George Washington Carver

Scientist

• Born: July 12, 1861(?)
• Birthplace: Near Diamond Grove (now Diamond), Missouri
• Died: January 5, 1943
• Place of death: Tuskegee, Alabama

Scientist, inventor, and educator

Best known for the many products that he derived from the peanut, soybean, and other crops, Carver also helped to revive southern agriculture devastated by decades of overfarming and to advance African American education.

Areas of achievement: Business; Education; Invention; Science and technology

Early Life

George Washington Carver was born a slave sometime shortly before or during the Civil War; considerable uncertainty exists about his early years. His mother, Mary, was an African American slave who had earlier given birth to another son, Jim; both boys took the last name of their owners, Moses and Susan Carver. Carver said that his father was a slave on a neighboring plantation who died in a log-rolling accident. Moses Carver’s Union sympathies led to tragedy when Confederate raiders kidnapped Mary and George from his farm and took them to Arkansas. Moses was eventually able to find George and barter a horse for the boy, but he was never able to discover Mary’s fate. When the Civil War ended, Moses and Susan Carver legally adopted Mary’s two sons. The brothers formed a contrasting pair, Jim hearty and healthy, Carver frail and sickly. Some scholars have attributed Carver’s lifelong health problems and high-pitched voice to castration during his captivity. Carter exhibited reluctance to discuss his early life, although he did explain that a disastrous event in his past prevented his ever marrying.

Carver’s vulnerable constitution suited him for household tasks rather than field work, but he did exhibit an early fascination with garden plants, and his skill at nursing sickly plants to health earned him the nickname “plant doctor.” Significant changes in his life occurred when he was ten years old. He became a Christian and began attending a school for African American children in Neosho, where he did chores for a black family in exchange for room and board. He continued as a part-time student and laborer, traveling first to Fort Scott, then to Olathe, and finally to Minneapolis, Kansas, where he worked and attended high school for four years. Eager for a college education, he applied to and was accepted by a Presbyterian college in Highland, Kansas, but his hopes were crushed when, upon arrival, he discovered that the college excluded African Americans.

After failed attempts at farming on the Kansas frontier, Carver traveled to Iowa, where he became the first African American student at Simpson College. Here he found encouraging mentors for his interests in art and botany, and his successes led to his transfer to Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University), where he worked in the college’s greenhouse and agricultural laboratory to pay his college costs. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1894, becoming the college’s first African American graduate, and stayed on to obtain his master’s degree. His graduate research bore fruit; for example, he found a new fungus that was later named after him.

Life’s Work

Having learned of Carver’s successes, Booker T. Washington, an African American educational leader who had founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes in Alabama, believed that he would be the ideal person to head his school’s recently established department of agriculture. Carver accepted Washington’s invitation and spent the next forty-seven years of his life at the institution. Carver faced daunting challenges when he arrived at Tuskegee in 1896. Facilities and funding were inadequate, and he had a heavy teaching load, which meant that he was not able to devote as much time to research as he would have liked. Nevertheless, through hard work and inventiveness, he was able to create a program well suited to producing excellent graduates and important research. For example, he trained students to construct their own laboratory equipment, and he lobbied state officials to pass a special bill in support of an agriculture facility at Tuskegee.

As director of this Agricultural Experiment Station, Carver was able to show how struggling southern agriculture could be revived. Decades of constantly growing cotton and tobacco had depleted the soil of its basic nutrients, but Carver showed how crop diversification, crop rotation, and the cultivation of such legumes as peanuts, soybeans, peas, beans, and alfalfa could serve the dual purpose of enriching exhausted soil and providing poor families and their farm animals with protein-rich foods. Through his bulletins, newsletters, and other popular publications, he was able to convince farmers to alternate plantings of cotton and peanuts, and they witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of their harvests. However, their successes soon resulted in saturated markets and reduced prices for peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. This stimulated Carver to find ways to expand markets for these crops.

