"When people think of Carver, they think of his science, or think that he invented peanuts," said Curtis Gregory, a park manager at Carver's birthplace in Diamond, Missouri. "Humans still have many things."
Mark Hirsch, a history professor at Mississippi State University and the author of Carver's environmental biography, said, "Carver is famous for something he shouldn't be, and this reputation masks the reason why we should remember him." In Hersey's view, Carver's contribution to the environmental movement, including his advanced thoughts on self-sufficiency and sustainable development, is far more important than his "stove chemistry".
Nevertheless, Carver is ridiculously famous for his peanut works, and may be the most famous black man in America for a while. .....1943, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, he commented on his death: "The scientific community has lost one of its most outstanding figures," he said.
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Carver was born in rural western Missouri. He was orphaned as a child and was freed shortly after the Civil War. In his twenties, Carver moved to Iowa, where he met a white couple and encouraged him to continue his higher education. Carver's education before this was basically fragmented and self-taught; At Simpson College in central Iowa, he studied art until his teacher encouraged him to study botany at Iowa Agricultural College. There, he became the first African-American student in the school.
Founded in 1858, Iowa State Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) is the first land-granting university in the country. The mission of a number of schools is not only to teach liberal arts, but also to teach applied science including agriculture. There, students study soil, entomology, analysis and agricultural chemistry, practical agriculture, gardens and rural architecture, as well as algebra, bookkeeping, geography and psychology.
1896 When he graduated from Iowa, Carver received a lot of teaching invitations. The most attractive person is booker T Washington, the first leader of Taskey Ji College, which is opening an agricultural school. As the first black American to receive postgraduate training in modern agricultural methods, Carver is a reasonable choice for this role. He accepted this and wrote: "It is a great ideal of my life to do my best for as many' my people' as possible. For this reason, I have been preparing for myself for many years; I think this road of education is the key to our people's freedom, but Carver's heart sank when he took the train to Alabama. In a broadcast in 194 1 year, he recalled: "My train left the golden wheat fields and high green corn fields in Iowa and headed for several acres of cotton fields, with nothing but cotton. . . Furry cotton grows close to the hatch; A few lonely collars are the only signs of vegetables; Stunted cattle and bony mules; Fields and hillsides are cracked, full of ravines and deep ruts. . . There is not much evidence of scientific farming anywhere. Everything looks hungry: land, cotton, livestock and people.
Carver's understanding is that although cotton is profitable, it does not add anything to the soil. This is not the most demanding crop, but its shallow roots and monoculture practice mean that the soil loses faster from cotton fields than from the earth. (Carver will later describe the eroded gullies in Taskey Ji campus, which are deep enough for people to stand in. ) How to use it, peanut ice cream and even peanut coffee. He applied for the patent of peanut butter-based cream, and invented peanut-based shampoo, dyes and pigments, and even "peanut nitroglycerin" which sounded scary.
However, this figure may be a bit exaggerated. Historians Barry McIntosh 1977 wrote in the American Heritage magazine that among about 300 uses of peanuts (287 are provided by the Carver Museum in Taskey), Carver described in detail that "many … are obviously not original", such as the formula of salted peanuts, when peanut farmer Jimmy Carter was elected president. He may also have obtained other information from contemporary cooking books or magazines; At the beginning of "How to Grow Peanuts and 105 Ways for Human Consumption", Carver was very grateful for the help from more than 20 sources, including good housekeeper, Montgomery advertising company, Wallace farmers and other magazines, newspapers and cookbooks.
Carver, however, has no illusions about his work. He doesn't want to create the "best" products, or even completely original products, because he creates few products, but only spreads information and formulas, which can be made by poor farmers with few tools or resources, Gregory said.
Carver's student john sutton1919 years or so worked with him in his laboratory. He recalled:
I was injured when I couldn't find a "real" scientist in him. . . . I should have known that he showed me again and again that he was mainly an artist who created good things. . . Something unnatural. He knows that he is not a so-called "real chemist" or even a person engaged in applied chemistry research. He once jokingly said to me, "You and I are' stove chemists', but we dare not admit it, because it will damage the publicity about me and my research released by Dr. Morton (booker T Washington's successor) and his assistant in the press release.
Carver's extensive contact with peanuts is in many ways due to his explosive testimony in support of peanut tariffs in Congress. 192 1 year, the us house of representatives fundraising Committee asked carver to testify about the proposed tariff on imported peanuts. Hirsch expected an uneducated remote forester, who was blown away by the whispering scientist.
"He has made thousands of public speeches on this point," Hersey said. "He can cope with everything. [Congress] was joking about watermelon, but they didn't say anything he didn't hear at the Georgia Expo. "The tariff on imported peanuts was stuck. In Hersey's words, Carver became a rock star."
It is a photo print of the chemical laboratory of Taskey Ji Institute. Francis benjamin Johnston (Global Historical Archives) took photos in his later years. A visitor asked Carver if he believed his peanut works were his greatest works. "No," he replied, "but it is more distinctive than my other works."
So what is his work? Hersey believes that this is a way to think about the environment as a whole, and it is also an understanding of the interrelationship between land health and people's health living on land long before it enters the mainstream thinking. Hersey said: "His movement is to make you turn a blind eye to the world around you. In Carver's words, it is to understand the interdependence between animals, plants and mineral kingdoms. But even today, this is not enough to produce good sound effects. "
The use effect of Carver is not as attractive as that of 300 kinds of peanuts, but a few years before the environmental movement began, Twitty told the Tribune, "Carver knows the value of working on the land, being with the land and working with each other."