NEGRO SCIENTIST’S REMARKABLE WORK

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 242, 9 July 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

NEGRO SCIENTIST’S REMARKABLE WORK

Claims He Is Guided By God

George Washington Carver, of Tuskegee, Alabama, does not know his exact age, does not know his family name. But Dr. George W. Carver, great—perhaps greatest—scientist of the negro race, agricultural chemist, poet, mystic, philosopher, cook, painter, needlework artist and pianist, knows one thing for sure. Asked how he arrived at his countless scientific discoveries, he said: “I never grope for methods. The method is revealed at the moment I am inspired to create something new.” Among his revealed inspirations he can count 145 products of the peanut, 107' products of the sweet potato, no end of dyes from the clays and soils of the south, as well as paint, wood stains and insulating board from the root of the palmetto plant, writes Berwin Kaiser..

It must have been some time around the close of the Civil War that a negro baby—not yet .named Carver—was abducted from a one-room shanty on a Missouri plantation. The earliest thing he remembers is that his. captors sold his family down the rifrer in Arkansas. But a German farmer, Moses Carver, liked the boy and traded a 300-dollar racehorse for him. He named him "George Washington” because he was honest and industrious. Somebody else gave him a book—“ Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book.” At 10 he started walking eight miles to and from school. And the rest of his learning he got from the fields and the woods. “I lived in the woods. I wanted to know everything, every strange stone, flower, insect, bird or beast” Now nearing SO, he still goes into the woods 365 days a year, at four o’clock in the morning, and still gets his learning there. “I gather specimens and listen to what God has to say to me. After I’ve had my morning’s talk with God, I go to my laboratory and begin to carry out His wishes for the day.” The Carver method may not make scientific sense—but the Carver results do. The south has a 60,000,000 dollars peanut industry largely because of him. It sees tests of “cotton” roads being made in several States, based on’a Carver idea of using cotton to reinforce asphalt It has a sweet potato starch plant in operation in Laurel, Mississippi, thanks to him. His assistants at Tuskegee are proud, and sometimes bitter, that whenever

he discovers something, he immediately gives the idea away. “Mankind,” be comments, “is being benefited, and that is the purpose for which my work is intended.” •

interest in peanuts goes back to the closing years of the last cent'.ry when Booker T. Washington, who had heard of the well-trained and able agricultural chemist teaching at lowa State University, asked him to come to Tuskegee. (Carver had put himself through Simpson Collage, at Indi an .‘la, lowa, by opening a laundry). At Tuskegee they gave him the problem of the destitute southern farmers. Carver tajught them crop rotation to contoat the boll weevil. He told them to plant peanuts because he knew that peanuts put vital stuff .back into the soil. One grower who followed his advice soon found himself with thousands of acres of peanuts. What on earth could you do with peanuts but. roast them and eat them or feed them to the bogs? So he asked Carver what he was supposed to do next “I went back to my laboratory,” the doctor recalls, “took the great Creator in with me and set to -work to find but what to do with his peanuts after they were grown.” Eventually he found scores of uses. Like Scientist Einstein, Scientist Carver is two kinds of man. F.'iistein has his violin; Carver likes to play the piano and once, in his young days, toured as a concert pianist He likes to paint—on paper he has made from his peanuts, in frames he has fashioned from material derived from corn husks. He cooks, too, and has a book of some 100 of his own recipes. He has taken prizes with his needlework. Once a fellow scientist named Thomas A. Edison wanted Carver to join with him at Menlo Park. Carver’s reply was brief, courteous, positive: . . work among my own people, God said.” But Dr. Carver treasured Edison’s letter —and quietly went on working. Such is Dr. George Washington Carver, once sold down the river into Arkansas, now member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, director of the Agricultural Research and Experiment Station at Tuskegee—the man who once asked: “God, what is a peanut?” and then became the means of expanding the peanut business into a 60,000,000 dollars industry.