DHJ:: The Days Before Yesterday

75 Years Ago
Late Late Winter/Early Spring 1926
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Spring 2001

From the Belgian & Percheron Reviews, the Breeder’s Gazettes, and general news sources from that period.)

Some number cruncher came up with the fact that the number of automobiles in the United States had reached nine million. This was 39% of the world’s total–or one car for every six Americans. Great Britain had one car for every 57 people and Germany, one car for every 289 persons. Germany had been struggling with high unemployment and rampant inflation, along with the humiliation of defeat and an Allied Occupation Force for eight years; ever since their defeat in WWI. She had also been trying to make a republican style government work, something she had little experience with, nor talent for. So, given the shape she was in, maybe one car for every 289 people wasn’t too bad.

This is a little digression but the allied military presence was also closed out about this time. Eight years sounds long enough for the occupation to last but maybe it was too soon, for it only took Prussia about six weeks to lift the ban on the Nazi Party and turn Hitler loose (legally) in front of microphones and large crowds. Desperate people look for simplistic answers, quick fixes and one dimensional solutions. Adolf would offer all of the above–plus a restoration of national pride–at least as he understood it.

As for the explosive growth of the automobile and truck business, that probably did more to shape the world we live in today than any political movements. It certainly made petroleum the liquid gold of the twentieth century. Oil tankers replaced Spanish galleons and British “Men of War” as the symbols of power and empire.

Judging from the number of huge trophy houses attached to three and even four car garages going up in some of the new subdivisions today, the ratio of cars to people in the U.S. must be about a dead heat. Throw in the snow blowers, snowmobiles and lawn mowers and I would say we are hopelessly outnumbered.

But that wasn’t the only new technology challenging the old established order. In February of that year President Coolidge signed into law a measure to create the Federal Radio Commission to “regulate this new industry.” So not only did government find itself building public roads on an unprecedented scale but also regulating the airways. And there was the telephone, too–that would call for some government regulation.

Still another straw in the wind that took place in March of 1927 was the incorporation of Pan American Airlines in New York. They were the first of the giant airlines. So mail, cargo and people were all about to take to the air in earnest. Ah, that would need regulation, too.

I find it somewhat ironic that so many government regulatory agencies came into being during this “conservative Republican decade.” They were created because they were necessary, to prevent chaos, and to give Joe Citizen both a voice in the matter and some protection. To listen to some folks talk, you’d have thought regulatory agencies scarcely existed before the “Great Depression” of the ‘30s and FDR’s New Deal years. Of course, Coolidge probably created them grudgingly whereas FDR whomped them up with gusto.

Are you puzzled by the politics of Afghanistan? Well, 75 years ago great-grandpa was puzzled about China. Like Afghanistan, it had its fractious tribes, ancient hatreds, warlords, communists, democrats, different religions and that kettle was really boiling. The two main groups in that seemingly endless dogfight were, of course, the communists of the north and Chiang-Kai-shek’s nationalists, basically from the south. But it was not a mirror image of either present day Afghanistan or our own civil war. Nor were there any terrorist strikes against the United States–nor the means to pull it off. In fact, I suspect 99 out of every 100 Americans could have ignored China without much difficulty. And 98 out of a hundred did.

But this upheaval in China was not good for trade, nor was it safe for foreigners to be tending the company store in China. So Great Britain sent in 12,000 men and several warships to remind them who was who. We also sent some marines and warships. Same reason. I think it was called gunboat diplomacy. There were also French and Japanese forces involved. At one point there were 20,000 foreign troops on patrol in Shanghai.

As Chiang’s army approached the city, the communists called for a general strike. Quite a few of Chiang’s boys were in sympathy with the strikers. Chiang tried negotiating with the communists but they would have none of it. Eventually, Chiang got the upper hand (for the moment) and our trade privileges were apparently ratified, satisfied, and agreed upon via arbitration. So they must have found someone to arbitrate with–so they could go home.

Our Marines were quite busy in more than China. Mexico was on the verge of a revolution and Coolidge sent troops to the border to protect American oil claims. Oil was asserting itself as the politics of the future. I believe our Marines were also dispatched to Nicaragua–to protect us from communism and maybe guarantee the supply of bananas at an attractive price. That expression, banana republic, had to come from somewhere. Last I looked, bananas were 29 cents a pound here in Waverly.

That is enough of the “world news” from 1927 for me. It is enough to remind us that a lot of the new tunes on the constant barrage of World News we are assailed with, loud and in color, are variations of old tunes. I’d just as soon get on with the draft horse and farming scene 75 years ago this spring.

