50 Years Ago
Late Autumn/Early Winter 1951
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Winter 2000 - 2001

(From the General News Sources, “Breeder’s Gazette,” “Belgian Review” and “Percheron News” etc., etc.)

It had been a scant five years since the end of WWII, yet we found ourselves again at war...in Korea. But unlike WWII, this was a limited war that left a great many Americans untouched in a personal sense. With prior service you were afforded the luxury of being a distant spectator...unless you had gone into the reserves or were career military. I hadn’t. If you were just getting out of high school, it was a different kind of tomcat.

It had been a scant four years since FARM JOURNAL, one of the four great national farm magazines of the time, had published the famous (or infamous) article by True D. Morse, president of the highly respected Doane Agricultural Service, called “Sell That Last Team”. It captured the tone of that post-WWII period so completely that I used it in my Century of Belgians book with their permission. So I will use it here as well. It follows.

I HATE to write this article because I am a lover of horses. I feel almost as though I were stabbing an old friend in the back.

My father kept horses until he died, partly as a contribution to his community. To the last he expected to see farmers wake up to what he believed was a big mistake in relying on tractors and trucks. He looked hopefully for the comeback of good draft teams.

Most people now realize that this can never be. Yet thousands of tractor farmers still hang onto that last team—not quite able to part with them.

Maybe you’re one of those farmers. If you want to keep “Molly” and “Fred” for sentiment, and are willing to pay for it, all right. But they are probably losing money for you every day. You might better sell them and put the same feed into a couple more dairy cows, or other livestock.

The facts are that the average farmer can’t afford to use work horses any more. R.O. Baver, for instance, has a 120-acre dairy farm in Ohio. He replaced his team of horses with a tractor, and added two cows to the herd to use the pasture and feed formerly used by the horses. Here are his figures:

Cost of keeping team of horses $182.49

Cash returns from two milk cows 238.50

Amount available to pay for tractor use each year $420.99

Cost of the tractor for a year:

Operation $113.99

Depreciation 121.22

$235.21

Subtract $235.21 from $420.99, and you find that Baver was $185.78 ahead. Besides, the tractor did more work.

J.B. Henry’s farm records in central Illinois for five years (1940-1944) show tractors doing work at one-half the cost of his horses.

Cost for horses per hour was 13.38 cents. Tractor cost per hour was 47.47 cents. But the tractor did the work of eight horses, so the comparative cost per hour was $1.07 for eight horses, and 47 cents for the tractor. It’s difficult to defend our faithful friends, the horses, against figures like these.

Tractors are often adopted as much for convenience as for economy. Anyone who has risen in the dark, day after day, to feed, water, curry and harness four to eight head of horses; rest, feed and water them at noon; and then to water, feed and unharness them at the end of a hard day’s work, doesn’t need to be told about the convenience of pouring gas into a tractor, adding water and pressing the starter button.

Tractors do break down now and then, but have you ever had the feeling that comes when “sleeping sickness”, colic or some other malady hits your horses?

It’s convenient, too, when wet weather stops work, or the season ends, just to let the tractor sit, without having to feed, water and clean stalls twice a day. This gives you time to do something else—or just to rest!

Important, too, are accident records. The Illinois Agricultural Association tabulated newspaper reports for 1938, and found that in Illinois horses caused nearly twice as many accidents as tractors.

There’s no doubt about it—the noble descendants of the prize horses of England, Belgium and France have made their last major contribution to American Agriculture.

Only one consoling thought remains: we still will have those beautiful animals that add so much to man’s pleasure—the saddle and show horses.

There you have it...the whole memorial service for the deceased. The sentimental prologue, praise for the noble fellow that he was, the figures to prove that he had outlived his time, the shoveling in of the dirt to cover the casket and the consoling final thoughts that farmers would now have time to ride and show their saddle horses or just rest. That short article encapsulated the conventional agricultural wisdom of late 1950. To all but the lame, the halt, the blind, the stubborn and the suspicious it was clear as a winter sunrise that “the golden age for rural America had finally arrived with the demise of the draft or work horse.”

This was evident in the community where I was born and grew up. The farm is five miles from town and, so near as I can recall, every farmstead was still occupied by people. Few to none of them had been abandoned, bulldozed or burned...yet. But the incremental and irreversible changes were in place.

