After finishing John Perry's George Washington Carver I took a few days to collect my thoughts on it before writing a review. As it happened, during that time I read a short essay by William F. Buckley, Jr. that included this aside: "it helps to think about peanut butter when you need moral strength." Though the essay was mostly a winking ode to peanut butter, what had inspired it was the 100th anniversary of the Tuskegee Institute in 1981, and Buckley began and ended his essay with praise for Carver. Whether or not Buckley meant his comment about the moral inspiration of peanut butter as a joke, it was more appropriate to Carver's life and legacy than he knew.
Carver, as Perry abundantly illustrates, showed great moral courage and fortitude throughout his long and productive life. As an infant, he and his mother, a slave on the Carver farm, were kidnapped by raiders in the cruel border warfare of Civil War Missouri. Their owner, a Mr. Carver (whose surname George Washington Carver adopted when he entered school), joined forces with a local Union scout and tracked the raiders, discovering George abandoned in a cabin. His mother was never seen again.
Perry outlines the course of Carver's life vividly and paces it well, never allowing the narrative to slow or become boring. He describes Carver's youth on the Carver farm, the challenges he faced as a sickly boy whose body was so ravaged by illness that his voice never matured, and as an intellectually and artistically gifted young man who wandered the frontiers seeking education and working hard to pay for it. Moving for much of his young life among whites, Carver eventually accepted a position at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama offered personally by Booker T. Washington. He taught and worked there the rest of his life.
Carver was a devout and even saintly man, but he was not perfect, and Perry does not try to depict him as such. He details Carver's deep, sometimes irritating needs for praise and attention, and his worsening attention to his teaching duties at Tuskegee. Perry also describes the sometimes difficult friendship Carver had with Washington, who had very specific ideas about how Carver's department should run, ideas that Carver disliked and often ignored. But Perry tempers these details with the fact that Carver got things done. Perry details Carver's numerous achievements at the Institute, including agricultural bulletins distributed all over the US and even translated for use in other countries, and of course the numerous uses Carver found for sweet potatoes and peanuts, crops that were less taxing on the depleted soil of the former Deep South cotton belt.
Throughout, Perry illustrates the tensions caused when others honored Carver's achievements or sought his expertise. America, he shows, was willing to accept the expertise of a man of Carver's genius but were unwilling to accommodate a man of his race. On trains, Carver was sometimes denied first class seating for which he or a benefactor had paid extra; testifying to a Congressional committee on agriculture, he was subjected to racist jokes from a Connecticut congressman; and as an elderly man, he was denied a room in a posh New York hotel until the publisher of his biography intervened. Carver's response was always gracious. He sided with Washington in the racial conflicts of that time, believing that black Americans could accomplish more by showing themselves equals rather than demanding equality.
I was surprised by two things in Perry's book. The first was that, even in segregated Jim Crow America and in the conflicts within the civil rights movement, everyone who met Carver liked him. Figures like W.E.B. Du Bois were notoriously antagonistic to Washington, but went out of their way to praise Carver as a man of science and an inspiration to others. Given ten minutes to discuss peanuts with the aforementioned congressional committee, Carver asked for and was gladly given extra time until he had spent nearly two hours with them. The second thing that surprised me was that science and agriculture were not Carver's first loves--those were music and art.
In retrospect, it's unsurprising that Carver should have aspired to be an artist. Perry shows that Carver brought an artist's love to every project he undertook. Carver believed that science was a great means to understanding more about God, and few have pursued science and truth with more relish than Carver. "I know that science is truth," Perry quotes Carver as saying. "Jesus said, 'Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth will set you free.' It seems to me that he meant, 'You shall know science and science shall make you free'" (p. 95).
Perry's book is an inspiring story, one that should encourage its readers to use their God-given talents--and especially their intellects--for his glory.
Highly recommended.
