AVIATION: The successful solo flight across the Atlantic in May of 1927 by Charles Lindbergh set in motion a whole series of “firsts” in aviation. On April 12, 1928, three German flyers proved that it was just as possible to cross the Atlantic from east to west as from west to east. They flew their German-built Junkers from Ireland to New York. They, of course, did not get the wild, spontaneous reception that Lindbergh did in Paris. For one thing, there were three of them, and for another, they cheated–starting out from Ireland instead of the continent.

A couple of days later two French pilots landed at le Bourget, ending a 45,000 mile round-the-world flight. There are many “routes” around the world. You can sort of establish your own mileage.

Then a couple of months later Amelia Earhart, a 29-year-old tom-boy from Atchison, Kansas, became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. She was, however, accompanied by two male pilots and it was a twin engine plane, not a monoplane as was Lindbergh’s craft, the “Spirit of St. Louis.” The three of them took off from Boston and 22 hours later landed in Wales. She said she went because she wanted to show that this type of travel was comparatively safe and ought to be developed.

That is exactly what Lindbergh, the hero, was doing. He found celebrity a burden, not a career. So he threw himself into the development of commercial aviation–where his unwanted celebrity was very useful. Prior to fame he had been one of the early pilots in carrying the U.S. mail. Now he wanted to move people as well as letters. He promoted the idea at any and every opportunity and he had a great many opportunities. He forged business relationships that would last for forty years, such as his connection with and part ownership of Pan American Airlines. He was there almost at the birth of Pan-Am.

If you are really interested in Lindbergh, allow me to suggest Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg. Originally published by Putnam & Sons in 1998, it is now available in paperback from Berkley Books. It costs sixteen bucks. It is a good story, well told.

UNHAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH: I’d nominate China for that one 75 years ago. Everybody seemed to be fighting everybody else. There were regional warlords, communists, the northerners under the command of a man named Tso-lin and the southerners under the command of a man named Chiang Kai-shek. The Japanese had a lot of troops over there and the British had a few to protect their stake in the game, and on and on. I suppose some called themselves conservatives or loyalists and others called themselves liberals or liberators. It was probably dangerous to ask–or even be there. I can’t sort it out.

But we did have a dog in that fight. It was Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists. He had recently married a girl who was the sister-in-law of the former president of the republic, when they had one, and she had graduated from Wellesley. There had been two services, one at the Methodist Episcopal church and a civil service at a big hotel in Shanghai. He and she got what could be called “good press” in our country.

Meanwhile, somewhere, Pearl Buck was busy scribbling away and editing her book, The Good Earth. It would be published the next year and win the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Later the same book would win the Nobel Peace Prize for literature. She had been raised by Christian missionaries in China and spent the first 32 years of her life there.

As for American farmers at the time, I doubt they were paying much attention to China. China was not a trading partner for our soybeans and corn then. As indicated above, China wasn’t even organized–much beyond knocking the other guy out. So even our military and industrial communities probably had limited interest. I suspect real interest was limited to professional China-watchers in our state department and niches in academia. As for the impression most Americans had of China–they were probably shaped more by Pearl Buck than the New York Times.

THE STOCK MARKET: They called them the Roaring Twenties and the impression one can get is that it was “ever onward and upward,” until the big crash. Wasn’t so. Actually, the stock market was as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. For the last couple of years or so it had been experiencing big time nervous twitches–harbingers of the future. It had happened on February 28, again on March 28, another on May 16 and still another on June 12. As usual, the Wall Street watchers and big shots were unable to predict or explain why these huge one-day selloffs were occurring. Can’t you just hear them now: “the fundamentals (what are ‘they’–exactly?) are sound (what does ‘sound’ mean–exactly?) and there was no reason to panic.”

I think it was time to go see the doctor to find out why Joe was falling down the basement stairs every few weeks. But 1928 Joe would get up, shrug it off and go on. The fundamentals were sound.