I was helping dad on the home farm, one brother was farming the farm next door, making a total of about 400 acres. But the landlord and his wife still lived on the farm next door. His two sons had chosen other careers. Actually, both of them became journalists. There must have been something in the water in that neighborhood. Anyhow, the farmsteads were still occupied and the fences, both line and cross, were still in place. So most anyplace, after harvest, you could still run cattle, horses, hogs or sheep on the stalks or stubble to glean the fields. Go west a mile to an uncle and one of my cousins and you saw the same scenario. That was the story all through the midwest. Superficially it looked much the same as just before the big war.

My oldest brother had developed a profitable little retail dairy, pasteurizing the milk from our place and two or three other herds with a grand total of 60-65 cows in milk. It was a combination of Swiss, Guernsey and Holstein milk that went into that vat daily and the three breeds got along just fine in a glass bottle. Within two years that retail dairy would be absorbed by Anderson-Erickson out of Des Moines. So that,too, was just a precursor of things to come for small dairies and small towns.

This was about the same time that a young co-ed at Iowa State named Jeannine noticed some of A.B. Caine’s old horse bulletins on a rack and picked one up for her dad...who was also sort of a hold out on this horse thing. It wasn’t because he needed any instruction on what horses were for. She said she felt sorry for them because it was obvious that nobody else was picking them up.

These changes weren’t limited to just farms and small towns. I want to share a couple of paragraphs from FARM MAGAZINES, MILESTONES & MEMORIES by Lee Schwanz, who was one of the editors of COUNTRY GENTLEMAN at the time it got swallowed by a whale of a different sort.

“In January 1950, a couple of kids from Iowa loaded up the car and headed east to start a great adventure. I was joining the staff of COUNTRY GENTLEMAN magazine. No wonder we were excited. COUNTRY GENTLEMAN was the Number 1 farm magazine in America—first in circulation and first in advertising.

“Five years later it was dead and I want to say up front that it wasn’t all my fault.”

It was swallowed up by FARM JOURNAL with one gulp. Ironically, both were based in Philadelphia, just a stone’s throw from each other. So even this old publishing giant turned out to be just another farm next door.

That was the mood fifty years ago. We didn’t know where things were going but they were sure headed “someplace else”. The same can be said of today. I don’t think even the hot shots know, but there is no shortage of futurists, both giddy and gloomy. That is a fairly safe place to hang out since no one has been there. Prophecy is not an exact science.

The 1951 BELGIAN REVIEW carries a full page ad from the Ohio Belgian Breeders Association for 1950. It lists 40 members, quite a large group for 1950, and they were urging out of state horsemen to come to Columbus the following August to the largest Belgian show in the country. That was a factual statement, it was the biggest pup in the litter at the time. I have to believe that this strong state association is one of the chief reasons the breed came through that twenty year draft horse disaster (from 1945-65) with something to rebuild on. They stuck together and toughed it out.

Wilbur Bell, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Wilbur Coy, Salem, Ohio, replaced Charley Wentz, Wharton, Ohio, and Les Wilson, Owatonna, Minnesota, on the board. Both Wentz and Wilson declined renomination. Wentz had been one of the great breeders in the eastern cornbelt and had judged the 1950 American Belgian Show at the Ohio State Fair. Wilson had been a giant in the western cornbelt, as longtime manager of Boulder Bridge Farms Belgians and Guernseys. They were both old enough to quit but I suspect that the bleak future had more to do with it than age.

The Belgian show at the International was terrible...a total of 12 breeding horses were shown. I have no Percheron records from that year but it couldn’t have been much better. I suppose the Wilson and Budweiser Clydesdale hitches were in there, too. Surprisingly enough, Penn State (with Elmer Taft in charge) was still showing halter horses. Everywhere you looked...the sun was setting. Almost.

At Canada’s Royal Winter Fair there were 119 purebred Belgians giving them the largest exhibit of the three breeds for the first time. Four American exhibitors went north and they took a pile of awards home with them. Meadow Brook Farm, Rochester, Michigan, with Harold Clark in charge had senior and grand mare on the 3 year old, Linda; reserve senior stallion on Progress Farceur; and reserve junior champion stallion on Band Master.

Water Cress Farm, Northville, Michigan, with Don McKarns in charge, had senior and grand stallion on Cadet Farceur and C. O. House, Arcadia, Indiana, had reserve grand stallion on Master’s Successor.

Meadow Brook also had both grand and reserve geldings as well as having the top six-horse hitch in the Belgian/Percheron section. Chet and Molly Umholts, Earl Park, Indiana, followed in second place in the six.

