75 Years Ago
Late Autumn/Early Winter 1927
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Winter 2001 - 2002

 

We were entering the age of certified experts. The air was full of studies, statistics, warnings and opinions–many of them dressed up as revelation.

In October of that year, Dr. Dunlap of John Hopkins in Baltimore asserted that smoking made men more dependable. For what? I don’t know. I somehow doubt that he was working on respiratory diseases. No mention of women, whether it made them more dependable or not. Nonetheless those were his findings, or at least his theory. My dad must have believed him–if he ever heard of him, which is doubtful. You could depend on him to be smoking a good deal of the time. He was fairly respectable in other respects as well.

I believe I could issue a paper on the salutary effect of pacifiers (binkeys to our grandsons) in the case of little kids. They are definitely quieter and less likely to be raising cane with one of those things in their mouth. Unlike Dunlap, I plan to include thumbs in my study. They are cheaper and have the additional advantage of not getting lost. It is hard to mislay a thumb and they are not damaging to your lungs.

A British writer named MacKenzie (must have been a Scot) was warning one and all that birth control could be our undoing, allowing the rapidly multiplying Chinese to someday overrun Western Civilization. There is always something to worry about.

Ever hear of the Great Houdini? He was a world famous escape artist and made a right good living out of it. He died. He was only 52 years old and sort of a victim of his own conceit. Speaking to a group of students in Montreal, he boasted of how his stomach muscles could withstand very hard blows. Some kid in the crowd took him at his word, jumped up on the stage and struck him twice in the stomach, just above the appendix. A couple of days later, performing in Detroit, he complained of the pain. But like the great showman he was, went ahead with his performance. The show must go on, etc. The following day, doctors removed his appendix but it was too late. He died of peritonitis. I don’t know what action, if any, was taken against the young man. But I’ll bet he never did it again.

A more ordinary death was that of Eugene V. Debs at the age of 71. He had made a career out of running for president–even more than Wm. Jennings Bryan. Debs ran as the Socialist candidate five times from 1900 to 1920. On his last go round, in 1920, he did his campaigning from a jail cell, having been convicted of sedition during wartime in WWI. He got almost a million votes–his highest total. The roaring ‘20s and the successful communist revolution in Russia, had taken the wind out of the socialist sails by 1926. Nonetheless a good many of Debs’ policies became public policy during the next couple of decades.

Benito Mussolini had consolidated his power in Italy and was swaggering around like the bully he was. Not everyone thought he was the answer. Two issues ago, I reported on an Irish woman who had taken a shot at him, but just gave him a nosebleed. This time it was an 18 year old boy who thought Mussolini was just what Italy didn’t need. He didn’t get it done either.

No less a person than Pope Pius lauded Benito’s latest escape with this incredible statement: “This is a new sign that Mussolini has God’s full protection.” I imagine the would-be assassin was executed. With God’s blessing? There were a lot of apologists for Mussolini because he was bringing order out of chaos.

So the affairs of man were about as messy as usual.

In our country the stock market, after a couple of good scares in early 1926, had stabilized and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover told us in November that with production and consumption at all-time highs, some wages up, and unemployment down, that “the nation had never enjoyed so much prosperity.” We obviously had the combination figured out here in the U.S.

If that little cross section of statements, pronouncements, and studies from 1926 doesn’t make you a little uneasy, you must have nerves of steel. Kind of like Houdini’s stomach muscles.

Now to the livestock scene as seen through the eyes of the Breeder’s Gazette for the last quarter of 1926. Going through those papers from that period is a little like watching an old friend die, inch by inch. It had gone from greatness to slim pickings in little more than a decade. There were reasons for the decline, but some of it was self-inflicted.

The reasons were abundant. Founded in 1881 as “an illustrated weekly devoted to diversified farming and stockraising,” it aimed, unlike many of the farming papers of that time, at a truly national audience. It was evangelistic in its promotion of the “purebred idea”–in all aspects of domesticated livestock; and the role that improved livestock played in a balanced farming scheme. For the first thirty plus years of its life, it was crowned with great success. It was even instrumental in founding some of the stud and herd books. It was so successful that it spawned a whole litter of special breed magazines in all species. Those magazines (progeny if you will) made deep inroads into their lineage of advertising for sales, etc. Tractors came along and made even deeper inroads into their horse advertising. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that their advertising income from purebred livestock dropped like a rock in a silo.

Then, along came WWI with the distorted economics of the wartime boom in both commodity and land prices, followed by a postwar bust that changed the very nature of farming in this country. While the ‘20s were called roaring in some areas, such as manufacturing, a general malaise, to use President Carter’s unfortunate (for him) choice of word much later, surrounded the business of farming.