May 28, 1928, was not one of those fall-down-the-stairs days but it was eventful. On that day Dodge Bros., Inc., and the Chrysler Company entered into holy matrimony. It was the largest merger to date in a still young automotive industry. This would put them into the same league as Ford and General Motors. The “big three” had been created.

Which brings me to–GOVERNMENT STATISTICS: On June 25 of 1928, two government agencies acknowledged that perhaps not all was well. The Commerce Department said that two million Americans were out of work. The Labor Department said that it was closer to four million. Bear in mind that our population and labor force were much smaller. If you accept Labor’s figures–about 10% were unemployed and if you accept Commerce’s figures–about 5% were unemployed. My hunch is that women might not have been included–because most of them were staying home raising kids, canning tomatoes, and patching overalls. Our history with lots of women working outside the home for wages was very limited at that time.

Agriculture had been in the dumpster since the post-war letdown of 1920. Now, it seems, farmers were getting some additional company. The unemployment was said to have started in the textile industry (we must have still had one) where many workers were being replaced by machinery–and not just in textiles. An additional concern was that big-ticket investors were starting to park their money overseas.

PRESIDENT COOLIDGE: The year 1927 had produced some of the most devastating floods our kind had ever experienced, both in the West and in the great basin of the Mississippi. On May 15 President Coolidge signed legislation allocating 340 million dollars for flood control in the Midwest and West. The Army Corps of Engineers had their work cut out for them, constructing levees on both sides of that great river for hundreds of miles. Coolidge signed the bill. He wasn’t totally against spending money but he had to be convinced of the need.

Two weeks later the latest version of the McNary-Haugen farm relief bill arrived on his desk. I believe this was the third attempt in as many sessions of Congress. It was vetoed–again, three for three. Coolidge didn’t like it because he said it was price-fixing. The sponsors of the bill called it price-stabilization.

But farm prices had been sour a good share of the time in the last seven or eight years. When something is broke it is a good idea to try to “fix” it–one way or another. It was the method more than the motive that Calvin quarreled with–he thought it was naughty to “fix” prices. Setting prices is a job for the invisible hand of the market, not a huge new agency. You would have thought those congressmen would have learned–it is okay to mess around with Mother Nature (levees) but don’t mess around with theology (invisible hands).

At the same time let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. So far as McNary-Haugen is concerned, the devil was in the details. He did not want to establish a huge USDA to administer the thing. That went against his grain–not decent prices for farmers. If one had to choose three presidents from the 20th Century that were, in terms of background and experience, kin to farmers, I think it would be Coolidge, Truman, and Carter. Their views and knowledge of farming were personal, not academic or theoretical.

On the other hand, stabilizing prices at a profitable level is much easier for industry than agriculture where the demand is relatively inelastic. It is much easier, if one can afford it, to own a car, a truck and a camper than it is to eat fifteen eggs for breakfast every morning–just because they are cheap.

Well, he wouldn’t have to veto it again, he was packing to leave. It was time for the two parties to gather in convention to nominate their tickets for the 1928 presidential election.

THE CONVENTIONS: The Republicans were first up to the plate. They met in Kansas City in mid-June and nominated Herbert Hoover for president and Charles Curtis from Kansas as his running mate. Several weeks before the convention, Sam Guard had gone into Washington, D.C., to interview the Secretary of Commerce–Herbert Hoover. Hoover, the “odds on” favorite to win the nomination, completely won Sam Guard over. He conceded the rightness of part of the thrice-vetoed legislation and dissected the parts he would have vetoed himself. But we didn’t have line item veto.

So when convention time rolled around, Sam Guard took his new Breeder’s Gazette radio station to Kansas City and broadcast from there. He had become a Hoover fan and I think he had a picnic. Here is a quote from his Sunup column following the convention.

“I was dumfounded when one of our subscribers met me in the lobby of the Baltimore (hotel) and exclaimed, real earnest-like, ‘What is the editor of the Breeder’s Gazette doing at the Republican National Convention?’”

