Roosevelt wanted Jeffers to be administrator of the synthetic rubber program that had so far been unsuccessful. Jeffers told the president there were already too many administrators. "I'm going to be director or I'm not coming," he said. Roosevelt agreed. The press gave him the title "Rubber Czar."
He said he would serve a year, and would continue to run the Union Pacific as well. His first act was to fire everyone in the rubber program. Ten days after taking charge he ordered nationwide gasoline rationing to conserve fuel and rubber and imposed a 35-mile-per-hour speed limit.
Jeffers told off a Senate Agriculture Committee that tried to pressure him into using cotton cord instead of rayon in tires. "We have gambled too damn long on the rubber situation," he told the committee. "I'm not going to put myself in a position where it can be said that I haven't the intelligence or guts to do a job. The trouble with this whole situation is that it has been a muddle of men who were afraid that some Congressional committee or pressure group wouldn't like their decisions. I am going to make my decisions and I'll stand by them."
The New York Herald-Tribune editorialized: "Here at last is a man in high position who says in blunt words what every American has longed to hear said by those in charge of our war program in Washington." Maury Klein in his book Union Pacific: Vol. II, adds: "In that instant the legend of Jeffers as folk hero zoomed to national stature."
For nine months, Jeffers worked from early morning to late at night and avoided the customary Washington social life. He broke through the priority system that had stymied the effort to get synthetic rubber production up and moving. As Klein wrote: Jeffers had to solve huge technical problems, wheedle enough critical materials to get the plants built, and survive the bureaucratic infighting that was the national pastime in Washington. None of it came easy. The czar fought with the oil states, who resented rationing, skeptics who doubted he knew enough to do the job, the military services who wanted their own 'experts' involved, the Army Air Force, news commentator Elmer Davis, and his own boss, Donald Nelson....
"He was racing against time in two ways: his pledge to hold the job only a year, and the dwindling stockpile of reserve rubber that would barely make it through 1943. If Jeffers did not have the synthetic plants on line soon, the war effort would be in deep trouble."
By June it was clear synthetic rubber production for the year would exceed any previous year's importation of natural rubber. In September, Jeffers resigned and went back to Omaha.
It was undoubtedly Jeffers' most notable public service, an accomplishment critical to the war effort.
Submitted: February 11, 2022, by Cosmos Mariner of Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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