75 Years Ago
Late Summer/Early Autumn 1928
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Autumn 2003

There was some wonderful news 75 years ago. So wonderful that it was too good to be true. What had started out as a fairly simple (and I would think, almost unnecessary) French-American non-aggression pact had grown into what came to be known as the Kellogg-Briand Treaty Outlawing War. The initial agreement between us and France seemed like such a good idea that Frank Kellogg, our Secretary of State at the time, suggested that other world powers be invited to “sign on” as well. The idea took hold and before you know it eleven other countries (including Great Britain, Germany and the U.S.S.R) had put their approval on this treaty.

The U.S.S.R. was about to launch into its first Five Year Plan (more or less completing the job of the abolishment of privately owned farms, among other things) and things were such in Germany that their fragile republic was at risk of capitulating to Adolf Hitler and his crowd. This whole treaty thing was meaningless. Pretty sentiments on paper signed by people who could not deliver the goods and others who had every intention to ignore or trash them the moment they became inconvenient. Ending war is not that easy.

I’ve mentioned the movies in this column several times. They were the television of the ‘20s. Talking pictures were still fairly new. Not all the big shots in Hollywood and New York were convinced that they were so hot, or the wave of the future. Joseph Shenk, the president of United Artists, took a dim view of them, saying the people will not want talking pictures long. He said he was making some only to satisfy passing interests. While he didn’t think the dialogue mattered, he did think certain sound effects (like a rapping sound when an actor knocked on the door) were useful. But as for all this conversation, his faith remained “in silence.” I find that kind of astonishing–from a big wheel in the relatively new movie business. A vastly different view was held by a young fellow named Walt Disney who renamed his favorite mouse “Mickey” for his new film, “Steamboat Willie.” Disney’s faith was NOT in silence. It was in sound, animation, color and graphics. And mice who talked.

The third post-WWI Olympic Games were held. They opened on July 28 in Amsterdam, Holland. The first postwar Olympics were held in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1920. In 1924, it was Paris, France. So Western Europe was the site of all three. In 1932, at the bottom of the great global depression, the Olympics came to this hemisphere, being staged in Los Angeles, California. In 1936, with the world once more on the cusp of war (which had been outlawed of course by the Kellogg-Briand treaty), it went to Berlin. There the triumphs of Jesse Owens, with four gold medals to the great black athlete from Ohio State, literally drove Adolf Hitler from the stadium. Jesse had made a mockery out of Hitler’s racial gibberish. The Fuhrer refused to congratulate our black winners. We also had Jews on our team.

But, back to 75 years ago, and Amsterdam. There were not nearly as many events in the ‘20s, particularly for women. All told, there were over 100 events and about a fourth of them(26) were in Field and Track where the Americans did very well, winning nine gold medals. Finland and Canada were also very strong in this area. But in many areas such as Cycling, Canoeing, Shooting, Gymnastics and Equestrian sports, the U.S. was skunked. We did win basketball but were nowhere in sight where Soccer, Handball and Field Hockey were concerned.

If I were to single out two young athletes from North America from that 1928 Olympics, one would be John Weissmuller, a swimmer who won two gold medals. He came back to become Tarzan in the movies. It probably paid better than swimming and he probably just had to master some new strokes like “Me Tarzan–you Jane–let’s go swimming.”

The other one I’d single out was a 19 year old Canadian named Percy Williams. This high school student had hitchhiked across Canada to participate in the trials. He arrived in Amsterdam a virtual unknown. Once the games were underway, that changed in a hurry. He won the gold in both the 100 and 200 meter dash. Wow! What a high for a kid.

On August 11, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover formally accepted the nomination Sam Guard (and others) had conferred on him in Kansas City in June. He chose his college alma mater, Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, as the place to accept the Republican nomination for president of the United States. In retrospect, it has to be one of the most amazing political acceptance speeches of all time. Hoover’s confidence in this country, its economic system and his own ability to solve every problem and make everything work was breathtaking. He stated, “We in America today are nearer the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land.” His platform was “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.”

Within six months he would be sworn in as president of the United States. And within a year, Black Thursday–the great stock market crash of October 1929, would make paupers out of princes and fools out of wise men. Herbert Hoover was not a lucky man, at least in that stage of his life. Events, as they often are, were in the saddle. But as we approached the harvest season of 1928, none of that was apparent. He looked like a shoo-in and he was. As for farming, it was actually kind of upbeat. At this juncture we will leave the so-called “big news” and switch to the Breeder’s Gazettes of July, August and September 1928.

