George Washington Carver As Icon

February 12th, 2008 · 1 Comment

George Washington Carver
Hall of Famous Missourians

The Heck of a Guy Posts On George Washington Carver Thus Far

Last week, two Heck of a Guy posts dealt with George Washington Carver. The first, George Washington Carver - Hometown Hero¹ set forth the legendary story of George Washington Carver, the same story I learned through numerous visits to the Carver Monument near Diamond, Missouri, and the story of his life almost invariably proffered in print and online publications. The second, George Washington Carver - Hero or Hype?, examined the wide gap between Carver’s honors and his status as a public icon and the meager quality of his few actual accomplishments. That second post ended with these lines:

The mystery then becomes how and why the apotheosis of Carver from exceptional human being to the personification of humane science took place - and, perhaps more perplexingly, why that immaculate image of George Washington Carver persists to this day despite easily accessed, well documented evidence to the contrary. And that is the subject of the next George Washington Carver post.

Today’s post explores the creation of the heroic image of George Washington Carver, emphasizing the qualities that led to his ascension to superhuman status.

The Extent of Carver’s Fame

A reprise of the type and source of the laudatory descriptions bestowed upon Carver is essential to understanding the reasons for his deification. The simple degree of fame Carver enjoyed during the latter part of his life and that persisted for years afterward may be difficult for today’s reader to appreciate.

From the admittedly unscientifically gathered database of my casual conversations over the past several years, it seems that most educated adults (or at least most educated adults I happen to meet) can identify George Washington Carver as a scientist who was black and who worked sometime during the first half of the 20th century. Perhaps half of those who recognize the name also know that he “made a lot of stuff from peanuts.” A few, often those who attended a school named after Carver or just saw a Black History Month presentation about Carver, can add that he also “made a lot of stuff from sweet potatoes” and was associated with Booker T. Washington. In 2008, anyone professing more knowledge of Carver’s life should be automatically suspected of being a professional or, more likely, amateur historian, an alumnus of or student at Tuskegee Institute, or someone who grew up in Diamond, Missouri.

For a measure of the pervasiveness of Carver’s reputation and the esteem in which he was held, one need only consider this declaration by James H. Jones (Associate Professor Of History At The University Of Houston and the author of ”Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment), writing in the November 8, 1981 New York Times:

At the time of his death in 1943, George Washington Carver, the Peanut Man, was probably the best-known and most respected black figure in America, occupying a place for blacks and whites alike that Booker T. Washington had held earlier and Martin Luther King Jr. would fill later.

The Press and The Legend of George Washington Carver

In George Washington Carver - Hero or Hype?, I referenced the most popular nicknames associated with Carver in print; I suggest these are important indicators of how he - or his legend - was characterized:

Miracle Worker
Wizard of Tuskegee
Savior of Southern Agriculture
Peanut Man, Peanut Scientist, Peanut Doctor, Peanut Wizard
Plant Doctor (during his childhood)

Time, in the Nov. 24, 1941 issue, went a step farther, dubbing him the “Black Leonardo.” These excerpts from the article by that name are helpful in gaining an understanding of his reputation:

Patriarch George Washington Carver, who hobbles benignly about Tuskegee’s campus, is an artist. But he is better known as the greatest Negro scientist alive, the man who pioneered new uses for Southern agricultural products, developed 285 new uses for the peanut, got 118 products, including vinegar, molasses and shoe blacking, from the South’s surplus sweet potatoes. In his laboratory he and his assistants also make paints and dyes from the red Alabama clay, the oil of the Alabama peanut, with which he paints the natural phenomena he sees around him: birds, fruit, flowers, mountain vistas.

Visitors, impressed by the simple realism and tidy workmanship of the pictures, found still more to admire in the adjoining collection of handicrafts (embroideries on burlap, ornaments made of chicken feathers, seed and colored peanut necklaces, woven textiles) which the almost incredibly versatile Carver had turned out between scientific experiment and painting.

White-haired, toothless Sage Carver still sticks to his philosophy: “Save everything. From what you have make what you want.” His gnarled hands are always busy with bits of string, tinfoil, clay, which he fashions, as he talks, into decorative objects.

Pleased with his exhibition, George Washington Carver is equally pleased with a brand-new automatic elevator, a present from his admirer Henry Ford,² which was installed six weeks ago to save his aged legs (he was born a slave at an unknown date in the 1860s) the 19 painful steps up to his room. “Exquisite elevator,” he chortled. “The doctor said he couldn’t do much for me as long as I climbed those 19 steps. I’m not very old, but I’ve been around a long time.”