The 1927 Belgian Review was actually a review of both 1925-’26. Just as the 1929 Review would be a review of 1927-’28. Then there was a three year lapse until the 1932 Review, which would review 1929-’30 & ‘31. Then another skip to the 1935 Review, which would review the 1932-’33-’34 shows. From that point on the Belgian Reviews have been annual. So you collectors of old paper who keep searching for the 1926, ‘28, ‘30, ‘31, ‘33 and ‘34 Belgian Reviews–you may as well quit looking. You will have to find a new hobby. There was, however a 1925 Review and it was the first.

The Percherons stuck with annual publications through that period, as well as starting earlier. Some of their early ‘30s annuals got pretty skinny but Ellis McFarland, the Percheron secretary, was a proud man and they were the big dog in the kennel. The Belgians on the other hand, with conservative lawyer, J.D. Connor at the helm, never did what they couldn’t afford to do.

The striking thing about the 1927 Belgian Review was that even though the breed was taking very different roads in the two countries, the relations between the two societies remained very cordial–clear up until WWII. Rather than preach, I’m going to reproduce some pictures of winners in the two countries that appeared in that 1927 REVIEW. Now, one might look at these photographs and say–with the breed going different directions in Europe and North America, how could importers such as Holberts, Dygerts, Trumans and others continue to bring horses over clear up until WWII brought it to a screeching halt in 1939.

Judging from these pictures I’d say the importers were not buying horses to win in Brussels–they were buying for resale to Americans. So maybe it was a happy arrangement for both buyer and seller. In terms of color, it was most definitely true. Nearly every import was sorrel or chestnut by the late ‘20s and ‘30s and those colors were not, and are not popular in Belgium. The breed was big and versatile enough to feed both markets. This divergence of type has continued to this day, and probably accelerated on our side anyway. The one thing the horses have in common is remote ancestors.

I find nothing very mysterious about this. The same could be said of both Brown Swiss and Holstein cattle in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when I was still intensely interested in dairy cattle. Our cattle were much more angular or dairy (for lack of a býtter word) than their old country cousins. A breed of livestock is a work in progressÐnot a statue in the park. Nor is it a steady march toward some sort of perfection (whatever that might be) that will never quite be attained. Sometimes more is lost than is gained–sort of like all those 401k plans last year. This assures both livestock judges and brokers of lifetime tenure–just like professors.

An editor without a cause or a pet peeve is like a preacher without a sermon or a referee without a whistle–a pitiful sight. Alvin Sanders, the BG editor for life, was experiencing lean times with his paper but he was never a pitiful sight.

While he was pleased to have gotten the government and packers to finally agree on grade and label meat, he still wasn’t completely happy about it. This was the “baby beef” era where 4-H kids and their champion steers were both of a tender age. And while he reckoned the grading and labeling that was finally being done was ok for the average housewife, it wasn’t quite what he had in mind.

On January 13, 1927, he said, “The drawback of baby-beef making, from the farmer’s standpoint is that it means crowding the calves on concentrates from first to last. There is no preliminary growing or maturing of the frame and muscular tissue through the consumption of the roughage that is produced on every farm.” In other words, Alvin missed those huge ribeyes and steaks from big two year old steers which were “vastly better than that from the calfy yearlings.” This baby beef business also conflicted with the way he saw cattle in farm management–as useful grazers and gleaners. “That roughage needs to be consumed and the fat calf business did not take up that slack in the farm economy. You must first grow a well bred calf, and finish him afterwards, if you want to utilize the coarser farm forage and produce the bullock that will actually cut out real, honest to goodness beef, rich in flavor beyond any possible comparison with the pampered babies who dominate today’s market.”

Sanders conceded that the average housewife regarded his kind of beef as too wasty and the cuts too large. He knew that–but he said there was a Cadillac trade out there in the grade A hotels, clubs, cafes and the railroad dining cars. In other words, in the posh places of Chicago and other cities, and I suppose on Cunard liners bound for Europe. So what he was beating the drum for was both a HEAVY CHOICE and a HEAVY PRIME. He also saw a lot of big two year old steers as a partial solution to the farm problem–utilizing some of the surplus grain and rough feed—just as Wayne Dinsmore did the draft horse and mule who ate what they produced and thereby kept millions of bushels of hay and grain off the market while they provided their own fuel and replacements.

An article entitled Community Horse Breeding, by a young Animal Husbandry professor at Iowa State named J.C. Holbert, claimed my attention–especially since I had just buried Farceur in the last issue for either the second or third time in my life. J.C. didn’t have to travel far to do this one–just jump in his Ford or Chevy and travel about thirty miles west on Highway 30, the old Lincoln Highway, and there he was in Ogden–the epicenter of Belgian horse breeding in America. He found no less than thirty breeders of registered Belgians clustered within a radius of twenty miles from Ogden, stating that this tiny region “bred more high class Belgians than any state in the union. (Take that, Ohio and Indiana!)

He listed them all. They ranged from very young breeders with just a few mares to old, established breeders with national reputations. About half of them had Swedish surnames, an item that may well be of interest only to me.

