...But the Army, which seems not too interested in seeing the synthetic program get started, is beginning to get deeply interested in the country's stockpile of used rubber...
...Thus those already built are so much gravy over and above the 43 per cent Also there is a chance that these plants may be pushed to greater actual production than their rated capacity...
...Mankind has to win them anew, every day...
...Albert Guerard, has made this point perfectly clear: I should have no chance against Mr...
...As a consequence, each one of them is in a permanent state of war with the community...
...in the auction room...
...From compromise and tolerance Lincoln had moved out boldly at the opportune moment to take the leadership of -the nation, and war between the North and the South was inevitable...
...the Republic of Liberia...
...For this reason, plus the feeling in some Washington circles that Standard and the Standard licensee group do not want to produce rubber, it has been cynically predicted that no synthetic will come from them for the duration of the War...
...And one nation's legitimate and natural expansion may be something quite different from another's ruthless aggression and exploitation...
...The United States leaped forward and became the greatest industrial nation of the world...
...All submarine stories have had the well-worded "moral" that the rubber program would have to be curtailed because of these threats...
...Lincoln saw that the old South was hell-bent on Secession and he knew that a separate Southern nation of slaves and slaveholders within the United States would be inimical to the interests of the entire nation, free whites as much as Negro slaves...
...Phillips Petroleum Company was one of the early casualties...
Vol. 26 • February 1943 • No. 7
