Carver's work with local herbs (1910 on), the First World War (1914), Booker T. Washington's death, devastating Carver (1915), and Thomas Edison's attempt to hire Carver (1915).

Chapter 11 - The Old Guards


The huge Columbian Exposition, which
Carver had seen in 1893
forecast a world where an electric switch
lights up a city, sets machinery
in motion. That vast fair, the writer’s source
for Oz, a land of grand illusions, lent
great glory to the leashed electric force
which since has driven world wars. As we have spent
so prodigally nature’s energies
to stoke our angry engines, it’s high time
we looked to folks who find in herbs and trees
real power and medicine, reason and rhyme.
Through history’s changes, Carver would remain
wholly himself, while nations raged in pain.

 
Booker T. Washington, probably in an attempt to get Carver out of his lab and to the people, summoned him to his office to propose that he create an exhibit on health, install it in a train coach car and travel the Southern states teaching rural people. Carver recalled suggesting that they “go further” by having him “analyze everything in Macon County” and make an exhibit that would “show the commercial possibilities of each thing.” By appealing to Washington’s loyalty to Macon County and desire to commercialize Tuskegee’s work, he managed to get his approval and support for a completely different plan that would buy him time, before he was compelled to travel, to live his vision of humanity learning the identities and uses of living things near their homes.
He began the project by making his bulletin topics specific to Macon County, including one on their gloriously colorful and fragrant ornamental plants, which local landscape gardeners and florists, he said, could use to make their area “one of the world’s Meccas of natural beauty”: dogwood, red bud, golden-yellow jessamine flowers” hanging “in long graceful streamers from the branches of shrubs and small trees,” stately red maples and red buckeyes forming “a… living picture of unequaled charm,” masses of pink honeysuckle flowers, and chocolate-colored sweet shrub flowers.

 
Dogwood trees were also on a list he compiled of 115 medicinal plants in the county, their roots being useful in bringing down a fever. Black willow bark was the original aspirin; wild garlic could lower blood pressure; and his list included also crop plant products like corn silk, cotton root bark, peach leaves and lettuce, a mild opiate. “I was… surprised and delighted,” he said, “to find such a large number of official drug plants, as well as… an equally large number… which will become official as soon as their… properties are better understood.” He hoped to see many acres of Southern soils producing medicinal and pot herbs.” He told of prescribing a tea of ragweed and other natives during a class he was teaching for Tuskegee’s summer school teachers, some of whom had gulped too much ice water on a hot day and upset their digestion. “Several members of the class,” he recalled, “said they had never had anything that relieved them so quickly as that tea. One… told me… they left the room so sick… got some leaves on the way, chewed them,… swallowed the juice and got relief right away.”

At the time that he was identifying and analyzing Macon County’s plant medicines, many of the plants he called “the old reliable vegetable drugs” were becoming hard to find on the market, giving rise to what he called, “synthetic substitutes of questionable value.” Behind this development, unknown to him, were Frederick Gates, the man in charge of distributing oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropic money, and Abraham Flexner, an influential educator, who were bent on positioning synthetic substitutes to dominate the market so thoroughly as to make a vision like Carver’s, of people growing “old reliable vegetable drugs” for small businesses, seem impossibly quaint.

One evening after supper, Carver visited Washington’s son Davidson and his wife. As they sat on the porch listening to crickets chirp, Mrs. Washington told of a dream that had come to her the night before, in which her father-in-law had spoken to her. All she could clearly remember was him saying, “Professor Carver will carry on for me. I have faith in him.” Her words jolted Caver from his reverie. “Did he say that?” he asked. “Did he really say that?” Yes, she said; those words were as clear as if they were being spoken this minute. Carver pressed for more details. How had he been dressed? Where had they been? Since his dream as a boy that had led him to the knife, Carver had no doubt that a dream could convey a useful message. “I am… certain,” he wrote to a former student whose mother had died, “that [she] will come to you… often… in your sleep and guide your footsteps whenever temptation assails you, and whenever a great measure must be decided..” Mrs. Washington was unused to seeing an educated man admit such an interest openly, but she tried to recover her dream images, in which the Principal had been in his usual business suit and, she thought, in the parlor at the Oaks. The few words she recalled him speaking to her, however, proved to be enough to free Carver from his grief and return him to his uplifting self.

When a reporter asked him for his greatest tribute to Washington, he made a sweeping gesture with one of his long arms to indicate Tuskegee and said, “This speaks for him.” He repeated the saying about English architect Sir Christopher Wren—“If you seek a monument, look around”—and said, “I can say this… with reference to Booker T. Washington. I pass his resting place two or three times every day,… look into that great granite boulder and… say, this is where his tired body is resting, but his monument is within the hearts of the people wherever civilization exists.”