Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Should it be operated by the Government? Should it be turned loose to live or die? Should it be kept alive in an incubator by tariff protection? An interdepartmental committee, headed by popular red-faced William L. Batt, wartime rubber czar, tried to answer these questions. Its answer to all of them: No. The Batt committee hoped to turn the war baby into a healthy, unsubsidized and profit-making private industry...
...should war babies be brought up? Last week an official proposal was made for the future of one of the most important: the $700 million synthetic-rubber industry, all Government owned...
...requests a month. For a recent issue of TIME they were asked to determine (among other things): the wage rates of natives in the Solomon Islands; the form of poetry most similar to the rhumba rhythm; major U.S. cities controlled by Republican mayors; the number of U.S. synthetic rubber plants that have closed down; how many Methodists there are in Europe ; the Moslem stand on birth control...
...Belem, mouth of the Amazon, the trekkers were treated to pep talks on the romance of the jungle, shown how to cut the bark of the hevea (rubber tree), and then pushed into the jungle. Disillusion came fast. The hevea did not grow in stands; sometimes the trees were miles apart. Dwellings were mostly mud huts which the men built themselves in tall forests through which the sunlight never entered. Flesh-eating piranha fish kept them from river baths. Snakes bit them. The atabrine that the U.S. sent down to combat malaria was stolen by middlemen...
Death & Slavery. Of the 18,000 men who went to Amazonia, only a few were ever seen again. Most of these, ragged derelicts, now beg in the streets of Manaus and Belem. Others have staggered home to tell bitter stories of slavery and death. Said one: "The thieving rubber buyers and the mosquitoes were our worst enemies. Those of us who tried to escape were captured and beaten senseless. Those who really escaped were imprisoned in the mysteries of the jungle...