75 Years Ago
Late Late Winter/Early Spring 1929
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Spring 2004

(From the Breeder’s Gazettes of January, February and March 1929, Belgian Reviews & Iowa Yearbook of Agriculture of that time, along with general news of that period)

As mentioned in this 75 Year column in the last issue, it was time to install a new president in the White House. But there was quite a long wait from that early November election until the inauguration. Time enough for two more king-sized one day belly flops on the stock market, one on November 23 just a couple of weeks after the election and another just a couple of weeks after that–on December 8. They had been preceded with whoppers on May 16 and July 11 of 1928. That is four big downers in seven months. There were obviously a lot of Nervous Nellies around. It reminds you of an alcoholic in denial who can somehow always manage to get up, stick a fresh flower in his lapel and go jauntily on exuding confidence and good cheer.

On February 15, the U.S. Federal Reserve Council came out in favor of curbs on stock speculation. It was about time, but how are you going to say when investing is and isn’t speculating? And exactly how were they going to curb greed and our love affair with the quick buck? Beats me.

On March 4, 1929, Herbert Hoover was sworn into office. It was a cold, windy, rainy day. Bad omen? I don’t know. Omens come and go. I believe Hoover took office with a lot of confidence and with ample reason for it. He had done some pretty significant, even great things. First as an engineer in the private sector, followed by the relief effort to Belgium in WW I and then as Secretary of Commerce. The guy knew the ropes and had both a good heart and a fine mind, but that would not be enough. My guess is that he looked forward to his presidency. He and Calvin Coolidge might have been the two happiest men at that inauguration. One because he was coming in and the other because he was going out.

Are you one of those people who think Wyatt Earp was simply a legend? Not so, he was a real person. On January 13, 1929, the man who was known as “an incorruptible lawman” and a “gunfighter without equal” died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 80. He had been the marshall of Dodge City, Kansas, in 1876. He said, “I was hired to stop the killing” and that is what he did. I believe Kansas has been relatively free of gun fights ever since.

But Chicago wasn’t. It had a terrible reputation for gangsterism in the 1920s and deserved it. On February 14, what came to be called the Valentine’s Day Massacre took place in a beer warehouse in that city. This was not a “good guys-bad guys” shoot-out. It was a case of a bunch (or cell) of bad guys taking out seven of their rivals from another gang. It was an assassination. They took ‘em into a warehouse, lined ‘em up and mowed ‘em down with a machine gun. To add insult to injury, some of the assassins were wearing Chicago police uniforms...but they weren’t cops. This really upset the chief of police.

Wyatt, where were you when we needed you? In a grave in California, that’s where.

But it wasn’t all bad news. Charles Lindbergh could almost guarantee that in 1929. Ever since becoming the first person to fly the Atlantic, he was riding a wave of public adulation that I doubt we have seen since. He was non-political, young, handsome, untainted by scandal of any kind, and modest enough to truly dislike all the attention focused on him. At the time, he was down in Mexico romancing a daughter of our Ambassador to that country. Her name was Anne Morrow. The two of them went for a joy ride in (what else?) an airplane. He had to land that plane as a cripple when it lost its right wheel. One wing tip hit the ground and it turned upside down. Neither of the young passengers were hurt and Lindbergh dismissed the accident as a “mishap that could happen to anyone.”

I don’t know if young Lindbergh had a job, as such, but he had a couple of worthwhile positions. Shortly after this tip-over, he was named as aviation advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce. He was already associated with an outfit known as Pan American airlines, charting routes and scouting for airport sites.

I suppose you should also know that the average business girl (assume that means secretary/ stenographer type) in New York City was earning $33.50 for a 50-hour week.

On the other end of the spectrum, an old guy named Asa Candler died. His was the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches type tale that this country has always loved. This one time “poor Georgia farm boy” started brewing up a concoction he called Coca Cola in a small shed in 1888. In 1919, he sold the company for 29 million dollars. One message is that if you have a small shed on your place, don’t be in a hurry to tear it down just to make things look neater. The other message is if strange people are hanging around at odd hours, better take a look. They could be brewing up something else–like meth.

So far I have slighted Europe so we must report one thing from the “old world.” Generally treaties are between governments with standing armies, stock exchanges, etc. But not all treaties.

On February 11, 1929, the government of Italy and the Vatican signed a treaty. Acting for the government was Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy–who, it seems, thought he was a reincarnation of Julius Caesar. He called himself El Duce. He was a Fascist before Hitler was. In fact he coined the term. “Fascist” was derived from the ancient Roman symbol of power-the fasces.

Someone just asked ”Is there a horse connection?” Yes, there is. Benito was the son of a blacksmith. But I doubt he ever shod a horse or made a shoe.

Early on, he became a publisher, of all things, of a Socialist paper in Austria and Switzerland. But he had bigger game in mind.

