George Washington

George Washington Carver captured the imagination of the American people. The romance of his life story and the eccentricities of his personality led to his metamorphosis into a kind of folk saint both in his lifetime and after. He was readily appropriated by many diverse groups as a symbol for myriad causes. To Southern businessmen Carver was an incarnation of the New South philosophy. Religious leaders embraced the scientist's proclaimed reliance upon God as an inspirational source in an age of materialism. Those struggling through the depression saw Carver as a living Horatio Alger whose story offered hope to those who tried hard enough.

Separating the real George Washington Carver from the symbolic portrayals of his life is difficult. Reality and mythology became blurred even within Carver's own mind, and his life did have mythic qualities. Yet Carver was more than a folk saint; he was a real person, with all the complexities and contradictions inherent in human nature, and these were exaggerated by the fact that he was black in a white America. In the end he won international fame for his efforts to find commercial uses for Southern resources and was proclaimed one of the world's greatest chemists. For a variety of reasons both the value of his discoveries and the significance of his role in revolutionizing the Southern economy were considerably inflated.

Had Carver been white, his choice of careers would probably have been different. If he had placed his personal desires above his sense of responsibility toward his fellow blacks, he most likely would have become either an artist or a botanist engaged in plant breeding or mycological research. When he accepted Booker T. Washington's offer to come to Tuskegee Institute in 1896, he unknowingly sacrificed these career alternatives but opened the door to his eventual fame.

For almost twenty years, however, Carver remained in the shadow of Washington at Tuskegee, devoting his life to a career of agricultural research and education. When Washington died in November 1915, Carver was in his fifties and had already made many of his significant contributions, but he was still largely unknown and dissatisfied with his life. To some degree this sense of failure was what propelled Carver toward the role of "creative chemist" and international fame after Washington's death.

Hence George Washington Carver's early life - how he had managed to climb out of slavery - became useful to those groups that eventually appropriated his story as confirmation of their own contention that blacks who were prepared to pay the price were not unduly deprived of opportunity.

The leading myth-maker in those years, supplying the public with portraits of Afro-Americans who succeeded despite the obstacles they faced, was Booker T. Washington, who wrote the first widely published account of Carver's childhood for his 1911 book, My Larger Education. Apparently more interested in using Carver's story to make particular points about the innate abilities of blacks and the value of hard work than in documenting the actual circumstances of Carver's early years, Washington wrote of Carver's childhood in the same directed prose that he had so successfully employed in his own biography, Up From Slavery. He noted that Carver "was born on the plantation of a Mr. Carver" and "was allowed to grow up among the chickens and other animals around the servants' quarters, getting his living as best he could." The impression was one of benign neglect by the master of a large plantation.

Several of Washington's complaints concerned externals that affected Tuskegee's public image. For example, he rebuked Carver for not seeing that the agricultural machinery was put away. This practice could harm the implements, but Washington seemed more concerned that it appeared "like the common country people." Washington noted that the weakness of the signs was "especially noticeable" the day of the governor's visit.