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| <back | home The War Garden Victorious by Charles Lathrop Pack (1919) Excerpts from the book When I first learned of this nearly 100 year old movement I almost fell off of my hoe. I always thought that the Victory Gardens were the revolutionary item of the day. But that was in WWII. The War Gardens were in WWI. This is what needs to happen throughout this country. Now. Whether we need to paint it with a patriotic fervor or not. The important thing is the NEED is going to become very acute in a few years. As always there will be pioneers doing the essential ground breaking work waiting sometimes impetuously for the masses to get on board. This is not an airy faerie idea. This has already happend... nearly 100 years ago in THIS country! <<In the lexicon of the typical American there is no such word as “cannot.” Keen-eyed Americans who saw the situation as it really was, decided that if the mountain would not go to Mahomet, they would see that Mahomet went to the mountain. The mountain in this case was labor, and Mahomet the space necessary for the production of food. These men, with that vision without which the people perish, possessed imagination. They saw little fountains of foodstuffs springing up everywhere, and the products of these tiny fountains, like rain-drops on a watershed, uniting to form rushing streams which would fill the great reservoirs built for their compounding. The tiny fountains were innumerable back-yard and vacant-lot gardens. The problem was to create these fountains.>> <<This could be accomplished only the systematic education of the people, the one hundred million people of the United States. Such a huge educational campaign could be carried out only through the customary channels of publicity – the daily press, the periodicals, the bulletin-boards, and other usual avenues. Oddly enough, it is usually hardest to influence man for his own benefit. The matter of home food production was no exception to the rule. Before the people would spring to the hoe, as they instinctively sprang to the rifle, they had to be shown, and shown conclusively, that the bearing of the one implement was as patriotic a duty as the carrying of the other. Only persistent publicity, only continual preachment, could convince the public of that. Hence it was necessary that the campaign of education be well-conducted and continuous. This called for the creation of an organization to back the movement and assure its standing. The author, therefore, realizing the need of developing latent resources of food supply, and after consultation with other men who were eager to do their duty in the circumstances, conceived and organized the Commission.>> <<The sole aim of the National War Garden Commission was to arouse the patriots of America to the importance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them how to do it, and to educate them to conserve by canning and drying all food they could not use while fresh. The idea of the “city farmer” came into being. In every part of the country were communities where land and labor were already together, where it would be necessary to move neither the mountain nor Mahomet. Near every city were vacant lots, “slacker lands,” as useless as the human loafer, to whom, perhaps, Mahomet must be brought. Whether the land to be cultivated was a back yard or a vacant lot, it was a potential source of food supply, and the raising of food on these areas would solve many problems besides that of food production. Food raised by the householder in his yard or a new-by lot, was “Food F.O.B. the Kitchen Door.” There were no problems of transportation or distribution to be solved in such food production.>> <<The creation of an army of soldiers of the soil presented much the same difficulties presented by the creation of any other army. First of all there was the matter of recruiting. This was a purely volunteer movement and all recruits must come through voluntary enlistment. Then it was necessary to point out the importance of the work and to create enthusiasm for gardening. Next, it was necessary to train the recruits. Intelligent instruction had to be furnished, for many of these new soldiers of the soil had never before handled a hoe or a garden fork. As the campaign progressed it was found that the best results could be obtained by organizing communities. Hence it became necessary to outline methods for community organization. So unexpectedly great was the response to the campaign that it proved essential to turn attention to the matter of food conservation, to the preservation of surplus products which the garden campaign had brought into being. The function of the Commission, therefore, was to awaken interest in both food production and food conservation and to provide instruction along each line of endeavor.>> To view the on-line version of the book, click here. <back | top^ |