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…
