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The Rehabilitation of George Washington Carver

Filed under: Fascinations | By DrHGuy | February 19, 2008 at 3:03 pm


George Washington Carver: Can Image and Reality Converge?



The four previous Heck of a Guy posts focused on George Washington Carver1 have demonstrated the following:

  1. The accomplishments commonly attributed to George Washington Carver, including multiple uses of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops,2 that made him the best known black man of his era and resulted in his being known as the Wizard of Tuskegee, Miracle Worker, Peanut Man, Savior of Southern Agriculture, Black Leonardo, et al, were greatly exaggerated and of minimal significance. This information was known to those in his field during his lifetime and has been available to the reading public at least since the late 1970s. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of publications about Carver, to this day, presents the legendary but inaccurate account of Carver’s work.
  2. The apotheosis of Carver was possible because he was viewed by the black community as a miracle worker as well as a role model and was perceived as non-threatening and cooperative by the white establishment.
  3. The core of Carver’s life was his religious faith. Because of his belief in a universe the operated by God’s design, he was convinced that every problem was paired with a solution that God would reveal to him.
  4. Beginning in the 1970s, revisionist historians have castigated Carver not only for his ascension to fame based on an exaggerated or fictional version of his accomplishments but also his passivity in the face of racial discrimination.

This fifth and final Heck of a Guy post on George Washington Carver examines his vision of a self-sustaining environment, a concept which is far more deserving of commendation than the lists of products from peanuts, even had those lists been accurate.


Myth Perpetuation

The title of this post, “The Rehabilitation of George Washington Carver,” is more a wish than a realistic goal. As anyone who has tried knows, myth busting is at best difficult, and the straightforward exposition of facts disproving the myth is almost never sufficient to accomplish the task.

Once established, myths are self-perpetuating. Stories once heard are retold or, especially on the Internet, copied and pasted. Even if one manages to convert the source of the myth to a revised account, the original legend may have already spread exponentially through the population. Tracking down every reference to Carver, a relatively minor historical figure, would require a gargantuan effort and commensurate expense. It is difficult to suggest a likely candidate to perform or fund that work when the outcome will have little immediate effect other than improve the accuracy of the information.

And, a myth typically serves (or at least served) a purpose. Once an individual or, especially, an institution subscribes to a myth, the investment in it often exceeds any commitment justified by the actual circumstances. In Carver’s case, who wants to volunteer to go to every George Washington Carver Elementary/Middle/High School and Academy to explain that their original namesake didn’t actually do all those things listed on that plaque in the main hallway (especially given that many if not most of such schools appear to serve a predominantly black student body)? Even if they bought into the premise, what should they do - change the name of the school, rewrite the plaque, … ? Heck, I wouldn’t even want to email all those web sites who use Carver as an example of American inventiveness, proof that one can be both a Christian and a scientist, an role model for youngsters to emulate, or an exemplar of the wonders of nature. That still leaves those stamps and coins displaying Carver’s visage, the statues and monuments in his honor, and his medals, awards, and hall of fame memberships. The good news, I suppose, would be that the USS George Washington Carver, the nuclear powered, Polaris missile equipped submarine, has been routinely decommissioned.

Revising a legend may be even more difficult than revealing the ostensible hero to be a fraud. That is doubly true for Carver since his accomplishment, as mentioned, is that he espoused a conceptual framework that speaks to today’s ecological concerns. At least in contemporary American culture, numbers are, if not essential, certainly helpful in the myth-fabrication biz. Statistics that indicate one hit more home runs, made more money, or garnered more votes are are a good start toward stardom. Carver was not the new Edison, but that was the template - a list of inventions - into which his work was forced. “He created more than 300 products from the peanut” is a convenient signal of genius that is also easy to recall, especially compared to “He had a good idea that was ahead of his time.”

