"Can Vegetables, Fruit, and the Kaiser, Too. Write for Free Book to National War Garden Commission, Washington, D.C." 

September is still preserving time, so I thought the next few World War Wednesdays would be about canning. 

This is another of my favorite World War I propaganda posters. Developed by the National War Garden Commission, the poster shows glass jars with zinc tops. Tomatoes at left, peas at right, and front and center, the profile of Kaiser Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia. His spiky German helmet and saber hang on the jar, which is labeled "Monarch Brand, Unsweetened." 

Eminently clever, the poster implies that home preserving has the power to defeat the might of the German Empire and the Kaiser himself. 

The First World War was one of the first times that ordinary Americans were called upon to preserve food in their homes. Many Americans, especially those in rural areas, were already canning and preserving the bounties of their home gardens. But as commercial canning became increasingly widespread, inexpensive, and safer, people with easy access to food retailers found it much easier to simply purchase canned goods, instead of going through the bother of putting up their own. Many people were still using the tried-and-true, but not necessarily safe, methods of their forebears. And while water bath canning was increasingly outpacing the traditional food preservation methods of fermentation, drying, and sealing jam with paraffin wax, water bath canning low acid vegetables still was not 100% safe. 

But as the government encouraged food conservation and food preservation, the National War Garden Commission stepped up to the plate. Founded (and funded) by timber magnate Charles Lathrop Pack, the National War Garden Commission published a series of food preservation pamphlets that were used all over the country by home economists and women's groups to encourage home canning. 

The National War Garden Commission was also behind the school garden movement, but that's another post. 
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The Commission would go on to produce a number of pamphlets on war gardening (renamed "Victory Gardening" post-war, a term that would be revived during the Second World War), including one pamphlet entitled "The War Garden Guyed," published in 1918. A clever play on words ("to guy" someone was to make fun of them, or ridicule), the "Guyed" contained cartoons, poems, and slogans both promoting and making fun of the gardening and food conservation movements. Submitted by newspaper editors, soldiers in the trenches, magazines, and ordinary people, the collection is quite a fun read, and not the only version the National War Garden created. 

"Raking the Gardener and Canning the Canner" predated "The War Garden Guyed" by one year - published in 1917, a quick turnaround indeed and indicates how quickly ordinary people adjusted to the idea of home gardening and canning.

You can view almost all of the National War Garden Commission pamphlets on archive.org. 

In 1919, the National War Garden Commission used the "Can the Kaiser" poster image again, this time on their revamped "Home Canning & Drying of Vegetables and Fruits," rebranded "Victory Edition" post-war. At the bottom of the cover, it reads, "The Kaiser IS Canned." 

Although the fervor for home canning, thrift, and self-sufficiency continued into 1919 and 1920, by the time economic prosperity had returned full-force to give us the Roaring Twenties, most ordinary people who took up canning for the war effort abandoned it in victory. 

But I like to think that many of the food preservation lessons learned during the First World War would be revived and put to good use by the time the Second World War rolled around.

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Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War I by Rose Hayden-Smith is one of the few books on the topic of wartime gardening that scarcely mentions World War Two. The focus on gardening and horticultural movements prior to and during the First World War is a welcome addition to the small but growing pantheon of food history books from that era.

Hayden-Smith, although a historian, is also a sustainable gardening advocate and it shows in this book - a little too much for my taste. Hayden-Smith uses the history of World War I war gardens as justification and inspiration for modern gardening movements, using period primary source material as evidence. If you are new to the ideas surrounding the modern sustainable agriculture and community gardening movement, you might find this interesting, but as someone who has followed said movement since high school, I found the constant references and asides to the modern era annoying and unnecessary. I would have vastly preferred if Hayden-Smith had made her connections between past and present at the end of each chapter, rather than interrupting the flow of the historical with the modern.

Modern gardening aside, Hayden-Smith covers the World War I gardening movement by taking in-depth looks at Charles Lathrop Pack and the National War Garden Commission, the United States School Garden Army, the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, and the Woman's Land Army of America. Although the Woman's Land Army of America has been admirably covered in-depth by Elaine Weiss's Fruits of Victory, the other three topics have been little-studied and Hayden-Smith has done an admirable job of digging through obscure archives and has brought to light new resources from California (where she lives).

Another chapter outlines the propaganda work of the war garden and food conservation movements and a final chapter takes a quick look at gardening in the Interwar to Post-War years in the United States. The book concludes with a summation of the war garden movement throughout the decades following and a call to action and advocacy for modern community gardening efforts.  

The best chapter is on the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women - it is well-researched, interesting, and provides new insights into the origins of both the Woman's Land Army of America and Cornell University's cooperative extension home economics program, headed by Martha Van Renssalaer - a graduate of the horticulture school. 

Although the information is fascinating in the other chapters, they are somewhat poorly organized. For instance, in the chapter on the National War Garden Commission, Hayden-Smith references Charles Lathrop Pack numerous times, but doesn't introduce his background or any biographical information until halfway through the chapter (the chapter begins on page 32; Pack is finally "introduced" on page 48). In addition, perhaps at the behest of the publisher, there are constant parenthetical asides that in other books would have been asterisked footnotes, or simply incorporated into the text. Parenthetical asides pointing out obvious connections between the source material and modern food and gardening movements were especially annoying.

It was a frustrating read - I could see and feel the potential for a truly excellent book, but was stymied every time a statement was followed by another saying the exact same thing, information was unnecessarily put in a parenthetical aside, or information was written in an order that made little sense. Frankly, the book was in serious need of a good editor (not a copy editor, although I did also find a few typos) - someone to give advice on how to organize the arguments and the best order for the book. Because although each topic/chapter was interesting in and of itself, there was also little to tie all four topics to each other. I would be interested to know if the book had been peer-reviewed before publication.

In all, I would recommend it to anyone interested in the food and/or gardening history of World War I, but don't expect an easy read. 

If you would like to purchase Sowing the Seeds of Victory through this link, I will receive a small commission.