Cultivating the earth as a response to moments of crisis dates back over a century, but not just as a relaxing activity. During World War I, writes Rose Hayden-Smith, a major Victory Garden movement promoted the idea of gardening as a civic duty. The goal was to increase food production on the home front, under the reasoning that the conservation of resources on the home front was key to victory on the battlefield. Garden propaganda was “striking in its use of military imagery,” according to Hayden-Smith’s article. Poster campaigns often depicted “regiments” of women and children as “soldiers of the soil,” marching alongside U.S. troops.
The Victory Garden movement built on an existing network of school gardens, an innovation that came from the reforms of the Progressive Era. While a graduate student in city planning and business, Brian Trelstad described the social aims of school gardens, including city beautification, reduction of juvenile delinquency, improved public health and nutrition, and the Americanization of immigrants. School gardens were perceived as a means of creating good workers and citizens.
By the start of World War I, school gardens were receiving support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then from the Bureau of Education’s newly created Division of Home and School Gardening. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 and established the U.S. School Garden Army, it received significant grants from national security and military appropriations.
Victory Gardens soon sprang up in public spaces, vacant lots, railroad easements, and even on the National Mall and White House lawn. The enthusiastic participation in Victory Gardens was due to more than a desire to feed the nation. They provided an opportunity for an increasingly consumer-oriented, urbanized American society to return, at least for a time, to a producer past and to reconnect with agricultural roots.