Carver Saves the South
1896 AD
1896 1896
85.40W32.25N
SCI

TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA
	The North had won the Civil War and the slaves of the South had been freed -- but only to live in poverty.
	George Washington Carver wanted very much to help them. He was the son of a slave with a hunger for education. He spent 20 years working and studying so he could attend college, eventually studying agriculture at Iowa State University. Then, because his heart was with the former slaves, he accepted a job at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school founded by blacks and devoted to improving their lives.
	As he traveled through the South to Tuskegee in 1896 he saw the poverty, much of it caused by its one-crop economy. Cotton ruled, but it ruined the soil and was often destroyed by insects called boll weevils.
	So Carver ran a demonstration farm at Tuskegee, showing farmers how to enrich the soil and persuading them to plant peanuts and sweet potatoes.
	Carver was enthusiastic about peanuts. They are nourishing and improve the soil, but unfortunately there wasn't much of a market for them. So, because he was a religious man, Carver prayed, and asked God, "Why did you make the peanut?"
	Then he set to work in his lab. He came up with peanut cheese, milk, coffee, flour, ink, dyes, soap, wood stains, chili sauce, drinks, salve, bleach, rubbing oil, shampoo, shaving cream, axle grease, metal polish, linoleum, paper, plastics, wood filler, synthetic rubber, wallboard, Worcestershire sauce, face cream, fruit punch, insulating board and on and on. In all, he invented 300 uses for the peanut and 118 for the sweet potato.
	Carver was frequently asked to speak, and though he often endured many indignities during his travels because of his race, he kept at it, promoting peanuts and sweet potatoes and nudging the South away from its dependence on cotton.
	Carver was frequently offered jobs in industry, but he turned them all down and never accepted money from the many people he helped.
	In 1916 British scientists elected him a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 1939 he was given the Roosevelt medal. In 1940 he donated his life savings of $33,000 to Tuskegee Institute to carry on his research. He died in 1943.