Chemistry in a new key: Surplus, soy, and the history of sustainable enterprise in the United States, 1934-1950
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larock-sm-sts-2023-thesis.pdf
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Thesis PDF
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Author(s)
La Rock, Zachary
Advisor(s)
Paxson, Heather
Date Issued
September 2023
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In the mid-1930s, a prominent group of industrialists, politicians, and farmers in the United States rallied around chemurgy, an emergent field of applied chemistry that sought to transform post-World War I agricultural surplus into industrial commodities. Ephemeral but wide-ranging in its scope, the “chemical revolution” that chemurgy’s proponents envisioned was a promise that the ends of agriculture and those of industry might be hybridized if the former dedicated itself to the cultivation of plant-based chemical compounds for the latter’s manipulation. In so doing, chemurgy became, in the eyes of its advocates, something of a panacea: for raw material scarcity, for Dust Bowl land degradation, and for underemployment caused by the Great Depression and racial segregation after Civil War Reconstruction. Under the banner of this hard-to-pronounce neologism, automaker Henry Ford and soil scientist George Washington Carver united in unlikely friendship and a quest to find new industrial applications for already existing plants, especially the soybean.
Historicizing the futures that chemurgy’s allies, especially Ford and Carver, advocated, two distinct versions of the field emerge. Ford’s chemurgy entailed autarchic, unregulated mass production of single crops that linked farms, factories, and a white American workforce ever more closely as they worked to harvest profits for captains of industry. That of Carver, meanwhile, privileged the diversification of arable land and self-maintenance of a black base of growers in a context marked by land dispossession and accumulation under racial capitalism. Almost a century since chemurgy was coined, it is worth revisiting this long-forgotten movement as a progenitor of contemporary calls that processes of industrial production be low-waste, renewable, even “green.” The tensions internal to this modernist doctrine of scientific praxis, which anchored innovation firmly in the soil, situate a North American genealogy of the logics by which today’s industries of sustainable enterprise replicate ecological and economic inequities of the past.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
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