Carver, George Washington
(b. July 1864?; d. 5 January 1943), naturalist, agricultural chemurgist, and educator. With arguably the most recognized name among black people in American history, George Washington Carver's image is due in part to his exceptional character, mission, and achievements; in part to the story he wanted told; and in part to the innumerable books, articles, hagiographies, exhibits, trade fairs, memorials, plays, and musicals that have made him a symbol of rags-to-riches American enterprise. His image has been used for postage stamps, his name has been inscribed on bridges and a nuclear submarine, and he even has his own day (5 January), designated by the United States Congress in 1946.
Thanks in large part to Linda O. McMurry's 1981 book,
George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, it is now possible to separate legend from fact and discover the remarkable child, youth, and man behind the peanut. McMurry concludes that Carver was a person out of step with his era—an exceedingly gifted black man in a time of white supremacy, a man of conservation and ecology in an age of exploitation. Carver was born to a slave woman, Mary, most likely in July 1864; his father was a slave on a neighboring farm and was killed in an accident before Carver was born. Susan and Moses Carver were the owners of the southwest Missouri homestead (near Diamond Grove) and of Mary and George. When bushwackers—vigilantes under the control of neither the Union nor the Confederate forces—kidnapped the mother and child, the Carvers were able to get the baby back, but Mary was not recovered.
Because the small child (now an orphan but no longer a slave) was so sickly, he spent his time helping Susan around the house, acquiring the skills of cooking, sewing, and cleaning that he would later use to pay his tuition for school and college, where he often took on such tasks as doing laundry for other students. Impressive to all around him was the youngster's affinity for plants and his ability to cultivate and nurture them. When he was old enough, he made his way to school, in Neosho, and from there, at age thirteen, to a series of high schools and various employment in Kansas, graduating in Minneapolis, Kansas. He went on to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, in 1890, and from there to the State Agricultural College at Ames, Iowa, in 1891. As a student, he found himself torn between his love for art and music and his more marketable skill with plants.
Carver's botanical talents, especially in mycology (the study of fungi), at Iowa State College, where he earned his Bachelor of Agriculture degree in 1894, led to his appointment to the faculty while he studied for his master's degree (awarded in 1896). At this point his life and career took a dramatic and defining turn; Booker T. Washington recruited him to come to Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in rural Alabama.
Carter's success during his forty-year tenure at Tuskegee can be credited to his persistence, hard work, inspiration, dedication, and inventiveness—the other faculty looked down on him for his dark skin and resented the fact that their principal had brought in a northern-educated scientist. Their hostility was exacerbated by Carver's special privileges; his salary was twice theirs, and he enjoyed two rooms in the dormitory (most faculty were assigned only one). Carver's consistent carelessness with his dress furthered their scorn, and Booker T. Washington, busy creating an impressive campus for his northern philanthropic visitors, was troubled by Carver's failure to look the part of the noble black educator. From Carver's perspective as the new director of agricultural research, Tuskegee was woefully underequipped, unable to provide adequately for a research scientist. He had expected to have time for his work with fungi, but instead he was kept busy with administrative work, for which he had neither interest or skill, and teaching duties that (while rewarding once he got beyond the students’ disrespect) were also incredibly time-consuming. The farmers surrounding Tuskegee whom he was supposed to help were shockingly poor and busily engaged in wearing out the already deficient soil with cotton production. They could not afford fertilizer, and soil erosion took such a bitter toll on the fertility of their fields that subsistence farming was prevalent.
Fortunately George Washington Carver was not a man to despair or to give up easily. He created laboratory equipment from junk picked up on his countryside wanderings. He put his mind to work on possibilities for food crops and set his hopes on two that could restore nutrients to the soil and bring much-needed nourishment to the diets of farm families: the peanut and the sweet potato. He then came up with hundreds of ways those crops could be used and marketed, from glues and paints to medicinal oils and cosmetics. Carver created a mobile school, the Jesup Wagon, which allowed him to reach the farmers with his products and recommendations (such as crop rotation and contour plowing). Little by little, he patiently transformed southern agriculture.
