George Washington Carver: The Making of a Myth

Abstract

I N SCIENCE AS IN OTHER FIELDS OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR ABLE AND accomplished black Americans usually found recognition slow in coming and meager when it came. The careers of biologist Ernest Everett Just and entomologist Charles Henry Turner exemplified this tendency, and their names remain anything but household words. George Washington Carver, on the other hand, became a legend in his own lifetime, with a popular reputation far transcending the significance of his accomplishments. His agricultural education and extension work at Tuskegee Institute in behalf of rural southern blacks was praiseworthy but unspectacular in nature and impact. The uses for soils and plants he developed or advocated were not of pioneering importance in science, nor were they widely adopted. Yet he was acclaimed a scientific genius for discovering hundreds of valuable applications for peanuts and sweet potatoes and for revolutionizing the southern economy. In reality, his legendary reputation depended less on these supposed achievements than on his psychological and social utility to both whites and blacks. From his Missouri childhood on the farm of Moses Carver, his owner until emancipation, George Carver had a special affinity for plants. Day after day I spent in the woods alone in order to collect my floral beauti[e]s and put them in my little garden , he later wrote. . strange to say all sorts of vegetation seemed to thrive under my touch until I was styled the plant doctor, and plants from all over the country would be brought to me for treatment. What he called his inordinate desire for knowledge extended to music and painting as well as the sciences.' After varied experiences, including a try at homesteading in Kansas, he attended Simpson College and worked his way to a bachelor of science degree from