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George Washington Carver

 
Who2 Biography: George Washington Carver, Inventor / Botanist
George Washington Carver
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  • Born: c. 1860
  • Birthplace: Diamond Grove, Missouri
  • Died: 5 January 1943
  • Best Known As: America's great peanut innovator

George Washington Carver was a celebrated botanist and inventor at a time when it was still rare for African-Americans to reach those heights. The son of a Missouri slave, Carver grew up to attend Iowa State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's in 1896. He then joined the faculty of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. His attempts to find crop alternatives to cotton led him to the peanut; eventually he created more than 325 products from the humble legume, helping to create demand for the plant and establish it as a major American crop. Carver also worked with sweet potatoes, soybeans and pecans, among other plants, and is often credited with changing the face of agriculture in the American south.

Carver's exact birthdate is unknown; a Missouri census record from 1870 lists George Carver as 10 years old; a photo of that record can be found here... He was an accomplished artist who displayed paintings at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair... Carver is often credited with inventing peanut butter, but it seems others had created that product before Carver began his work with peanuts... He is no relation to President George Washington. According to the Wikipedia, Carver began to use the name George Washington Carver at Iowa State "to avoid confusion with another George Carver in his classes"... Carver was posthumously awarded the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Iowa State in 1994... Another brilliant botanist of the same era was Luther Burbank.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: George Washington Carver
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George Washington Carver
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George Washington Carver (credit: Courtesy of the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama; photograph, P.H. Polk)
(born 1861?, near Diamond Grove, Mo., U.S. — died Jan. 5, 1943, Tuskegee, Ala.) U.S. agricultural chemist and agronomist. Born a slave, Carver lived until age 10 or 12 on his former owner's plantation, then left and worked at a variety of menial jobs. He did not obtain a high school education until his late twenties; he then obtained bachelor's and master's degrees from Iowa State Agricultural College. In 1896 he joined Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama, where he became director of agricultural research. He was soon promoting the planting of peanuts and soybeans, legumes that he knew would help restore the fertility of soil depleted by cotton cropping. To make them profitable, he worked intensively with the sweet potato and the peanut (then not even recognized as a crop), ultimately developing 118 derivative products from sweet potatoes and 300 from peanuts. His efforts helped liberate the South from its untenable cotton dependency; by 1940 the peanut was the South's second largest cash crop. During World War II he devised 500 dyes to replace those no longer available from Europe. Despite international acclaim and extraordinary job offers, he remained at Tuskegee throughout his life, donating his life's savings in 1940 to establish the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee.

For more information on George Washington Carver, visit Britannica.com.

Scientist: George Washington Carver
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American agricultural chemist (1864–1943)

Carver was born a slave in Diamond Grove, Missouri. Nevertheless, he managed to acquire some elementary education and went on to study at the Iowa State Agricultural College from which he graduated in 1892. He taught at Iowa until 1896, when he returned to the South to become director of the department of agricultural research at the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama. There he stayed despite lucrative offers to work for such magnates as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

His main achievement was to introduce new crops into the agricultural system of the South, in particular arguing for large-scale plantings of peanuts and sweet potatoes. He saw that such new crops were vital if only to replenish the soil, which had become impoverished by the regular growth of cotton and tobacco.

But he did much more than introduce new crops for he tried to show that they could be used to develop many new products. He showed that peanuts contained several different kinds of oil. So successful was he in this that by the 1930s the South was producing 60 million dollars worth of oil a year. Peanut butter was another of his innovations. In all he is reported to have developed over 300 new products from peanuts and over 100 from sweet potatoes.

Biography: George Washington Carver
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George Washington Carver (1864-1943) started his life as a slave and ended it as a respected and world-renowned agricultural chemist.

Born in Kansas Territory near Diamond Grove, Mo., during the bloody struggle between free-soilers and slaveholders, George Washington Carver became the kidnap victim of night riders. With his mother and brother, James, he was held for ransom; but before they could be rescued the mother died. Merely a babe in arms, Carver was ransomed for a $300 racehorse by Moses Carver, a German farmer. Thus he was orphaned and left in the custody of a white guardian from early childhood.

Carver had responsibility for his own education. His first school was in Neosho, lowa, some 9 miles from his home. Neosho had once been a Confederate capital; by now it had become the site of the Lincoln School for African American children. With James he walked there every day. His first teacher was an African American, Stephen S. Frost. He and his brother went faithfully to school for several years. Finally James tired of formal schooling and quit to become a house painter, but not George. He continued until he was 17. Then he went on to complete his high school work in Minneapolis, Kans.

Carver really wished to become an artist. His sketch of the rose Yucca gloriosa won him a first prize at the World's Columbian Exposition (1893).

Carver applied to study at the lowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts but was turned down when it was learned that he was of African heritage. He then applied to Simpson College at Indianola, lowa, where he was the second African American to be admitted. Tuition was $12 a year, but even this small amount was hard to come by. Carver raised the money by working as a cook at a hotel in Winterset, lowa.

After 3 years' attendance at Simpson College, he once again applied for admission to lowa State. He was admitted and was placed in charge of the greenhouse of the horticultural department while doing graduate work. He earned his master's degree in agriculture in 1896.

In April 1896 Carver received a unique offer from the African American educator Booker T. Washington to teach at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Said Dr. Washington: "I cannot offer you money, position or fame. The first two you have. The last from the position you now occupy you will no doubt achieve. These things I now ask you to give up. I offer you in their place: work - hard, hard work, the task of bringing a people from degradation, poverty, and waste to full manhood. Your department exists only on paper and your laboratory will have to be in your head."

Carver accepted the challenge. He arrived at the tiny railroad station at Chehaw, Ala., on Oct. 8, 1896. In a report to Dr. Washington he wrote: "8:00 to 9:00 A.M., Agricultural Chemistry; 9:20 to 10:00 A.M., the Foundation of Colors (for painters); 10:00 to 11:00 A.M., a class of farmers. Additional hours in the afternoon. In addition I must oversee and rather imperfectly supervise seven industrial classes, scattered here and there over the grounds. I must test all seeds, examine all fertilizers, based upon an examination of soils in different plots."

Through the years Carver was gaining national and international stature. Chinese and Japanese farmers raised many unique problems for him. Questions were referred to him from Russia, India, Europe, South America. He later had to turn down a request to journey to the Soviet Union. In 1916 he was elected a member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts in England; he went to Washington to the War Department to demonstrate his findings on the sweet potato in 1918. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP in 1923.

An early close friend of Carver was Henry A. Wallace; the pair knew each other for 47 years. Wallace said that Carver often took him on botanical expeditions, and it was he who first introduced Wallace to the mysteries of plant fertilizers. Carver was a shy and modest bachelor. An attack of whooping cough as a child had permanently caused him to have a high-pitched tenor voice. He considered it a high duty to attend classes and was seldom absent. In 1908 he returned to the West to visit his 96-year-old guardian, Moses Carver, and to visit the grave of his brother, James, in Missouri.

A careful and modest scientist, Carver was not without a sense of humor. When one of his students, hoping to play a trick on him, showed him a bug with wings of a fly and body of a mosquito, Carver was quick to label it "a humbug."

