Description
With Carver's arrival at Iowa State (1891), the account broadens--from the formation of his character to the nature of his achievement. Scientist? Agriculturist? Exceptional--or exemplary--black? McMurry, an impressive researcher (who seems no stranger, either, to plants or plant study), fills out the milieu--both difficult and supportive--at Iowa State's pioneering ag school, where lone-black Carver shone (and became the intimate of later US Secretaries of Agriculture). She then places him--with painstaking fairness--in Booker T. Washington's contrasting (students who could barely read, strictly practical study), yet not inimical Tuskegee. Though Carver and Washington quarreled until the latter's death in 1915 (and prickly, uppish Carver, a poor administrator, lost campus-standing in the process), Washington's demands for tangible results and the needs of Alabama's poor black farmers brought forth from Carver the outstanding work of his career: the advancement of sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and peanuts as substitutes for cotton, soil-replenishers, income-supplements, and home-grown food. Concerning which, in his "threefold" bulletins, he provided instruction for farmers, information for teachers, and recipes for housewives. . . . McMurry thus sees him, convincingly, as a great, holistic educator and premature champion of small-scale farming who went astray--after Washington's death and the advent of fame--into commercialization of the peanut and his own glorification as a "wizard chemist" and "saintly genius."
