Victory gardens

During World War I, the government encouraged the populace to voluntarily supplement their diets by growing much of their own food in plots popularly called war gardens. After the armistice ended the war in 1918, these plots were hailed as “victory gardens.” In December 1941, following America’s entry into World War II, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard sponsored a National Defense Garden Conference in Washington, D. C., for the purpose of resuscitating the practice of victory gardens. This was done as much to convince American families to grow their own food and supplement their diets as for producing foodstuffs for the troops. A consortium of seed companies, the agricultural press, and gardening organizations then conferred over how best to stimulate interest in the program among the private citizens. Fortunately, the population was enthusiastic about gardening, and the program quickly assumed impressive proportions. By 1943 it is estimated that some 20 million families had established plots of one kind or another. These assumed an astonishing variety of sizes and locales, ranging from backyards to vacant city lots, rooftops, school yards, and window sills—in sum, any place that fruits and vegetables could be cultivated. And, because most Americans were far removed from the soil, the Department of Agriculture wrote, printed and distributed handy and informative pamphlets outlining what crops to grow

Poster for the U. S. Department of Agriculture promoting victory gardens (Library of Congress)

And how. A wide variety of produce was encouraged, especially tomatoes, which yielded abundantly in little space. The bulk of food raised was then stored and preserved by a combination of drying and freezing, but the most popular method was canning. During the war years victory gardens produced more than one million tons of vegetables and at their peak up to 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the United States.

Victory gardens became so popular that they also served as a de facto badge of civic pride for supporting the war effort. Gardening and the ethos of self-sufficiency granted average citizens a genuine sense of contributing to the war effort, and all sectors of the population, the ELDERLY, women, teenagers, and even children, were encouraged to do their share. In this vital respect victory gardens became a popular symbol for the war and a conduit for fostering morale and national unity.

Further reading: Amy Bentley, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Richard R. Lingeman,

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Putnam, 1970).

—John C. Fredriksen