5 January: Boreham on George Carver

Black Face, Green Fingers
Americans of the days of Lincoln or Garfield, would have thrown up their hands in pious horror, and stared at each other in speechless consternation, if some audacious prophet had foretold that, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Government of the United States would, almost simultaneously, honour a pair of negroes by issuing postage stamps bearing their images and superscriptions. In one way, Booker T. Washington and George W. Carver were as much alike as peas in a pod: in another way they differed as sharply as chalk differs from cheese. Both were born in slavery. As a sickly baby, George Carver and his mother were stolen from their owner's estate by a gang of ruthless raiders. Pursued, the bandits were induced, in exchange for a worn-out race horse, to restore the baby, more of a liability than an asset to them, but the mother was never seen again.

Neither Washington nor Carver—the men immortalised on the postage stamps—ever saw their fathers; slaves seldom did. In both cases, the names that they bore were pure inventions. The two were alike also, in their profound conviction, reached quite independently, that their kith and kin were heading for stark tragedy unless, by careful education and vocational training, they could be fitted for the freedom that they were destined to enjoy. And eventually the two men became associated on the faculty of the great university at Tuskegee that Booker Washington had established for the uplift and equipment of his people. Yet, whilst Washington was massive and muscular, Carver was a weedy, wizened wisp of a man who looked as if a puff of wind would blow him away. As a child he was puny; as a youth he was scraggy and undersized, and, in maturity, there was much in his appearance and demeanour to invite derision and contempt. Whilst Booker Washington looked a born commander, there was nothing in the slight, shabby, and shambling figure of Carver to convey the impression that he was one of earth's mightiest intellects, a natural master of men.

Ears That Caught Nature's Whisper
Waif as he was, Carver early betrayed a singularly sensitive and hungry mind. Wandering about the country in quest of any odd job that would provide some sort of sustenance and shelter, he walked every highway with wondering eyes wide open. At one farmhouse, in which he was left for an hour or two by himself, his curiosity prompted him to poke about in the big empty rooms. Suddenly he came on a gallery of family portraits. He had never before seen a painting. The glorious vision took his breath away. He felt that a man who could do such work must have been made in the image of God. To produce such treasures was to become a subsidiary Creator. He resolved to apply himself to the superb adventure. From that time his palette became the delight and the solace of his life. But the sensational discovery of those early days was the discovery that, though he had a black face, he possessed green fingers. An inexplicable magic slept in his touch. He had but to tickle the most sterile plot and it laughed with abounding fertility. He seemed instinctively to understand plants and seedlings of every kind; and, in some occult and mysterious way they seemed to understand him. He knew, as if the earth had confided to him her secrets, exactly what kind of soil each separate growth required, and as soon as he picked up a handful of loam and sifted it through his fingers, he sensed what crop should be entrusted to it. His intuition in such matters was positively uncanny. By tireless industry and severe frugality, he earned the money that would open to him the college gates. As a student, and, later, as a teacher, his genius astonished everybody. And then, he was, in 1916, appointed Professor of Agriculture at Tuskegee.

Secrets Of The Soil The Salvation Of Men
His golden hour struck when the southern planters found themselves in dire distress with their cotton crops. The fact was, of course, that the soil was sick of cotton. It had produced cotton, cotton, cotton, year after year, until, in accordance with a well known principle of agriculture, it revolted against the sickening monotony of the task imposed upon it. Carver advised the planters to change from cotton to peanuts, or, at least, to grow the two crops in rotation. Revering as gospel every word that fell from his lips, they soon produced such prodigious quantities of peanuts that the market was glutted and the growers were faced by ruin. Hurrying to his laboratory, Dr. Carver discovered 300 uses, varying from linoleum to cosmetics, to which the peanuts could be put. Thus he not only saved the cottonfields, but enormously augmented the industrial activities of his country. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other magnates offered him princely salaries to join their organisations; but money made no appeal to him.

Moulded by a faith that was as simple and as strong as a granite pillar, Carver's life stood attuned to the lovely spirituelles and lilting melodies for which his dusky race is famous. His Bible was his constant companion. He used to say that the transformation of the plantations began on the day on which, falling upon his knees, he asked God to tell him why He had created the peanut. Nature seemed eager to pour her secrets into his attentive ear. His favourite quotation was Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall":

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower, but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Commanding the admiration of millions who never looked into his twinkling hazel eyes, Carver was loved with an almost passionate devotion by those associated with him. He died on January 5, 1943, and was laid to rest in the grassy plot where he and Booker Washington now slumber side by side.

F W Boreham

Image: George W Carver