During this period, Carver came into conflict with his colleagues and Washington over his neglect of administrative duties and his cavalier treatment of department budgets. Washington relieved him of his director’s post at Tuskegee in 1910. This event gave Carver much more time to develop derivatives from various food products. Over the next thirty years, he became famous for the many products he derived from peanuts, including beverages, cheeses, dyes, inks, paints, plastics, cosmetics, and medicinal oils. He eschewed publishing his discoveries in scientific or technical journals, preferring to publicize his recipes in periodicals accessible to farmers and housewives. He also exhibited his products at state fairs.

Carver’s life changed dramatically with the death of Washington in 1915 and the installation of Robert Moton as his successor. Moton excused Carver from all classroom obligations and encouraged him to devote himself fully to agricultural research. By this time Carver’s discoveries had become sufficiently well known that he was elected the first African American member of the Royal Society of London. He studied soil and how to make it more fertile, but he devoted most of his energies to creating a wide variety of products from peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, beans, pecans, cotton, cowpeas, and plums. Carver rarely patented his discoveries or subjected them to peer review; he favored making his recipes and products freely available to all who might benefit from them. At a hearing before a congressional committee in 1921, he exhibited the flour, dyes, milk, and cheeses that he had made from peanuts in order to persuade lawmakers to pass a bill instituting a protective tariff on imported peanuts. His fame as the “peanut man” led to job offers; for example, Thomas Alva Edison, another trial-and-error inventor, wanted Carver to work for him, but Carver decided to remain at Tuskegee.

In 1923, Carver formed the Carver Products Company to develop processes for manufacturing foods, dyes, stains, and paints from clays and crops for sale to other companies, but this enterprise failed, as did the Carver Penol Company a few years later. These commercial ventures did lead to Carver’s only patents for his discoveries. Despite these disappointments, Carver was successful as a consultant to several companies who made use of his expertise on plant products. In the 1930’s, he participated in the chemurgy movement, which focused on the development of commercial chemicals from agricultural products. In 1937, he met Henry Ford at a chemurgy conference and they became friends. Indeed, Ford considered Carver the patron saint of the movement. Even with his growing fame and influence, Carver found that his work at Tuskegee suffered because of the lack of funding brought on by the Depression. Although his health began to decline, he was able to accept many awards that came his way, and he established a foundation to continue his work at Tuskegee. When he died from anemia early in 1943, the Tuskegee Institute received numerous messages of condolence from all over the world.

Significance

Estimates of Carver’s significance have varied in the decades since his death. The recipient of many awards during his lifetime for the many ways he improved southern agriculture, Carver continued to be honored after his death. His Missouri birthplace was made into a national monument, and he was the first African American scientist commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp. A nuclear-powered submarine was named in his honor, and in 1990, he became a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Many hagiographical biographies have been published, particularly for young people. Carver became revered as a saintly scientist and inventor who used his knowledge to improve the lives of poor farmers. On the other hand, revisionist scholars have noted discrepancies between these idealized portraits and the harsh realities of Carver’s life and work. His refusal to publish in refereed scientific journals or attend scientific meetings meant that his claims of discoveries and inventions largely escaped scientific scrutiny. When scholars gained access to his records, they found that many of his recipes and inventions derived from the work of others. Hence, his claims to hundreds of by-products derived from various crops have been drastically reduced. Nevertheless, his importance to the field of agriculture has been reemphasized, particularly his environmental philosophy that humans constitute an inextricable part of the community of living things, necessitating the wise and respectful use of the land and its plants.

Bibliography

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West. The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country. New York: Free Press, 2000. Analyzes Carver’s work as important to both African American and American history. Bibliography and index.

Holt, Rackham. George Washington Carver: An American Biography. Rev. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. Carver handpicked Holt to write his authorized biography, and this book profits from the author’s interviews with Carver, his friends, and colleagues. Bibliography and index.

Kremer, Gary R., ed. George Washington Carver: In His Own Words. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. A collection of important and interesting letters and speeches by Carver. Bibliography.

Mackintosh, Barry. “George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth.” Journal of Southern History 42, no. 4 (November, 1976): 507-528. An early example of a revisionist account of Carver’s life and work. Primary and secondary references.

McMurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. A revisionist biography that attempts, by using primary sources, to separate the man and scientist from various myths and idealizations. Detailed notes and index.