In This Story DESTINATION GUIDEUnited States FIRST LADY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WANTED to plant vegetables on the White House lawn. It was early 1942 and American troops were departing daily for the battlefields of Europe. Her garden would be a small act of patriotism, a symbol of shared commitment and sacrifice recognizable to anyone who had lived through the Great War 25 years earlier—to anyone, that is, except Claude Wickard. President Franklin Roosevelt’s new Secretary of Agriculture believed the war gardens of 1917 and 1918 had been a waste.“I hope there will be no move to plow up the parks and the lawns to grow vegetables as in the First World War,” he told those who gathered for the National Defense Gardening Conference, which was quickly organized in the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “I do not think the Nation will benefit at present from a widespread, all out campaign intended to put a vegetable garden in every city backyard or vacant lot.”When the Department of Agriculture’s Victory Gardens program debuted soon after, it was not the national call to action and triumph of government messaging that we remember it as today. It was, in fact, its opposite. The word went out via public service announcements and agricultural-extension agents: The country, newly at war, needed its farmers. But it did not need its city gardeners.
Source: When World War II Started, the U.S. Government Fought Against Victory Gardens – Gastro Obscura
