I always nominate GW Carver as the greatest American because as a kid I survived on peanut butter sandwiches. With the collapse of Southern agriculture, the other side of any transformation is what happened to Southern agriculture. No person's work did more to help smallholder type Southern farmers, both black and white. We shouldn't be surprised that a son of slaves should prove to be such a genius. At the end of the Civil War, in many places it was blacks who held much of the cultural body of skills and practical knowledge in farming, growing food, cooking, producing 'homespun' clothes, and the skilled trades. His gardening and dietary advice (much of it based on what he had learned growing up) probably helped relieve the South of its widespread pellagra as much as any other measure (poor whites and blacks would often eat a diet that consisted of corn, fat back and molasses, which is a recipe for pellagra). He also did important work on issues that ultimately helped the South's textile industries as well as the sort of manufactured foods we take for granted, like ketchup and mayonnaise. Post-moderns might think that homecanning is something that has been around since the beginning of the country, but the Mason jar is a revolution of the mid 19th century. Home canning was actually a technique that Carver helped to promote and disseminate. His crop rotation methods saved the farming south.
http://inventors.about.com/od/stepbystep/ss/Hard_Times.htm http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm.htm#rotation In the United States, George Washington Carver brought his science of crop rotation to the farmers and saved the farming resources of the south. http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventors/a/GWC.htm Early Life George Washington Carver was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver. He was born into difficult and changing times near the end of the Civil War. The infant George and his mother kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders and possibly sent away to Arkansas. Moses Carver found and reclaimed George after the war but his mother had disappeared forever. The identity of Carver's father remains unknown, although he believed his father was a slave from a neighboring farm. Moses and Susan Carver reared George and his brother as their own children. It was on the Moses' farm where George first fell in love with nature, where he earned the nickname 'The Plant Doctor' and collected in earnest all manner of rocks and plants. Education He began his formal education at the age of twelve, which required him to leave the home of his adopted parents. Schools segregated by race at that time with no school available for black students near Carver's home. He moved to Newton County in southwest Missouri, where he worked as a farm hand and studied in a one-room schoolhouse. He went on to attend Minneapolis High School in Kansas. College entrance was a struggle, again because of racial barriers. At the age of thirty, Carver gained acceptance to Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he was the first black student. Carver had to study piano and art and the college did not offer science classes. Intent on a science career, he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. Carver became a member of the faculty of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (the first black faculty member for Iowa College), teaching classes about soil conservation and chemurgy. Tuskegee In 1897, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty until his death in 1943. Read the pamphlet - Help For Hard Times - written by Carver and forwarded by Booker T. Washington as an example of the educational material provided to farmers by Carver. At Tuskegee Carver developed his crop rotation method, which revolutionized southern agriculture. He educated the farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as; peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potato, and pecans. Helping the South America's economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture during this era making Carver's achievements very significant. Decades of growing only cotton and tobacco had depleted the soils of the southern area of the United States of America. The economy of the farming south had been devastated by years of civil war and the fact that the cotton and tobacco plantations could no longer (ab)use slave labor. Carver convinced the southern farmers to follow his suggestions and helped the region to recover. Carver also worked at developing industrial applications from agricultural crops. During World War I, he found a way to replace the textile dyes formerly imported from Europe. He produced dyes of 500 different shades of dye and he was responsible for the invention in 1927 of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. For that he received three separate patents. http://www.sdabol.org/answerer/answerer5.htm Macon County then, like most of the South, grew cotton and little else. To save the soil Answerer Book 5 16 and add to farm income Carver advocated growing sweet potatoes and peanuts. Today the sweet potato is a southern farm staple; and our peanut farmers of the South will this year get close to $70,000,000 for their crop. More than any other person, Dr. Carver has helped to break cotton's throttle-hold on southern agriculture. In his Macon County pioneering, he found scarcely any vegetable gardens, few pigs, chickens or cows. Pellegra--produced by an unbalance diet--was widespread. He therefore preached kitchen gardens and worked out recipes showing how to prepare and preserve vegetables. Today, according to the county agricultural agent, there is hardly a Negro farm in Macon County without a vegetable garden, pigs, chickens and at least one cow. Pellagra has virtually disappeared. Dr. Carver insists that the start-where-you-are formula will work anywhere. Some years ago he spoke before a Negro organization in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For illustrative materials he spent an early morning on Sand Pipe Hill, near Tulsa. He came back with 27 plants, all containing medicinal properties. "Then," he said, "I went to Ferguson's Drugstore and bought seven patent medicines containing certain elements found in those plants. The medicines had been shipped in from New York. They should have come from Sand Pipe Hill. 'Where there is no vision the people perish.'" * * * He has been called--this man whose parents were Negro slaves--"the first and greatest chemurgist." Million-dollar businesses have been built all or in part from his discoveries--largest among them being a $200,000,000 a year peanut industry. His crop-pioneering puts many millions every year into the pockets of southern farmers. Answerer Book 5 17 He has been showered with honors. Thomas Edison invited him to join his staff at $50,000 a year. Henry Ford has given him a laboratory for wartime food research. Last June "The Progressive Farmer" gave him its annual award for "outstanding service to southern agriculture." The Theodore Roosevelt Medal came to him in 1939 as "a liberator to men of the white race as well as the black." "What other man of our times," asked the New York Times "has done so much for agriculture in the South?" _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