Carver utilized the materials at hand. He was interested in crop rotation and soil conservation. From the clay soil of Alabama he extracted a full range of dyestuffs, including a brilliant blue. He created 60 products from the pecan. From the common sweet potato he extracted a cereal coffee, a shoe polish, paste, oils - about 100 products. From the peanut he developed over 145 products. Carver suggested peanuts, pecans, and sweet potatoes replace cotton as money crops. He published all of his findings in a series of nearly 50 bulletins.

The testimony of Carver before the congressional House Ways and Means Committee in 1921 led to the passage of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Bill of 1922. Scheduled to speak a scant 10 minutes, he was granted several time extensions because of the intense interest in his presentation. (He appeared in a greenish-blue suit many seasons old, having refused to invest in a new suit: "They want to hear what I have to say; they will not be interested in how I look.")

In 1935 Carver was chosen to collaborate with the Bureau of Plant Industry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He received the Theodore Roosevelt Medal in 1939 for distinguished achievement in science. During his lifetime Carver had made many friends. Henry Ford was his frequent host. Carver was a treasured friend of Thomas A. Edison. It was Edison who offered to make him independent with his own laboratories and an annual stipend of $50,000. Other intimates of his were Luther Burbank, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs. He was also a friend of three presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Dr. Carver had earned the salary of $125 a month from the beginning until the end of his service at Tuskegee. He might have had much more. In 1940 he gave his life-savings, $33,000, to establish the George Washington Carver Foundation at Tuskegee Institute to perpetuate research in agriculture and chemistry. He later bequeathed his entire estate to the foundation, making a total of about $60,000. He died on Jan. 5, 1943.

At the dedication of a building in his honor at Simpson College, Dr. Ralph Bunche, Nobel Prize winner, pronounced Dr. Carver to be "the least imposing celebrity the world has ever known." Dr. Carver's birthplace was made a national monument on July 14, 1953.

Further Reading

Of the many studies of Carver the best is Rackham Holt, George Washington Carver: An American Biography (1943). Also useful is Shirley Graham and George D. Lipscomb, Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist (1944).

Black Biography: George Washington Carver
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agricultural chemist; botanist; educator; researcher

Personal Information

Born c. 1861, near Diamond Grove, MO; died January 5, 1943, in Tuskegee, AL; son of Mary (a slave on the farm of Moses Carver); father unknown, but believed to have died in an accident shortly after George's birth.
Education: Iowa State University, B.S., 1894, M.S., 1896.
Religion: Presbyterian.

Career

Worked odd jobs throughout Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa while pursuing a basic high school education, 1877-1890; Iowa State University, Ames, IA, assistant botanist and director of college greenhouse, 1894-1896; Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL, head of agriculture department, 1896-1910, head of department of research, 1910-1943; founder of George Washington Carver Foundation and Carver Museum at Tuskegee Institute; researcher focusing on improving Southern agriculture through crop diversification and finding multiple uses for various crops; author of articles on agriculture.

Life's Work

George Washington Carver was an agricultural chemist and botanist whose colorful life story and eccentric personality transformed him into a popular American folk hero to people of all races. Born into slavery, he spent his first 30 years wandering through three states and working at odd jobs to obtain a basic education. His lifelong effort thereafter to better the lives of poor Southern black farmers by finding commercial uses for the region's agricultural products and natural resources--in particular the peanut, sweet potato, cowpea, soybean, and native clays from the soil--brought him international recognition as a humanitarian and chemical wizard. An accomplished artist and pianist as well, Carver was among the most famous black men in the United States during the early twentieth century.

Carver was born a slave on the plantation of Moses Carver near Diamond Grove, Missouri, sometime during the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. His father appears to have died in a log-rolling accident shortly after George's birth. The Carver farm was raided several times throughout the war, and on one occasion, according to legend, bandits kidnapped George, who was then an infant, and his mother, Mary, and took them to Arkansas. Mary was never found, but a neighbor rescued young George and returned him to the Carver farm, accepting as payment a horse valued at $300.

Now orphaned, George and his older brother, Jim, were raised by Moses and Susan Carver. George was frail and sickly and his frequent bouts with croup and whooping cough temporarily stunted his growth and permanently injured his vocal chords, leaving him with a high-pitched voice throughout his life. While his healthy brother grew up working on the Carver farm, George spent much of his childhood wandering in the nearby woods and studying the plants. Here he formed the interests and values that determined his later life--love and understanding of nature, long morning walks in the woods spent thinking and observing, strong religious training, and a taste of racial prejudice.

The Carvers realized that George was an extremely intelligent and gifted child eager for an education. But since he was black, he was not allowed to attend the local school. In 1877 he left home to study in a school for blacks in nearby Neosho, getting his first exposure to a predominantly black environment. He roomed with a local black couple, paying his way by helping with the chores. Soon exhausting his teacher's limited knowledge, he hitched a ride to Fort Scott, Kansas, in the late 1870s with another black family, becoming part of the mass exodus of Southern blacks to the Great Plains during that decade in search of a better life.

Carver worked as a cook, launderer, and grocery clerk while continuing to pursue his education. Witnessing a brutal lynching in March of 1879, he was terrified. As quoted by Linda O. McMurry in George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, more than sixty years after the incident he wrote: "As young as I was the horror haunted me and does even now." He immediately left Fort Scott and moved to Olathe, Kansas, again working odd jobs while attending school. There he lived with another local black couple, Ben and Lucy Seymour, following them to Minneapolis, Kansas, the next year. Obtaining a bank loan, Carver opened a laundry business, joined the Seymours' local Presbyterian Church, and entered a school with whites, finally completing his secondary education.

In 1884 he moved to Kansas City, working as a clerk in the Union Depot. Accepted by mail at a Presbyterian college in Highland, Kansas, he was refused admission when he arrived because of his race. Though humiliated, he stayed in Highland to work for the Beelers, a cordial and supportive white family. Carver followed one of their sons to western Kansas in 1886 and tried homesteading, building a 14-square-foot sod house. But at that time he seemed more interested in playing the piano and organ and in painting than farming.

Carver moved again in 1888 to Winterset, Iowa, where he worked at a hotel before opening another laundry. A local white couple he met at church, Dr. and Mrs. Milholland, persuaded him to enter Simpson College, a small Methodist school open to all, in nearby Indianola, Iowa. He enrolled in September of 1890 as a select preparatory student, one allowed to enter without an official high school degree. Carver was unique in more ways than one: besides being the only black student on campus, he was the only male studying art.

By all accounts his Simpson experience was enjoyable. Carver took in laundry to support himself, was accepted by his fellow students, and had many friends. But his art teacher, impressed by his talent with plants, strongly encouraged his transfer to the Iowa State College of Agriculture in Ames, which housed an agricultural experiment station considered one of the country's leading centers of farming research. Three future U.S. secretaries of agriculture came from this university, including Professor James Wilson, who took Carver under his wing.

Again Carver was the only black on campus. He lived in an old office, ate in the basement, supported himself with menial jobs, and was active in the campus branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). Soon he stood out for his talent as well. One of his paintings was among those chosen to represent Iowa at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The faculty, equally impressed by his ability to raise, cross-fertilize, and graft plants, persuaded him to stay on as a post-graduate after he graduated in 1894.

Carver was appointed to the faculty as an assistant botanist in charge of the college greenhouse. He continued his studies under Louis Pammel, an authority in mycology (fungi and other plant diseases), receiving a master's degree in science in 1896.