Sam Guard had been completely won over by Herbert Hoover. Alvin Sanders, his predecessor, had served the Republican administration of Wm. Howard Taft as a member of a tariff commission–so the paper’s antecedents had been basically, but not blatantly, Republican. With Sam’s “Sun Up, Sun Up” column in the July 1928 Gazette any moderation went out the window. It is one of the most ringing endorsements of a political candidate I have ever read.

“We approach a new day for livestock farming. We are to usher in the Golden Age of American Agriculture.” That is how it started out. Where confidence and optimism are concerned, he out-Hoovered Hoover’s acceptance speech at Stanford.

There was some reason for his upbeat attitude. The first half of 1928 had been a tale of modestly rising prices for all livestock and livestock products. Most farmers were pleased. Sam was more than pleased, he was ecstatic. Take his second paragraph, for example: “If I had advice to offer, it were this; buy farm land now; choose a proved purebred sire now–proved by pedigree or by performance; get sound, producing females at going prices, all you can properly house and feed.”

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.

“If I were to offer advice” Sam, that is exactly what you did. He was an optimist and not attuned to doing things in half measures. With the decade that lie ahead, he would need all the optimism he could muster and, more immediately, he would need to develop a taste for crow. He would have to eat plenty of it.

There was an immediate response from the readers with quite a few submitting their resignations as subscribers, while others cheered him on. But there was no turning back. The hubbub over Sam’s enthusiastic cheerleading for Hoover led to an invitation to both candidates to lay their farm programs out in detail. And so Herbert Hoover and Al Smith did so in the September issue.

The following slightly edited letter is typical of the bunch:

“All I want to say is that you fellows better stick to your knitting and keep out of politics. We farmers out this way are pretty well fed up on Herbert Hoover. I think when it comes to our preference in the matter that we are pretty well able to paddle our own canoes. If you do this (pipe down, that is) and we make a mistake and elect the wrong man, you’ll have a clear conscience and can go right on striving to give us what we thought we would get when we subscribed––from W.C. Gleason, Ingham County, Minnesota (I find it interesting that most such letters were identified by county, rather than post office).

In that same September issue is an article with an interesting subtitle: “Feeding Oats to Cattle and Hogs solves a surplus problem which the tractor dragged in.” The author, with the Ohio Experiment Station, starts out with the following: “ It’s fortunate that we have turned some attention to oats as a feed for beef cattle and hogs. With corn selling well over a dollar a bushel and a tremendous acreage seeded to oats, eastern cornbelt farmers want information relative to feeding oats and in place of corn.

“We do not want to convey the impression that oats is superior to corn, but we do feel that oats is a better fattening feed than many realize.”

And, as he implied in his title–we had lost an awful lot of equine oats consumers but we still need the crop in our rotation. So with corn over a buck a bushel, it was time to say a kindly word for oats. I’ve always liked oats, regarding it as one of the safest of feeds and one of the best for young animals–calves, colts or lambs. Maybe pigs too–I “never did pigs much.”

In 1928, the American Shorthorn Breeders Association purchased several Milking Shorthorn animals in Great Britain with the plan to offer them at public auction here at home. The first group of eighteen averaged $650 a head at public auction in Chicago on August 11. A smaller group was consigned to the Eastern States Milking Shorthorn Sale at the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts, in September. They also sold very well. A lot of them were very young.

What I find so unusual in this is that it is an extremely speculative thing for any breed association to do. Most such associations were perfectly willing to leave importing up to their more venturesome members. But this particular association seemed to regard sale management as simply one of their functions. They were into sale management big time.

The August issue “gossip column” included the fact that Charles Irvine, (see last issue for Irvinedale story), Ankeny, Iowa, had stopped by at the Gazette offices in Chicago enroute to Holland, where he was slated to attend the great livestock show at the Hague. I always thought of the Hague as strictly the home of the World Court and the official residence and the seat of government of the Dutch monarch–not a great annual livestock show. But apparently, it has also been the home of a great livestock show. This was not just an impulse on Irvine’s part. He, along with Fred Holbert, Greeley, Iowa, had been appointed by the Belgian Association here in the U.S. to inspect the records of the Belgian breed in Holland. The Dutch breeders, feeling that their horses were as Belgian as the ones across the line in Belgium, had requested equal recognition of their pedigrees by the American Association. I suppose the Dutch wanted to get in on some of that export money. I don’t believe it worked, but then I don’t know how a lot of these tales ended.

