July 22nd, 2008 · Comments Off
Livin’ ain’t easy, Bloggin’s twice as tough
The Vulnerable Soul Of The Blogger
One can blog ones little heart out to bring what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light” to the public, asking for no other gratification than occasionally imbuing the reader with a bit of wisdom to enhance that individual’s life, only to have that vision shattered by those near and dear to him.
And, no, I’m not referring to the tragedy of discovering last month that my closest friends did not know, despite the multiple Heck of a Guy posts broadcasting the fact, that Leonard Cohen wrote “Hallelujah.” That episode is past; I have found that one can indeed love the sinner while hating the sin.
No, this desecration of the dream came to light this past weekend as I was catching up on the past month’s missed reading of the blogs I follow. In this process, I noticed that fellow McHenry County inhabitant and blogger, Cal Skinner of McHenryCountyBlog, had posted a description of his family’s vacation in and around my old stomping ground, southwest Missouri.
Given that I’ve written volumes about the wonders of this area, I was eager to read the Skinner family’s take on those sights.
I’ve excerpted the pertinent portions of Cal’s entry, Back From Vacation, below:
If you have noticed a dearth of local, breaking news since Independence Day, it was because our family was in Missouri on vacation. … We stayed at Joplin’s Hotel Desmond, much more than a bread and breakfast, because my gracious little sister and my brother-in-law run it.
We were treated to a Grand Lake, Oklahoma, 4th of July Saturday. … The rest of the day was spent in an undeveloped cove of this 66 mile long man-made lake. … My son was enchanted by the Undercliff Bar and Grill south of Joplin. We went twice. It had a toy scoop money grabber that guaranteed a prize, even if it was a piece of penny candy. He eventually got the bracelet he wanted. … We went to the Dickerson Zoo in Springfield, up I-44 from Joplin. The highlight (pun intended) was seeing folks feed the giraffes from a raised platform. The same day we visited the Fantastic Caverns. The latter were fantastic because one does not have to walk. We guys … went to see Big Brutus in southeast Kansas coal strip mine country.
Big Brutus is the second largest drag line in the country. It has been preserved and folks can climb to the cab. … we went together to the Precious Moments Chapel. I have to admit not wanting to go the first time around back in the early 1990’s. I thought the Precious Moments statuettes were “terminally cute.” The figurines still are, but the Chapel is worth the trip. … Next, the two sisters decided it was time to visit Branson, which is about as far south in Missouri as Joplin, but without a direct west-east connection. … Sunday we ate at Andy Williams’ Moon River Cafe. He was out playing golf, the bartender told us as he was serving our meal at the almost empty restaurant. That night, I enjoyed the joint show of Paul Revere and the Raiders, plus Bill Medley, the remaining and deep-voiced Righteous Brother. … And, who was in the audience? Andy Williams, Ann Margaret and her husband Roger Smith. They were sitting way up top, but I didn’t bring my camera. …
The Response
Heck of a Guy readers are no doubt appalled by this account - and not just because, in defiance of his own advice, Cal didn’t have his camera handy and thus forfeited his chance to play paparazzo to the Branson jet set.
No, the true horror arises from the realization of opportunities lost.
While I do not criticize those sites the Skinner family did visit, I cannot but lament that the most important local attractions were missing from their itinerary.
Let’s start with the absence of …
The Obligatory Parent-initiated Vacation Forced March To An Historically Or Culturally Significant Location (OPVFMTAHOCSL)
As it turns out, one can’t swing any sort of cat - deceased, live, or suspended in status Schrodinger - in the vicinity of southwest Missouri without hitting a Historically Or Culturally Significant Location (HOCSLs): a live feline, for example, placed in the prescribed centrifugal, arms length orbit could be clawing at civil war battlefields, archaeological digs, museums, mineral displays, or all manner of civic festivals. Heck, the whirling cat himself could well become the nidus of a festival.
But, of course, the obvious choice from this category would have been Diamond, Missouri (AKA The Gem City of the Ozarks), less than a 30 minute drive from Joplin and the birthplace of George Washington Carver, who was featured in six Heck of a Guy posts, and DrHGuy. There is, in fact, already a national monument located at the farm where George was born.
George Washington Carver National Monument near Diamond, Missouri
Scenes from the George Washington Carver Monument
DrHGuy’s earliest home is, alas, not available for viewing because of its current role as - and I kid you not - a shed.
DrHGuy is far too modest to point out that the Skinner clan could, without leaving the city limits of Joplin, have made the pilgrimage to the McDonald’s where a young DrHGuy learned the ways of commerce, starting as a humble and lovable bun boy, then moving up to condiment dispenser, and finally rising to the position of shift floor manager. It was, in fact, that selfsame DrHGuy, who compiled, with his own hands (carefully washed as per the McDonald’s instructional video) two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun into the first Big Mac sold in Joplin.
Dramatization of first Big Mac sold in Joplin, Missouri. DrHGuy, creator.
Not that DrHGuy’s feeling are hurt or anything.
The Spiritual Venue
The Skinners did visit the Precious Moments Chapel, which technically qualifies as a spiritual site although its only mention in a Heck of a Guy post was as part of a threat in an extortion scheme.
Regardless, The primal preternatural locus of the area is clearly the Spooklight, the apparition described in this excerpt from Spooklight Story?