In this excerpt from the Preface of George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol3 by Linda McMurry, the best of the Carver biographies in my judgment,4 the author describes the creation of the Carver mythology eloquently and evenhandedly:

George Washington Carver captured the imagination of the American people. The romance of his life story and the eccen­tricities of his personality led to his metamorphosis into a kind of folk saint both in his lifetime and after. He was readily appro­priated by many diverse groups as a symbol for myriad causes. To Southern businessmen Carver was an incarnation of the New South philosophy. Religious leaders embraced the scientist’s pro­ claimed reliance upon God as an inspirational source in an age of materialism. Those struggling through the depression saw Carver as a living Horatio Alger whose story offered hope to those who tried hard enough. To people concerned with race relations Carver’s career was either proof of the ability and intelligence of Afro-Americans or an indication that slavery and segregation could not have been too bad if they produced a Carver. And to the general public puzzled by technology that was changing the world with frightening speed, Carver made science seem more human and understandable. Thus, segments of his life and personality were often highlighted and embellished in order to prove a point. The public image that emerged was of a kindly old “wizard,” hardly offensive to any believer in the American dream.


Separating the real George Washington Carver from the sym­bolic portrayals of his life is difficult. Reality and mythology became blurred even within Carver’s own mind, and his life did have mythic qualities. Yet Carver was more than a folk saint; he was a real person, with all the complexities and contradictions inherent in human nature, and these were exaggerated by the fact that he was black in a white America. In the end he won international fame for his efforts to find commercial uses for Southern resources and was proclaimed one of the world’s greatest chemists. For a variety of reasons both the value of his discoveries and the signifi­cance of his role in revolutionizing the Southern economy were considerably inflated.


Carver did not actually assume the role of “creative chemist” until relatively late in his life. Even while still a child, Carver and those around him were aware that he possessed rare and unusual talents. He believed his talents had been given him for some spe­cial mission, and he spent many years wandering in search of his destiny. Had Carver been white, his choice of careers would prob­ ably have been different. If he had placed his personal desires above his sense of responsibility toward his fellow blacks, he most likely would have become either an artist or a botanist engaged in plant breeding or mycological research. When he accepted Booker T. Washington’s offer to come to Tuskegee Institute in 1896, he unknowingly sacrificed these career alternatives but opened the door to his eventual fame.


George Washington Carver As Visionary

When Carver came to Tuskegee, he found a scene that was a stark contrast to that he had left in Iowa. Most of Alabama, he found, was covered with soil he characterized as “practically a pile of sand and clay, making a yield far below the cost of production.” Moreover, he understood that farming that depleted soil would result in only “another mortgage [for whomever worked the land] … as an unpleasant reminder of the year’s hard labor.”5

He also recognized that the sharecropping system created a downward spiral for both the farmer who grew the crops and the landowner.

An indication of the complexity of the system and Carver’s insight into it can be gleaned from this excerpt from Mark Hershey’s Hints And Suggestions To Farmers: George Washington Carver And Rural Conservation In The South6

Carver recognized this reality, noting in one experiment station bulletin, “The renter and those who must be advanced have a much more complex problem to solve. They must cooperate with the landlord, and get him to assist in providing ways and means by which they [Carver’s suggestions] can be carried out.” That assistance was seldom forthcoming. Apart from improving the value of their property and recovering their investments from their tenants, white landlords had little interest in aiding the black farmers who worked their land. As Ned Cobb pointed out, “It wasn’t that I was ignorant of what I had to do,” but “you had to do what the white man said, livin here in this country. And if you made enough to pay him, that was all he cared for.”

Similarly, although it certainly made sense to raise livestock of various sorts, most sharecroppers were not in a position to lay out the initial payment for a well-bred animal. Though Tuskegee loaned its stud animals out to local farmers, many African Americans did not own any animals to which they could be bred. Getting a loan for such an animal could be difficult. Securing credit in the South—as in the rest of the nation—was still a profoundly local proposition during the Progressive era. There simply were not opportunities for tenants to appeal to creditors far removed from local politics. For black tenants appealing to white landlords and merchants, this meant that their deference to whites was factored into decisions about credit-worthiness. Since any attempt to become independent of their landlords could be interpreted by their creditors as an effort to transcend “their place,” pursuing the means to financial independence could jeopardize their credit, and thus make acquiring such a loan more difficult.