The new graduate was in great demand. Iowa State wanted him to continue working there. Alcorn Agriculture & Mechanical College, a black school in Mississippi, was interested in his services. But when school principal Booker T. Washington, the most respected black educator in the country, asked Carver to establish an agricultural school and experiment station at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he accepted. According to Barry Mackintosh in American Heritage, Carver responded: "Of course it has always been the one great ideal of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of my people possible, and to this end I have been preparing my life for these many years, feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom for our people."

Tuskegee was an entirely new world for Carver--an all-black, industrial trade school located in the segregated deep South. He went because he agreed with Washington's efforts to improve the lives of the country's black citizens through education, economic development, and conciliation rather than political agitation. He would devote the rest of his life to the institution and its goals.

Carver arrived at Tuskegee in the fall of 1896 and immediately ran into problems. Many of the faculty members resented him because he was a dark-skinned black from the North who was educated in white schools and earned a higher salary than they did. Carver was a trained research scientist, not a teacher, at a primarily industrial trade school. He had few pupils, for the simple reason that most black students viewed a college education as a way to escape from the farm. In addition, he proved to be a poor administrator and financial manager of the school's two farms, barns, livestock, poultry, dairy, orchards, and beehives.

Washington and Carver often clashed. The realistic and pragmatic school principal expected practical results, while his idealistic, research-oriented professor preferred working at the school's 10-acre experimental farm. In 1910 Carver was removed as head of the agriculture department and put in charge of a newly-formed department of research. He gradually gave up teaching except for his Sunday evening Bible classes.

Carver found his true calling as head of the Tuskegee Experiment Station, working on research projects designed to help Southern agriculture in general and the poor black farmer, "the man farthest down," in particular. Alabama agriculture was in a sorry state when he arrived. Many farmers were impoverished, and much of the state's soil had been exhausted and eroded by extensive single-crop cotton cultivation. Carver set out to find a better way and to make Tuskegee a leading voice in Southern agricultural reform, as well as an important research, information, and educational center.

He encouraged local farmers to visit the school and to send in soil, water, crops, feed, fertilizers, and insects to his laboratory for analysis. Most of his findings and advice stressed hard work and the wise use of natural resources rather than expensive machinery or fertilizer that the area's poor farmers could not afford. Realizing that his discoveries and those of other agricultural researchers nationwide would have little effect unless publicized, Carver brought Tuskegee to the countryside by creating the Agriculture Movable School, a wagon that traveled to local farms with exhibits and demonstrations.

He also attempted to reach a wide audience with the experiment station's bulletins and brochures that he wrote and published from 1898 until his death. Rarely containing new ideas, Carver's bulletins instead publicized findings by agricultural researchers throughout the country in simple, non-technical language aimed at farmers and their wives. His early bulletins stressed the need for planting crops other than cotton to restore the soil, the importance of crop rotation, strategies for managing an efficient and profitable farm, and ways to cure and keep meat during the hot southern summers. They also offered instructions on pickling, canning, and preserving foods and lessons on preparing balanced meals.

To replace cotton, the longtime staple of Southern agriculture, Carver experimented with sweet potatoes and cowpeas (also known as black-eyed peas), along with crops new to Alabama like soybeans and alfalfa, the soil-building qualities of which would revitalize cotton-exhausted soil. He publicized his results in several bulletins from 1903 to 1911, providing growing tips and listing uses ranging from livestock feed to recipes for human consumption. But none of these crops became as popular with farmers or caught the public's fancy as his work with the ordinary peanut.

When Carver arrived in Tuskegee in 1896, the peanut was not even recognized as a crop. A few years later, Carver grew some Spanish peanuts at the experiment station. Recognizing its value in restoring nitrogen to depleted Southern soil, he mentioned the peanut in his 1905 bulletin, How to Build Up Worn Out Soils. Eleven years later another bulletin, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption, focused on the peanut's high protein and nutritional value, using ideas and recipes published previously in other U.S. Department of Agriculture bulletins.

A revolution was underway in Southern agriculture, and Carver was right in the middle of it. Peanut production increased from 3.5 million bushels in 1889 to more than 40 million bushels in 1917. Following a post-World War I decline in production, peanuts became the South's second cash crop after cotton by 1940.

After publicizing the peanut and encouraging Southern farmers to grow it, Carver turned his attention to finding new uses for the once-lowly goober. Learning of his work, the United Peanut Associations of America asked Carver to speak at their 1920 convention in Montgomery, Alabama. His address, "The Possibilities of the Peanut," was noteworthy for two reasons: a black addressing a white organization in the segregated South and Carver's knowledge and enthusiasm about the product.

The following year he testified before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, captivating congressional representatives with his showmanship and ideas for multiple derivatives from the crop including candy, ink, and ice cream flavoring. Mackintosh noted that Carver established his new celebrity nationwide, telling the lawmakers, "I have just begun with the peanut." From then on he was known as the "Peanut Man." After his death, the Carver Museum at Tuskegee credited him with developing 287 peanut by-products, including food and beverages, paints or dyes, livestock feed, cosmetics, and medicinal preparations. Peanut butter, however, was not among his discoveries. His similar laboratory work with the sweet potato totaled 159 commodities like flour, molasses, vinegar, various dyes, and synthetic rubber.

But in reality, most of these by-products were more fanciful than practical and could be mass-produced more easily from other substances. Peanuts continued to be used almost entirely for peanut butter, peanut oil, and for baked goods instead of the plethora of products Carver concocted. For all his discoveries, he only held three patents: two for paint products and one for a cosmetic. None was commercially successful.

Carver's laboratory methods were equally unorthodox and not in accord with standard scientific procedures. He usually worked alone, was uncommunicative with other researchers, and rarely wrote down his many formulas or left detailed records of his experiments. Instead, he claimed to work by divine revelation, receiving instructions from "Mr. Creator" in his laboratory.

Carver's prestige began to rise after Booker T. Washington's death in 1915. Given his growing celebrity status, he became Tuskegee's unofficial spokesman and a popular speaker nationwide at black and white civic groups, colleges, churches, and state fairs. He often played the piano at fund-raising events for the school. Carver was named a fellow of the British Royal Society for the Arts in 1916 and received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1923 for advancing the black cause.

A fanciful 1932 article in American Magazine solely credited Carver with increasing peanut production and developing important new peanut products that transformed Southern agriculture. Reprinted in the Reader's Digest in 1937, it boosted his soaring popularity as a scientific wizard. Backed by automobile manufacturer Henry Ford and inventor Thomas Edison, Carver became the unofficial spokesman of the chemurgy movement of the 1930s that combined chemistry and related sciences for the benefit of farmers. Continuing his work with peanuts, he encouraged the use of peanut oil as a massage to help in the recovery of polio victims.

With his soft-spoken manner, strong Christian beliefs, scientific reputation, seeming disregard for money, and accomodationist viewpoint toward the nation's racial question, Carver became a national symbol for both races. Southern whites approved of his seeming acceptance of segregation and used his accomplishments as an example of how a talented black individual could excel in their separate but equal society. Blacks and liberal whites saw Carver as a positive role model and much-needed symbol of black success and intellectual achievement, a man who visited U.S. presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge and dined with Henry Ford.

Carver left his life savings of $60,000 to found the George Washington Carver Foundation--to provide opportunities for advanced study by blacks in botany, chemistry, and agronomy--and the Carver Museum, to preserve his scientific work and paintings at Tuskegee. The site of Moses Carver's farm is now the George Washington Carver National Monument. A U.S. postage stamp was issued in the agricultural pioneer's honor, and Congress has designated January 5, the day of his death, to pay tribute to him each year.

