USA TODAY (MAGAZINE)
June 2008, Vol. 136, No. 2757, pp. 4-5

Copyright © SOCIETY FOR ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION. June 2008. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

George Washington Carver: A Mighty Vision Beyond Peanuts

"We are the architects of our own fortune and the hewers out of our own destiny."--George Washington Carver

     

George Washington Carver, Botanist and Educator Dr. George Washington Carver (1864-1943) poses in a laboratory in this circa 1935 photograph. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Many people today know George Washington Carver (1861-1943) largely from the myths that have grown around him. The fact is, he did not invent peanut butter; it had existed in many cultures for centuries--neither did he create 300 new products from peanuts, though he created some, and collected many others. Carver is a man with a fascinating life story and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, who overcame tremendous odds to become one of the U.S.'s most versatile scientists.

     He was a trail-blazing proponent of sustainability, who believed that "nature produces no waste" and neither should man. He was a humanitarian whose primary goal was, as he put it, "to help the farmer and fill the poor man's empty dinner pail."

     This complex and intimate portrait of one of America's best known names--and least-studied men--emerges from the exhibition "George Washington Carver." It follows his entire life and career, revealing his struggles and remarkable achievements as scientist, conservationist, educator, and humanitarian. It brings together more than 100 artifacts from Carver's personal life and work, along with animated and live videos, interactive displays, a diorama of Carver's childhood farm, and a re-creation of the Jesup Wagon, his mobile classroom.

     A frail child born into slavery, Carver and his mother were kidnapped by slave raiders when he still was an infant. The baby was abandoned by the kidnappers and rescued by his owners, Moses and Susan Carver, who adopted him and his brother. Carver's biological mother never was found.

     Moses was a farmer in a Missouri frontier town, a very frugal man who abhorred waste of any kind. Since George was a sickly child, unable to help much on the farm, Susan taught him handiwork such as embroidery, knitting, and crocheting. George also spent a lot of his time outside, collecting rocks, observing nature, and creating a "secret garden." His sensitivity and curiosity were apparent and, even as a child, he was known throughout the area for his remarkable skill with plants.

     "I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life--but there was no one to tell me," Carver later wrote. His foster parents had no formal education, and there were no schools close to their home--only a Blue-back speller in which Carver found few answers to his endless questions. So, at age 13, he left home, with his family's blessings, to seek an education.

     With a rich collection of artifacts, the exhibition traces Carver's path and passions as he worked his way through elementary and high school, through rejection and welcome, to Simpson College in Iowa, then to Iowa State University, and finally to a research and teaching position at Tuskegee Institute (now University).

     Given his drive and education, Carver could have become a theoretical chemist, an academic botanist, or an inventor--but that was not his bent. He had decided early on that his calling was to help "the man farthest down." On his way to Tuskegee, Carver, known as the "Plant Doctor," saw fields of scraggly cotton in exhausted soil and poor black farmers struggling to survive. He had what he called a "mighty vision"-of barren fields turning green with crops, whitewashed farmhouses gleaming in the sun, gardens sprouting with vegetables and flowers.

     "Carver was driven by the needs he saw around him," says Michael Dillon, chair of the Botany Department at The Field Museum, Chicago, and one of the exhibition's curators. "His research was very goal-oriented."

     One of the ideas that Carver seized upon was crop rotation--a practice long known to other cultures but not used in the South, where cotton truly was king. Carver understood that cotton had depleted the soil of the nitrogen that plants need in order to grow, and he knew that legumes, such as peanuts and peas, had a symbiotic relationship with bacteria that could take inert nitrogen molecules from the atmosphere and convert them into a form plants can use.

     It was the desire to make these alternative crops more useful to farmers and others that led to his famous work with peanuts, cow (or black-eyed) peas, and sweet potatoes. (Sweet potatoes, though not a legume, grow easily with little or no fertilizer.) He sought many other practical solutions as well, experimenting freely with seeds, soil enrichment, natural fertilizers, and more.

     In every aspect of his research, Carver sought to make his findings accessible to the communities around him. He put plain-language information and instructions into bulletins that were distributed widely, and he took the Jesup Wagon to farms and public spaces, demonstrating farming and composting techniques, cooking, canning...even home makeovers with paints, furniture, and decorative items made from plants and minerals.

     Carver's ideas on conservation were ahead of their time. "I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this Earth to give us a breathing spell," he said. "As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms...for we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."

     Carver blazed a trail for the development of products from plants, a field known as chemurgy. He found hundreds of new uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soy beans--from buttermilk to bleach, automobile fuel to glue, shoe polish to shaving cream, laundry soap to linoleum, wallboard to rubber, and much more. Carver worked on biofuels with Henry Ford, and made a massage oil for polio victims--though it turned out to be the masseur, Carver himself, as much as the oil, that was effective.

     After Carver, interest in plant products went out of fashion for decades--only to be rediscovered at the end of the 20th century. Today's accelerating research on plant-based fuels, medicines, and other products is rooted in Carver's work, though not always with his altruism. Though he took out a few patents, his interest was not in money but in public good. His passionate testimony on the potential of peanuts moved Congress to pass a tariff protecting U.S. peanut farmers.

     "The most important gift Carver gave to people wasn't any particular product," Dillon concludes. "It was the gift of self-worth." Carver crossed racial and class boundaries. He gave of himself so that others could become educated, self-sufficient, and proud. He followed his own vision to improve the lives of others.

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The Hutchinson Dictionary of Ideas  2004; Lexile Score: 810; 0K, SIRS Renaissance