75 Years Ago
Late Summer/Early Autumn 1929
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Autumn 2004

(From the Breeder’s Gazette of July, August & September 1929 and the general news and historical record of that time period.)

I believe I would be safe in saying that Herbert Hoover, the new president of the United States, was a fairly cautious man. On July 3 of that year he announced that he would not be shaking any more hands than was absolutely necessary in the near future. This was due to hot weather and a sore hand. How conservative-to even save on hand shakes.

Calvin Coolidge, the man he had recently replaced in the White House, also had a sore hand. But his was for an entirely different reason. Like many ex-presidents, he promptly wrote his autobiography and one day in September he autographed 1,000 copies in 3-1/2 hours. I’ll bet Calvin kept at it even after his hand got sore. Partly because he was making a few bucks at it and partly because he was enjoying the role of being an ex-president more than he ever did the presidency.

The Chinese and the Russians were feuding over the railway that served Manchuria and Siberia. It had been jointly operated by the two governments. They both had plenty of troops in the neighborhood, sort of daring one another to cross the border, fire a shot or make a bad face. It was the usual game of military chicken as played by grown men and boys.

On July 17, the U.S.S.R. broke off diplomatic relations with China. A couple of days later, our secretary of state, Henry L. Simpson, warned both parties that they must settle this dispute without recourse to arms because that is what the Kellog-Briand non-aggression pact said-”everybody had to be nice to each other.”

War was averted, but I doubt that scrap of paper had much to do with it. Both Chiang Kai-shek in China and Joseph Stalin in Russia were still relatively new in their jobs and had mighty full plates without a war to worry about on the outer edges of their respective domains. Neither one needed a war at that time and in that place.

The other hot spot in the world 75 years ago was Palestine-that birthplace of religions and the crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa. Both the location and the history of the place guaranteed that here was a place where many things went bump in the night. All of those crosscurrents from 1929 (which were ancient then) are still alive and well, but with different caretakers.

In 1929, Great Britain was stuck with the job for a couple of reasons. One, they had driven the Turks out of the place during WW I and in 1917 they had issued what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration-Lord Balfour being their foreign secretary at the time. This declaration pledged British support for Palestine as the national home of the Jews. This was mighty unpopular with the Arabs living there.

After the war, the League of Nations extended their approval of the declaration and appointed the British to rule Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. It had to seem to many of the inhabitants that this bunch of big-wigs in striped suits in Geneva, Switzerland, were pretty cavalier about deciding all sorts of things for them. Consequently, 75 years ago the inhabitants of Palestine were killing one another at a right good clip. There is nothing very new about the news from that quarter.

It might surprise you that one of the “new ideas” of 1929 floated at the League of Nations in Geneva was a proposal from the French Premier, Briand (same guy that the Kellog-Briand non-aggression pact was named for) suggesting that the European nations start working toward a United States of Europe. It was regarded as ridiculous by many, simple-minded by others and got no serious hearing. It took a wrenching decade long world depression and another World War, followed by a Cold War that lasted several more decades, to make it seem reasonable enough to try. Aristide Briand must have been one very determined optimist.

Another thing the League of Nations did that summer was to get most everyone to sign on to the accord governing the treatment of prisoners of war. Thus the so-called “Geneva Convention” is now 75 years old.

Speaking of wars and war literature, Austria banned the great anti-war book from WW I entitled All Quiet on the Western Front from its army libraries. That is a curious little squib of news–I doubt if army libraries anywhere were exactly loaded with anti-war and/or pacifist-type books.

Enough on politics, let’s try transportation and travel. I’ve mentioned the German Graf Zeppelin before. In August of 75 years ago, it made a historic trip around the world–21 days, 7 hours and 26 minutes and was said to be a new record for round-the-world travel. It carried 16 passengers and crew of 37. The trip started at its hangar in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Its first stop was at its home base in Frediderichshafan, Germany, from there over Europe and Siberia to Japan, then across the Pacific to Los Angeles and finally on to Lakehurst.

On July 7, 1929, a company known as T.A.T. (Transcontinen-tal Air Transport) inaugurated cross-country flights for people, as well as letters. Up to that time, commercial carriers had limited themselves to mail. It was actually a combination of air and rail–in daylight hours they would fly, at night they would go by train where they could (1) get a decent meal and (2) actually lie down and get some sleep. It took three or four days.

A couple of months later, on September 4, eight people were killed when a T.A.T. plane went down in New Mexico. It was struck by lightning. Trains were way the best bet in 1929 if you had a long ways to go. In Europe, trains are still the best bet to get to a lot of places. Here in our country, Amtrak is sort of regarded as our unwanted stepchild by a lot of people. (I have absolutely nothing against step-children.) Personally, I prefer it to flying, driving or walking where most long trips are concerned-but I don’t think most, or even many, Americans want it or would support it. When gasoline gets to $4 a gallon, they will complain about it, and then gas up and go.

