Empire of RubberAn ambitious and shocking expose of America's hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow. In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world's automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the U. S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation's explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and