"But it [the Bible] tells about the God who made the peanut. I asked Him to show me what to do with the peanut, and He did."
"Now to be branded as a liar and party to such hellish deception it is more than I can bear, and if your committee feel that I have willfully lied or [was] party to such lies as were told my resignation is at your disposal."
In 1921 a gentle, high-voiced black man in a worn coat, a fresh flower in his lapel, stood before the United States House Ways and Means Committee to speak about the peanut. He had been allotted ten minutes. The initially derisive congressmen kept him for the better part of two hours, and America acquired the legend of the Peanut Man, the folksy wizard who conjured three hundred products from a humble legume. George Washington Carver (1864-1943) was closest to an EII — the devotional-ethical servant whose whole life is organized by an inner moral vow, and whose intelligence works by drawing possibility out of the humble — colored by a noticeable sensory accent.
Carver's laboratory at Tuskegee was named God's Little Workshop. He was not merely a scientist who happened to be religious, he understood his science as listening to nature as God's continuous speech, and his mission as the researcher as the attentive servant who asks small enough questions. He was a preacher, and the story he loved to tell has him asking the Creator why the universe was made and being told the question was too big for him. He asked smaller and smaller — why man was made, what the mulberry was for — until he arrived at a question sized to him: the peanut. Indeed, EII/SEI is quite a "humble" combination, more humble than the "pure" version of these types, partially explainable by a mix of high Di and low Qe with low Se.
He refused salary increases across four decades. The famous biographers' detail is the drawer of uncashed paychecks, accumulated for years because the money simply did not interest him. Offers came — the Edison offer seems to be at least partial legend, its figures contested, but the pattern of declined lucrative invitations is documented — and he stayed at Tuskegee for forty-seven years, in two rooms, serving the poorest farmers in America. Set him beside someone like Dale Carnegie, who reverse-engineered the warm gesture into a business, and the contrast is almost comical: here is a man in whom the instrumental, "flexible" relation to other people, or to money, or to his own advantage, seems never to have formed at all. His actual values were different. "I am just plain Carver," he would say to those who came looking for the great scientist — and the humility, all witnesses agree, was not performed.
According to Carver's Wikipedia article, Booker T. Washington (likely LSE — not LSI, because his program was accumulation-and-growth, not order-conservation, and not SEE despite the patronage machine, since his personal texture was austere-industrious), the president of the Tuskegee Institute — who admired Carver's genius and said so — was exasperated about his administration: the man could not run the poultry yard, keep orderly accounts, or manage subordinates, and the Institute eventually learned to route the practical apparatus around him. His Te and Se were clearly neither strong, nor valued (that's why I rejected my initial SLI hypothesis for him — that's a far more practical type, and his whole attitude to life seemed ethical). He promoted crop rotation with nitrogen-fixing plants like peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore soil depleted by cotton, while inventing over 300 commercial uses for peanuts and over 100 for sweet potatoes to help struggling sharecroppers, but this was more in the realm of potential ideas, with the application left to others. More telling still is how Carver took the criticism: with wounded feelings and repeated threats of resignation — the gentleness of EII's conduct doesn't mean the type can't do some moral blackmail at close distance. But his public conduct, even under Jim Crow, was non-confrontational and accommodating — a posture that later generations of activists would dislike. Nor EII nor SEI are fighters, and especially not someone who happens to mix strong-valued Fi and Si with weak-unvalued Se and Te!
The strong Si (stronger than for your average EII) shows itself in what he made — foods, flours, milks, oils, lotions, cosmetics — the domains of nourishment and bodily comfort. And his healing was literal handwork: the peanut-oil massage therapy he gave, hands-on, to polio patients who traveled to Tuskegee for it.
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