Enough of that. The world was a pretty choppy place 75 years ago this fall. We will now take a look at the Breeder’s Gazettes for that time period.

The Gazettes were fairly good sized, upbeat and sassy 75 years ago. They read like the staff was having fun putting them together. In their September issue, they boasted on the cover-”125,000 copies, welcoming the readers of American Swineherd, established in 1885.” They had just bought American Swineherd from Eisert & Company, the publishers of American Poultry Journal.

The Swineherd magazine was established in 1885, only four years after the elder Sanders had started Breeder’s Gazette. Impossible as it sounds, in 1919-’20, a single issue of that pig paper totalled 600 pages. This was at the peak of the goofy pedigreed hog boom, complete with fieldmen at every sale, $10,000 boars and a general loss of sanity. It was worst in the Poland Chinas. The purebred trade has had a few of those seizures.

But by 1923, the bloom was off the rose big time and it was sold to the publisher of the Poultry Journal. The Gazette had earlier swallowed the American Sheep Breeder, so when the opportunity arrived, they decided to digest the hog as well as the sheep. They called it a consolidation–just like the captains of industry they rubbed shoulders with in Chicago described their crippled acquisitions.

Anyhow, with that issue the Gazette boasted 125,000 copies, attested to by the A.B.C.-the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The previous high water mark for the Gazette was in 1917 with a circulation of 98,397. Of course, it was a weekly then, published every Thursday. Following WW I, American agriculture tanked - land values, livestock and grain. The 1920s were a sorry decade for the sons of the soil. But these twoyoung upstarts, Sam Guard and C.L. Burlingham had, from all appearances,turned the old Gazette around.

On June 15, Herbert Hoover (of the sore hand) had signed a piece of legislation called the Agricultural Marketing Act, a $500,000,000 (that is a half billion, with a ‘b’) kitty to bring more stability to farm prices. It would be run by a Federal Farm Board of eight members, as yet unnamed, who would administer this effort. As I understand it, the idea was to bring to agriculture some of the same discipline, organization and controls that industry already possessed. Much of it would be done through the various commodity groups and co-operatives already serving grain and livestock. I think they almost had to make it up as they went along.

Hoover prevailed on Alexander Legge, president of International Harvester, to take a cut in salary from $320 a day to $38.50 a day to serve as chairman. He agreed to give it a shot for one year. Hoover had solved a lot of problems with big companies and governments. I think he was very smart and had a good understanding of how such organizations worked. And, I suspect, he also thought that you could apply many of the same things to the problems of pricing farm commodities.

Upon the appointment of Legge, a subscriber, Clyde Patterson, Moultrie County, Illinois, wrote in the following comment, “He has been the mastermind of taking money from the farmer. I wonder, can he get to the other side and return it?”

So nobody actually knew how or if this thing was going to work-but there was a half billion dollars and some very capable people appointed to this Farm Marketing Board. Sam Guard, the young editor, was a born optimist, and had been completely mesmerized by Hoover and was on a “feel good” roll. He and his partner, Charles Burlingham, were having fun. The division of labor between the two was interesting.

All the dairy breeds had their annual meetings and big sales during that late summer, early fall period. Burlingham went to all the dairy shindigs in the east and called it “The Greatest Year Yet.” It sure appeared to be just that. Business was up, cattle prices were high, and dairying was quite possibly the healthiest of the various livestock enterprises at that time.

Sam, on the other hand, went up to East Lansing to exhort their students and then scooted out to a Montana ranch to do his cover story. He was obviously taken by the place, the man and the subject. The place was the Mount Haggin Land & Livestock Company near Anaconda, Montana. The man was Dr. H.C. Gardiner, certainly one of the leading sheep breeders in the world. Gardiner introduced Sam to a new word-which is kind of surprising in itself. I thought he knew them all. The word was giest. That is the word Gardiner used to describe his Hampshire ram that would grace the cover of the Gazette.

He told Sam that his cover sire had giest. And that is how Sam described the ram-going on to explain: “Those of you who know German will recognize the significance of giest at once. Fundamentally, it means “ghost’ or the spirit-soul, genius, courage, life, refined fluid. Anyhow, I know it is what all these cover page sires have-giest.”

I believe the place had giest too-here is Sam’s description of it: “As snow-capped Mount Haggin towers above the Deer Lodge plain on one side and the famed Big Hole country on the other, so Dr. H.C. Gardiner rises among the top figures in the improvement and propagation of the Hampshire race of sheep.”

This was no small place. They had about 8,000 purebred sheep with an annual sale of rams running way, way over four figures. That is a lot of boy sheep, thousands of them.

