Rehashed and revised from this 2014 item on his 150th birthday.
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By most calculations, George Carver was born in January 1864 near Joplin. He was born in the last year of official slavery to a mother owned by a German farmer named Moses Carver. Soon after George was born his family was stolen and held for ransom by outlaws; Moses Carver paid to get them back. After emancipation George’s mother went elsewhere and Moses raised George and brother James as his own kids. From the start George was a man on a mission. Moses recognized that George had a unique talent for plants so he was put in charge of the kitchen garden instead of plowing and harvesting. He immediately started improving the plant breeds. Later he seemed to have a talent for finding the right people and places to help with his mission, and steering around people who wanted to obstruct his path.
He moved to Kansas, which was more open for ex-slaves; attended Highland College near St Joe, then headed west into Ness County to homestead. He wasn’t interested in plain farming; he set up experimental plots on his acreage and began breeding and hybridizing crops.
Later he finished a college degree at Tuskegee and became a teacher there. His mission continued. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Improve the crops that Southerners, and especially black Southerners, could offer to the world. Improve farming methods to make labor more efficient.
Carver was the exact opposite of modern activists who force the world to accept their people as aristocrats. When the world has to accept you and reward you for everything, your worst impulses and worst performance quickly come to the surface. An aristocracy always degenerates. It’s human nature.
A brief passage from a routine report on a routine experiment in a USDA bulletin shows how Carver’s mission informed everything he did:
Beyond his massive opus of valuable work, Carver left us one huge quote (which I’ve already noted and used in the top icon). The most perfect and complete definition of science.
Look about you.
Take hold of the things that are here.
Let them talk to you.
Talk to them.
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The Carver / Booker T approach was meant to make American blacks more prosperous by using their special talents and training, mainly in agriculture. Prosperity is good in itself, and it would also make blacks indispensable to the overall economy. The agricultural approach might have worked, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Henry Ford unexpectedly came along and opened industrial work to blacks. Model T replaced Booker T. Henry understood that they were working toward the same goal in different ways, and in 1940 he paid George to develop a soybean-based plastic.
In the ’60s the black activists (Jackson, Sharpton et al) opened a new and false horizon, replacing economic power by political power. Since then our industries have been destroyed by the other side of the Gramscian pincer, so there’s only a very limited industrial path to prosperity for blacks or whites. Political power and financial power are the only pieces still on the board.
Polistra's Mill 