That stumped Sam for a time but as he said, “Once seated in the old Convention Hall, I felt perfectly at home. This is where we used to hold the American Royal Livestock Show before they got a better place down by the river.”

The Democrats met in Houston a couple of weeks later–Sam did not attend. They nominated a man about as unlike Hoover as it is possible to be. Hoover was a mining engineer, a self-made millionaire, a graduate of Stanford University and had emerged from WWI as one of the most admired men in America due to his taking over the role of “feeding Belgium.” He was a civilian war hero. His father had been a blacksmith in rural Iowa. So here was a man of tremendous accomplishment and not given to jocularity.

The Democrats nominated Al Smith. Born in New York City, he left school at the age of twelve to go to work as a newsboy. Later he worked in the Fulton Fish Market. So he was sort of a graduate of the streets and a practitioner of survival. He was smart and the Tammany Hall party machine was his ticket to public service. Elected to the state legislature in 1903, he served in Albany until becoming governor in 1919. So he had been governor of our most populous state (at that time) for eight years when his fellow New Yorker, Franklin Roosevelt, nominated him for president–calling Smith “the Happy Warrior.” His running mate was Joseph Robinson, a longtime senator from Arkansas who was most things Smith was not–such as Protestant, rural, very at home in Washington and Southern. In some respects it was a balanced ticket.

As for Hoover and Smith, it was introvert/extrovert, Quaker/ Catholic, West Branch, Iowa/New York City; and one spoke very carefully and the other spoke Bronx. And this would be the first election where radio might make a difference.

Let’s talk some more about radio–along with the Breeder’s Gazettes of that now long ago spring of 1928. The new owners were putting out big, interesting and challenging (to the readers) issues. They must have been feeling their oats because they put their magazine belly deep into the radio business. Yep, they made a deal with Westinghouse Farm Station KFKX in Chicago whereby they would broadcast directly from their Stock Yards station daily. Their daily schedule is reproduced here. The new owners loved it. In fact they had even used the immediacy of radio to justify going from bi-weekly to monthly. This was especially important where the markets were concerned.

Sam, in his previous job as Director of Information for the then new American Farm Bureau, had produced a weekly show on this same station for that big farm organization. Later he managed WLS as a radio station for three years, turning it into a good farm station. He was a natural for radio with millions of listeners “attending” his Little Brown Church show which he broadcast. When mega-sized tornadoes hit the Midwest he raised $215,000 for the orphans of the storm.

Shortly after buying the Gazette they put Jim Poole, their markets editor, on the air under the auspices of the Chicago Livestock Exchange. Then in December of 1927, just six months after buying the old magazine, the young partners were invited by the National Broadcasting Company (yes, NBC) to produce shows from the International Livestock Exposition for a chain of thirteen stations.

Oh, it must have been an exciting spring for the young owners, C. L. Burlingham and Sam Guard, with not only the oldest all-around livestock journal in America but their very own radio substation on the second floor of the Purebred Livestock Record Building at the Union Stock Yards. If you look closely at that daily schedule, you will note that the Percheron Society of America was the Thursday sponsor of their noon program–with Secretary McFarland at the mike. Of course, his office was about a block away.

The price of hogs, which had been dismal in 1927, even rose dramatically in the spring of 1928.

The problems of farming were not all economic, but engaged on multiple fronts and the Gazette did its best to cover all of them.

Two of the great campaigns at that time were the “Eradication of the Corn Borer” and the fight against bovine and avian tuberculosis. They gave abundant space to both of these problems.

The invasion of this continent by the European Corn Borer was serious business. One of the most Draconian measures suggested was to corner the foe in the vicinity of infestation around the Great Lakes. We are reproducing an editorial and map outlining that strategy from the April 1928 issue. It has some of the overtones of a military campaign.

Then came this suggestion from Germany, which was also fighting the borer. The borers overwintered or hibernated in corn stalks. So with some special equipment, they cut the stalks off below ground and either fed them as fodder or burned them. If that special equipment was a spade, that sounds rather labor intensive.