… While Carver recognized that the political and economic systems of the South rendered black tenants vulnerable at every turn, he could find no effective way to address the problems they faced and so could only encourage them to appeal to their landlords for cooperation.

For its part, the white power structure greeted the message of Carver and Tuskegee’s extension agents with some suspicion. Writing in the 1930s, Campbell acknowledged, “White landowners and others at first questioned the advisability of having Negro agriculturists come, especially among their tenants, lest something be done to disturb the established plantation relationship.” At least on one level, their fears were justified. In a study of the Tuskegee demonstration service, Karen Ferguson pointed out that any effort “to create an independent yeomanry through land ownership and self-sufficiency in a region where white prosperity depended on cotton monoculture and the subjugation of black labor” had a decidedly subversive element to it. However, in order to spread this message, the institute needed the support of both white philanthropists and local planters. This meant that Carver, Booker T. Washington, and the Institute’s extension agents had to publicly align themselves with the interests of Tuskegee’s white supporters and appeal to the planters’ self-professed beneficent paternalism. Predictably, this white support diminished their credibility among tenant farmers.

The suspicion with which rural people met Progressive reform is well documented. No matter how sincere the reformers’ motives, their critiques and advice carried implicit assumptions about the ignorance of those they were trying to help—assumptions that understandably raised rural people’s hackles and distrust.



Hershey also points out that

for the most part Carver espoused practicable, environmentally sound ideas. Farmers, no matter how poor, could eschew the “lazy way of improving, not the fertility of their land, but the yield of the current season’s crop, by the application of inferior ready mixed commercial fertilizers.” Instead, they could build up the humus by plowing the remnants of harvested crops back into the land and by working manure from their animals and composted vegetable matter into the soil. In theory, at least, they could rotate nitrogen-fixing leguminous plants, including peanuts and cowpeas, with cotton and corn. Likewise, maintaining vegetable gardens, raising such livestock as might be practical (whether chickens, hogs, or cows), plowing crosswise to hills rather than straight up and down them, and gathering some of the “many hundred bushels of [wild] plums that go to waste every year” hardly seem economically impractical or ecologically unsound.


Carver was aware of the educational shortcomings facing poor farmers, particularly black ones, in the South.65 In fact, widespread illiteracy among African Americans in the South was at least partly responsible for the development of an extension program for his department. Although it differed from the other avenues he pursued in that he eventually entrusted it to others, the Institutes’s extension program came to constitute the fourth primary manner in which he sought to persuade black farmers to transform their relationship with the land.

This extension service was formalized, incorporating the Jesup Wagon (a wagon outfitted with demonstration exhibits and equipment and named after Morris K. Jesup, who, a philanthropist who funded the project).

Jesup Wagon


The era of modern agribusiness was already dawning as Carver waged his campaign, portending the demise of autonomous, self-sufficient farms. Indeed, by the late 1930s, when Carver came to regret transferring his focus to the commercial possibilities of his research and returned it to aiding impoverished black farmers, the world he had begun to work with was irrevocably gone. New technologies had become necessities in the eyes even of the poorest black tenants, and they could not be produced on farms no matter how independent.


And Carver’s vision extended beyond the immediate community of farmers. Peter Burchard, in George Washington Carver: For His Time and Ours,7 lists examples of Carver’s ideas that are pertinent to today’s ecological issues, including transforming farm products into fuel and using mycorrhiza-enhancing methods to enrich the soil rather than commercial, petroleum based fertilizer that leads to runoff and contamination of ground water.


