Carver's mission to poor struggling farmers and his vision for agriculture (1897 on).
Chapter 8 - The Individual Farthest Down
Carver had landed at Tuskegee Institute, he said, “in a strange land and among a strange people,” and found there “devastated forests, ruined estates, and a thoroughly discouraged people, many just eking out a miserable sort of existence from the furrowed and gutted hillsides and neglected valleys called farms. It was easy to see,” he said, “that the first and prime essential was to build up the soil and demonstrate to the people that a good living can be made on the farm.”
Alabama’s warm, humid, subtropical climate teemed with life—some unpleasant, as he reported to his friends in Iowa, “My... duties have kept me very busy, and take me in amongst the lizards, frogs, snakes, ticks, mosquitoes, and ‘chiggers,’ of which there is always a superabundance.” But all the dangerous and annoying creatures, he told them, were of minor concern to him compared to “the objects in view.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who had toured the States in the 1830s, had pointed out then the reason for Carver’s sense of estrangement in the South, and also the run-down conditions he had found there. “I could easily prove,” he had written, “that almost all the differences… between the characters of the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern states have originated in slavery.” The Northerner, he explained, “obliged to subsist by his own exertions,… becomes a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, or a cultivator;… and his avidity… amounts to a species of heroism.” It was this heroic avidity that Carver had absorbed, first from Mose and Susan and then from most of his teachers, whose roots were in the North. The Southerner, by contrast, de Tocqueville continued, “scorns not only labor but all the undertakings that labor promotes; as he lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man;… field sports,… military exercises, violent bodily exertion,… the use of arms, and…single combat.” Carver once teased Southern idleness in a comment on what he called “the glorious name ‘Alabama,’ meaning, ‘Here we rest.’ Unfortunately,” he said, “too many interpret the meaning as… doing just as little as possible to eke out the miserable existence they find themselves [in].”
“The vast amount of cheap and unskilled labor that has been put upon… our southern soils,” he said, referring to the ignorant and motivation-deprived efforts of early white settlers, black slaves and tenant farmers, “has been a curse… to agriculture.” He said that the principles of unkindness to others as injustice and kindness as trying “to assist you in every way that I can… to do my very best for you” applied “with equal force to the soil. The farmer,” he explained, “whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it;… a soil robber,… robbing it of some substance it must have.”
The “devastated forests” he found in the South—torched to clear land for cotton farming, burned accidentally when farmers failed to control fires they had set to remove last year’s cotton stalks, or sold for lumber—were a prime example for him of unkindness to soil. “You can’t tear up everything just to get the dollar out of it,” he warned, “without suffering as a result. It is a travesty to burn our woods and thereby burn up the fertilizer nature has provided for us. We must enrich our soil every year instead of merely depleting it. It is fundamental,” he continued in words that ring even more tragically prophetic now than when he said them, “that nature will drive away those who commit sins against it.”
“Everyone told me,” he recalled, “that the soil was unproductive; but it was the only soil I had.” If he could revive it, the Station’s soil would carry a message, as he later put it, that “we must enrich our soil every year, instead of merely depleting it… Whenever the soil is wasted,” he said, “the people are wasted. A poor soil produces… people poor economically,… spiritually and intellectually, poor physically… Whenever the soil is rich the people flourish.”
His methods of rescuing land from centuries of abuse add up to what we now call organic farming. The organic movement traces its lineage to British scientist Sir Albert Howard, whose experiments in India around 1940 led him to the observation most essential to organics: that plants grown in healthy soil can fight off diseases and pests. Carver never mentioned Howard’s worthy work, but the Englishman’s discovery would have been no revelation to him; he had advised farmers in 1902, “Have your garden as rich as possible. Your plants will then be more apt to overcome the attacks of insects and any other enemy which come upon them.”
In the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi was trying to help his dark-skinned people of India break an oppressive yoke by promoting the revival of rural home industries when he heard of Carver’s pioneering work in the same endeavor. Carver, at the time around seventy to Gandhi’s sixty-five, looked uncannily like him, especially in his wire-rimmed specs. The two men’s thinking was very much the same, except for Carver’s avoidance of politics. “Feed the hungry people first,” Carver said, “and at the same time it will have a bearing upon the soul,” sounding very much like Gandhi’s “To a hungry man, God comes in the form of food.” Gandhi got a message to Carver through an intermediary. Carver sent a set of his bulletins, and Gandhi wrote two months later that he hadn’t received them, so Carver sent another set with a letter telling him it was “a great pleasure and privilege” to keep in touch, adding, “May God ever bless, keep, and direct you in this marvelous work you are doing. My heart goes out,” he said, “to the great Mr. Gandhi, who is really willing to die for his people. My prayers... go out to him in his fight for justice.”