The Spooklight has appeared here since the 1860s, typically taking the form of a bright light (sometimes described as a “ball of fire”) of a yellow-orange color, ranging in size from what one might guess would be a large flashlight to something the size of a bushel basket or larger, that seems to be at the top of the next rise. The light routinely moves to the left and right. Less often, it’s said to split into smaller balls of light or take on different colors (red, blue, and green). Those walking toward the light find that it disappears until, if they continue forward, it reappears behind them.
The Spooklight offers, in short, the consummate religious experience:
the opportunity to scare the bejesus out of all involved
The Spooklight, near Hornet, Missouri
And, this reliably occurring miracle was certainly close by.
Spooklight Road is eleven miles southwest of Joplin, Missouri, just past the village of Hornet, in the area where Missouri borders Oklahoma and Kansas. The light is most commonly described as being visible from inside the Oklahoma border looking to the west.
Yet (cue ominous music) no Spooklight expedition was mounted by the Skinner Party.
Tomorrow:
Part II of The DrHGuy Alternative Southwest Missouri Tour
AKA, If She Finds Out, This Will Break My Mother’s Heart
Footnotes
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Tags: Fascinations
February 20th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Observations Evoked By The Heck of a Guy George Washington Carver Posts
The following notes are tangents, asides, and other remnants that percolated to the surface of my cortex while I was working on the Carver posts.
Carver’s Influence On A Child’s Perception Of Blacks
Mrs. Linklater commented on one of the George Washington Carver posts:
I discovered George Washington Carver when I was about eight years old. We had to go to our grade school library and read a biography. I was fascinated first by his accomplishments, but more because he was black. Such was life in the fifties
My parallel experience was warped by the geodemographic quirk of growing up near the George Washington Carver National Monument in a rural area with almost no blacks in the population.
Except for two years of middle school and my freshman year of college, I lived in my hometown, Diamond, Missouri, until I was 21. During that time, the only black people residing in or near that town, frequenting the local stores, attending the consolidated school that drew students from the outlying farms several miles from the facility itself, or belonging to any of the numerous churches in town were the Superintendent of the George Washington Carver National Monument or members of his family.
They stood out not only because they were black but also because, in a population almost devoid of college educated individuals other than teachers and some of the clergy, the Superintendents assigned by the National Park Service were college graduates. They and their families were also well spoken, typically well traveled, and, if my recall is accurate, usually hailed from urban environments, traits which distinctly atypical in my immediate environment
Consequently, I grew up with the impression that blacks were especially well educated and sophisticated. Such was life in the 50s - in Diamond, Missouri.
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George Washington and George Washington Carver
All sources seem to agree that George Carver did not use a middle name in childhood or early adolescence.
The two prevalent accounts of how he acquired “Washington” as part of his name follow:
- Wikipedia and others state that “In order to avoid confusion with another George Carver in his classes [at Iowa State University], he began to use the name George Washington Carver.”
- Other sites, such as George Washington Carver, report that “In the spring of 1885 [6 years before attending Iowa State University], … he had given himself the middle name of Washington.” Some sources, such as George Washington Carver: From Slave to Scientist by Janet Benge, add that he used the middle initial “W” in his correspondence because mail addressed to “George Carver” was being delivered to another George Carver.
As late as the first or second grade when a teacher gently disabused me of the notion, I was convinced that the shared names denoted some special connection between George Washington Carver and George Washington.
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There are a number of photos of Henry Ford and George Washington Carver on the internet, but, as far as I can determine, this site has the only such photo emblazoned with the caption, George Washington Carver, left, and industrialist Henry Ford share a weed sandwich in this 1942 photograph.
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The two leaders of foreign nations best known for soliciting Carver’s advice on enhancing their respective county’s agricultural resources were Joseph Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi also asked for personal nutritional recommendations).
This is probably no more than a “how about that?” sort of coincidence, but doesn’t it seem somehow significant?
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There is a strong consensus that Carver was a talented artist and musician. It is interesting to speculate about how his life and history might have changed had he pursued a career, as he originally intended, in either of these fields instead of being persuaded by his college art teacher to change his studies and his focus to agricultural science.
If nothing else, the Tuskegee Institute would have been a very different sort of place without Carver, and it is difficult to imagine who, had Carver not been on the scene, would have carried on Booker T. Washington’s legacy after his death. On the other hand, it is appealing to wonder if Carver might personally have been happier confronting artistic challenges rather than dealing with the problems caused by abject poverty, depleted soil, and illiteracy.
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George Washington Carver (left) and Allan Truax (right)
Ongoing readers will recognize the photo of Allan Truax, an individual who has been featured in several Heck of a Guy posts. Given that Allan Truax was a contemporary of Carver’s and that Truax was well read in general, it would be surprising if he were not aware of Carver’s work. Since Truax was specifically interested in horticulture and mycology (which were also areas of focus for Carver), it is not far fetched to believe he may well have had some insight into the extent to which Carver’s accolades were exaggerated.
In any case, I find myself longing to ask Mr. Truax about his opinion of Mr. Carver.
Footnotes
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Tags: Fascinations
February 19th, 2008 · Comments Off
George Washington Carver: Can Image and Reality Converge?
The four previous Heck of a Guy posts focused on George Washington Carver have demonstrated the following:
- The accomplishments commonly attributed to George Washington Carver, including multiple uses of peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other crops, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Symbol by Linda McMurry, the best of the Carver biographies in my judgment, 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.”
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 South
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, 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 community 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
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