Italy was a constitutional monarchy at the time and he apparently didn’t think much of it. A born agitator, in 1919 he came back to Italy and published his Fascist Manifesto, which was a real Christmas tree of contradictions. His sworn enemies were Socialists (even though he had been one), Catholics, Labor Unions, Liberals and anyone else who didn't march to his drummer. It also included granting the vote to women and some other surprising things.

As for those who did march to his drummer, they were called black shirts and used the ancient Roman salute–now known as the Heil Hitler salute. By 1926, this professional demagogue and his party pretty well had the monarchy up a tree. He became, for all intents and purposes, a dictator.

Anyone, even a dictator, can only cope with having so many enemies and by 1929, he must have decided that being at odds with the church, in Italy of all places, was a loser. So he signed a treaty with the Vatican. The friction between the church and state had even preceded Mussolini.

It sounds to me like the church got the best end of the deal. The government (or Mussolini in this case) recognized Roman Catholicism as a state religion, Catholic instruction would be mandatory in primary and secondary schools and matrimony is viewed as a sacrament and the state does not have the power to grant divorces. And the government also agreed to pay the Vatican an immense sum of money, several million dollars. Amazing. And the party of the second part didn’t even have a Navy.

This story may be apocryphal, but it has the ring of truth to it. Several years later, during WW II, Adolf Hitler is supposed to have asked sneeringly, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

Well, on February 11, 1929, when that agreement was signed, he must have had at least a couple of platoons more than Mussolini.

And with that we will go to the Breeder’s Gazette from that period to see how our fathers and grandfathers were getting along in the farming and horse business.

Beforewemoveontothe Breeder’s Gazette, there is a paragraph in the Iowa Yearbook of Agriculture (1930, close enough) that offers an insight into something that happened during that period. It read as follows: “Medium-sized draft animals are apparently in the best demand at sales. This is due to the fact that the biggest demand is for farm power. The sale of high class, big, heavy animals has been somewhat spotted, etc., etc.”

The rest was shorthand for saying draft horsemen had lost the battle for the city streets. Where big companies once took pride in having big, handsome geldings pulling their freight wagons, they are now using trucks. Big, fancy geldings had been the top of the market. Sending them into the weekly Chicago market and expecting to find eager buyers for them had become a lost cause. Plainly stated, the top of the commercial market had gone south, having been replaced by trucks that ate oil and gasoline–not hay and grain.

It wasn’t just in the cities. A good many farms, especially larger grain farms, had purchased a tractor, or tractors, for heavy tillage work, plus belt power jobs such as threshing and silo filling and the “horse killer” summer jobs such as harvesting oats and wheat. But almost all of them retained some live horse and mule power, along with the tractor. They just didn’t keep as many and didn’t use them on much of the most demanding work–so they figured they didn’t need them as big as a house. My own dad is an example of that. He bought a McCormick-Deering 10-20 in the early ‘20s for plowing, discing and belt work. He also kept three or four teams for everything else–and drained the 10-20 and put it up on blocks for the winter. That was the only tractor on the place for about twenty years.

So it is little wonder that some deliberate downsizing took place. Some of it was encouraged by the profs at the colleges of agriculture, and it was reflected in their judging. It wasn’t just a fad. I suppose they were factoring the market and the realities of the times into their judgment. Whichever came first, the chicken or the egg, there was some deliberate downsizing by both breeders and judges in those fifteen years leading up to WW II.

The Canadians, as near as I can tell, must have had a similar market but didn’t follow suit. To say that in many cases it took two fairly dissimilar horses to win the same class at Chicago and Toronto was a fact.

The risk, of course, is that in breeding down for size, that instead of getting a little smaller, but still an athletic and agile horse, you might get just a dumpy little chunk–just as you have failures going the other way. Beef cattle did the same thing. I don’t know what was behind that–it wasn’t trucks and tractors.

In the February 1929 issue of BG, the McCormick-Deering Company carried, as an ad, two whole facing pages stating that these 500 American farmers were–”All using McCormick-Deering power exclusively”and calling them “Leaders in the New Age of Mechanical Power.” They were listed alphabetically by name, followed by address, acreage farmed and type of farming. Not the jazziest ad in the world–just a long list of names.

You didn’t have to look very carefully to see that most of them were from Texas up through the high plains states to Montana, North Dakota and the Pacific Northwest –most of them wheat growers. The two biggest were one 6,000 acre ranch in Montana and a 4,800 acre spread in Washington, both listed “wheat.” On the opposite end of the scale were several guys with 20 to 40 acres, mostly with orchards and some specialty like sweet corn.

Having gotten the big picture, I then did a careful count of how many of these leaders lived in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio–four of the most diversified farming states in the country. Those four states (all great horse producers) yielded a grand total of eight horseless farms. Four of them were from 200 to 237 acres and four were under 200. So the “revolution” was being overstated.

Those early 1929 Gazettes were called The “New” Breeder’s Gazettes by the editors, and they were new in many ways. They were big and fat and sassy. That “new” business was not an overstatement. It was definitely moving with the times, as they say.

