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The real scandal was that nobody, before Pearl Harbor, had the combined foresight and strength of character to haul Jesse over the White House coals—and Jesse had forehandedly had his penny-pinching notions approved by the President. The U.S. was caught so short that somebody should have been impeached—but no one could put his finger on whom to impeach. Jesse Jones was rubber king by default, not by delegation of powers.
After Pearl Harbor all hell broke loose. Aside from a start on four "shadow plants," the U.S. had 25,000 tons a year of privately financed synthetic capacity (all specialty rubbers like neoprene). This was about the tonnage that Germany had when she entered the war in 1939, and it was pretty good for private industry, considering the cost, but for the U.S. at war it was rubber starvation. Congress and the people began to howl.
Jesse Jones, suddenly everyone's whipping boy, developed a stock answer to all rubber rows: he was going to build more & more, some time. In late December, it was to be 120,000 tons, in January it was 400,000, in March 600,000, then 800,000. By June it was to be 1,000,000 tons. Letters of intent from Jesse to the trade fluttered down like ticker tape at a pre-crash Wall Street parade.
Trouble was, the letters were all too often followed by "we didn't mean it" telegrams and they were all based on little or no decision as to process. The new plants—for butadiene, styrene and their combination into buna—were pushed around because too many cooks were stewing over how big the rubber program was to be.
Troubled citizens had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that Congress was going to "tear the lid off rubber"—and high time, too—but once the lid was off all they could see was a sheaf of alibis, and a "dreadful" corporation called Standard Oil. Jesse Jones said it wasn't his fault, he wasn't really in charge of rubber, ever; OPC Deputy Coordinator Ralph Davies said he wasn't either; Rubber Tsar Arthur Newhall (who took over this April) said very little, but everyone knew that his boss Don Nelson was still scrapping with the Army over the powers the President was supposed to have given him in the first place.
Meanwhile, almost as often as somebody told the public that the rubber shortage was terrible (despite Mr. Jones's grandiose plans), somebody else discovered another rubber source—guayule—dandelions —unpronounceable Polish and Russian weeds and inventors—new technological discoveries. Each "discovery" had some political wheelhorse to trundle it; each one had just enough "maybe" in it to scare Government rubbermen into another paralyzed pause.
One basic trouble is that butadiene can be produced in too many different ways: from the products of oil refining; from coke plants; from ethyl alcohol made either synthetically or out of such farm products as wheat, molasses, potatoes, etc. So synthetic rubber became still another battleground on which farm "chemurgy" proponents hurled their imprecations at the oil refiners.