A new age was dawning and while others such as Farm Journal and Country Gentleman moved into agri-business, the Gazette remained steadfastly loyal to agriculture. While others talked mostly about the business of farming, the old Gazette continued to devote most of its diminishing pages to extensive show reports, breed news and sometimes just purebred gossip. The purists loved it. Others abandoned it for their state and regional papers and the national sheets that, while they still treated the purebred livestock business with respect, talked mostly about the business of farming.

The Gazette did not change. Maybe it couldn’t and still be the Gazette. So you wind up in late 1926 with slender little 28-32 page issues and fewer readers. Want to know what is going on in the Brown Swiss or Guernsey or Angus business? You could find that in-depth in the breed papers–and in most cases you really didn’t care about what the “other” breeds were doing. Change is never easy. Sometimes it is impossible. I’m not throwing rocks. Had I been around and an old Gazette hand, I suspect I’d have been as resistant to making the necessary changes as Alvin Sanders was. And there is no assurance that that would have worked either.

They did make gestures in that direction, pushing performance and progeny testing, such as DHIA testing, dam/daughter bull proofs, ton litter programs in swine, etc. When pulling contests came into being, they were promoting them.

Speaking of new programs, it was in 1926 that the Hoosier Gold Medal Colt Program was started as a joint project of the Indiana Draft Horse Breeders Association, Purdue University, and the Agricultural Extension Service. Actually, they put the rules together in 1925 but 1926 was their first year of operation. In that year, they had 96 breeders nominate 140 colts. In 1927, it almost doubled in size and continued to play an important role in improving draft horses in the Hoosier state, clear up to recent times. P.T. Brown, (Parke’s father), was the extension horseman who shepherded this program through great growth in the ‘30s.

While on the subject of horses, I can’t resist one 75 year old obit. On December 17, 1926, Colonel (also known as Senator) E.B. White, owner of the famous Selma Farm in Virginia and breeder of Laet, died. He had just recently been elected to his 14th year as president of the Percheron Horse Association, having served on the board for about twice that long–since 1911. A great leader with a natural wit, a brilliant mind, and a keen sense of duty, he is remembered as much for his public service as for the great horses he bred. I note that the World Percheron Congress will be held in Virginia in 2002–surely it would be remiss if some important award honoring this great Virginian’s memory is not awarded in some fashion.

The livestock markets in late 1926 were kind of sour. The market editor’s November 18 column starts out with “An optimistic forecast of livestock markets for the ensuing 30 days is impossible. The legacy of the big 1925 corn crop is still in the process of liquidation by the stockyard route.” The market had been fighting that big carry-over crop all year. Some dope in the Gazette headed that column with this title, “An Optimistic Market Forecast.” I think that headline writer got as far as Poole’s first six words and then wrote the header.

Lespedeza was catching on as a legume hay crop in the southern tier of states including Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. It turned out better than kudzu or multiflora rose hedges for fences. Both of those became pests. I recall taking some of our Swiss cattle to the Missouri State Fair some 20 years later, in 1949. I ordered hay from the feed barn, expecting alfalfa. Turned out to be lespedeza. I didn’t know what to make of it. The cows didn’t either, but they eventually ate it.

So long as I’m making some guesses as to what was going on in people’s minds, I’ll throw Wayne Dinsmore, secretary of the Horse Association of America, into the hopper. (They hadn’t seen fit to include mules yet.) Dinsmore had been very effective at generating good copy for the draft horse, with the new pulling contests and with the multiple hitches for field work. During 1926, he had article after article pushing endurance rides for saddle horses. I suspect he was getting some pressure from light horse people to do something comparable for them. About half the horses in the ride, starting at Brandon, Vermont, were from cavalry units stationed at Fort Ethan Allen in Vermont and from Fort Myer in Virginia. Not surprisingly, those army horses dominated the event–just as they had in 1924 and 1925. They were splendidly conditioned. There were plenty of troopers to ride them every day, I’m sure. So the Army still had some interest in horses through their Remount Program.

There was a considerable outmigration of farm people to the cities at that time. This bugged the Gazette staff, and especially DeWitt Wing, one of their more cantankerous columnists. While urban sprawl was an absolute midget compared to today, it was happening. If your farm was located close to a population center, some realtor was bound to point out that “there is more money to be made on the land than out of it.” If it was located right.

If it wasn’t, there were more would-be sellers than willing buyers. This inequity of value of land for farming versus what is now called development, really stuck in the craw of the Gazette. Wing’s column, “All Around the Farm,” was every bit as pessimistic on the promise of agriculture as anything written today. Sanders, on the other hand, deplored this migration to the cities but looked for a reverse movement, stating that “it is highly probable that within the next few years the landward flow of people will be on a considerable scale.” There would, in fact, be a back-to-the-land migration in the 1930s, but it was born out of desperation, not opportunity, as unemployed relatives returned “home” to a cow they could milk and a potato patch. Meanwhile, farm land values continued sluggish.

