Jesse Jones was apparently not worried. He talked blithely of stepping up synthetic rubber production, which ran around 12,000 tons last year, to 400,000 tons a year by the middle of 1943.* But he was almost alone in his optimism. Leon Henderson bluntly advised a House Committee, considering a suggestion to exempt Washington taxis from tire restrictions, that the nation's largest rubber stockpile in history (600,000 tons) would not stretch more than seven months if normal consumption were permitted. Harsh were his facts on tires: in the face of a normal demand for...
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