The two breeders who provided the center of gravity were W.B. Donelson who had been raising Belgians for thirty years and owned the largest stud in the area, running as high as 200 head at one time. The other key individual was Grant Good who had been a breeder for over twenty years and had brought Farceur into the community.

So what was the big deal about community breeding? Just about everything at that time. First, our transportation system was what would be regarded today as primitive. Most long distance (anything over 100 miles) travel was by rail, ditto for the transportation of animals. And second, there was no artificial insemination. This gave any community with a large concentration of seed stock producers in any species, particularly in horses and dairy cattle, a great marketing tool, as well as a great breed improvement tool. Had Grant Good lived in anything less than a great draft horse using and producing area, the purchase of Farceur at that long price would have been nuts. Where dairy cattle were concerned, it was spawning DHIA associations giving those fellows a handle on which cows were really making money and which ones weren’t. Everybody had their own bull. So a half dozen fellows could club together, after they had agreed on a breed, and go out and buy a half dozen bull calves with good production credentials and then swap them around for years. Every one of them would not have to go shopping for a new bull every two or three years. They could swap them around for years–long enough to discover which ones were doing the job and discard the counterfeits along the way. When someone wanted a carload of heifers of any breed, guess where they would go.

I don’t think it was quite as useful with beef cattle and hogs, but with them it offered an opportunity for local joint consignment sales–or in the case of purebred hogs, annual or semi-annual production sales on consecutive days. Community breeding was both a great marketing tool and a breed improvement tool. As highways improved and car travel became almost universal, those advantages diminished.

For example, Ralph Humes from Delaware, Ohio, reported that he and three of his Delaware County neighbors had recently sold five young Percheron stallions to a dealer in Canada–and that was the fifth shipment of stallions to this particular dealer in the last four years. In addition, they had sent a carload of 24 purebred Percheron mares to buyers in Maine that winter–and another load of high class mares and geldings had been sold to Penn State College for use on their 2200 acres of farms. It was no accident that Delaware County, Ohio, referred to itself as “Le Perche of America.”

The same can be said for any community that profited from having high class stallions in public service–of any breed, or all breeds. Communities would develop a reputation for producing useful commercial horses–and the buyers, who came by train and stayed in hotels, would return to those communities year after year.

As stated at the outset, the rapid growth of private travel and transportation by truck and automobile, changed everything it touched–and it touched everything.

They say (I’m not a hundred years old) that the big old cumbersome early tractors met with more initial acceptance in the high plains (wheat country) than back here and further east and south. That makes sense, larger fields, less crop diversification, fewer year-round jobs for chore teams, etc. A little item in the March 17, 1927, Gazette stating that some 900 horses, making up 37 cars, had been assembled and shipped out of Pawnee County, Kansas, since the beginning of the year, which was a scant ten weeks earlier, gives credence to that theory. That is a lot of commercial horses to leave one Kansas county in ten weeks.

Those winter Gazettes from 75 years ago were filled with reports of the big annual winter get-togethers of farm people at the land grant ag schools. They all called them “Farmers’ Week” or some variation of it. The various livestock groups would meet on the campuses, for meetings, short courses and just smoozing with the Animal Husbandry profs. It was sort of an annual ritual and love fest.

Farming can be a kind of solitary vocation, so farmers and stockmen love “meetings.” And as a means of putting faculty, researchers, farmers and purebred breeders together, it was no doubt a fairly effective vehicle. Somewhere along the line, such things seem to have petered out somewhat. In a recent phone conversation with Lynn MacVey, a former colleague here at DHJ who has since returned to teaching Vo-Ag here in Iowa, we talked about this. He mentioned that his adult night classes now attracted almost entirely farmers whose average age would be about 60 or better. They seem to enjoy the camaraderie and exchange of shared local experiences and ideas far more than younger farmers who are more inclined to use the internet and/or professional consultants. I can believe that.

But, back to 1927. At the Minnesota shindig, the secretary of their horse association stated that they had a membership of 1400 members! At East Lansing, West LaFayette, and several other such meetings, either Wayne Dinsmore or H.L. Young, from the Horse Association of America, was on hand to demonstrate the tie-in and buck back method of putting multiple hitches into the field. In Iowa, Bill Crownover, then secretary of the Iowa Horse and Mule Association was drumming up more membership to browbeat the legislature into a handsome annual appropriation to put that office into the state capital and fieldmen into the field to promote the horse and mule industry in this state. This was agrarian politics in its purest form.