At his death from complications of anemia in 1943, Carver remained the most famous African-American of his era, world renowned as a scientific wizard. However, none of his hundreds of formulas for peanut, sweet potato, and other by-products became successful commercial products. Nor was he solely instrumental in diversifying Southern agriculture from cotton to peanuts and other crops. The great boom in Southern peanut production occurred prior to World War I and Carver's bulletins promoting the crop.

Carver's true importance in history lay elsewhere. For nearly 50 years he remained in the South, working to improve the lives of the region's many poor farmers, black and white. Through his talents as an interpreter and promoter, he put the agricultural discoveries and technical writings of leading scientists in everyday language that ill-educated farmers could understand and use. And in an age of strict racial segregation, his importance as a role model and national symbol of black ability, education, and achievement cannot be undervalued.

Awards

Fellow of the British Royal Society for the Arts, 1916; Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1923; D.Sc. from Simpson College, 1928; Roosevelt Medal for distinguished service to science, 1939; D.Sc. from University of Rochester, 1941; Thomas A. Edison Foundation Award, 1942; inducted into Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 1973, and National Inventors Hall of Fame, 1990.

Further Reading

Books

  • Adair, Gene, George Washington Carver, Chelsea House, 1989.
  • George Washington Carver: The Man Who Overcame, Prentice-Hall, 1966.
  • Holt, Rackham, George Washington Carver: An American Biography, Doubleday, 1943.
  • Kremer, Gary R., George Washington Carver: In His Own Words, University of Missouri Press, 1987.
  • McMurry, Linda O., George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, Oxford University Press, 1981.
  • Moore, Eva, The Story of George Washington Carver, Scholastic Inc., 1990.
Periodicals
  • American Heritage, August 1977.
  • American Magazine, October 1932.
  • Ebony, July 1977.
  • Jet, January 29, 1990.
  • Journal of Black Studies, September 1988.
  • Journal of Southern History, November 1976.
  • Life, March 1937.

— James J. Podesta

US History Companion: Carver, George Washington
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(c. 1864-1943), black educator and agricultural researcher. Carver was one of the best-known African-Americans of his era. Growing mainly from his research on peanuts, his rise to fame created myths and obscured much of the true nature of his work. His humble origins were part of his appeal to publicists who made him a national folk hero. He was born in the Missouri town of Diamond. His mother and older brother were the only slaves of Moses and Susan Carver, successful, small-scale farmers. His mother disappeared, presumed kidnapped by slave raiders, while George was an infant. He became both free and orphaned at about the same time.

The childless Carvers raised him and his brother as their own children. Being a sickly child, George was not required to do hard labor but helped around the house. Very early his intellect and knowledge of nature awed those around him, but he was not allowed to attend the neighborhood school because of his color. Thus at a young age he began a series of moves through the Midwest, seeking more education. He supported himself cooking, doing laundry, and homesteading before finally enrolling at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, in 1890.

At Simpson Carver majored in art, but a teacher convinced him to transfer to Iowa State College to study agriculture. By the time he completed a master's degree in agriculture in 1896, Carver had impressed the faculty as an extremely talented student in horticulture and mycology as well as a gifted teacher of freshman biology. Had he been white, he probably would have stayed at Iowa and concentrated on research in one of those fields. Instead he accepted an offer from Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

For nearly twenty years (1896-1915) Carver labored in the shadow of Washington. He taught classes and operated the only all-black agricultural experiment station, but he proved inept at administration, provoking frequent clashes with the principal. He was engaged, however, in some of his most significant work--seeking solutions to the burden of debt and poverty that enmeshed landless black farmers.

Carver's research and innovative educational extension programs were aimed at inducing farmers to utilize available resources to replace expensive commodities. He published bulletins and gave demonstrations on such topics as using native clays for paints, increasing soil fertility without commercial fertilizers, and growing alternative crops along with the ubiquitous cotton. To enhance the attractiveness of such crops as cow peas, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, Carver developed a variety of uses for each. Peanuts especially appealed to him as an inexpensive source of protein that did not deplete the soil as much as cotton did.

Carver's work with peanuts drew the attention of a national growers' association, which invited him to testify at congressional tariff hearings in 1921. That testimony as well as several honors brought national publicity to the "Peanut Man." A wide variety of groups adopted the professor as a symbol of their causes, including religious groups, New South boosters, segregationists, and those working to improve race relations. Some white publicists exploited Carver's humble demeanor and apolitical posture to provide a "safe" symbol of black advancement; many, however, seem to have been genuinely captivated by his compelling personality. Carver's fame increased and led to numerous speaking engagements, taking him away from campus frequently.

By the late 1920s Carver had abandoned both teaching and agricultural plot work. He continued to advise peanut producers and others, always refusing to accept compensation. Much of his time was devoted to lecture tours of white college campuses, sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the ymca. With his warm personality he cultivated close personal relationships with dozens of young whites, opening their eyes to racial injustice, and continued to serve as a mentor and father figure to black students.

Carver never made a significant contribution to scientific theory, and he developed no commercially feasible new products. His ideas of sustainable agriculture based on renewable resources were out of step with his times, but perhaps not with the future. His early work enriched the lives of countless sharecroppers, and later in life he was a potent source of inspiration as a symbol of African-American achievement.

Bibliography:

Gary R. Kremer, George Washington Carver in His Own Words (1987); Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol (1981).

Author:

Linda O. McMurry

See also Agriculture; Washington, Booker T.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: George Washington Carver
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Carver, George Washington, 1864?-1943, American agricultural chemist, b. Diamond, Mo., grad. Iowa State College (now Iowa State Univ.; B.S., 1894; M.A. 1896). Born a slave, he later, as a free man, earned his college degree. In 1896 he joined the staff of Tuskegee Institute as director of the department of agricultural research, retaining that post the rest of his life. His work won him international repute. Carver's efforts to improve the economy of the South (he dedicated himself especially to bettering the position of African Americans) included the teaching of soil improvement and of diversification of crops. He discovered hundreds of uses for the peanut, the sweet potato, and the soybean and thus stimulated the culture of these crops. He devised many products from cotton waste and extracted blue, purple, and red pigments from local clay. From 1935 he was a collaborator of the Bureau of Plant Industry. Carver contributed his life savings to a foundation for research at Tuskegee. In 1953 his birthplace was made a national monument.

Bibliography

See biographies by R. Holt (rev. ed. 1966) and L. Elliott (1966).

History Dictionary: Carver, George Washington
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An African-American scientist and agricultural innovator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carver aided the economy of the South by developing hundreds of industrial uses for crops such as the peanut and the sweet potato.

  • Carver, who was born to slave parents, was the first black scientist to gain nationwide prominence.

  • Quotes By: George Washington Carver
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    Quotes:

    "Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

    "When you can do the common things in life in a uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."

    "When I was young, I said to God, god, tell me the mystery of the universe. But God answered, that knowledge is for me alone. So I said, god, tell me the mystery of the peanut. Then God said, well, George, that's more nearly your size."

    "Where there is no vision, there is no hope."

    "Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise."

    "How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because some day in life you will have been all these."