Barry Mackintosh, in George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth,3 makes a convincing argument that the popular press was a major determinant of Carver’s prestige, one publication often feeding off another:

In 1923 the Atlanta Journal published a full-page feature stressing Carver’s background and personal attributes: “He combines all the picturesque quaintness of the ante-bellum type of darkey, the mind of an amazing scientific genius, and the soul of a dreamer. And his career… is no less picturesque.” … Success Magazine that year dubbed him “Columbus of the Soil” and approvingly noted how, in Washington, he had “deferentially remained in the background until all of the white men had been heard.” … Newspaper and magazine articles continued with some regularity. In 1929, in a prominent feature entitled “Negro Genius Shows ‘Way Out’ for Southern Farmers,” Osburn Zuber of the Montgomery Advertiser found Carver “certainly the greatest genius the negro race has yet produced.”

But the Carver myth received its greatest impetus in 1932 with the publication of an American Magazine article by James Saxon Childers. Childers held Carver personally responsible for increasing peanut production in response to the boll weevil attack on cotton, then for increasing demand by developing peanut products and markets. He devoted much space to his subject’s humility, unconcern for money, and other eccentricities and had him “shuffling” and “shambling” wherever he went. The article prompted a massive inpouring of letters to Carver from across the nation—many seeking help or advice with personal problems—and fixed his reputation more firmly than ever before in the public mind. In 1936 Wade Moss of the Tom Huston Peanut Company put forth a piece in the Chemist, predictably titled “The Wizard of Tuskegee.” Moss had Alabama farmers facing bankruptcy from the weevil in 1898 (the pest did not strike Alabama until the second decade of the twentieth century), then appealing to Carver for advice. When they obeyed his command to grow peanuts, he discovered ways to use the crop, making possible the spectacular growth of the peanut industry. Although the circulation of articles like Moss’s did not approach that of Childers’s, journalists and popular biographers later magnified their impact by accepting them uncritically as source material. On occasion uncritical acceptance extended even to academic historians. In A History of the South William Best Hesseltine perpetuated Carver’s catalog of discoveries by citing his “leading rank as an industrial scientist” in developing “165 different products from the lowly peanut and 107 food products from the yellow yam….”

… When the February 1937 Reader’s Digest printed a condensation of the Childers article Carver’s mail hit another peak. The next month Life did a photo feature lauding him as “one of the great scientists of the U.S.” That year the New York Times also praised his “300 useful products” from the peanut and “more than 100 products of varying human values” from the sweet potato. … In June 1942 the New York Times again acclaimed him editorially, citing his “long series of discoveries that have memorably improved the agriculture of the South.”

The Politicians and Carver

Carver was the subject of praise not only from the press but from politicians. Bennett Clark, a Senator from Missouri asserted that Carver had “achieved a place as one of the foremost scientists of all the world for all time….” On Carver’s death, President Franklin Roosevelt eulogized, “The world of science has lost one of its most eminent figures…. The versatility of his genius and his achievements in diverse branches of the arts and sciences were truly amazing. All mankind is the beneficiary of his discoveries in the field of agricultural chemistry.” As noted in George Washington Carver - Hometown Hero, Roosevelt signed the order appropriating $30,000 for the creation of the Carver Monument, the first national monument dedicated to an African-American and also the first to a non-President. Only two other individuals have had their birthplaces designated as national monuments: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

To advance the bill establishing the Carver Monument,⁴ (then) Senator Harry Truman testified that “the scientific discoveries and experiments of Dr. Carver have done more to alleviate the one-crop agricultural system in the South than any other thing that has been done in the history of the United States.” In a committee hearing on the bill, one supporter argued that “The bill is not simply a momentary pause on the part of busy men engaged in the conduct of the war, to do honor to one of the truly great Americans of this country, but it is in essence a blow against the Axis, it is in essence a war measure in the sense that it will further unleash and release the energies of roughly 15,000,000 Negro people in this country for full support of our war effort.”

And Carver’s appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee in January 1921 may well have been the moment when he achieved national notoriety. His presentation of the products that could be produced from peanuts, including breakfast food, candy, milk, ice-cream flavoring, livestock feed, and ink, held the committee’s interest well over the allotted time and contributed to the hoped for passage of a tariff on foreign peanuts.

The George Washington Carver Honors

In the list of Carver namesakes, surely the most well populated category is schools. Scores, if not hundreds, of elementary, middle, and high schools are named after George Washington Carver.

Carver has also been the recipient of numerous federal government honors, being featured on stamps, coins, and federal office buildings.

And, of course, a nuclear powered submarine carrying Polaris missiles.

There are bridges, like this one in Des Moines, named after him.