As for Holbert, he was already over there doing his annual late summer buying of both Belgian and Percheron stallions for shipment to their barns in Iowa.

The Percheron Association, more than any of the other breeds, fought the publicity battle for the draft horse. They and the Horse & Mule Association of America–both with Chicago headquarters. And the Belgians did a bit of it, too. I don’t think the other breeds could afford to.

The Percheron Association was busy, busy, busy tabulating stuff for the 1929 Percheron News. All of it, of course, calculated to make the Percheron look good.

One of the things they did was a census of the purebred draft horses owned by the agricultural colleges in the U.S. The colleges owned a total of 668 registered drafters in 1928. 478 of them, or 71%, were Percherons. The blacks and greys were found on 38 campuses, the Belgians on eleven, the Clydesdales on nine, the Shires on three (all in the West) and the Suffolks were nowhere to be seen in colleges. As to how many plain old horses and mules the colleges owned and used–no figure is given. With their farms and experimental stations, I’m sure the commoners outnumbered the aristocrats by quite a load.

You might also be interested in the five largest shows in the country in 1928. Here they are in the order of size:

Percherons: Ohio State Fair; The International in Chicago; Iowa State Fair; the American Royal in Kansas City; and the Kansas State Fair. (Kansas was a real Percheron power at that time, ranking 4th in registrations (331) and third in transfers (402)).

Belgians: The National in Waterloo, Iowa; The International in Chicago; Ohio State Fair; Indiana State Fair; and Minnesota State Fair.

Clydesdales: Illinois State Fair; Indiana State Fair; Wisconsin State Fair; The International in Chicago; and Minnesota State Fair. (When the Canadians stayed home, Chicago took a hit–in 1928, many Canadians stayed home.)

Shires: The International in Chicago; Illinois State Fair; Iowa State Fair; Washington and the Pacific International in Portland, Oregon. (This is an indication of the relative Shire strength in the West. As for the International, it was entirely dependent on Iowa and Illinois stables.)

It wasn’t all hog supplements, Farmall tractors, bull calves and boar pigs, windmills and harness that was advertised in those 1928 Gazettes. There was more to life than that. But not if you had bad breath! Like this ad for Listerine. (Yes, Jeannine and I still use it.) No matter how charming you may be or how fond of you your friends are, you cannot expect them to put up with halitosis (unpleasant breath) forever. They may be nice to you–but it is an effort. Livestock exhibitors don’t talk about “CIRCUITS” anymore. They either show or they don’t show and they tend to evaluate each show as an individual effort. Not so in the days of yore. For then the livestock was shipped by rail, you had your own car with a water tank for the duration and there were facilities to load and unload livestock at all major shows. So–there were circuits. This ad lists three of them. Note the tight scheduling. When the big outfits committed to making a show circuit, you could figure on being gone for anywhere from a month to three months. You got special rail rates. No trucks with Omaha boxes, no trailers. It called for a very different kind of commitment and it sure wasn’t for everyone. The stock truck and good hard surface roads changed all that–but fair managers still tended to “schedule themselves” so as to make it attractive to “fit in” with other shows well into the present.

This illustration is lifted from a full page ad in the August 1928 Breeder’s Gazette. The theme of the ad was that the International truck was the Loyal Friend of the Farmer. There were a half million motor trucks on American farms by 1928. With a stock rack you could haul your own livestock to the fairs. This is the machine that made show circuits obsolete.

The September 1928 Gazette carried this notice of the upcoming Singmaster Dispersal at the farm near Keota. Even in a dull market this sale would attract a lot of attention. That family had been more important to the breed in this state than any other family.

Ernest L. Humbert, Corning, Iowa. An Iowa farmer of French descent (pronounced UM-BARE in France) was appointed to the Percheron board by Mr. Butler, the president of the board, to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of R.W. Hoit, Beacon, Iowa. You’ll see more of Humbert’s horses in this column next time.