Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,765

This is the grave of Carl Vrooman.

Born in 1872 in Macon County, Missouri, Vrooman grew up pretty well off. His father was a judge. Vrooman grew up mostly in Kansas and attended Washburn College in Topeka for a year before transferring to Harvard in 1891. After graduating in 1894, he studied at Oxford a bit too, though did not receive a degree there. While there, he met Julia Scott, daughter of a prominent Illinois family, whose uncle Adlai Stevenson was Grover Cleveland’s Vice-President. They fell in love and married in 1896, with Stevenson giving her away. They traveled around Europe for a bit before finally coming back and settling in Bloomington, Illinois in 1900, Julia’s home town.

Vrooman was intensely committed to both the Democratic Party to agricultural reform. Thanks to his connections to the Stevenson dynasty and his own Kansas connections, he was already Regent of the Kansas State Agricultural College from 1898 to 1900, which is today Kansas State University. Julia’s family owned a bunch of farm land and Vrooman was committed to testing his theories about scientific farming on it, which probably surprised his in-laws, who were less excited about farming. He tried to run for the Senate from Illinois, but dropped out when he realized he would not win and in favor of party unity. That would pay off for him.

As a well-connected Democrat interested in agricultural issues, Woodrow Wilson named Vrooman Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in 1914, under David Houston, who headed the agency. Vrooman traveled the nation, giving lots of talks urging scientific farming and the latest techniques, something that farmers themselves often resisted. He also took on promoting the recently passed Smith-Lever Act as his own. Smith-Lever created modern agricultural extension programs, connecting the land grant schools to everyday farmers. He also pushed for greater credit extensions for agricultural enterprises. Related to this, Vrooman was also an important person in the good roads movement, connecting rural America up to the new transportation infrastructure of the car. Like the rest of the nation’s new technologies, farmers were at risk of being left behind.

Julia was working with Carl pretty much the whole time. They wrote together, including 1914’s The Lure and Love of Travel, which was about their trips in Europe and trying to get Americans who could to travel. So few Americans did and reading the travel literature of this time is pretty interesting in how it serves to introduce the nation to the sheer idea, often more interesting than the book itself. She later wrote a political novel about life in Washington called The High Road to Honor, published in 1924, which was pretty well reviewed. Undoubtedly, she wrote or edited much of his work too. But of course that would be something a wife would rarely if ever get credit for.

What makes Vrooman remembered today among historians (not the general public of course) was his critical role in starting the victory garden campaign during World War I. The U.S. entering the war was a real test for the Progressive state and the Wilson administration embraced the challenge. Much of what it did was absolutely abominable. Given new powers, the Progressive state would prove systematically repressive in a way that even the Gilded Age state had never been; despite the late 19th century seeing things such as using the military to crush the Pullman strike or the passage of the Comstock Laws, what the Progressive state did was to make the repression competent and more systematic. So the government didn’t just use the military to bust a strike, it used new laws to make criticizing the government illegal and rounded up and deported immigrant radicals. But the thing about a newly competent state is that it could use its competence for just about anything it wanted, so long as there was some level of government support for it.

So the government wanted to mobilize the nation around food-based issues for the war, as is pretty well documented. Herbert Hoover led a lot of this. Vrooman was also centrally involved. He was an essential figure in the National Emergency Food Garden Commission, basically, the Victory Gardens. Vrooman didn’t lead it–that went to Charles Lanthrop Peck, head of the American Forestry Association–but he was on the seven man commission to run it. Vrooman traveled the nation promoting the idea. The Commission hoped to get 1 million gardens planted, but in fact there were 5 million. It just became a way to show your patriotism. A lot of these gardens were a few bean and corn plants to the side of the house, yes, but they still counted. Did this really matter in winning the war? Eh, probably not. The U.S. really did produce a lot of food. But then one thing about World War I planning is that it was a war much longer than the amount of time the U.S. actually fought in it and so a lot of this stuff was really just coming to maturity by the time Armistice Day happened in November 1918.

Vrooman was passionate about the victory gardens. Part of the idea was to get women on board as central figures as the war effort and the Wilson administraiton fully propagandized around that idea. He told the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in New Orleans in April 1917 that “for every regiment of soldiers fighting for their country there should be a regiment of women, conserving food, economizing and aiding in every way possible to solve the food problem.” He was good enough at this that Wilson sent him to Europe to work on the agricultural problems of the Allies and quickly realized that famine was about to hit and the U.S. needed to step up and provide a lot of food aid. But his health wasn’t super great and he came back home. He lived an extremely long life and he evidently recovered from whatever the issue was, because in 1921, the American Farm Bureau put him in charge of a big famine relief effort in eastern Europe, which was successful enough that he was decorated by the Polish government.

Vrooman always did want to get back into electoral politics, but even though he was a reasonably prominent Democrat in central Illinois, it never worked out. But this was a Republican stronghold, so much so that the Republican incumbent had actually won in the wipeout year for Republicans of 1934 and so Vrooman’s attempts to unseat him in 1946 and 1948 both failed. Still, both he and Julia lived approximately forever. He died in 1966, at the age of 93. She lived on until 1981, dying at the age of 104.

Carl Vrooman is buried in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery, Bloomington, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other central figures in American agricultural history, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. I am sure you have lots of money after Black Friday for this. Edwin Meredith is in Des Moines, Iowa and William Jardine is in Logan, Utah. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.