Masks of Rubber

Masks in Rubber

Out of the dreamlike confusion of the Rubber Scandal, two new faces swam into focus last week. The New York Times reported flatly one morning that Franklin Roosevelt had asked Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone of the U.S. Supreme Court to make an investigation and give the nation the facts. Justice Stone's picture hovered momentarily on the front page, then dissolved into vapor. President Roosevelt had talked to him--but not about an investigation.

But Washington insiders were aware of another figure: bald, bearded Dr. Chaim Weizmann of London and Palestine, noted chemist, noted Zionist. Dr. Weizmann had a date in Washington to confer with Presidential Adviser Judge Samuel I. Rosenman. Reports were that Dr. Weizmann, who did not claim to know all the facts about synthetic rubber, nevertheless knew more of them than any other one man, perhaps could set the record straight.

In World War I, Dr. Weizmann's skill got Britain out of a worse jam than the U.S. rubber shortage. Britain was desperate for acetone, needed to make explosives. It had to be distilled from wood, and there were hardly enough trees in the world to supply the demand. Dr. Weizmann found a way to make synthetic acetone, solved the shortage overnight, in return won the British promise of a homeland for Jews in Palestine.

Even then Dr. Weizmann was experimenting with synthetic rubber: his acetone was a byproduct. Perhaps able, inventive Chaim Weizmann was the man to whom the U.S. could look for a way out of the Rubber Scandal.

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