Any place Carver lived or worked is likely to have sprouted a marker or monument of some type. The school he attended from ages 10-12 is preserved in his name.

This Kansas historical marker, dedicated to the “Homestead of a Genius,” designates the site of a sod house where Carver homesteaded through two seasons of drought and blizzards from 1886-1888 before abandoning the home and Kansas to move to Iowa.⁵

The Iowa State University site lists some of his formal honors:

He received many honors in his lifetime and after, including a 1938 feature film, Life of George Washington Carver; the George Washington Carver Museum, dedicated at Tuskegee Institute in 1941; the Roosevelt Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture in 1939; a national monument in Diamond Grove, Mo.; commemorative postage stamps in 1947 and 1998; and a fifty-cent coin in 1951. He was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1977 and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1990. In 1994, Iowa State awarded him the degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. In recent years, Dr. Carver has also been recognized by being named to the USDA Hall of Heroes (2000) and one of 100 nominees for the “The Greatest American,” series on the Discovery Channel (2005).

George Washington Carver As Black Icon

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Carver’s honors is the recurring pattern discernible in this excerpt from the City of Austin web site, George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center - Museum History:

In its early years, the Angelina Street library was simply known as the “Colored Branch.” In 1947, however, it was christened the George Washington Carver Branch Library in honor of the inventor and scientist who brought so much pride to African-Americans.

While nationality and ethnicity have long been factors in the designation and admiration of heroic figures in any field, race appears to have played a pivotal role in Carver’s case. Key to his gaining a place in the national spotlight, for example, was his position at Tuskegee. As it happened, in 1896, Carver was completing his master’s degree in agricultural science at Iowa State University at the same time that Booker T. Washington, who had himself just become a national figure consequent to his 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech⁶, who was trying to staff Tuskegee Institute with an all-black faculty (and who a year earlier had burst on the national scene with his Atlanta Exposition Address) was becoming increasingly desperate to find a qualified African American scholar to direct Tuskegee’s agricultural school. Washington offered Carver the position, arguing that he should accept lest Tuskegee be “forced… to put in a white man.”⁷

Indeed, Carver’s elevated status among both blacks and whites was irrevocably tied to his race. Unlike, to take a simple example, Jackie Robinson, whose baseball skills would have been apparent regardless of color, Carver’s utility as a legend was directly dependent on his being black.

At a time when the Civil Rights was a vague concept and the first halting steps toward challenging segregation and Jim Crow laws were being imagined, Carver, all the while eschewing leadership of a movement or political faction, won praise in a white-dominated culture scarcely able to tolerate blacks, let alone acknowledge their accomplishments. Here was someone whose name could be applied to schools, libraries, stamps, and coins without fear of embarrassment or resentment.

America needed a heroic African American figure acceptable to all races, a fit subject for the press, a model for others, a benefactor to the poor and downtrodden but also friend to the rich and powerful, and a reliable, safe figurehead for elected officials to champion (a wise politician does not name nuclear submarines after radical revolutionaries) - and George Washington Carver was that man.

Coming Attractions

The role Carver’s religiosity, his avoidance of political confrontation, and his philosophy played in creating “Safely Super George” and his real achievement that has been lost in that process will the focus of the next post in this series.

Footnotes

”Hometown Hero” refers to the fact that Carver was born and raised in the same small town in southwestern Missouri - Diamond or, as it was known in Carver’s day, Diamond Grove - that was my hometown nearly a century later. ↩
Carver’s relationship with Henry Ford to which the Time article alludes and a similar connection between Carver and Thomas Edison are presented by some as especially impressive credentials. Consider this excerpt from Famous Missourians:

Carver lived a simple and industrious life. A skilled artist and musician who never married, Carver lived out his life in a dormitory at Tuskegee Institute. He became friends with many people, some of whom were quite rich and famous. One of his closest friends was the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. Ford made sure that an elevator was installed in Carver’s dormitory so that Carver could get to his laboratory more easily in his later years. [emphasis mine]

↩
Barry Mackintosh, George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth. Journal of Southern History. Vol. XLII, No. 4, November 1976, pp. 507-528. ↩
Because of World War II, non-war expenditures, such as the Carver Monument, were banned by presidential order. Missouri Senator Harry S Truman sponsored a bill anyway ↩
Hints And Suggestions To Farmers: George Washington Carver And Rural Conservation In The South ↩
Also known as the “Cast down your bucket where you are” speech. The entire address is available at Booker T. Washington Delivers the 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech ↩
Booker T. Washington to Carver, April 17,1896, GWC Papers, Box 4, Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee, Alabama. ↩