Carver speaks at large conferences organized by non-denominational Christian leader Glenn Clark (1938-39), tours as a much-loved famous figure, is given the Humanitarian Award from the Variety Clubs of America (May 1941), receives two honorary doctorates (June and November 1941) and has a show of a lifetime of artwork (December 1941).

Chapter 18 - Looking for Great Souls

 
Glenn Clark, a short, bald, quasi-rotund teacher of creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, had started a group of non-denominational Christians for the purpose of seeking heaven here and now through prayer. Meeting Jim Hardwick 1928, he had been inspired by his stories of Carver’s prayerful power and had written him. A few weeks after Carver’s reply, he had been called to New York City to give a series of talks in Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s church and had written asking Carver to pray that God would speak through him. “I was on the train,” he recalled, “when the letter reached him; but I knew the hour and the minute… The whole car suddenly… flooded with a celestial light, and I knew… God was near.”

Clark would call Carver “America’s most spiritual man,” and Carver would return the compliment, telling him that when their souls met in prayer, he was “lifted above… the littlenesses… hovering around ready to creep in and destroy the greatness of spirit, the God within us… I am looking for great souls,” he told Clark— including, of course, him—“and I find them.”
In 1938 Clark invited Carver to headline a “Crusade for Christ” he was planning for early April, reserved a drawing room for his trip north to St. Paul and asked him to stay with him and his wife. Carver’s energy was so depleted by pernicious anemia that he told him he doubted he could go. “My heart,” he wrote to Harry Abbott, “is giving me a warning every little while… that it may just get tired and stop for a long rest. Unless I gain very much in strength,” he wrote to Clark, “it will not be wise to attempt the trip. However, with your prayers and prayer groups, it may be that I will gather sufficient strength.”

Trusting that he would get stronger, Clark got a man of means within his circle, Harvey Hill, to send Carver expense money for the trip, saying that he felt it was God’s will that he should come. But a week before the scheduled talk, Carver wrote, “A complete collapse… makes it… imperative that I cancel the trip,… much to my regret.” Three days later, however, he wrote to Clark, “Strange as it may seem, and yet not strange, God willing, which He has indicated most strongly by renewed physical strength, I am planning to leave for St. Paul… Continue to pray for me, please.”

At four a.m. the morning of the day he was to take the train, Clark recalled, “I was awakened… tingling through and through. I instantly knew that all was well with Dr. Carver… I arose and dressed and continued to tune in.” The next morning he met the train, finding Carver every bit as drained and feeble as he had said, and suggested that he could avoid the strain of sitting before his talk on the platform before the gaze of the people by skipping the opening program of song by the Phyllis Wheatley House Negro Singers. “Oh, I most certainly must… hear those singers,” Carver said. “They have kindly consented to sing, and… might be disappointed if I came all this way… and then did not hear them… I will sit down in front, not on the platform... After I am through speaking,… keep people away from me, as I am always too exhausted after a long lecture to speak to anybody.”

 
The audience crowded Minneapolis’ Lyceum Theater to the doors with hundreds standing. Clark introduced Carver to them with the story of the Oracle of Delphi being asked who was the world’s greatest man and replying Socrates, because he knows that he knows nothing. “The man who meets this definition best… today,” Clark said, “is Dr. George Washington Carver. He knows that he knows nothing... He does not know where the knowledge he has given the world comes from; all he knows is that it comes from a power greater than himself.” “I am disappointed,” Carver then told the crowd, “in the introduction Professor Clark made of me… I don’t think he did a very good job. I always look forward to introductions about me as good opportunities to learn a lot about myself that I never knew before.” This got a big laugh, and he was off and running.

Soon he walked away from his microphone, dismaying Clark and his fellow organizers; “but to our amazement and joy,” Clark said, “his voice was loud and clear, with a silver, musical quality… which carried to the farthest corners of the huge auditorium. I never heard a voice with greater carrying power. It was a though he utilized unused, hidden vibrations in the ether.”

 
Clark had forgotten to announce that no one must speak to him after the talk. “The moment he had concluded,” he recalled,
hundreds rushed forward, and a moment later they were milling across the platform trying to get within reach of his hand. He… had sunk back in his chair completely relaxed, paying no attention to anyone… Some touched his hand and went quietly away; many,… disregarding my entreaties, tried to talk to him: “Have you written any books?” “How old are you?” To these… he paid no heed; but occasionally, he reached out and touched a hand,… and I noted that these persons invariably were those most in tune with him. One… little lady surprised me by whispering in his ear. He nodded and took the… little white… flower from his buttonhole and handed it to her...
As we rode home I said to him, “I noticed that you responded to some of the people and not at all to the others. Could you detect the spiritual ones from the others?”

“Oh, that was very, very easy... One of the clear ones was that little lady that wanted my flower. Wasn’t that sweet of her to ask for it?”

As they rode the next morning to the train station, Carver told Clark, “Last night as I rode to the auditorium, I was holding [the] flower in my hand,… and in the silence… I was talking to it, and it… to me… It told me that… a great spiritual awakening… is going to come from… plain, simple people who know—not merely believe, but actually know—that God answers prayer;… from… laymen… going about their work and putting God into what they do,… who want to make God real to mankind… It is going to be a great revival of Christianity, not a revival of religion. We can have religion and still have wars.”