Carver the Christian had no doubts about Gandhi the Hindu’s godliness. “He, in his way,” he said, “is one of the most spiritual of all living souls; he listens to God and does everything on the unselfish, spiritual basis. This is the source of his power.” A reporter discovering the same thing in Carver wrote, “From what I have read of Gandhi of India, I am prepared to feel his spirituality; but I had never heard of this side of Carver… I was expecting to talk to a great scientist; but the moment I looked into the eyes of Dr. Carver,… I realized that I stood face to face with one of the most spiritual men—one of the most developed souls of this age.” One of Carver’s young Southern white “Blue Ridge Boys” made a similar comparison when he wrote, “You will take your place among the Mahatmas, the great-souled ones in whom all personal concern has been consumed by a burning love for humanity and for God.”
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Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman who had toured the States in the 1830s, had pointed out then the reason for Carver’s sense of estrangement in the South, and also the run-down conditions he had found there. “I could easily prove,” he had written, “that almost all the differences… between the characters of the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern states have originated in slavery.” The Northerner, he explained, “obliged to subsist by his own exertions,… becomes a sailor, a pioneer, an artisan, or a cultivator;… and his avidity… amounts to a species of heroism.” It was this heroic avidity that Carver had absorbed, first from Mose and Susan and then from most of his teachers, whose roots were in the North. The Southerner, by contrast, de Tocqueville continued, “scorns not only labor but all the undertakings that labor promotes; as he lives in an idle independence, his tastes are those of an idle man;… field sports,… military exercises, violent bodily exertion,… the use of arms, and…single combat.” Carver once teased Southern idleness in a comment on what he called “the glorious name ‘Alabama,’ meaning, ‘Here we rest.’ Unfortunately,” he said, “too many interpret the meaning as… doing just as little as possible to eke out the miserable existence they find themselves [in].”
“The vast amount of cheap and unskilled labor that has been put upon… our southern soils,” he said, referring to the ignorant and motivation-deprived efforts of early white settlers, black slaves and tenant farmers, “has been a curse… to agriculture.” He said that the principles of unkindness to others as injustice and kindness as trying “to assist you in every way that I can… to do my very best for you” applied “with equal force to the soil. The farmer,” he explained, “whose soil produces less every year, is unkind to it;… a soil robber,… robbing it of some substance it must have.”
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“Everyone told me,” he recalled, “that the soil was unproductive; but it was the only soil I had.” If he could revive it, the Station’s soil would carry a message, as he later put it, that “we must enrich our soil every year, instead of merely depleting it… Whenever the soil is wasted,” he said, “the people are wasted. A poor soil produces… people poor economically,… spiritually and intellectually, poor physically… Whenever the soil is rich the people flourish.”
His methods of rescuing land from centuries of abuse add up to what we now call organic farming. The organic movement traces its lineage to British scientist Sir Albert Howard, whose experiments in India around 1940 led him to the observation most essential to organics: that plants grown in healthy soil can fight off diseases and pests. Carver never mentioned Howard’s worthy work, but the Englishman’s discovery would have been no revelation to him; he had advised farmers in 1902, “Have your garden as rich as possible. Your plants will then be more apt to overcome the attacks of insects and any other enemy which come upon them.”
In the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi was trying to help his dark-skinned people of India break an oppressive yoke by promoting the revival of rural home industries when he heard of Carver’s pioneering work in the same endeavor. Carver, at the time around seventy to Gandhi’s sixty-five, looked uncannily like him, especially in his wire-rimmed specs. The two men’s thinking was very much the same, except for Carver’s avoidance of politics. “Feed the hungry people first,” Carver said, “and at the same time it will have a bearing upon the soul,” sounding very much like Gandhi’s “To a hungry man, God comes in the form of food.” Gandhi got a message to Carver through an intermediary. Carver sent a set of his bulletins, and Gandhi wrote two months later that he hadn’t received them, so Carver sent another set with a letter telling him it was “a great pleasure and privilege” to keep in touch, adding, “May God ever bless, keep, and direct you in this marvelous work you are doing. My heart goes out,” he said, “to the great Mr. Gandhi, who is really willing to die for his people. My prayers... go out to him in his fight for justice.”
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