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Chapter 7 A Layman: George Washington Carver (Circa 1862-1943)
Of the many biographies of effective Christians I have read, none seem as miraculous as that of George Washington Carver, the only American among those selected for biographical sketches in this book. The odds stacked against Carver—especially in his early years—were seemingly insurmountable. Yet, time after time, God engineered circumstances to reward his patience and perseverance.
George Washington Carver was born on a frontier farm in Missouri during the Civil War—exactly when is not known. His mother, a slave, was stolen by “bushwhackers” when George was a baby and George was informally adopted by his mother’s owner.
Because he was sickly as a child, George helped around the house and garden while his older, more robust, brother worked in the fields. Early on, George demonstrated a restless curiosity and zeal to learn. When his chores were over, he would go to the woods and study nature—the wildflowers, birds and frogs. He would poke beneath the tree bark and watch the insects crawl. More than anything else, he wanted to understand the magically complex world of nature. When the neighbors had plants that were dying, George would take them to the woods and nurse them back to health. For miles around, people called him the “plant doctor.” Schools in Carver’s area were for white children only, but George had a dream of getting an education and he never gave up his dream. Finally, he heard about a school for black children in a distant town, and, without knowing how he was going to survive, he told his adoptive family what he was going to do. They wished him well, and with many misgivings watched this young boy—thirteen or fourteen years old—walk out into the world to make it on his own. The year was 1875.
The “colored” school in question was in Neosho, Missouri, which had recently been the Confederate capital of Missouri. George arrived there, tired and hungry, with no one in the town knowing or caring that he was there. He was walking to the schoolhouse when a wiry black woman saw him in her back yard. George had come to the home of Moriah Watkins, washer-woman and midwife, a person who had a tender soul. She took it as her responsibility to help all the stray creatures that crossed her path. Her husband, Andrew, was an odd-jobs man, and they had no children of their own. Within minutes, George was eating biscuits in her kitchen.
That first night, Moriah curtained off a corner of her one-room house to make a place for George to sleep. When George mentioned that he was mighty lucky to stumble into her yard, Moriah corrected him. “Luck had nothing to do with it, boy,” she said, “God brought you to my yard. He has work for you, and he wants Andrew and me to lend a hand.” George was to learn that according to Moriah Watkins’ simple and straightforward faith, God is everywhere and has a plan for each of his children; he permits nothing to happen by accident or mere chance. These were precepts by which Moriah lived—along with cleanliness and work—and soon these would become unshakable parts of George Carver’s being.
The school George had come to was a one-room schoolhouse with about seventy-five students sitting under a fidgety black teacher named Stephen S. Frost. When bitter winter winds blew through the cracks in the building, everyone wore their coats and mittens all day and shivered—except for the ones next to the wood stove. But this did not bother George. He was in school, and had his first reader and a piece of slate to write on. He was shy around his classmates. He preferred to draw pictures on his slate than participate in the rough and tumble games at recess. After school, he helped Aunt Moriah with her work around the house.
His Christmas gift from Moriah that first Christmas was a Bible, a leather-bound volume, worn from much loving use. Within the year, George had memorized great segments from Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs and the Gospels. And every day thereafter—even on the day he died—he read from the Bible, and it was never far from his reach.
Finally, on December 22nd, 1876, he got a Certificate of Merit from Mr. Frost, who continually reminded his students to “know their place.”
For about ten years, George roamed the Midwest, doing menial work, always with the dream of getting more education. Aunt Moriah had said to him one night, “You must learn all you can; then go out in the world and give your learning back to our people. They are starving for a little learning.” During this time, he applied to Highland College (in Highland, Missouri), and was accepted, but when he arrived after a long journey, he was told sadly by the college president, “You didn’t tell me you were Negro. Highland College does not take Negroes.”
But the dream never left his mind. A breakthrough came when he met the Milhollands, a white couple at Winterset, Iowa. They met at a Baptist church. John Milholland, a medical doctor, and his wife invited George to their home, and over a period of time they realized his potential, and encouraged him to go to college. When he told them of his rejection at Highland College, they suggested Simpson College in Indianola, not far from there. It was a college endowed by a Methodist Bishop who fervently believed in the equality of all men. And so, at dawn on September 9, 1890, Carver expectantly walked the thirty miles to Indianola.
A teacher wrote, “He came to Indianola with a satchel full of poverty and a burning zeal to know everything.” He came up against many trials, but he met them with the same quiet dignity and grace with which he had met other trials, and, indeed, would continue to meet the rest of his life.
A teacher at Simpson College, Etta M. Budd, a recent graduate at the time, and a perceptive person, helped George get established. She became aware of his skills with plants, recognized his potential, and asked him challenging questions. Since her father was a professor of horticulture at Iowa State Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Ames, she paved the way for his entry there.
