50 Years Ago
Late Spring/Early Summer 1953
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Summer 2003

On April 1 (April Fool’s Day) Congress created another cabinet level agency called the Health, Education and Welfare Agency. President Eisenhower’s choice for the first head of that agency was Mrs. Ovetta Culp Hobby, who had served as commander of the Women’s Army Corps during WW II.

Popularity ebbs and flows. Fifty years ago the word was that football, baseball and basketball were either static or losing spectators. On the other hand, it was pointed out that crowds at the track, for both Thoroughbred running races and Standardbred trotting races, were growing, with close to 46 million people turning out at the tracks that year. Whether it was the betting windows or the horses that drew the crowds was not mentioned. Of course, these figures came from Triangle Publications, an outfit that published horse racing periodicals. You can attach about as much importance to these comparisons as your bones tell you to.

Probably the thing that would play the biggest role in the future was the work of a pair of scientists named James Watson and Francis Crick, both PhD.’s, one American and one Brit. They went public with their work on the molecular basis of heredity–their double helix model for DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). It would come to impact everything from police investigations to the registration of draft horses.

The annual debate in Hartford, Connecticut, (this had been going on for about twenty years) was on their law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married or unmarried women, which must include most women. According to state law, “Any person who shall use any drug, medical article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than $50 or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year, or be both fined and imprisoned.”

This law was about as successful as prohibition but it could have been a great source of revenue. Forget the jail sentences–they would soon be full anyhow. Just collect the fines and that little commonwealth would have had enough surplus cash to give it to the feds. It would have paid for the whole Korean War with change left over.

There was a P.O.W. exchange in Korea, the first in that conflict, I think. The swap, done in April, was supposed to involve 600 Allied prisoners (ours, South Korea’s and other Allies’) versus 5,000 North Koreans and 700 Chinese. Why the huge inequity? I would guess simply because the Communists did not take prisoners in most cases.

Down in French-Indochina, the French were not leaving willingly. But the war wasn’t going their way, either, as it spread to Laos. Our secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had a fixation about it–it was called his domino theory. He was sure that if the French left or got beat that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall like dominos.

Well, eventually, the French got licked. But not before they appointed a new supreme commander for that area and hung in there a little longer. Eventually we would inherit the mess, calling it the Vietnam War. And eventually we left, too.

Ernest Hemingway was living in Cuba at that time. He had spent a lot of time in his boat. When he wasn’t in his boat, he was at his typewriter. The result was The Old Man and the Sea and it won a Pulitzer Prize that year.

But forget the cold war, and the hot wars in the Far East, forget that Great Britain’s great days of empire were over (and France’s, too) and you all come to a party with all the pomp and ceremony that generations of privilege confer. In June of 1953, it was the time to crown a new queen of Great Britain. On June 2, 1953, Elizabeth had her “official debut” or CORONATION. She had actually been functioning as the monarch for well over a year since the death of her father, George VI. As a child she never expected to be queen. Her uncle, Edward, George’s elder brother, was next in line for the throne. But things happen. Edward, more playboy than king material, fell hard for an American named Wally Simpson and married her, thus, throwing in his hand so far as the king business went.

During WW II, Elizabeth, with her father as king, drove a truck in the Women’s Army Corps. She has been a splendid lady. And probably the only queen in Great Britain’s history who could fix a flat tire.

The draft horse business had a very weak pulse in 1953. In terms of registrations, the Belgians had touched bottom in fiscal 1952 with only 171 registrations. The Percherons were too modest to list their numbers in the Percheron News but they were worse off than the Belgians. The Clydesdales were worse off than the Percherons and the Shires and the Suffolks had become, in practical terms–invisible.

Speaking of visibility, you could drive halfway across any of our great Midwest farm states and never see a horse or mule in harness. You might see an old pair standing under an oak tree in the pasture. To find them in 1953, you had to know where to look. Random driving around wouldn’t do it, except in the Amish communities that reached from Pennsylvania out through Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. In those communities, both horses and people were going about their accustomed tasks in much the same fashion as back in the ‘30s, when the draft horse was still very much in the game.

The Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the only big early show in the country. On that week, in that place, you would not know the patient was so sick. Both the Belgians and Percherons put on popping good shows out there fifty years ago. In the Belgian Show, there were exhibitors with names like Orndorff (grandpa, not the kids) and Elmer Lapp. In the Percherons, Marvyn Forwood provided most of the winners. The reason I mention this is that people like these are still raising foals, still competing and in the process, preserving the bloodlines. Even so, there is no use in denying that some very useful families of horses simply petered out during this era. Fortunately the public still loved them, even if their neighbors didn’t.

I’m going to debunk some of the conventional wisdom that I hear these days. Conventional wisdom is something that people say, believe and accept as gospel without examining it. The conventional wisdom that I quarrel with is, “It was the Amish who kept the draft breeds alive during the 1940s and ‘50s.” I’ve heard it. You’ve heard it. It ain’t true. But like most of the conventional wisdoms, it does have some truth embedded into it.

Were it not for the thousands of Amish farmers who depend on drafters for their power, the whole art of horse farming – even the idea of farm communities, might well have been lost. But, it appears to me that the Amish did not become serious breeders of Belgian and Percheron seed stock in any significant number prior to the mid to late 1950s. I believe they did not get active in the breeding any sooner because they could add and subtract very well.

In the 1940s and early ‘50s there were tens of thousands of still fairly young, serviceable and unemployed draft horses around. The only competitor the Amish had for these animals was the kill market – the dog food can. Why raise replacements when you could buy them for peanuts?

That great resurgence of draft horse breeding in the last half of the 1930s (it peaked about 1938) left American farms with a lot of young horses by the time we entered the war in 1941. During the war there was great pressure to produce foodstuffs. Consequently there were no restrictions on gasoline for farmers. With so many of the young men off to war most of the farming was done by old men and kids. Tractors have headlights. Those war years simply demolished the draft horse business. Then the vets came home. Mechanization raced ahead. I can remember quite a few horses reaching the age of 5 or 6 without ever wearing a harness. And the trucks were rolling to Estherville, loaded with the faithful older teams and the 5 or 6-year-olds who never felt leather, tin-can bound for Fido.

By 1953, fifty years ago, that pantry was getting empty and that is when the Amish got far more interested in raising colts. You find few Amish surnames in the records of pre-WW II Belgians and Percherons. Amish breeders are now producing some of the finest in both breeds, and not merely as replacement work stock but as top flight breeding animals in the purebred trade.

So I think I can make a case for the idea that as long as the country had plenty of cheap horses for sale, the Amish community saw little need to become serious horse breeders. When it became apparent that the well was going dry, they then embarked seriously on providing not only their own equine replacements, but the seed stock as well. It took both the “English” and the Amish to “save the draft horse.”