Still others were seeking solutions by chemical or biological means.

I can recall, as a little kid, the “fires of fall,” when many farmers would burn their stalks. I don’t remember how they bunched them, maybe with a dump rake. I suppose the theory was to incinerate the hibernating borers and, given the equipment of the times, make the ground easier to work in the spring. There was, however, a loss of organic matter. Some of those old discs sort of bounced over the stalks, caressing rather than cutting them. I had one like that.

It was a major concern in the Corn Belt and the young editors gave it their best shot–even when they thought some of the suggested solutions were straight from Nutsville.

The other big battle being waged was the one against TB. This campaign against bovine tuberculosis started in 1917 and in 1918, Congress appropriated a half million dollars for the cause. That half million had, by 1928, become a six million dollar fund augmented with state appropriations totaling twelve million more. By 1928, about half the breeding cattle of the U.S. had been tested.

The program was testing, slaughtering the reactors, disinfecting the premises and compensating the owners. Not totally unlike the usual control of foot and mouth disease. It, too, had a map but one map a day, or an issue, is enough.

In the earlier years it was thought that nearly all of swine tuberculosis came via cattle through the milk and droppings. A lot of skim milk was fed to hogs. But a decline in the percentage of hogs condemned at packing houses did not start downward, as did the cattle. It then became apparent that there was another source of infection. It turned out to be mother’s hens. It was determined that 75% of the TB in swine was of the avian or fowl variety. So a second front was opened on TB.

Where cattle were concerned, there was an accredited herd program where annual testing was done. A second program was the modified accredited county plan, which involved county-wide testing. A county became modified accredited when the incidence of the disease was not more than one half of one percent. This is a big country and it was a slow go, as you can well imagine.

Most of the progress was made in the Northeast and Upper Midwest which was home to many dairy cattle and where herds were of modest size. Huge areas of the High Plains and Mountain States (ranch country) had done next to nothing like the Southeast and California. That figured. It was a lot easier to herd test where there were ten or even twenty milk cows that come into the barn twice a day to be milked than 5,000 Hereford cows who regarded anything on just two legs as something to run from.

I don’t know what happened on the poultry front, other than frequent testing and culling. The McLean County (Illinois) system of portable hog houses and raising pigs on clean ground probably got a shot in the arm for chickens as well. One more job for the team or tractor–pull the chicken house to a new patch of ground.

Hog cholera got its share of attention, too, but we don’t have room for everything. It was, after all, 75 years ago and there was an effective vaccine available. You just had to use it. There was a long editorial in the May issue entitled “Down With Hog Cholera.” Not a very courageous title–exactly who was “Up for hog cholera?” That is kind of like saying “Down With Sin.” Except that hog cholera was more specific.

And sometimes I think they just liked to turn the fox loose in the henhouse to watch the commotion. In May they ran an article by George A. Hunt who, obviously, had been deceived at a few purebred hog sales. He had a long list of sharp practices–everything from pulling bids taken from that sparrow high in the rafters to more refined types of fraud. His special targets were the field service guys who represented farm papers. First, they sold the breeder an ad, and then they promised fantastic results and did whatever it took to get them–even though very often the hogs weren’t really sold. He called them inventory sales.

Naturally, the rebuttals came and filled more pages in subsequent issues.

Purebred hog sales got a thorough airing for the next couple of issues and, giving the editors the benefit of the doubt, maybe even worked toward cleaning up–or at least exposing some shady practices.

Purebred hog sales were a dime a dozen then, and for a long time afterward. For one thing, hogs have litters, not singles and most every farmer needed a new boar now and then. With cross-breeding commonplace, they might also need to replenish the distaff side on occasion–so why not pick up a few gilts at a nearby sale and start over? That is why hog breeders had annual sales–they had the volume and two litters a year to deal with. The great majority of sales were on the square–as were their owners. But George Hunt had been shafted and, via Breeder’s Gazette, “told all.”