During the course of his studies at Ames, which included botany, chemistry, geometry, zoology, bacteriology and entomology, George sometimes awed his teachers—not only with his remarkable fund of information but with his intuitive grasp of theory. All the while, he was supporting himself as a janitor, waiter, greenhouse and laboratory caretaker. He was active in numerous extracurricular activities. He was the official trainer of the athletic teams. There seemed to be magic in his fingers as he massaged the muscles of athletes.
George graduated in 1894. He finally had earned the long-sought Bachelor of Science degree, and graduated near the top of his class. There was an opening for an assistant botanist in the experiment station and George got the job. He began specializing in mycology, that branch of botany dealing with fungus growth. He soon had twenty thousand specimens in his collection. He wrote scientific papers and crisscrossed Iowa lecturing on horticulture and mycology.
It was during this time that George formed a friendship with young Henry Wallace whose father was a professor at the college. This friendship was to last half a century. Long afterwards, U.S. Vice-President Henry Wallace wrote of the influence George had over him. He said that Carver, out of the goodness of his heart, kindled in him an ambition to excel in botany.
In 1896, George received his Master’s degree in Agriculture and Bacterial Botany. It was then that a man named Booker T. Washington, who knew of Carver’s reputation in agriculture and was struggling to keep alive the dream of a black institution in far-away Alabama, wrote the following letter to George:
I cannot offer you money, position or fame. The first two you have. The last, from the place you now occupy, you will no doubt achieve. These things I 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.
Four days later, as he read this letter, George’s heart beat fast. God had revealed his plan for him. Booker T. Washington’s invitation was—to his heart and mind—a summons to duty. “To this end,” he replied in acceptance of Tuskegee’s offer of fifteen hundred dollars annually, “I have been preparing myself for these many years, feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.” In another letter to Mr. Washington, he wrote, “No individual has the right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it. I pray that my work at Tuskegee will become my reason for living.” On October 8th, 1896, Carver left the Midwestern plains and prairies that had brought him to manhood, and arrived via rail in the heart of Dixie, where cotton had ruled for one hundred years. Year after year cotton had drained the good from the soil, producing an ever-smaller yield. Great forests were cut down to make room for more fields for cotton to be grown. Without the protective cover of the trees, the topsoil was washed away. Later, when Carver was counseling an old farmer to try a different crop, he was told, “Son, I know all there is to know about farming. I’ve worn out three farms in my lifetime.” What a challenge it must have been to teach agriculture and bring about reform in the South of those days!
Professor Carver now had thirteen black students. When his boxes of books and materials arrived by freight, they had to remain unpacked in the narrow room assigned him. There was not even space for his precious mycological collection.
Early on Carver told his students they were going to build a laboratory. They went to a school junk heap, and reclaimed old bottles, rusted pans, wire and odd bits of metal. Then they knocked on doors in Tuskegee and scavenged rubbish in back alleys until their resourcefulness paid off. The students watched in amazement as the makeshift laboratory took shape. This is how George Carver started his crusade to remake the South—by using scraps and discards.
He told his students he was not there to contribute to their individual gain; nor was the school. His goal—and the school’s goal—was to lead their people forward. He told them that only service counts. One of his earliest students, who went on to become a lawyer in Oklahoma, later said, “He taught me that the human brain—my brain—held incalculable wealth, and all I had to do to free it was to want to.”
Carver taught his students that there is no richer plant food than the things that are thrown away everyday. He sent them to the woods to bring back buckets of leaf mold to spread on their experimental garden plots. He taught them that legumes—such as cowpeas—had the unique capacity to absorb nitrogen from the air and feed it back to the soil.
To everyone, Carver passed on his “magic formula”, i.e., “Start where you are.” Everywhere he repeated his precept that “a good garden will free you from the plantation store.” He taught them pride in possession of their homes; he taught them how to build sanitary toilets. In all the things he did with his students, he practiced Booker T. Washington’s conviction that “you can’t keep a man in the ditch unless you’re willing to get in with him.”
Carver developed a movable school which became a worldwide institution. It started as a mule-drawn cart in 1906, and by 1918 had evolved into a huge automobile truck—a fully equipped traveling experiment station. People from other counties and communities poured into Tuskegee for assistance in launching their own movable schools. Carver always believed that the movable school had been his most important work. It resulted in a nationwide revolution in soil conservation. Ultimately, the idea spread abroad, and visitors came to Tuskegee from Russia, Poland, China, Japan, India and Africa. When they arrived, they listened with fascination to this lanky professor as he told of his experiences and suggested techniques for adopting them abroad.
