Like the oil resources that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was appointed to coordinate production and use of during World War II (1939–45), rubber was another critical raw material needed for the war. However, 90 percent of the U.S. sources for rubber were disrupted by Japanese military expansion in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific by the early 1940s. The dire need to coordinate the replacement of those sources fell to railroad executive William M. Jeffers (1876–1953).

Jeffers was one of nine children born to William and Elizabeth Gannon Jeffers in North Platte, Nebraska, in January 1876. His father, an Irish immigrant, was a laborer for Union Pacific Railroad. Young William began working for Union Pacific at fourteen years of age. Through the next forty-seven years, Jeffers rose through the ranks to become president of Union Pacific in 1937. Under his leadership, Union...