    See more famous quotes by George Washington Carver

    Wikipedia: George Washington Carver
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    George Washington Carver

    George Washington Carver in person.
    Born January 1864 (1864-01)[1]
    Diamond, Missouri, U.S.
    Died January 5, 1943 (aged 79)
    Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.

    George Washington Carver (January 1864[1][2] – January 5, 1943), was an American scientist, botanist, educator and inventor whose studies and teaching revolutionized agriculture in the Southern United States. The day and year of his birth are unknown; he is believed to have been born before slavery was abolished in Missouri in January 1864.[1]

    Much of Carver's fame is based on his research into and promotion of alternative crops to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes that used peanuts.[3] He also created or disseminated[clarification needed] about 100 products made from peanuts that were useful for the house and farm, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.

    In the Reconstruction South, an agricultural monoculture of cotton depleted the soil, and in the early 20th century the boll weevil destroyed much of the cotton crop. Carver's work on peanuts was intended to provide an alternative crop.

    In addition to his work on agricultural extension education for purposes of advocacy of sustainable agriculture and appreciation of plants and nature, Carver's important accomplishments also included improvement of racial relations, mentoring children, poetry, painting, and religion. He served as an example of the importance of hard work, a positive attitude, and a good education. His humility, humanitarianism, good nature, frugality, and rejection of economic materialism also have been admired widely.

    One of his most important roles was in undermining, through the fame of his achievements and many talents, the widespread stereotype of the time that the black race was intellectually inferior to the white race. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed him a "Black Leonardo", a reference to the Renaissance Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci.[4] To commemorate his life and inventions, George Washington Carver Recognition Day is celebrated on January 5, the anniversary of Carver's death.

    Contents

    Early years

    Carver was born in Diamond Grove, Newton County, Marion Township, near Crystal Place, now known as Diamond, Missouri, on or around July 12, 1865.[5][6] His slave owner, Moses Carver, was a German American immigrant who had purchased George's mother, Mary, and father, Giles, from William P. McGinnis on October 9, 1855, for seven hundred dollars. Carver had 10 sisters and a brother, all of whom died prematurely.[citation needed]

    When George was only a week old, George, a sister, and his mother were kidnapped by night raiders from Arkansas.[7] George's brother, James, was rushed to safety from the kidnappers.[7] They sold the slaves in Kentucky, a common practice.[citation needed] Moses Carver hired John Bentley to find them, but only George was found. Moses negotiated with the raiders and swapped a racehorse for the infant's return,[7] and rewarded Bentley.

    After slavery was abolished, Moses Carver and his wife, Susan, raised George and his older brother, James, as their own children.[7] They encouraged George Carver to continue his intellectual pursuits, and "Aunt Susan" taught him the basics of reading and writing.

    Since blacks were not allowed at the school in Diamond Grove, and he had received news that there was a school for blacks ten miles (16 km) south in Neosho, he resolved to go there at once. To his dismay, when he reached the town, the school had been closed for the night. As he had nowhere to stay, he slept in a nearby barn. By his own account, the next morning he met a kind woman, Mariah Watkins, from whom he wished to rent a room. When he identified himself as "Carver's George," as he had done his whole life, she replied that from now on his name was "George Carver". George liked this lady very much, and her words, "You must learn all you can, then go back out into the world and give your learning back to the people", made a great impression on him.

    At the age of thirteen, due to his desire to attend the academy there, he relocated to the home of another foster family in Fort Scott, Kansas. After witnessing the beating to death of a black man at the hands of a group of white men, George left Fort Scott. He subsequently attended a series of schools before earning his diploma at Minneapolis High School in Minneapolis, Kansas.

    College

    At work in his laboratory

    Over the next five years, he sent several letters to colleges and was finally accepted at Highland College in Highland, Kansas. He traveled to the college, but he was rejected when they discovered that he was an African American. In August 1886, Carver traveled by wagon with J. F. Beeler from Highland to Eden Township in Ness County, Kansas.[8] He homesteaded a claim[9] near Beeler, where he maintained a small conservatory of plants and flowers and a geological collection. With no help from domestic animals he plowed 17 acres (69,000 m2) of the claim, planting rice, corn, Indian corn and garden produce, as well as various fruit trees, forest trees, and shrubbery. He also did odd jobs in town and worked as a ranch hand.[8]

    In early 1888, Carver obtained a $3000 loan at the Bank of Ness City, stating he wanted to further his education, and by June of that year he had left the area.[8]

    In 1890, Carver started studying art and piano at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa.[10] His art teacher, Etta Budd, recognized Carver's talent for painting flowers and plants and convinced him to study botany at Iowa State Agricultural College in Ames.[10] He transferred there in 1891, the first black student and later the first black faculty member. In order to avoid confusion with another George Carver in his classes, he began to use the name George Washington Carver.[citation needed]

    At the end of his undergraduate career in 1894, recognizing Carver's potential, Joseph Budd and Louis Pammel convinced Carver to stay at Iowa State for his master's degree. Carver then performed research at the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station under Pammel from 1894 to his graduation in 1896. It is his work at the experiment station in plant pathology and mycology that first gained him national recognition and respect as a botanist.

    At Tuskegee with Booker T. Washington

    George Washington Carver (front row, center) poses with fellow staff members from Tuskegee Institute in this circa 1902 photograph taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

    In 1896, Carver was invited to lead the Agriculture Department at the five-year-old Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, later Tuskegee University, by its founder, Booker T. Washington. Carver accepted the position, and remained there for 47 years, teaching former slaves farming techniques for self-sufficiency.

    In response to Washington's directive to bring education to farmers, Carver designed a mobile school, called a "Jesup wagon" after the New York financier Morris Ketchum Jesup, who provided funding.[11]

    Carver had numerous problems at Tuskegee before he became famous. Carver's perceived arrogance, his higher-than-normal salary and the two rooms he received for his personal use were resented by other faculty.[12] Single faculty members normally bunked two to a room. One of Carver's duties was to administer the Agricultural Experiment Station farms. He was expected to produce and sell farm products to make a profit. He soon proved to be a poor administrator. In 1900, Carver complained that the physical work and the letter-writing his agricultural work required were both too much for him.[13]

    In 1902, Booker T. Washington invited Frances Benjamin Johnston, a nationally famous female photographer, to Tuskegee. Carver and Nelson Henry, a Tuskegee graduate, accompanied the attractive white woman to the town of Ramer. Several white citizens thought Henry was improperly associating with a white woman. Someone fired three pistol shots at Henry, and he fled. Mobs prevented him from returning. Carver considered himself fortunate to escape alive.[14]

    In 1904, a committee reported that Carver's reports on the poultry yard were exaggerated, and Washington criticized Carver about the exaggerations. Carver replied to Washington "Now to be branded as a liar and party to such hellish deception it is more than I can bear, and if your committee feel that I have willfully lied or [was] party to such lies as were told my resignation is at your disposal."[15] In 1910, Carver submitted a letter of resignation in response to a reorganization of the agriculture programs.[16] Carver again threatened to resign in 1912 over his teaching assignment.[17] Carver submitted a letter of resignation in 1913, with the intention of heading up an experiment station elsewhere.[18] He also threatened to resign in 1913 and 1914 when he didn't get a summer teaching assignment.[19][20] In each case, Washington smoothed things over. It seemed that Carver's wounded pride prompted most of the resignation threats, especially the last two, because he did not need the money from summer work.