In a report to President Booker T. Washington dated January 20th, 1904, Carver summarized his daily activities. In his report, he gave his class schedule, and then added:
In addition to this, I must try—rather imperfectly—to oversee seven industrial classes scattered here and there over the grounds; I must test the seeds, examine all the fertilizer—based upon the examination of the soil of the different plots; I must also personally look after every operation of the experiment station and write up our work, distribute it, and keep in touch with all the experiment stations. I must endeavor to keep the poultry yard straight. In addition to the above, I must daily inspect 104 cows that have been inoculated, looking carefully over the temperature of each one, making comparisons and prescribing whatever is necessary, besides looking after the sickness of other animals.
Not mentioned by Carver in his report was the Bible class he taught. The way in which his Bible class started was accidental. Boys would come to his room in two’s and three’s on Sunday afternoons, and Carver would talk to them about the relationship between science and the Scriptures. He often acted out the roles of Biblical characters. Once, when talking about the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah, he brought his story to a climax by touching off some chemicals in a great cloud of fumes and smoke. The boys leaped to their feet—and probably never forgot the story.
A boy asked him how he could know God. Carver asked him what he was studying. “Electricity.” “Have you ever seen electricity?” George asked. “No.” Carver said, “But when you make the proper contact, when you fulfill the laws of your trade, you can make a bulb light up, can’t you—because electricity is always there. Isn’t that right?” “Yes,” the boy agreed. “Well,” Carver said, “God is always there, too—just waiting for you to make contact. He is all around you, in all the little things you look at, but don’t really see.” And on and on he would go.
The class grew and finally had to be moved to the Carnegie Library. It was a rare week when all three hundred seats were not filled. Carver always stressed to his students that they should give to others—that they must learn to give what they had—their talents, their friendship, a cheering word. It was to students in his Bible classes that Carver related most of the aphorisms for which he is remembered, examples of which follow:
On getting things done: “Back of my workshop, there is a little grove of trees, one has been cut down. It makes a good seat. I have made it a rule to go out and sit on it at four o’clock every morning, and ask the good Lord what I am to do that day. Then I go ahead and do it.” On Nature: “I love to think of Nature as an unlimited broadcasting system through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune Him in.” On opportunity: “There is opportunity enough for anyone prepared to do what the world needs done.”
During his long tenure at Tuskegee (1896-1943), Carver consistently declined a raise in salary. When he died in 1943, he was still earning the $125 per month that Dr. Washington had offered him in 1896. The truth was that Carver had not the slightest regard for money. When he was chided by a fellow teacher for turning down a salary increase, Carver, genuinely baffled, said, “What would I do with more money? I already have all the earth.”
His reputation as a plant doctor spread among the white people. Sometimes his patched sweater and shapeless cap deceived even the best-intentioned white into addressing him as a beggar. A case in point was a lady who had sent for “the Tuskegee man” to see if he could help her ailing peach trees. When she looked up and saw a poor and somber-looking Negro approaching, she asked him if he would like to earn fifty cents cutting her grass. For some reason, Carver was silent. He went to the mower and neatly cut the grass in both front and back yards. Then he knocked on the door and said, “Now, what seems to be the trouble with your peaches, Ma’am?”
At the school, Carver had no identification problem. Next to the college president, he was the most familiar person on campus. His social life was limited because of his total dedication to his work. He paid no attention to the hour of the day, the day of the week, or the season of the year. Other than teaching a Sunday evening Bible class and making an occasional visit to lecture at another college, his work at the laboratory and experiment station filled his life. When a lady noted that he seemed to have a way with children, she told him so and added that he ought to have a family of his own. He smiled and said, “What woman would want a husband forever dropping soil specimens all over her parlor? How could I explain to a wife that I need to go out at four o’clock every morning to talk to the flowers?” Carver knew that his first loyalty must be to his work.
When the boll weevil—which feeds on the cotton plant and then infests it with millions of microscopic eggs—destroyed the cotton fields of the South, the effect was devastating. In 1915, not one farmer out of ten could pay his tax bill in Coffee County, Alabama. Carver advised the farmers to burn their infested cotton, and then plant peanuts. He told them that there is more high-protein nourishment in a pound of peanuts than in a pound of the best beefsteak. He also informed them that the peanut, a legume, would build up their land. But when many farmers took his advice, a glut of peanuts hit the market. They asked, “Who will buy them from me?” Carver had been so engrossed in overcoming the evils of the one-crop system, and promoting the peanut that he had no answer. But he determined that he would have to find answers to this question. How he did it was explained years later to the students at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota[1]:
He told them how he went to his beloved woodlands in the predawn darkness of a morning in October and cried out, “Oh, Mr. Creator, Why did you make the Universe?” Softly he went on with his story: “And the Creator answered me. ‘You want to know too much for that little mind of yours,’ He said. ‘Ask me something more your size.’ “So I said, ‘Dear Mr. Creator, tell me what man was made for.’ “Again He spoke to me, and He said, ‘Little man, you are still asking for more than you can handle. Cut down the extent of your request and improve the intent.’ ” The audience of 1000 boys and girls in the Macalester chapel sat absolutely still. Not a freshman fidgeted or coughed, but all leaned expectantly toward the feeble old man with the magically musical voice. He was bathed in a cone of light, the eternal flower standing plain in his lapel, and the love of God shining even more plainly in his eyes. He stood motionless on the platform, his seamed old man’s face uplifted and rapt with the remembering. “And then I asked my last question. ‘Mr. Creator, why did You make the peanut?’ “’That’s better!’ the Lord said, and He gave me a handful of peanuts and went with me back to the laboratory and, together, we got down to work.”
