Heck Of A Guy

Introduction

Three previous Heck of a Guy posts have focused on George Washington Carver:

George Washington Carver - Hometown Hero 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. George Washington Carver As Icon, the most recent of the three posts about Carver, explored the creation of the heroic image of George Washington Carver with emphasis on two points:

1. Carver’s position as the preeminent black man of his era, as elaborated by James H. Jones (Associate Professor Of History At The University Of Houston), 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.

2. The extravagant nature of his commendations, especially those bestowed by the press and public officials, whether bureaucrats or elected officials.

Today’s post looks at how the fit between Carver and the era during which he lived both accelerated his fame inappropriately and obscured his actual contributions.

George Washington Carver’s Christianity¹

There seems little doubt, even among the most dubious of his detractors, about the sincerity of Carver’s faith in God or his dedication to Christian principles.

Carver’s genre of Christianity was an idiosyncratic blend constructed from ideas he absorbed from many Protestant services and his own reading. As a child, he attended the Locust Grove Church located less than a mile from the Moses Carver farm and staffed by a variety of Methodist, Baptist, Campbellite, and Presbyterian circuit preachers. When Carver boarded with Mariah and Andrew Watkins, a black couple living in Neosho, Missouri, in order to attend school there, Mariah Watkins, a midwife and nurse, took him to African Methodist Episcopal services. As he traveled though Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa as an adolescent seeking an education, he was regularly seen at a variety of churches and at 15, taught a class at the Methodist Church in Olathe, Kansas. He also led Bible classes at Tuskegee and spent much time in prayer.

From these experiences, Carver developed a distinctly nondenominational faith that provided the guidelines for his life. He spoke of dedicating his life to his faith and, indeed, his scientific work was performed in the service of his perception of God.

As Carver explained,

Integral to Carver’s Christianity was the conviction that God would reveal to him the divinely created mechanisms by which the world and the universe operated. He was fond of telling the story of his first revelation when, as a young boy longing for a pocket knife, he had a dream about one being stuck in a half-eaten watermelon and, upon rising, went to that location where he found the knife. To a large extent, his scientific studies were in the same pattern. Carver investigated and God pointed him to the discovery.

Carver was, in fact, first a fundamentalist Christian and second a scientist, rejecting evolution and believing in a universe created by and operating by rules set down by God. He repeatedly attributed his discoveries to a scientific methodology, the goal of which was to garner knowledge about the world God had constructed.

Two other Carver quotes are pertinent:

While Carver’s attribution of his success to God made him a popular subject for inspirational books and tracts, it was also the trigger for perhaps the most vehement attack on his work made during his lifetime. The New York Times article “Men of Science Never Talk That Way,” (Nov. 20, 1924) accused him of “a complete lack of the scientific spirit” because “real chemists” do not attribute their successes to divine inspiration. The Times went on warn that Carver thus discredited his race and Tuskegee Institute. While Carver received much support from church groups and many publications, he was clearly stung by the criticism and became more circumspect about his methods afterwards.

George Washington Carver and the Politics of Race

Since his death, Carver’s most vigorous denouncements have been accusations that he was an Uncle Tom who accommodated the white establishment rather than standing up for the rights of blacks and was rewarded with canonization as folk hero.

This excerpt from Barry Mackintosh’s George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth, is characteristic:

These detractors position Carver as someone white American could safely accept because of his humility, his religious beliefs, his field of expertise, and his apolitical, personally deferential style. According to them, he was, in my amateur superhero portraiture, Safely Super George.

I contend that this view is oversimplified.

The implicit criticism that Carver was complicit in an effort to achieve notoriety seems especially overdone. George Washington Carver was George Washington Carver. His life and his beliefs centered around the value of the individual to make ones way in the world. While Carver certainly faced discrimination and was repeatedly hampered by racial prejudice, he had managed to work his way from a birth into slavery to a position of importance in which he took pride. Moreover, he had repeatedly found help and succor from white people, beginning with his once-owners, then foster parents, Moses and Susan Carver. It was through the recommendations of all white couple he met at church, Dr. and Mrs. Milholland, that he was persuaded to enter Simpson College where another white woman, his art teacher, persuaded him to change his career path from art and music to agricultural science. The list of such incidents is long and extends throughout his life. To intimate that he should have been a spokesperson for his race against the oppression of the white community is to demand that he ignore his own experiences.

It also seems unlikely that the benefit from these associations ended with Carver. Consider this excerpt from the Iowa State University Web Site:

It’s hardly a stretch to believe that that kind of quiet example set by Carver would be useful in attenuating racial conflict.

And, while he provided services to everyone and specifically consulted with white dominated groups such as the peanut growers and processors, the overwhelming majority of his work was devoted to helping poor black farmers.

While Carver is guilty of allowing others to praise him beyond his accomplishments and ambiguously describing his work, there seems to be little evidence that he played a major role in creating the mythology that surrounded him.

Let’s consider his appearance as an example. Again quoting Mackintosh,

The reason behind Carver’s “devotion to old, worn clothing” would seem to far more likely be his well documented penuriousness than a tactic to falsely portray a picture of humility.

Perhaps the issue is simply one of choices; even if one assumes that Carver had an obligation, because of his prestige, to help others of his race (a precarious philosophical stance that, in contemporary times, assigns similar obligations to athletically talented black men), it seems difficult to fault Carver for choosing to promote self-sufficiency of black farmers through improved agricultural methods and pushing the idea that God is blind to race rather than leading the political opposition to black oppression, a role for which Carver had few skills and little aptitude.

Coming Attractions: George Washington Carver As Visionary

Footnotes

1. The facts that follow are documented in several sources. Unless otherwise noted, however, all references in the section headed, “George Washington Carver’s Christianity,” can be found in Linda McMurray. George Washington Carver. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 1981↩
2. Rosa Parks By Douglas Brinkley New York: Lipper-Viking. 2000↩

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