The influence of the International Livestock Show in Chicago was evident on these campuses as virtually every one of them staged a “Little International”with their students using the college’s beasts. Such events were run by the student “Saddle and Sirloin Clubs”–also a takeoff on the International. It was sort of a grooming contest for kids, too. D.J. Kays from Ohio State, for example, mentioned that Wm. B. Murray, later of Percheron fame and still later of Standardbred fame, was the student president of the Saddle and Sirloin Club at Ohio State, and Dave Haxton–then head horseman at Woodside Farm (home of Laet) was their draft horse judge.

I suppose we better run at least one photo from the 1927 Percheron Review. This one was taken at the 1926 International Livestock Show in Chicago and shows Mr. B. H. Moore, Rouleau, Saskatchewan, Canada with this pair of big black Percheron geldings that won the pair class for horses weighing a ton or better apiece, all breeds competing. Beating the Clydesdales was the name of the game in the hitches at Chicago in those days. The Percheron Review says, “Note they are big, deep bodied, thickset horses which will work and stay fat on a moderate amount of feed.” The unspoken, but pointed, message was that this “other breed”—that often won all the hitch classes—was not overly famous for 1 - deep bodies, 2 - being thickset, or 3 - easy keepers. On the other hand, I doubt that most of today’s top Percheron hitches would flip out over this team. . .but quite a few farmers and pullers might.

Those Gazettes from early 1927 seemed slightly more upbeat than their immediate predecessors. Sanders was fond of pointing out that the coming year looked not too bad for livestock producers. That the farmers in the most trouble were those who were overleveraged from boom time investments and too lazy to keep livestock. Although he put it a little more delicately than “too lazy.” Wayne Dinsmore was fond of pointing out that if farmers would park (or junk) their tractors and use more horses and mules that they would eat up much of the grain and hay surplus, thereby raising their price and eliminating their dependence on gasoline. But any way you cut it, the Jeffersonian model of independent yeoman farmers was under stress.

I’ll mention good old Cal Coolidge one more time. On February 25, 1927, he vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm bill wherein the government would have been required to step into the market place to support commodity prices, later to unload them on to the world market. I don’t know whether that legislation was good or bad at that time. Its time would come in the 1930s when things were a good deal worse. But in 1927, Calvin had a child-like faith in the wisdom of the invisible hand of the market. That religion too is still around. But as for the name Calvin, I know hardly anyone named Calvin. Do you? It must have fallen into disuse with the onset of the Great Depression. At any rate, it has been out of favor for quite awhile. I would someday like to attend a baptism for a male child named Calvin. If you hear of one, let me know. I’ll try to attend.

That leaves only three subjects from 1927 untouched. Or, at least, that I’m going to touch. The first is the march of feminism, the second, fine poetry, and the third, odor from livestock confinement setups.

In 1927, the American Guernsey Cattle Club celebrated its Golden Anniversary with a pilgrimage to the Channel Islands and England. When Jeannine and I put that first Draft Horse Tour to Great Britain together about 30 years ago, we thought we were breaking new ground. Wrong, the Guernseys had done it in 1927–proving, I suppose, that there really is nothing new under the sun.

Anyhow, the Guernsey Cattle Club sponsored a contest for Guernsey 4-H kids and the prize was a free trip to Guernsey. There were applicants from twelve states. The winner was a girl from Wisconsin. It was deemed important enough that Karl Musser, the Guernsey secretary, came out from New Hampshire to the annual meeting of the Jefferson County, Wisconsin, Guernsey Association to make the award. He said, “In awarding this prize, I want it distinctly understood that it is given in recognition of her general proficiency as a calf club member and her value as a useful citizen, rather than for the prizes won by her Guernsey calves.” Sounds like Musser, and I wasn’t even born yet. By that time the winner was a student at a Normal College (old name for Teacher’s College) preparing for being a useful citizen. Her closest competitors were two other girls, one from Iowa and one from New Jersey. Makes you wonder if those three judges (all men) weren’t maybe scouting for a first rate secretary/office manager type, doesn’t it?

I believe a girl also won the draft horse division of the Little International at the University of Wisconsin that winter. Wisconsin, home of many beautiful and accomplished women, must have been in the vanguard of the feminism in the livestock movement at that time.

For the fine poetry award, we go to Missouri. L.M. Monsees, a great Mammoth jack and jennet breeder from Smithton, Missouri, submitted this hybrid nursery rhyme to D.C. Wing’s “All Around the Farm” column.

“Mary had a little mule that followed her to school. It was against the rule to have a mule in school. The teacher, Mr. Pool, with a rule, struck the mule. And then we had recess for three weeks.” That is close enough to make it a winner.

As for the award for the control of odors peculiar to farms, we award the blue ribbon to the National Association of Farm Equipment manufacturers with their announcement that more manure spreaders had been sold in 1926 than in any previous year, suggesting that manure doesn’t smell nearly as bad if it is spread thinly around, nor does it result in giant fish kills. In many respects, it seems to be a lot like money–if adequately spread around it does good works, concentrated, it becomes a real problem.