SLAVE to MAGICIAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 187, 22 January 1943, Page 5

SLAVE to MAGICIAN

(Written for "The Listener’ by

J.S.

KELLY

TRULY marvellous life hisA tory lay behind the recent announcement in a_ brief cable message of the death of Dr. George Washington Carver, the celebrated negro scientist, and wizard in chemistry. Born a slave on.the farm of Moses Carver, near Diamond Grove, Missouri, he never knew his father or mother and began life without a name, the Carvers bestowing their name on him. He never knew when he was born; in \1937 he estimated that he was more than 70. When he was six months old, night riders cartied him and his mother away and no one ever knew what became of his mother. The child was restored to his owner in exchange for a broken-down racehorse. His captors had neglected him and when Moses Carver’s men found him he had developed whooping cough and was dying. The Carvers nursed him back to life. As a youth he was frail and under-sized; he did household work and became an excellent cook and learned to mend clothes. Paid for His Own Education By odd jobs and latterly as the owner of a small laundry he earned the money to pay for his education, including his courses at college. He took his degree in agriculture at the Iowa State College and the authorities were so impressed with his work that they appointed him to the college faculty. Booker T. Washington, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, the negro organisation for higher and professional education, invited Carver to join the staff of the institute and he accepted, seeing a great opportunity to serve his own people. The cotton lands were becoming exhausted because of failure to rotate crops, and Carver became a strong advocate of growing other more profitable crops, especially peanuts and sweet potatoes. As a result of that advocacy, farmers increased their acreage of those crops, and then, suddenly and sadly, Carver awoke to the fact that supply had been increased without increasing the demand. The crops were rotting and the farmers who had planted them were losing money. Carver spent days and nights in his laboratory seeking new uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes, and as each product was perfected he gave it freely to the world, asking only that it be used for the benefit of mankind. Chemical Wonders From the peanut ‘he made nearly 300 useful products-including cheese, candies, instant coffee, pickles, oils, shaving lotion, dyes, lard, linoleum, flour, breakfast foods, soap, face powder, shampoo, printer’s ink, and even axle grease. From the sweet potato he made more than 100 products, among them starch, library paste, vinegar, shoe blacking, ink, dyes, and molasses. From wood shavings he made synthetic marble; from the muck of swamps and the leaves of the forest floor, fertilizers; and from cow dung, paint. Carver did more than any

other man to rehabilitate agriculture in the southern states, experts say. Dr. Carver’s versatility was shown by his skill in painting flowers; he painted them on paper made from peanut shells, and the frames for his pictures he made out of maize husks. His paintings have been exhibited at world fairs, and one is, or was, in the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris. He wove gorgeous rugs with fibres made from cotton stalks. He was a skilled musician and once toured the United States Middle West as a concert pianist. Secret of his Success The secret of Dr. Carver’s success was summed up in what he told his students: "When you do the common things of life in an uncommon way you command the attention of the world." Asked by J. S. Childers, the author of an article in the American Magazine from which these particulars have been gleaned, how he found time for all his accomplishments, Dr. Carver replied: "Chiefly because I have made it a rule to get up every morning at four o’clock, I go out into the woods. Alone there with the things I love most, I gather specimens and study the great lessons that Nature is eager to teach me. In the woods each morning, while most persons are sleeping, I best hear and understand God’s plans for me." Money meant nothing to Dr. Carver. They tried, unsuccessfully, to lure him away from the Tuskegee Institute by offering him a salary of 100,000 dollars; Edison fared no better when he asked Dr, Carver to come to his laboratory and work with him; and when peanut-growers in Florida offered him 100 dollars a month as a retainer after he had told them how to combat disease which had attacked their crops, he declined, saying "that God did not charge anything for growing the peanut and he shouldn’t ‘charge anything for curing it." Childers wrote: No one can adequately seport the strange feeling of spiritual betterment that one feels when Dr, Carver, with his humble smile, places his trembling hands on your shoulders and says: "Good-bye, my boy, and may God bless you." It is a benediction from a simple, a kindly, a noble heart.