Here too, just as with type in draft horses and beef cattle, the magazine was responding to not only market changes, but to what would now be called “lifestyles.” While almost all of their editorial space was devoted to the livestock industry, the advertising end had undergone a huge shift–as well as growth.

Just for fun, I did a rough tally of their eighty-eight page February 1929 issue. There were right at fifty-five pages of advertising. Of those fifty-five pages, only about fifteen were livestock ads including about three of draft horse ads. So their overall ad percentage was about 60-65%.

There were twenty-five full page ads and ten of them were devoted to selling trucks, tractors or automobiles to farmers–and farmers, for obvious reasons, were better buyers of cars than city people. They had farther to go and no mass transit.

But there was a whole range of new products from short line equipment and feed additives to water systems to give you “water at the turn of the tap” and “interior lighting at the turn of a switch.” And, of course, Listerine and the mail order catalogs.

So here was a bumper crop of truly new products just yearning for a home in the country. And the young owners of Breeder’s Gazette had 100,000 subscribers, which was nothing to sneeze at by the so-called Advertising Industry, which became bigger than many of the industries it was selling.

Strangely enough (to me) was the fact that there were still a lot of ads aimed at getting farmers to migrate. Here are the places you were invited to move to in the early spring of 1929: Canada–half page saying that “Canada rewarded Purebred Stock Breeders” paid for by the Canadian government; also half pages from both Mississippi and Alabama (the Dairyland of Dixie), and they weren’t asking you to just come down for the winter; and the Milwaukee Railroad was urging you to pull up stakes and head for the “Judith Basin” in central Montana; and if you didn’t hanker for the big sky country, Mr. Brewer–the immigration agent for the Milwaukee Road, could set you up to get rich in the “West River Country of South Dakota.” He said, or the ad did, that “with a little capital you can own your own farm and prosper up there.” For more information on this last one, you can contact my pal, Walt Schaefer, up there in South Dakota. He knows all about South Dakota.

THIS AD APPEARED IN THE 1929 PERCHERON REVIEW.

Waynedale King, the then 5-year-old stallion who topped the Hill sale at $3,050. He was bred by S.H. Schmalle, a farmer-breeder from Thornton, Iowa, who developed him and showed him to junior and reserve grand champion at the National Belgian Show in Waterloo in 1926. Sold to Evert King, Chicago, Illinois, he showed him to junior and grand at Chicago that same year. In 1927, he repeated as grand champion in Chicago. Following which he was sold to Mr. Hill in Montana. What figure the two private sale figures were is just that "private."

So on “big time” advertising, the old magazine was doing better than ever. On the livestock ads, they were not doing near as much. And the reason for that is pretty simple. The Gazette had done as much to foster the growth of the purebred breeds and breed associations in this country as anyone. More, not as much.

But as the kids grow up, they move out on their own and that’s what happened. By 1929, most of the successful breeds and/or associations had their own trade magazines. And when the Holstein World or the Shorthorn World or Angus Journal arrived in your mailbox, it was ALL ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE BREED. Some were monthlies, others quarterlies, and some annuals, but they were devoted to your breed. So that is where a lot of the livestock advertising had gone.

Some Horse Odds and Ends for 1929

The final chapter in a great Percheron story came to an end at Dunham Place, Wayne, Illinois, in DuPage County on February 15, 1929. This horse auction was attended by about a thousand people. There were around 35 head in the sale which averaged $327 a head. The top price for a stallion was $660 and the top pair of mares brought $510 apiece. They were sold into six states and Canada, including two agricultural college stables.

Founded in 1866, it was one of the best as well as one of the earliest breeding farms. Its founder, Mark Dunham, has a more secure hold on the title of “Father of the Percheron in North America” than anyone. His son, Wirth, carried on and was very active in founding the Horse Association of America in the early ‘20s which became the Horse and Mule Association of America.

The Dunham pasture land was in the process of being sold for subdivision purposes. The home, called Dunham Castle–modeled after one in France, still stands. Ironically enough, some of the cropland was used in the ‘20s by International-Harvester (Farmall tractor) as a sort of experimental farm. A riding or hunt club also once used the place. If you get your flight out of Chicago cancelled some day, and aren’t in any rush to get to where you are going, take your rental car and drive out toward Elgin and ask around for Dunham Woods. Interesting place. Sort of like Mount Vernon.
Another Important Sale

Also in February of 1929, Walter J. Hill, Livingston, Montana, shipped some sixty head of registered Belgians back to Waterloo, Iowa, for his dispersal sale. He obviously felt that it would be more economic to take the horses to the heartland of Belgian breeding than to expect Midwest breeders to beat a path to his door. It was held at the Dairy Cattle Congress grounds (home of the National Belgian Show at that time). The sale was managed by Charles Irvine, Ankeny, Iowa.

Sixty animals averaged $240. The top animal in the sale was the five-year-old stallion pictured here, Waynedale King. He went to Colonel J.W.Fuller,Catasaugua, Pennsylvania, for $3,050. Some 3- and 4-year-old stallions brought around $500 apiece (close to the price of an automobile).