He pulled on a flour-sack apron and shelled his handful of peanuts, grinding them to fine powder. This he heated then squeezed the mass under a hand press until the oils flowed freely and he had collected a cupful. He studied it long and hard, subjected it to a whole battery of heat and temperature tests, and was heartened by the results. Unlike particles of animal fat, each of which was imprisoned inside a gelatinous membrane, peanut oil would blend with other substances in emulsion and could easily be broken down to margarine, soap, cooking and rubbing oils—even cosmetics!
Exhilarated, he turned to the cake of meal, added water, heated and stirred it, sometimes tasting it and adding a pinch of sugar or salt. When it had cooled and looked like a pitcher of creamy milk, he filled a glass and drank it off. “It is milk!” he said aloud, and grinned back at himself in a chipped looking glass. And it was milk, not produced by any cow, but abundant in precisely the same food values. And a mere handful of peanuts made a whole glassful!
Now the hours fled, the whole day and the night, as he literally tore the peanut apart, isolating its fats and gums and resins and sugars and starches. Spread before him were pentoses, pentosans, legumins, lysin, amido and amino acids, all chemically pried from the remarkable little bundle of vegetable energy called the peanut. Endlessly he tested different combinations under varying degrees of heat and pressures and, miraculously, his hoard of synthetic treasures grew: candy, peanut butter and flour; then ink, dyes, shoe polish, creosote, salve and shaving cream. From the red skin of the nut he fabricated a paper finer than linen. From the hulls he made a soil conditioner, insulating board and fuel briquettes; binding another batch with adhesive, he pressed it, buffed it to a high gloss—and held in his hands a light and weatherproof square that looked precisely like marble and was every bit as hard.
All through the daylight and darkness he worked and for another day and another night, huddled over his single lamp in the surrounding gloom, dismissing the worried students who tapped at his door—“Are you all right, Dr. Carver?”—with a curt, “Yes! Yes! Please let me be.” He left the laboratory only to fetch more peanuts and occasionally, absent-mindedly, threw some in his mouth for nourishment.
But the truth was now his strength came from within. He felt himself to be in God’s hands, the mortal instrument of a divine revelation. [Note: This story is somewhat reminiscent of Handel’s experience when he composed the oratorio, “Messiah” at breakneck speed (and hardly eating) for twenty-three consecutive days.]
Years later, Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman would laud Carver as a seer, as well as a doer: “His vision built opportunities and new industries out of the soil, and he inspired researchers to look for buried treasures in farm commodities.” None of these lofty considerations even occurred to George Carver on that October night in 1915 when he finally sagged back on his workbench, gray and trembling with fatigue. He knew only that with God’s guidance he might have made it so that men could use every peanut harvested throughout the land. And if the peanut crop doubled or even tripled—as it was to do in a scant four years—then still every farmer would find a ready buyer in the marketplace. Wearily he stumbled to his feet and walked out into the chill sunrise to offer his devout thanks.
In the years ahead, he kept adding to the remarkable roll of products made from the little peanut. By the time he died there were well over 300, and scores of factories had been built to make them, and their range staggers the mind. The peanut, Carver showed, could provide virtually everything man needed to sustain life.
On January 21, 1921, Carver was testifying before the Ways and Means Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives concerning agricultural products. For nearly two hours, Carver held the Committee spellbound with his display of peanut products. There seemed to be no end to the astonishing list of things Carver could do with a handful of peanuts.
Carver continually put the needs of others ahead of his own. There have always been those who are militant in the fight for racial equality. Carver did not perceive this to be his calling. He once said, “If I used my energy struggling to right every wrong done to me, I would have no energy left for my work.”
Gradually his body began to wear out. He remained alert to the end. He never stopped reading the almost worn out Bible Moriah Watkins had given him at Christmas many years before. He died quietly in his sleep at twilight on January 5th, 1943. He was buried beside his friend, Booker T. Washington. The funeral text of the chaplain of Tuskegee Institute was: “For God So Loved the World.” Carver’s epitaph was, “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.”
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