There was a lot of push and promotion for silos with arguments such as this one-an acre of corn fed as silage gave us 370 steer-day feeds, a similar acre out of the crib (ear corn) about 176 steer-day feeds. And it wasn’t just for cattle feeders-silage makes milk as well as meat. Most of Iowa’s silos now stand empty. I guess it also makes ethanol.

O.E. Reed, chief of the Bureau of Dairy Industry, U.S.D.A., wrote an article I would have been proud to have my by-line on. The purebred era spawned some great things and some nonsense. Some folks seem to lose sight of the fact that a “paper” is simply a statement of genealogy. Like a birth certificate. With herd testing growing rapidly and daughter/dam bull proofs becoming important, one of the things Reed was asking was “Why are we not admitting these top producing grades into the herd books?” He cited examples in Europe wherein after three top crosses they are considered 100 proof. He was calling for pedigrees with performance and acknowledging that some cows with papers would no more than raise a calf. Reed was hard on “purebred scrubs.”

Speaking of performance, I want to bring you a dairy story from 75 years ago that I found quite admirable. The two “little sisters” among the five dairy breeds were the Ayrshires and Brown Swiss. Much smaller breed populations, relatively few men of great wealth hyping the values at sales, and an advertising budget that would keep you in with about a two or three inch ad every issue.

The National Dairy Show, which was a traveling show at that time, was scheduled for St. Louis, Missouri, in 1929. The Ayrshire folks, with their association at Brandon, Vermont, came up with a great promotion. They decided to show-case their breed this way: they selected two Ayrshire cows to walk from Vermont to St. Louis for the show. No particular effort was made to get outstandingorunusual specimens–one, in fact, was kind of undersized. Two breeders conveniently located close to Brandon were invited to each furnish a cow. One of then had been in milk for about seven weeks, the other for about eight months. So the touring Ayrshires set out for St. Louis-to prove their message that their cows were not sissies and were, in fact, economical. Accompanying the cattle was a very attractive porta-barn which served as a camper for the attendants and a base of supplies for the cows. And, I suppose, as shelter from the storm-if any arose. The cows were fed one pound of a balanced ration for every four pounds of milk and they were allowed to graze at night and also secure some roadside grass while traveling.

By the August Gazette, where these photos were taken from, they were well along the way, making a minimum of ten miles per day with an occasional 12 to 15 mile day. The plan was to walk the cows every day until taking a week long stop at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus. So they did have a schedule to meet midway. Milk weights were kept and regular Advanced Registry supervision made on the cows. “Tomboy,” the smaller one who freshened just seven weeks before leaving on her big trip, was milking up to 50 pounds of 4% milk per day. Not bad for a little cow who had never been fed over six pounds of grain a day, nor enjoyed any legume hay at home.

It was good, solid breed promotion-for a dairy cow that can “get along” on less than ideal conditions.

	The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company must have had the back outside cover tied up in a long term contract. There were a few critical letters to the editor printed to the effect that encouraging ‘our country girls’ to smoke Camels wasn’t exactly in the best tradition of the Breeder’s Gazettes. And for every one printed, I would bet there were a dozen unprinted.
	Here are Tomboy and Alice on the road from Brandon, Vermont, to St. Louis and the National Dairy Show. It was 10 to 15 miles per day and the leaders were not identified. I guess it was a case of anybody can lead a cow, but very few cows walk several hundred miles to the National Dairy Show. In the above photo the hiking Ayrshires make camp for the night beside their barn on wheels.
That was a big question in 1929. And with that larger circulation the old BREEDER’S GAZETTE was courting advertisers like mad. But when C.L. Burlingham asked his readers to fill out this form and send it in ONLY BECAUSE IT WILL ENABLE US TO MAKE FOR YOU A BETTER PAPER, he must have had his fingers crossed. It would also provide them with useful information when they sat down with advertising clients. Electricity, as much as petroleum, transformed America’s farms.

As for anything special from the draft horse section of the Gazette, there wasn’t. If anything, things were a little better. Horse breeding had gone so slack in the immediate post war years and the early ‘20s that there was no great supply of serviceable age drafters. True, the city demand was very light compared to pre-WW I, but the horse was still providing a lot of power on the farms and the U.S. horse population was aging-which no doubt helped the farm market for good young horses.

For pure unbridled optimism, you couldn’t beat Sam Guard. Here is how he closed out his last page of one of those ‘29 issues. “It is SunUp on the American stock farm. Stock farming has been through the slough. Cloven hoofs carried it out of the Depression. And now our herds head safely upward to higher ground.

“We are to usher in the Golden Age of American Agriculture.” Such bombast.

Sam was a true believer. He would have made a great evangelist.