It wasn’t just the breeders who were not giving up, the pullers were also carrying on. Michigan, that hot bed of horse pulling, had a strong Dynamometer Association and they reported that 200,000 people had witnessed their pulls at 38 county fairs and other farm events during 1950. Just over 1000 teams competed at these contests...not all from Michigan of course. A Fowler Bros. team of purebred Belgians, had gone undefeated through that season and set a new world record by pulling 4275 lbs. the distance. The horses weighed 5060 lbs. There were also a lot of stoneboat events that were not included in these numbers.

I doubt that was enough positive news for anyone to send Mr. Morse a wire to the effect that the touching funeral he had orchestrated in FARM JOURNAL was premature. As for the country at large, it bought into the funeral story hook, line and sinker.

I’ll run pictures from the REVIEW of three of those champions from late 1950.

The Korean War continued on its roller coaster course with a rapid advance into North Korea in October. By the 19th of October our army was in Pyongyang, their capital city. General MacArthur had called on the North Koreans to surrender, but they weren’t buying it, so the drive north to the Yalu River continued. By the end of the month they had reached this river which marks the border to Manchuria. MacArthur having “invited” the North Koreans to lay down their arms, felt justified in carrying the war north, even though Mao Tse-tung had stated that he would not allow his puppet state to be overrun. Maybe MacArthur thought the Chinese were bluffing...and maybe not.

There were several very willful people involved. President Truman and General MacArthur were center stage. There was no love lost there. On October 15, they had met on Wake Island in the Pacific to have a talk...and paper over their differences. MacArthur said he was confident the Chinese would not intervene. Truman gave MacArthur another medal and MacArthur said some nice things about Harry to the press, and they went their separate ways, cordially disliking, and distrusting one another.

Another willful character was Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea, who started crowing almost the minute our troops crossed the border that he planned to be the president of a united Korea without U.N. aid. Such gratitude!

Well, in November it happened. The Chinese crossed the Yalu in force and we were at war, not with a little puppet state, but with China itself. All hopes of ending the war by Christmas seemed pretty far fetched by mid-December as the communist armies again drove south.

Coming events were casting their shadows in other parts of Asia as well. The French were not doing well in Vietnam, in September they abandoned 250 miles of the Chinese border to the rebels. The French changed commanders and the Chinese invaded Tibet. Fifty years ago this Christmas our side wasn’t doing so great in that part of the world.

President Truman gave General Eisenhower a Christmas present on December 19, when he placed Ike at the head of NATO. Eisenhower had been serving as president of Columbia University in New York following his “crusade in Europe” as supreme commander. I somehow doubt that Eisenhower enjoyed being a university president. So this may have been a rescue. Truman may have also had something else in mind...namely his own successor. For two years later, Truman offered to sponsor Ike as his candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S. Truman’s blessing would have all but assured his nomination. There was only one hitch in the deal. Eisenhower wasn’t a Democrat.

Two things happened in baseball 50 years ago this fall. One was expected and the other was inevitable. The Yankees won the World Series in four straight wins over the Philadelphia Phillies. That was expected. Connie Mack, the 87 year old manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, retired. That was inevitable. For 67 years he had been either a player, club owner or manager. As True D. Morse would have said, “It is time for you to go, old fellow.” Even though he was pretty nimble for an 87 year-old.

There was an attempt on President Truman’s life by a couple of disgruntled Puerto Ricans. About a week after the assassination attempt, a music critic gave Margaret Truman (the president’s daughter) a bad review. Harry, with Puerto Ricans trying to kill him, MacArthur trying to direct him—rather than vice versa, and Bess telling him to play the piano a little softer, had had it. He went public with his intention to punch that music reviewer in the nose. A lot of fine and lofty people went tut, tut, tut. That certainly isn’t very presidential, etc., etc.

As a father of daughters, I think Truman’s response was appropriate. You shouldn’t have to clear something like that through the state department.

Oh, one more thing. George Bernard Shaw, great Irish born playwright, died. He was 94 and a cranky old man but a talented writer who could see every side of an issue and denounce and ridicule them all.

Drive-in theaters were breeding like rabbits and the American love affair with the automobile taking them everywhere. The people with sit-down movie houses were nervous. Some parents probably were too. So, they came and went. One of the last holdouts in this part of the state was a half mile north of our place. I think we went about twice in 15 years. It was kind of nice. On a quiet summer night you could sometimes hear the dialogue...or maybe it was the popcorn popping. Anyhow, it is gone. But we can still hear “taps” at the Boy Scout camp a couple miles south of us.

That is how I remember the first half of the last century sputtering to a finish...50 years ago.