Did George Washington Carver (c. 1864–1943) really invent peanut butter?
Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that Carver, an ex-slave who became one of the first prominent African American scientists, created the lunchtime staple at his lab in Alabama, along with dozens of other agricultural innovations.
But like many other facets of Carver’s life, his role in the invention of peanut butter is more nuanced than is often realized. Nutmeal was actually patented by another scientist, John H. Kellogg (1852–1943), in 1895.
But Carver did play a crucial role in popularizing peanut butter—and dozens of other food products—by touting its benefits to thousands of small farmers and sharecroppers. Carver is credited with reviving agriculture across the American South by convincing poor farmers to diversify their crops with peanuts and sweet potatoes instead of relying solely on cotton, the traditional staple crop.
In the larger culture, Carver was embraced as a symbol of African American accomplishment by both blacks and whites—albeit for different reasons. To blacks, he was proof that a former slave could succeed. To many whites, on the other hand, his nonconfrontational attitude was a model for how to be a “good” black.
Carver was born in Missouri and graduated from Iowa State College in 1894—the school’s first African American graduate, and one of only a handful of blacks to obtain college degrees in nineteenth-century America. Two years later, he was hired by Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) to teach at Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Washington was a leading advocate of “accommodationist” politics, accepting Jim Crow segregation while working to improve the economic status of African Americans. Carver would remain at the institute for the rest of his life, adhering to the apolitical stance of its founder.
By the 1920s, Carver was one of the most famous African Americans in the United States; Time magazine referred to him as the black “Leonardo” because of his wide-ranging interests (which, like Leonardo’s, included painting). Carver died at roughly age seventy-eight after falling down the stairs at his home in Tuskegee.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Carver is credited with publishing 325 uses for the peanut—including peanut soup, peanut bisque, peanut muffins, peanut doughnuts, liver with peanuts, peanut coffee, and peanut shaving cream.
- The George Washington Carver National Monument was established in his hometown of Diamond, Missouri, shortly after Carver’s death in 1943.
- Carver was reportedly once offered a job by Thomas Edison (1847–1931), but decided to remain at Tuskegee, where he could help poor farmers.
