The Good Earth
by Julia M. Klein
FEBRUARY 9, 2010 TAGS:
Born into slavery in Missouri during the Civil War’s closing months, George Washington Carver (1864-1943) was kidnapped, orphaned and nearly killed by whooping cough – all before the age of 1.
Not an auspicious beginning for a figure who would eventually be dubbed the “Peanut Man” and the “People’s Scientist.” The boy who overcame adversity became a man who could do just about anything with a plant. Sidestepping the era’s virulent racism, Carver developed hundreds of applications for the peanut, sweet potato, pecan and soybean; pioneered organic farming and bio-fuel manufacture, and embraced science as a tool “to fill the poor man’s empty dinner pail.”
Carver’s achievements have had special resonance for African Americans. But, as recounted in an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences (through Feb. 28), they are more broadly inspirational. A handsome man with an unusual high-pitched voice, Carver straddled poverty and privilege, Jim Crow racism and elite white approval, art and science, agriculture and industry. The show “George Washington Carver,” developed by Chicago’s Field Museum with Tuskegee University and the National Park Service, uses artifacts, text, videos, and interactive exhibits to construct a narrative that is compact, clear and surprisingly moving.
Carver’s biography is replete with paradox. Moses Carver, a farmer, acquired George’s mother, Mary, as a slave in payment of a debt, despite his own anti-slavery views. Raiders kidnapped Mary and George, and a scout the Carvers hired was able to recover only the baby. George’s father, another slave, died around the time of his birth. Moses and his wife, Sue, raised George and his brother, Jim, as their adoptive sons. That relationship set the stage for Carver’s many productive contacts with whites, who admired his industriousness, talents, and apparent humility. (By contrast, blacks sometimes found him prickly and arrogant, suggesting that racial norms shaped his demeanor.)
As a child, the sickly George roamed the forest exploring plant life, developing a fascination with botany. With the Carvers’ blessing, he left home around age 13 (accounts vary) in pursuit of an education, moving from school to school across the Midwest.
There were racial humiliations along the way. The teenaged Carver witnessed a lynching, not a rare event in those days. Highland College, in Kansas, accepted his mail application, but, when he arrived, refused to let him enroll. In other settings, he would be confined to basement dining and segregated rail cars. A deeply religious man – the New York Times once mocked him for attributing his scientific breakthroughs to inspiration -- he seems to have maintained his equanimity despite these slights. “I can’t do my work if my heart is bitter,” he said.
Carver’s gifts won him mentors (as well as protégées) of both races, from Booker T. Washington to Henry Ford. In a less restrictive era, the exhibition suggests, Carver might have pursued an artistic career. In Winterset, Iowa, his fine tenor voice in a church choir won the friendship of Helen Milholland, who, with her husband, welcomed him into her family and supported his educational aspirations. Carver wove, crocheted, knitted and embroidered all his life – examples of his craftsmanship are on display – and his painting was sufficiently accomplished to garner an award at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, he studied art and music.
For reasons that seem to have been mostly pragmatic, Carver transferred to the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, in Ames, to study agriculture. To support himself, he taught guitar, took in laundry, and typed telegrams (the exhibition has his Underwood typewriter). At one point, friendly white classmates kidnapped him – in a happy reprise of that terrifying childhood experience – to give him a new suit.
Carver became the first black faculty member at Iowa State, but his biggest career break came in Booker T. Washington’s offer, in 1896, to head the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Carver’s education at white schools and demands for various perks alienated some faculty members there. His relationship with Washington, too, was at times contentious, though this mostly admiring exhibition doesn’t dwell on their battles. “Washington asked him to become more productive and to complain less,” Gary R. Kremer writes in George Washington Carver: In His Own Words. In Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Marilyn Nelson idealizes the relationship, describing Washington and Carver rhapsodically as “two veil-raisers/Walking our people/into history.”
At Tuskegee, Carver became a venerated teacher and researcher, befriending some of the “boys” he taught, as well as white students who attended his lectures around the country. Those relationships, his most intense, gave the unmarried Carver a surrogate family.
Carver’s teaching efforts embraced Southern farmers. As the exhibition’s family-friendly interactives show, he worked to educate them about crop rotation, the use of natural fertilizers and other modern agricultural techniques. Years of cotton farming had depleted Southern soil, and Carver encouraged the planting of peanuts and other crops that would add nutrients. The show includes a reproduction Jesup Wagon, a traveling school in which Carver, beginning in 1906, went from farm to farm, preaching his agricultural gospel.
Some of Carver’s laboratory equipment, rudimentary by today’s standards, is on loan from Tuskegee. Carver rarely patented his creations, but made an exception for a peanut derivative called Penol, for respiratory ailments. He also used peanut oil to massage paralyzed polio patients, with enough success that they flocked to him as though Tuskegee were a Southern Lourdes. (The exhibition attributes any curative properties not to the oil, but to Carver’s soothing manner and excellent massage technique.)
Carver burst onto the national stage with his vivid 1921 congressional testimony on behalf of a protective tariff for peanuts, which included displays of unlikely peanut products.
His legend was inflated by a celebrity he welcomed and helped burnish. The popular press profiled him, and his scientific peers bestowed awards. Carver donated his own estate of $60,000 to the George Washington Carver Foundation and Museum at Tuskegee. The George Washington Carver National Monument, at his birthplace of Diamond, Missouri, also honors him.
Carver always disclaimed any genius as a chemist, all the while pursuing recognition for his accomplishments. The exhibition captures a characteristic tension between humility and arrogance in this Carver quotation: “I have accomplished no great deeds. I am only a trail-blazer. I have tried to point the way.” That turns out to have been more than enough.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review.
