hints and suggestions TO FARMERS: GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER AND RURAL CONSERVATION IN THE SOUTH

ABSTRACT

His reputation as "the Peanut Man" notwithstanding, George Washington Carver was very much a part of the nascent conservation movement during the Progressive Era. From the Tuskegee Institute, he sought to persuade black farmers that altering their environmental behavior could mitigate, to some extent, the economic and political vicissitudes they faced as a result of their race. His campaign on behalf of impoverished black farmers provides an instructive case study of how one strand of Progressive conservation was undone by its failure to adequately navigate the intersection of the South's land use and social and political institutions.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER remains a staple of elementary and junior high school social-studies classes, but academic historians have paid scant attention to him in recent decades. Indeed, the last time Carver excited much interest among them was during the 19705 when they debunked his reputation as a scientist and recast him as an Uncle Tom for his relative silence on racial injustice in the nation.' In 1981, Linda O. McMurry rectified this depiction to a considerable extent in her excellent and balanced biography, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. With its publication, historians seemingly considered the matter closed.2 Most apparently agreed with David Herbert Donald's conclusion that Carver was "no longer part of our usable past."3

Such a conclusion is short-sighted for many reasons, most especially because these critiques of Carver were directed more at the myths surrounding him than his actual achievements. The mythical Carver was "the Peanut Man," a cultural icon that emphasized and inflated his scientific discoveries and obscured the legitimate reasons for historians to consider him.4 In the swirl of accolades and tributes that had accompanied his rise to fame as a "creative chemist," much of Carver's lasting significance had been lost.

The dearth of interest in Carver among environmental historians is particularly lamentable. Carver spent the better part of his life thinking about the interaction of people and the natural world and making contributions to the development of sustainable agricultural techniques, but environmentalists remain only vaguely aware of his environmental vision. Believing it to be "fundamental that nature will drive away those who commit sins against it," Carver attempted to persuade southerners that their region's economic salvation lay in the adoption of more sustainable agricultural methods. (Despite his depiction as an Uncle Tom figure, he in fact took subtle jabs at the Jim Crow institutions of the South when he enjoined southern farmers to "be kind to the soil," reminding them that "unkindness to anything means an injustice done to that thing."5) His particular concern was the plight of impoverished black farmers in the region, and over the course of his first decades at Tuskegee Institute, he waged a campaign aimed at persuading them that they could defend themselves against the economic and political vicissitudes they faced as a result of their race by turning to the natural environment. Consequently, Carver offers a unique lens through which historians can catch a glimpse of Progressive-era efforts to navigate the intersection of land use, race, and poverty in the rural South as part of the larger conservation movement.

Though southern environmental history has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade, comparatively little attention has been paid to regionally distinct manifestations of Progressive conservation. In part, of course, this is because historians have looked for unifying themes, such as the wider Progressive impulse to entrust decision-making to experts. In part, this also may be because certain highly emphasized themes, such as the preservation-conservation dichotomy, make so little sense in the region; there were few swaths of what early-twentieth century conservationists would have recognized as "wilderness" in the South. Doubtless, it is also due to a de-emphasis of the agricultural wing of the conservation movement, perhaps because it lost a struggle within the community of scientific agriculturists for ascendancy. To be sure, few today associate scientific agriculture with environmentalist impulses. Whatever the reasons, Carver's campaign on behalf of impoverished black farmers offers an instructive case study of how one strand of the nascent conservation movement played out in the region.

As might be expected, understanding Carver's campaign requires a little background on Carver himself. Born a slave in Missouri at the close of the Civil War and orphaned at a young age, he was adopted by his former owners. Though his foster parents provided a loving environment in Carver's formative years, the opportunities for education were limited in Missouri for African Americans, and so in his early teens, Carver set off in search of an education. This search led him into Kansas, where he bounced around from town to town before graduating from high school in the central Kansas village of Minneapolis. Initially accepted to Highland College in the northeast corner of the state, Carver was turned away by the school when it discovered he was black, and for a time it looked as though Carver's formal education was over. In 1886, he headed to western Kansas to begin a life as a homesteader. The late 18805, however, were rough years on the western plains, marked by blizzards and drought. So in 1888 he borrowed sufficient funds to secure the title to his land and shortly thereafter abandoned his sod house and headed back across Kansas to Iowa.