    In 1911, Washington wrote a lengthy letter to Carver complaining that Carver did not follow orders to plant certain crops at the experiment station.[21] He also refused Carver's demands for a new laboratory and research supplies for Carver's exclusive use and for Carver to teach no classes. He complimented Carver's abilities in teaching and original research but bluntly remarked on his poor administrative skills, "When it comes to the organization of classes, the ability required to secure a properly organized and large school or section of a school, you are wanting in ability. When it comes to the matter of practical farm managing which will secure definite, practical, financial results, you are wanting again in ability." Also in 1911, Carver complained that his laboratory was still without the equipment promised 11 months earlier. At the same time, Carver complained of committees criticizing him and that his "nerves will not stand" any more committee meetings.[22]

    Despite their clashes, Booker T. Washington praised Carver in the 1911 book My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience.[23] Washington called Carver "one of the most thoroughly scientific men of the Negro race with whom I am acquainted." Like most later Carver biographies, it also contained exaggerations. It inaccurately claimed that as a young boy Carver "proved to be such a weak and sickly little creature that no attempt was made to put him to work and he was allowed to grow up among chickens and other animals around the servants' quarters, getting his living as best he could." Carver wrote elsewhere that his adoptive parents, the Carvers, were "very kind" to him.[24]

    Booker T. Washington died in 1915. His successor made fewer demands on Carver. From 1915 to 1923, Carver's major focus was compiling existing uses and proposing new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, pecans, and other crops.[25] This work and especially his promotion of peanuts for the peanut growers association and before Congress eventually made him the most famous African-American of his time.

    Rise to fame

    Carver had an interest in helping poor Southern farmers who were working low-quality soils that had been depleted of nutrients by repeated plantings of cotton crops. He and other agricultural cognoscenti urged farmers to restore nitrogen to their soils by practicing systematic crop rotation, alternating cotton crops with plantings of sweet potatoes or legumes (such as peanuts, soybeans and cowpeas) that were also sources of protein. Following the crop rotation practice resulted in improved cotton yields and gave farmers new foods and alternative cash crops. In order to train farmers to successfully rotate crops and cultivate the new foods, Carver developed an agricultural extension program for Alabama that was similar to the one at Iowa State. In addition, he founded an industrial research laboratory where he and assistants worked to popularize use of the new plants by developing hundreds of applications for them through original research and also by promoting recipes and applications that they collected from others. Carver distributed his information as agricultural bulletins. (See Carver bulletins below.)

    Peanut specimen collected by Carver

    Much of Carver's fame is related to the hundreds of plant products he popularized. After Carver's death, lists were created of the plant products Carver compiled or originated. Such lists enumerate about 300 applications for peanuts and 118 for sweet potatoes, although 73 of the 118 were dyes. He made similar investigations into uses for cowpeas, soybeans, and pecans. Carver did not write down formulas for most of his novel plant products so they could not be made by others.

    Until 1921, Carver was not widely known for his agricultural research. However, he was known in Washington, D.C. President Theodore Roosevelt publicly admired his work. James Wilson, a former Iowa state dean and teacher of Carver's, was U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1897 to 1913. Henry Cantwell Wallace, U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1921 to 1924, was one of Carver's teachers at Iowa State. Carver was a friend of Wallace's son, Henry A. Wallace, also an Iowa State graduate.[26] The younger Wallace served as U.S. secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940 and as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice president from 1941 to 1945.

    In 1916 Carver was made a member of the Royal Society of Arts in England, one of only a handful of Americans at that time to receive this honor. However, Carver's promotion of peanuts gained him the most fame.

    In 1919, Carver wrote to a peanut company about the great potential he saw for his new peanut milk. Both he and the peanut industry seemed unaware that in 1917 William Melhuish had secured patent #1,243,855 for a milk substitute made from peanuts and soybeans. Despite reservations about his race, the peanut industry invited him as a speaker to their 1920 convention. He discussed "The Possibilities of the Peanut" and exhibited 145 peanut products.

    By 1920, U.S. peanut farmers were being undercut with imported peanuts from the Republic of China. White peanut farmers and processors came together in 1921 to plead their cause before a Congressional committee hearings on a tariff. Having already spoken on the subject at the convention of the United Peanut Associations of America, Carver was elected to speak in favor of a peanut tariff before the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Carver was a novel choice because of U.S. racial segregation. On arrival, Carver was mocked by surprised Southern congressmen, but he was not deterred and began to explain some of the many uses for the peanut. Initially given ten minutes to present, the now spellbound committee extended his time again and again. The committee rose in applause as he finished his presentation, and the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 included a tariff on imported peanuts. Carver's presentation to Congress made him famous, while his intelligence, eloquence, amiability, and courtesy delighted the general public.

    Life while famous

    United States Farm Security Administration portrait, March 1942

    During the last two decades of his life, Carver seemed to enjoy his celebrity status. He was often to be found on the road promoting Tuskegee, peanuts, and racial harmony. Although he only published six agricultural bulletins after 1922, he published articles in peanut industry journals and wrote a syndicated newspaper column, "Professor Carver's Advice". Business leaders came to seek his help, and he often responded with free advice. Three American presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt—met with him, and the Crown Prince of Sweden studied with him for three weeks.

    In 1923, Carver received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP, awarded annually for outstanding achievement. From 1923 to 1933, Carver toured white Southern colleges for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.[25]

    Carver was famously criticized in the November 20, 1924, New York Times article "Men of Science Never Talk That Way." The Times considered Carver's statements that God guided his research inconsistent with a scientific approach. The criticism garnered much sympathy for Carver, as many Christians viewed it as an attack on religion.

    In 1928, Simpson College bestowed on Carver an honorary doctorate. For a 1929 book on Carver, Raleigh H. Merritt contacted him. Merritt wrote "At present not a great deal has been done to utilize Dr. Carver's discoveries commercially. He says that he is merely scratching the surface of scientific investigations of the possibilities of the peanut and other Southern products."[27] Yet, in 1932 professor of literature James Saxon Childers wrote that Carver and his peanut products were almost solely responsible for the rise in U.S. peanut production after the boll weevil devastated the American cotton crop beginning about 1892. Childer's 1932 article on Carver, "A Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse", in The American Magazine, and its 1937 reprint in Reader's Digest, did much to establish this Carver myth. Other major magazines and newspapers of the time also exaggerated Carver's impact on the peanut industry.[28]

    From 1933 to 1935, Carver was largely occupied with work on peanut oil massages for treating infantile paralysis (polio).[25] Carver received tremendous media attention and visitations from parents and their sick children; however, it was ultimately found that peanut oil was not the miracle cure it was made out to be—it was the massages which provided the benefits. Carver had been a trainer for the Iowa State football team and was skilled as a masseur. From 1935 to 1937, Carver participated in the USDA Disease Survey. Carver had specialized in plant diseases and mycology for his master's degree.

    In 1937, Carver attended two chemurgy conferences.[25] He met Henry Ford at the Dearborn, Michigan, conference, and they became close friends. Also in 1937, Carver's health declined. Time magazine reported in 1941 that Henry Ford installed an elevator for Carver because his doctor told him not to climb the 19 stairs to his room.[4] In 1942, the two men denied that they were working together on a solution to the wartime rubber shortage. Carver also did work with soy, which he and Ford considered as an alternative fuel.

