Little Guayule: The Lost Manzanar Rubber Project (2015)

'Little Guayule' is the untold story of a remarkable convergence of events at the end of 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew the USA into WWII. The subsequent conquest of the British and Dutch rubber plantations of SE Asia spurred a panic mentality in strategic circles as 95% of the world's raw rubber was now in enemy hands. A substitute would be needed... and fast... and the multi-million dollar Emergency Rubber Project was authorized by Congress. Meanwhile, on the Home Front, public ire soon focused on the Japanese in America, and nearly 120,000 on the west coast (2/3 of whom were native-born US citizens) were rounded up and sent to 10 prison camps scattered in desolate areas of the American west. In stepped Dr. Robert Emerson of Caltech, who championed a special project to recruit scientists, horticulturalists and farmers among the imprisoned Japanese Americans to work on the search for a rubber substitute. Overcoming war hysteria, bureaucratic inertia and racism, Dr. Emerson led a team of roughly 40 people to tackle the riddle of guayule, a rubber-bearing desert shrub native to southern Texas and northern Mexico. 'Little Guayule' is the story of Dr. Emerson and his team--the individuals, the obstacles they confronted and what they accomplished behind the barbed wire and guard towers of Manzanar, the 'relocation' camp out in the high desert of Eastern California.