The Verdict

Carver’s envisioned nothing less than a self-sustaining agricultural community8 to replace the catastrophic system of the time that doomed the impoverished, ill-educated, predominantly black, small farmers of the South. By no means naive, he recognized the necessity of addressing each part of the system. Crop rotation, for example, was only one element in the overall plan, which was cogent, insightful, and the best available opportunity to effect a crucial change.

This is a case in which a man faced overwhelming odds in the hope of making the world a better place for others - but failed.

Although some progress was made, Carver was not successful. Does “a good try” that doesn’t work deserve accolades?

Beats me. I do know, however, that I’m as proud of being even tangentially associated with Carver by virtue of our shared hometown as I was when I first read, when I was 7, the list of products he created from peanuts at the George Washington Carver National Monument.

It is difficult to feel pity for one who allowed himself to be aggrandized for feats he did not accomplish; it is also difficult, however, to feel contempt for one whose vision was unrecognized.


Footnotes


  1. Links to those four previous Heck of a Guy posts about Carver follow:

    ~back~

  2. Carver himself eventually tired of the ceaselessly repeated saga of the creation of products from these plants. “You’d think,” he once complained, “I knew nothing about anything but peanuts and sweet potatoes.” See George Washington Carver: Scientist, educator, and, yes, peanut proponent By Molly Woulfe, February 01, 2008 ~back~
  3. Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. Oxford University Press: New York. 1982 ~back~
  4. This excerpt from pages 4-5 of her book was also the source of my information about the origins of my hometown’s name, Diamond: “Southwest Missouri in the 1860s was hardly an auspicious place for the development of black genius. The area was just beginning to advance from its frontier stage. The land in Marion Township, where the Carver farm was located, was first offered for sale in 1843. By that time a few squatters from the East had already begun farming. Moses Carver and his brother, Richard, were among them, mi­grating to Missouri in about 1838 from Ohio and Illinois. The Preemption Act of 1841, which was passed to encourage small farmers to settle in the West, enabled a person who lived on and improved 160 acres of land for six months to buy it from the government at $1.25 an acre. Like most Western farmers, Moses Carver was not content with 160 acres and purchased a total of 240 acres soon after the land went on sale. As one of the first settlers, Carver was able to select a good site with an abundant water supply. Two springs and a creek lay near his house, and his acreage included both prairie and timberland. He constructed a rough one-room, hewn-log cabin with one win­ dow, one fireplace, and no floor. In this cabin he lived with his wife, Susan, as well as three nieces and nephews who were raised by Moses and Susan after his brother’s death in 1839. The years between 1840 and 1860 were profitable ones for the Carvers and for Newton County. Unlike the frontier areas of the Great Plains, Newton County had adequate water and a terrain suited to farming and livestock raising. During those twenty years the county’s population grew from 2,790 to 9,319. With the in­creased settlement a typical “crossroads village” sprang up near a diamond-shaped grove of trees not far from the Carver farm. Called Diamond or Diamond Grove, the settlement consisted of a general store, a combination blacksmith shop and post office, and one interdenominational church that served as a schoolhouse dur­ing the week.”Emphasis mine. ~back~
  5. George Washington Carver, “What Chemurgy Means to My People,” Farm Chemurgic Journal (September 1937): 40; George Washington Carver, “The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South,” Farmer’s Leaflet From the Bureau of Nature Study for Schools and Hints and Suggestions for Farmers No. 7 (April 1902). ~back~
  6. Mark Hersey, Hints And Suggestions To Farmers: George Washington Carver And Rural Conservation In The South. Environmental History, Apr 2006 ~back~
  7. Burchard, Peter Duncan. George Washington Carver: For His Time and Ours. “Special History Study: Natural History Related to George Washington Carver National Monument, Diamond, Missouri.” George Washington Carver National Monument, National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior. 2005. ~back~
  8. Carver’s vision is evocative of that put forward by Gandhi ~back~

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