    In 1939, Carver received the Roosevelt Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture enscribed "to a scientist humbly seeking the guidance of God and a liberator to men of the white race as well as the black." In 1940, Carver established the George Washington Carver Foundation at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1941, The George Washington Carver Museum was dedicated at the Tuskegee Institute. In 1942, Henry Ford built a replica of Carver's slave cabin at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn as a tribute to his friend. Also in 1942, Ford dedicated the George Washington Carver Laboratory in Dearborn.

    Death and legacy

    Upon returning home one day, Carver took a bad fall down a flight of stairs; he was found unconscious by a maid who took him to a hospital. Carver died January 5, 1943, at the age of 78 from complications (anemia) resulting from this fall. He was buried next to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University. Due to his frugality, Carver's life savings totaled $60,000, all of which he donated in his last years and at his death to the Carver Museum and to the George Washington Carver Foundation.[29]

    On his grave was written, He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.

    Before and after his death, there was a movement to establish a U.S. national monument to Carver. However, because of World War II such non-war expenditures were banned by presidential order. Missouri senator Harry S. Truman sponsored a bill anyway. In a committee hearing on the bill, one supporter argued that "The bill is not simply a momentary pause on the part of busy men engaged in the conduct of the war, to do honor to one of the truly great Americans of this country, but it is in essence a blow against the Axis, it is in essence a war measure in the sense that it will further unleash and release the energies of roughly 15,000,000 Negro people in this country for full support of our war effort."[25] The bill passed in both houses without a single vote against.

    1948 US postage stamp

    On July 14, 1943,[30] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated $30,000 for the George Washington Carver National Monument west-southwest of Diamond, Missouri—an area where Carver had spent time in his childhood. This was the first national monument dedicated to an African-American and also the first to a non-President. At this 210-acre (0.8 km2) national monument, there is a bust of Carver, a ¾-mile nature trail, a museum, the 1881 Moses Carver house, and the Carver cemetery. Due to a variety of delays, the national monument was not opened until July, 1953.

    In December 1947, a fire destroyed all but three of 48 of Carver's paintings at the Carver Museum [31] Carver appeared on U.S. commemorative stamps in 1948 and 1998, and he was depicted on a commemorative half dollar coin from 1951 to 1954. Two ships, the Liberty ship SS George Washington Carver and the nuclear submarine USS George Washington Carver (SSBN-656) were named in his honor.

    In 1977, Carver was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. In 1990, Carver was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 1994, Iowa State University awarded Carver Doctor of Humane Letters. In 2000, Carver was a charter inductee in the USDA Hall of Heroes as the "Father of Chemurgy".[32]

    In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed George Washington Carver on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.[33]

    In 2005, Carver's research at the Tuskegee Institute was designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society.[34] On February 15, 2005, an episode of Modern Marvels included scenes from within Iowa State University's Food Sciences Building and about Carver's work. In 2005, the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, Missouri, opened a George Washington Carver garden in his honor, which includes a lifesize statue of him.

    Many institutions honor George Washington Carver to this day, particularly the American public school system. Dozens of elementary schools and high schools are named after him. National Basketball Association star David Robinson and his wife, Valerie, founded an academy named after Carver; it opened on September 17, 2001, in San Antonio, Texas.[35]

    Reputed inventions

    George Washington Carver reputedly discovered three hundred uses for peanuts and hundreds more for soybeans, pecans and sweet potatoes. Among the listed items that he suggested to southern farmers to help them economically were adhesives, axle grease, bleach, buttermilk, chili sauce, fuel briquettes (a biofuel), ink, instant coffee, linoleum, mayonnaise, meat tenderizer, metal polish, paper, plastic, pavement, shaving cream, shoe polish, synthetic rubber, talcum powder and wood stain. Three patents (one for cosmetics, and two for paints and stains) were issued to George Washington Carver in the years 1925 to 1927; however, they were not commercially successful in the end. Aside from these patents and some recipes for food, he left no formulae or procedures for making his products.[36] He did not keep a laboratory notebook.

    It is a common misconception that Carver's research on products that could be made by small farmers for their own use led to commercial successes that revolutionized Southern agriculture,[37][38] but these products were intended as adequate replacements for commercial products that were outside the budget of the small one-horse farmer. Carver's work to apply the scientific method to sustain small farmers and to provide them with the resources to be as independent of the cash economy as possible foreshadowed the "appropriate technology" work of E.F. Schumacher.

    Peanut products

    Dennis Keeney, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, wrote in the Leopold Letter newsletter:

    Carver worked on improving soils, growing crops with low inputs, and using species that fixed nitrogen (hence, the work on the cowpea and the peanut). Carver wrote in The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South: "The virgin fertility of our soils and the vast amount of unskilled labor have been more of a curse than a blessing to agriculture. This exhaustive system for cultivation, the destruction of forest, the rapid and almost constant decomposition of organic matter, have made our agricultural problem one requiring more brains than of the North, East or West."[39]

    Carver did market a few of his peanut products. The Carver Penol Company sold a mixture of creosote and peanuts as a patent medicine for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis. Other ventures were The Carver Products Company and the Carvoline Company. Carvoline Antiseptic Hair Dressing was a mix of peanut oil and lanolin. Carvoline Rubbing Oil was a peanut oil for massages.

    Sweet potato products

    Next to peanuts, Carver is most associated with sweet potato products. In his 1922 sweet potato bulletin Carver listed a few dozen recipes "many of which I have copied verbatim from Bulletin No. 129, U. S. Department of Agriculture".[40]

    The list of Carver's sweet potato inventions compiled from Carver's records includes 73 dyes, 17 wood fillers, 14 candies, 5 library pastes, 5 breakfast foods, 4 starches, 4 flours, and 3 molasseses.[41] There are also listings for vinegar and spiced vinegar, dry coffee and instant coffee, candy, after-dinner mints, orange drops, and lemon drops.

    Carver bulletins

    During his more than four decades at Tuskegee, Carver's official published work consisted mainly of 44 practical bulletins for farmers.[42] His first bulletin in 1898 was on feeding acorns to farm animals. His final bulletin in 1943 was about the peanut. He also published six bulletins on sweet potatoes, five on cotton, and four on cowpeas. Some other individual bulletins dealt with alfalfa, wild plum, tomato, ornamental plants, corn, poultry, dairying, hogs, preserving meats in hot weather, and nature study in schools.

    His most popular bulletin, How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption, was first published in 1916[3] and was reprinted many times. It gave a short overview of peanut crop production and contained a list of recipes from other agricultural bulletins, cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers, such as the Peerless Cookbook, Good Housekeeping, and Berry's Fruit Recipes. Carver's was far from the first American agricultural bulletin devoted to peanuts,[43][44][45][46][47] but his bulletins did seem to be more popular and widespread than previous ones.