Another very noticeable change between the old (Sanders) and the new (Burlingham & Guard) ownership was that the amount of advertising by the dairy breeds increased sharply. It was pretty much on a par with the beef people. That had never been true with the former ownership.

And the dairy breeds were doing extremely well in 1928. The Jersey people stated that their first quarter (of 1928) registrations had increased by 20% and transfers 31% over the same period in 1927. The files were taking up so much space they had to rent two floors in an adjacent building–their three-story building was plumb full.

The other butterfat breed, the Guernseys, had their 51st annual meeting in May. During the past twelve months they had registered 39,027 cattle: 14,363 of them bulls and 24,664 females–new high records for both.

Why so many bulls? Because everybody had to have a bull. The sale of purebred bull calves was one of the most attractive reasons for milking good registered cows– instead of good grades who might give just as much. Bull calves were a significant part of my dad’s income and many others like him.

I had an old Holstein friend who said, before A.I., and when more people milked, the sale of bull calves completely covered the cost of keeping a good hired man. That also played a part in breed selection. Our neck of the woods was full of good Swiss cattle–making the bulls more saleable.

Nationally, however, Swiss were not popular or commonplace. They received little ink in the Breeder’s Gazette. But in that spring of 1928, they did rate some real publicity. Dr. C. F. Osborne had a small but great herd of them at Hampton, Iowa. His sudden death brought about a dispersal sale the likes of which hadn’t been seen in that breed. Forty-six head sold for an average of $650–the top cow for $5,400. Jessie Zoller, Walhalla Farm in New York, bought her and two of her stanchion mates for a total of $12,250. The top young bull went to Pennsylvania at $1,075. Iowans apparently didn’t have enough money to keep the top ones at home (see photo on p. 151).

Better mention the Ayrshires, too–this is an equal opportunity magazine, even for cows. They and the Swiss were the “two little sisters.” In the mid-’20s the Ayrshires took the lead in moving from Advanced Registry to H.I.R.–or Herd Improvement Registry. In shorthand, that means from production records on a handful of selected and pampered pets and show cows on test for production to testing the entire herd. In 1928, the Holsteins joined them and the others would. We were way behind the Danes, Dutch and Scots in meaningful measurements of production, feed costs and consequently, genetic gains were slow to come by.

So far we’ve mentioned almost everything except horses. There were a lot of gossipy-type paragraphs about the Percheron trade (they were right next door, literally) and a report from Fred Holbert, Greeley, Iowa, in the May Gazette stating that they had completed five importations from Europe in the last six months and were selling an average of five stallions a week. Of all the great importers of a mere ten years earlier, they were the only one still making voyages across the Atlantic with any regularity or in any volume.

Following is the horseman’s state of mind, straight from the 1929 Percheron News, which was a review of 1928.

SCARCITY ASSURES DEMAND. “Just now an actual shortage of horses appears to be on the way because breeding operations dwindled during the post-war agricultural depression. The equine population of the United States is now given as 14,541,000, the lowest in forty years and has registered a decline of 25% in the last eight years. In 1919, there were 91 colts foaled per 1,000 horses and mules on farms and ranches in the U.S. In 1927, the number had dwindled to 42.4. This foaling rate is far below the replacement level.

“Young breeding stock is already scarce and the outlook for the sale of colts particularly good.”

That isn’t the whole loaf but it is the nub of the story, or hope, of horsemen in the late 1920s. There is no question but that reduced levels of breeding had a stabilizing effect on horse prices. But scarcity is not something to build a future on. Recent decades of reduced numbers of sheep have supported the fat lamb market, even as per capita consumption of lamb has declined.

Every winter and spring would bring a few letters to the editor from stallioners that “business was picking up.” In some cases, I suppose it was true. But overall it wasn’t–numbers continued to decline, as did breeding. Holbert’s importations, however, were not anecdotal–they were for real. So, maybe things really were reaching a point of turnaround. We will see.