Not an auspicious beginning for a figure who would eventually be dubbed the “Peanut Man” and the “People’s Scientist.” The boy who overcame adversity became a man who could do just about anything with a plant. Sidestepping the era’s virulent racism, Carver developed hundreds of applications for the peanut, sweet potato, pecan and soybean; pioneered organic farming and bio-fuel manufacture, and embraced science as a tool “to fill the poor man’s empty dinner pail.” Carver’s achievements have had special resonance for African Americans. But, as recounted in an exhibition at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences (through Feb. 28), they are more broadly inspirational. A handsome man with an unusual high-pitched voice, Carver straddled poverty and privilege, Jim Crow racism and elite white approval, art and science, agriculture and industry. The show “George Washington Carver,” developed by Chicago’s Field Museum with Tuskegee University and the National Park Service, uses artifacts, text, videos, and interactive exhibits to construct a narrative that is compact, clear and surprisingly moving.
Carver’s biography is replete with paradox. Moses Carver, a farmer, acquired George’s mother, Mary, as a slave in payment of a debt, despite his own anti-slavery views. Raiders kidnapped Mary and George, and a scout the Carvers hired was able to recover only the baby. George’s father, another slave, died around the time of his birth. Moses and his wife, Sue, raised George and his brother, Jim, as their adoptive sons. That relationship set the stage for Carver’s many productive contacts with whites, who admired his industriousness, talents, and apparent humility. (By contrast, blacks sometimes found him prickly and arrogant, suggesting that racial norms shaped his demeanor.)
As a child, the sickly George roamed the forest exploring plant life, developing a fascination with botany. With the Carvers’ blessing, he left home around age 13 (accounts vary) in pursuit of an education, moving from school to school across the Midwest.
There were racial humiliations along the way. The teenaged Carver witnessed a lynching, not a rare event in those days. Highland College, in Kansas, accepted his mail application, but, when he arrived, refused to let him enroll. In other settings, he would be confined to basement dining and segregated rail cars. A deeply religious man – the New York Times once mocked him for attributing his scientific breakthroughs to inspiration -- he seems to have maintained his equanimity despite these slights. “I can’t do my work if my heart is bitter,” he said.
Carver’s gifts won him mentors (as well as protégées) of both races, from Booker T. Washington to Henry Ford. In a less restrictive era, the exhibition suggests, Carver might have pursued an artistic career. In Winterset, Iowa, his fine tenor voice in a church choir won the friendship of Helen Milholland, who, with her husband, welcomed him into her family and supported his educational aspirations. Carver wove, crocheted, knitted and embroidered all his life – examples of his craftsmanship are on display – and his painting was sufficiently accomplished to garner an award at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At Simpson College, in Indianola, Iowa, he studied art and music.
For reasons that seem to have been mostly pragmatic, Carver transferred to the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, in Ames, to study agriculture. To support himself, he taught guitar, took in laundry, and typed telegrams (the exhibition has his Underwood typewriter). At one point, friendly white classmates kidnapped him – in a happy reprise of that terrifying childhood experience – to give him a new suit. Carver became the first black faculty member at Iowa State, but his biggest career break came in Booker T. Washington’s offer, in 1896, to head the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. Carver’s education at white schools and demands for various perks alienated some faculty members there. His relationship with Washington, too, was at times contentious, though this mostly admiring exhibition doesn’t dwell on their battles. “Washington asked him to become more productive and to complain less,” Gary R. Kremer writes in George Washington Carver: In His Own Words. In Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), Marilyn Nelson idealizes the relationship, describing Washington and Carver rhapsodically as “two veil-raisers/Walking our people/into history.”
At Tuskegee, Carver became a venerated teacher and researcher, befriending some of the “boys” he taught, as well as white students who attended his lectures around the country. Those relationships, his most intense, gave the unmarried Carver a surrogate family.
Carver’s teaching efforts embraced Southern farmers. As the exhibition’s family-friendly interactives show, he worked to educate them about crop rotation, the use of natural fertilizers and other modern agricultural techniques. Years of cotton farming had depleted Southern soil, and Carver encouraged the planting of peanuts and other crops that would add nutrients. The show includes a reproduction Jesup Wagon, a traveling school in which Carver, beginning in 1906, went from farm to farm, preaching his agricultural gospel.
Some of Carver’s laboratory equipment, rudimentary by today’s standards, is on loan from Tuskegee. Carver rarely patented his creations, but made an exception for a peanut derivative called Penol, for respiratory ailments. He also used peanut oil to massage paralyzed polio patients, with enough success that they flocked to him as though Tuskegee were a Southern Lourdes. (The exhibition attributes any curative properties not to the oil, but to Carver’s soothing manner and excellent massage technique.)
Carver burst onto the national stage with his vivid 1921 congressional testimony on behalf of a protective tariff for peanuts, which included displays of unlikely peanut products.His legend was inflated by a celebrity he welcomed and helped burnish. The popular press profiled him, and his scientific peers bestowed awards. Carver donated his own estate of $60,000 to the George Washington Carver Foundation and Museum at Tuskegee. The George Washington Carver National Monument, at his birthplace of Diamond, Missouri, also honors him.
Carver always disclaimed any genius as a chemist, all the while pursuing recognition for his accomplishments. The exhibition captures a characteristic tension between humility and arrogance in this Carver quotation: “I have accomplished no great deeds. I am only a trail-blazer. I have tried to point the way.” That turns out to have been more than enough.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review.
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