Tuskegee Institute. George Washington Carver (
first row, center) with his staff at the Tuskegee Institute, c. 1902. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston.
Booker T. Washington Collection, Library of Congress
view larger image
None of this pleased Booker T. Washington; Carver's neglect of his administrative duties got him demoted. Happily, this left him with more time for his labs and his students. Carver corresponded with people he had known and impressed in Missouri, in Kansas, and in Iowa as well as with many he met during their visits to Tuskegee. Most of them were white, as he was more comfortable with white people than with blacks. As he became more widely known, outside recognition came his way, culminating in his election to Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts in London in 1916. Washington died in late 1915 and was replaced by the more congenial Robert Moton, who saw Carver's work as an asset to fund-raising. In 1921, Carver was allotted ten minutes to make a presentation before the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives in favor of a tariff on peanuts. The legislators, initially restive, kept him talking for the next two hours.
Other honors fell Carver's way in the 1920s and 1930s. He received the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1923 for distinguished service to science and an honorary doctor of science degree in 1928 from Simpson College. He was appointed as collaborator to the Mycology and Plant Disease Survey, Bureau of Plant Industry, U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1935. A bronze bust was dedicated to Tuskegee in 1937, a gift from friends across the country, and a feature film,
Life of George Washington Carver, was made in 1938. The George Washington Carver Museum opened in 1938, and Carver later received the Roosevelt Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture and an honorary membership in the American Inventors Society in 1939. Henry Ford Sr. dedicated the Museum at Tuskegee in 1941, and in 1942 Greenfield Village at Dearborn, Michigan, erected the George Washington Carver Cabin.
Carver died in 1943 at Tuskegee amid the droning aircraft sounds of the planes of the Tuskegee Airmen—in another age, during another war. His entire estate of more than $60,000 went to the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee. The George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond Grove, Missouri, was established by the Seventy-eighth Congress in 1943 with Harry S. Truman as one of its sponsors, and numerous other recognitions and honors have followed over the decades, including science buildings at Iowa State and Simpson College that bear his name. Scientist, chemist, naturalist, entrepreneur, artist, musician—no single term can encompass Carver's talents and the gifts he exercised on behalf of his fellow human beings.
[See also Agriculture and Agricultural Labor; Educators and Academics; Entrepreneurship; Moton, Robert Russa; Science and Scientists; Tuskegee Institute; and Washington, Booker T.]
Bibliography
- Adler, David A. A Picture Book of George Washington Carver (Picture Book Biography Series). Illustrated by Dan Brown. New York: Holiday House, 2000. An example of a children's book currently in print. One could argue that the misleading cover illustration, which depicts a very light-skinned black man in a white lab coat and blue tie does not resemble Carver very closely.
- Carver, George Washington. George Washington Carver in His Own Words. Edited by Gary R. Kremer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. A refreshing look at Carver through selected letters and other materials (such as his testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee). Each section is in the form of a narrative with lengthy quotes from Carver's writing.
- Holt, Rackham. George Washington Carver: An American Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1963. First Published in 1943. Holt spent a great deal of time meeting with George Washington Carver before his death and had access to his scrapbooks. The book has a lively style and excellent photographs.
- McMurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Solidly researched and documented, fair and honest, this biography is also a good read.
- Means, Florence Crannell. Carvers’ George, A Biography of George Washington Carver. Illustrated by Harve Stein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Biography written for children. Means visited Carver at Tuskegee and conducted numerous interviews. A short, age-appropriate bibliography.
- Nelson, Marilyn. Carver: A Life in Poems. Asheville, N.C.: Front Street, 2001. An unusual but highly effective approach to Carver's life and character, containing fifty-nine poems plus historical photographs and notes.
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