Congdon & Battles (big time Angus breeders) from Yakima, Washington, sent their herdsman to the 5th Territorial Fair in Honolulu, Hawaii, with four bulls and five females. Naturally they whipped the Island entries pretty bad. After winning most of the ribbons, the visiting cattle were sold to Island breeders at very attractive prices. That is a good example of combining business with pleasure and putting it all on the expense account tab. Of course, if they hadn’t gotten them sold, it would have been a long swim back to San Francisco.

Things must have been stirring a little bit in the draft horse trade–dull as the whole farming picture was. For in October and November, the Holbert Horse Importing Company of Greeley, Iowa, landed twenty Belgian stallions from Europe in Philadelphia on October 16. Eighteen of them were sorrels or roans and the other two were bays. So bay wasn’t quite dead yet in the Belgian breed. They also had two carloads of both Belgian and Percheron stallions to sail from Europe a little later. Fred Holbert stated that they intended to handle at least as many native-bred stallions as imports during the coming sale season. Holberts were not innocents; like Congdon and Battles with their Angus, they must have smelled an opportunity for profit.

This pair of registered Shire mares owned by Ralph Fogleman from Callender, Iowa, graced the November 4, 1926, cover of Breeder’s Gazette. Ralph was a good friend of my dad’s and very successful in the Shire business. I don’t know who these mares are but would bet they are both daughters of Tatton Merry Boy, his signature sire. If so, we had a grade half sister at home. Ralph also became a good friend to me, even though he generally called me Marv. . .who is my older brother. When we started the JOURNAL, he came over with his International Livestock show albums and gave them to me. I’ve used the dickens out of them for 37 years now.

Here is another thing I can relate to, as some folks say. The annual meeting of the National Dairy Association showed a deficit of approximately $45,000 on their year’s operations. Their chief (almost only) operation was to stage the National Dairy Exposition. The Gazette, who wanted it in Chicago at a different time than the International, kindly called their 1926 show the “Detroit Fiasco.” That had always been a traveling show and it was on thin ice. Wm. Skinner, their manager for the last 15 years, had enough. He threw in the towel and quit. Skinner wasn’t the problem. Attendance and money were the problems. So they set about looking for a new manager and investigating Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City as the site for their 1927 National Dairy Expo. It continued as a traveling show, clear up through 1941. Our involvement in the war put an end to it. After the war, Waterloo, Iowa, assumed the role until the same sort of problems assailed it. Now, it has been in Madison, Wisconsin, for several years with, apparently, adequate funding from the industry and/or state.

As usual, virtually the entire early December issue was devoted to detailed descriptions of the stock show at the International, the judging contests and the breed meetings. This was “their thing” and they did a wonderful job of coverage. It was what had made the Gazette and, I believe, what was slowly eating away at their circulation.

So we will close this out with a few photos of the top horses from the 1926 Chicago International. We will not bring you the detailed results–it was 75 years ago! It was a stout show.

The Clydes, coming from six states and two Canadian provinces were first rate. Although the Gazette commented that “many of the Canadian entries were shown in thin condition. While high condition in breeding classes is easily overdone, yet extreme leanness is not usually regarded with favor in American show rings.” A translation of that being “down here we find fat to be a good color, but frequently overdo it.”

Even so, those Canadian Clydes took eight blues and most of the purples back with them. So they must not have been too skinny. Hayfield Farms, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, made a stout challenge, especially in the younger classes, winning three classes and both reserve grands. The only other Americans to win a class were F.L. Anderson from Ross, Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin.

The Percherons had some recent imported stallions to contend with, for a change. Both Wm. McLaughlin, Columbus, Ohio, and Holberts from Iowa, had a few French-born horses there. But it was farmer-breeder George Dix from Delaware, Ohio, who won both the two and three year old stallion classes on homebred horses–as did Singmasters from Iowa in the aged stallion class. The two year old, Don Degas, went on to be junior and grand champion–only the second two year old to ever do so up to that time. In the mares, Michigan State’s Maple Grove Leila won her second Chicago grand championship.

I understand that Singmasters made some very good sales to H.C. Muddox of Sacramento, California. Elllis McFarland, the Percheron secretary, always hyped up those private sales at Chicago. It was, no doubt, the best place to meet buyers with deep pockets. All in all, the Percheron show was a great “breeders’ show.”

The Belgians also named a two year old as the grand champion stallion. It was Waynedale King, bred by an Iowa farmer of modest means and a lot of horse smarts. His name was S.H. Schmalle. Holberts’ recent imports took both the three and four year old classes. In the mare classes, another Iowa farmer of modest means, C.H. Jones of Livermore, was very stout with the grand champion mare. He also won both the Get and Produce.

The Shire show was small, with another young stallion, the three year old shown by Truman’s Pioneer Stud Farm, Bushnell, Illinois, claiming the top award. The Suffolk show was even smaller, with Hawthorn Farms, Illinois, winning the top stallion award on a four year old–his third time in the winner’s circle.

A photo do–who really needs to know more about a show staged 75 years ago