    Religion

    God and science were both areas of interest, not warring ideas in the mind of George Washington Carver. He testified on many occasions that his faith in Jesus was the only mechanism by which he could effectively pursue and perform the art of science.[48] George Washington Carver became a Christian when he was ten years old. When he was still a young boy, he was not expected to live past his twenty-first birthday due to conspicuously failing health. He lived well past the age of twenty-one, and his beliefs deepened as a result.[24] Throughout his career, he always found friendship and safety in the fellowship of other Christians. He relied on them especially when enduring harsh criticism from the scientific community and newsprint media regarding his research methodology.[49]

    Dr. Carver viewed faith in Jesus as a means of destroying both barriers of racial disharmony and social stratification.[50] He was as concerned with his students' character development as he was with their intellectual development. He even compiled a list of eight cardinal virtues for his students to emulate and strive toward:

    A monument to Carver at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis
    • Be clean both inside and out.
    • Neither look up to the rich nor down on the poor.
    • Lose, if need be, without squealing.
    • Win without bragging.
    • Always be considerate of women, children, and older people.
    • Be too brave to lie.
    • Be too generous to cheat.
    • Take your share of the world and let others take theirs.[35]

    Carver also led a Bible class on Sundays while at Tuskegee, beginning in 1906, for several students at their request. In this class he would regularly tell the stories from the Bible by acting them out.[35] Unconventional in respect to both his scientific method and his ambition as a teacher, he inspired as much criticism as he did praise. Dr. Carver expressed this sentiment in response to this phenomenon: "When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world."[51]

    The legacy of George Washington Carver's faith is included in many Christian book series for children and adults about great men and women of faith and the work they accomplished through their convictions respectively. One such series, the Sower series, includes his story alongside those of such men as Isaac Newton, Samuel Morse, Johannes Kepler, and the Wright brothers. Other Christian literary references include "Man’s Slave, God’s Scientist", by David R. Collins, and the Heroes of the Faith series book George Washington Carver: Inventor and Naturalist, by Sam Wellman.

    Notes

    1. ^ a b c "About GWC: A Tour of His Life". George Washington Carver National Monument. National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwca/expanded/gwc_tour_01.htm. "George Washington Carver did not know the exact date of his birth, but he thought it was in January 1864 (some evidence indicates July 1861, but not conclusively). He knew it was sometime before slavery was abolished in Missouri, which occurred in January 1864." 
    2. ^ The Notable Names Database cites July 12, 1864 as Carver's birthday here.
    3. ^ a b Carver, George Washington. 1916. How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption. Tuskegee Institute Experimental Station Bulletin 31.
    4. ^ a b "Black Leonardo Book". Time Magazine. 1941-11-24. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,801330,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
    5. ^ Pages 9-10 of George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol by Linda McMurry, 1982. New York: Oxford University Press (ISBN 0-19-503205-5)
    6. ^ Some sources say 1864. Carver's exact date of birth remains uncertain.
    7. ^ a b c d Rennert, Richard, ed. (1994), Profiles of Great Black Americans: Pioneers of Discovery, Coretta Scott King (introduction), New York: Chelsea House Publishers, pp. 26-32, ISBN 0-7910-2067-3 
    8. ^ a b c George Washington Carver: Scientist, Scholar, and Educator from the "Blue Skyways" website of the Kansas State Library
    9. ^ Southeast Quarter of Section 4, Township 19 South, Range 26 West of the Sixth Principal Meridian, Ness County, Kansas
    10. ^ a b College Archives - George Washington Carver from the Simpson College website
    11. ^ The first Jesup Wagon from a National Park Service website
    12. ^ Pages 45-47 of McMurry
    13. ^ Volume 5, page 481 of Harlan
    14. ^ Volume 5, page 504 of Harlan
    15. ^ Volume 8, page 95 of Harlan
    16. ^ Volume 10, page 480 of Harlan
    17. ^ Volume 12, page 95 of Harlan
    18. ^ Volume 12, pages 251-252 of Harlan
    19. ^ Volume 12, page 201 of Harlan
    20. ^ Volume 13, page 35 of Harlan
    21. ^ Volume 10, pages 592-596 of Harlan
    22. ^ Volume 4, page 239 of Harlan
    23. ^ Booker T. Washington, 1856-1915 My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience
    24. ^ a b GWC | His Life in his own words
    25. ^ a b c d e Special History Study from the National Park Service website
    26. ^ The legacy of George Washington Carver-Friends & Colleagues (Henry Wallace
    27. ^ Raleigh Howard Merritt. From Captivity to Fame or The Life of George Washington Carver
    28. ^ "Peanut Man". Time Magazine. 1937-06-14. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757923-1,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
    29. ^ GWC | Tour Of His Life |Page 6
    30. ^ George Washington Carver National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)
    31. ^ "Change Without Revolution". Time Magazine. 1948-01-05. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,794072,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-10. 
    32. ^ USDA Hall of Heroes
    33. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
    34. ^ George Washington Carver: Chemist, Teacher, Symbol
    35. ^ a b c History from the Carver Academy website
    36. ^ Mackintosh, Barry. 1977. George Washington Carver and the Peanut: New Light on a Much-loved Myth. American Heritage 28(5): 66-73.
    37. ^ McMurry, L.O. 1981. George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York, Oxford University Press.
    38. ^ Smith, Andrew F. 2002. Peanuts: The Illustrious History of the Goober Pea. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
    39. ^ Fishbein, Toby. "The legacy of George Washington Carver."
    40. ^ How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes, Geo. W. Carver from the Texas A&M University website
    41. ^ Carver Sweet Potato Products from the Tuskegee University website
    42. ^ List of Bulletins by George Washington Carver from the Tuskegee University website
    43. ^ Handy, R.B. 1895. Peanuts: Culture and Uses. USDA Farmers' Bulletin 25.
    44. ^ Newman, C.L. 1904. Peanuts. Fayetteville, Arkansas: Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station.
    45. ^ Beattie, W.R. 1909. Peanuts. USDA Farmers' Bulletin 356.
    46. ^ Ferris, E.B. 1909. Peanuts. Agricultural College, Mississippi: Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station.
    47. ^ Beattie, W.R. 1911. The Peanut. USDA Farmers' Bulletin 431.
    48. ^ Man of science-and of God (paid access) from The New American (January, 2004) via AccessMyLibrary
    49. ^ http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/n/Newman,Wilson_L. (dead link)
    50. ^ Quotes From Dr. Carver | Page 2 from a National Park Service website (dead link)
    51. ^ George Washington Carver Quotes
    52. ^ "Author Query". International Plant Names Index. http://www.ipni.org/ipni/authorsearchpage.do. 

    See also

    References

    • Carver, George Washington. "1897 or Thereabouts: George Washington Carver's Own Brief History of His Life." George Washington Carver National Monument.
    • Kremer, Gary R. (editor). 1987. George Washington Carver in His Own Words. Columbia, Missouri.: University of Missouri Press.
    • McMurry, L. O. Carver, George Washington. American National Biography Online Feb. 2000
    • George Washington Carver : Man’s Slave, God’s Scientist, Collins, David R., Mott Media, 1981)
    • George Washington Carver: His Life & Faith in His Own Words (Hardcover) by William J. Federer Publisher: AmeriSearch (January 2003) ISBN 0965355764
    • George Washington Carver: In His Own Words (Paperback)by George W. Carver Publisher: University of Missouri Press; Reprint edition (January 1991) ISBN 0826207855 ISBN 978-0826207852
    • H.M. Morris, Men of Science, Men of God (1982)
    • E.C.Barnett & D.Fisher, Scientists Who Believe (1984)
    • G.R. Kremer, George Washington Carver in His Own Words (1987)

    External links

    Legends of Tuskegee: George Washington Carver from the National Park Service
    National Park Service, George Washington Carver National Monument from the National Park Service


    Print publications


     
     

     

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    Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the George Washington Carver biography from Who2.  Read more
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