Book Review: Mule South to Tractor South
Book Review: Mule South to Tractor South
book review by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch
Mule South to Tractor South by George B. Ellenberg
published by University of Alabama Press. ISBN-10: 0-8173-1597-7
Typically I am bored stiff by academic books on agricultural history. It seems most of these books work hard to remove the human element from the narrative, if there is one. I say books rather than authors because I know a few agricultural academics and found them to be insightful and genuinely human. Must be something about the publishing/academic filter that squeezes the juice right out of the material. So when Mule South arrived at our office, I did not get around to look at it for a while. When I did, I was pulled right in to what I found to be an outstanding “narrative” laid right over the top of excellent scholarship. I was so impressed with the material and the presentation that I knew I wanted to do a review but felt challenged that anything I would do could not do justice to the full import of the book. So I contacted the publisher and received permission to republish an entire chapter in this issue. The material which follows will do a better job of introducing this important book than anything I might showcase and remark on.
Mr. Ellenberg has done an outstanding job with a slice of our history, bringing clear objectivity and more than a hint of empathy to the intangibles of our farming community’s cultural evolution. It is no wonder this book won for him the 2006 McMillan Manuscript Prize.
Debating Farm Power
The USDA, the Midwest, Mules, and Tractors
Chapter 4 from
MULE SOUTH TO TRACTOR SOUTH
Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South
by George B. Ellenberg
Copyright 2007 by the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Used by permission.
Despite the commonly expressed belief that mules would long remain an integral component of the southern agricultural economy, and despite encouraging signs that the animals would be produced increasingly in the Deep South, the mule population in the South plummeted after the Second World War and continued to dwindle during the 1950s. During the early part of the twentieth century, a clash broke out between tractor and draft-animal advocates, each side with its own agenda and each looking out for its own interests, but both driven by the belief that they had the best interests of the American farmers at heart.
No prophet foresaw the rapidity or the extent of change that would occur in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s. There had been rumblings of the coming changes in the Midwest, however, where mechanization began earlier than in the cotton South. Yet perhaps because the two regions were starkly different, few of the lessons learned in the Midwest were applied to the south. In addition, as Midwestern farmers shifted to tractors, thus reducing their dependence on draft horses, an important source of mules waned. The South’s response to mechanization, then, was affected by events in other regions of the nation. Still, as the Corn Belt shifted toward tractors, there was no clear indication that southern draft animals would also disappear within a generation. The leading agricultural journal of the South noted that draft animals “had not been man’s useful servant for these thousands of years to get off the face of the earth at the order of any mere inventor or manufacturer of lifeless machines.” Similar sentiments were expressed time and again until mules actually disappeared from southern fields.
Agriculture officials confronted the difficult issue of draft animals versus tractors first in the Corn Belt, and in that setting developed attitudes and policies related to tractorization which would later have a profound impact on southern agriculture. Thus, while geographically removed from the South, the shift to tractors in the Midwestern states set the stage for how the government viewed southern mechanization, and is crucial to understanding the relatively disinterested attitude the USDA held regarding many of the profound changes southern society underwent during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. This is not to say the USDA was not deeply involved in the South. The federal government poured money and manpower into the South, and such federal largesse usually benefited eager, large landowners and neglected small farmers, tenants, and sharecroppers. It is also important to note that there were differences in how the USDA and other agencies, such as the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, viewed farms and farmers. The point remains, however, that the federal government often expended much of its energy studying what was happening, more than trying to direct the changes. This may have stemmed from conflicting views within the agencies, as well as the fact that much of the leadership had grown up on farms and had experience with draft animals. Having said that, the role of the USDA in the process of tractorization has not been explored in detail, and historians have yet to explore fully the various factors related to tractorization.
By the time the draft animal-tractor debate engulfed the USDA, the automobile and, to a lesser extent, the truck already were fixtures on many American farms. Rural people across the nation had embraced automobiles by the 1920s. In every state the percentage of farms reporting automobiles was substantially higher than that of farms reporting tractors. On the national level, only 3.6 percent of farms had tractors. The ratio of tractors to farms varied from region to region and crop to crop, but in no region as defined by the census did more than nine percent of farms report tractors. A few states such as North and South Dakota boasted more than fifteen percent of farms with tractors, but this phenomenon was unusual. During the years following World War I, draft animals still served as the main source of plowing and cultivating power. Thus, it was hardly a given that tractors would supplant them in only a few decades, and for that reason draft-animal advocates believed they had a reasonable chance to convince farmers to continue to hitch their plows to animals and not to machines. Most people simply could not conceive that working horses would not have an important place in the modern industrial and agricultural worlds.
While the USDA unflinchingly advocated increased efficiency and greater productivity in agriculture, it also expounded the virtues of self-sufficiency and of the family farm. Over time, however, efficiency and productivity won, and in the end, the “USDA did not simply propagate improved methods — it became the Church of Information and Technology (with its own missionaries) for millions of modernizing farmers. Its experts eventually embraced any machine or chemical that promised increased production regardless of how technological change would affect farm families or the environment.” The USDA did not immediately embrace technology without question, nor did department officials always see tensions between the efficiency and selfsufficiency. Officials constantly stated and apparently believed that American farmers could have the best of both worlds. Despite the fact that a conflict had long existed between the family-farm principle and the political exigencies of modern statehood, the USDA insisted that the Jeffersonian and Madisonian ideals could be harmonized on the American farm. It was perhaps a naïve view, especially in the southern context, but one genuinely held by agricultural officials who, according to one scholar, had not pushed mechanization hard enough.
More often than not, policies that affected not only southern agriculture but southern rural society developed outside the South. The treatment of tenants under the AAA is perhaps the most obvious example of well-intentioned but ill-fated decisions, yet it is hardly the only one. To be fair, the USDA faced enormous difficulties, not the least of which was the logistical difficulty of implementing policies in a nation as large and agriculturally diverse as the United States. Yet, on apparently clear-cut issues such as the tractorization debate, the department often found it difficult to take and hold a position.
On a broad scale, the Department of Agriculture stressed scientific farming techniques and the use of labor-saving machinery in order to increase efficiency while reducing the man-hours required for specific operations such as harvesting grain or planting a field. The land-grant college system played a key role in implementing the USDA’s vision. Driven by “a progressivist fervor that equated progress with science, mechanization, and capital-intensive methods on the farm, in the farm home, and in the factories,” the land-grant college and its progeny acted as a prime mover in the technological revolution in agriculture, although the reasons for this have not been fully explored. According to the USDA, greater productivity ensured that farmers would retain an edge in a highly competitive environment. For all of its trumpeting of the value of scientific farming and labor-saving machinery, however, the department had no guidelines for dealing with the rise of the tractor during and immediately following the World War I era. Consequently, the USDA seemed unsure of its ultimate goals as it groped toward firm policies in this area. The stakes being high, a storm of debate broke upon the Department of Agriculture as tractor numbers increased rapidly in the Midwest.
Much of the inability of the USDA to make generalizations beyond seeing a future with both types of power, of course, rested on the local or regional nature of agricultural choices. So, to some degree, the national scope of the Department of Agriculture itself limited its ability to address the question of horses versus tractors in any but the most general way. But USDA officials did not seem to employ this argument. The state land-grant university, experiment stations, and extension systems acted in a more local context, but the enemies in this battle focused on Washington administrators.
The USDA refused to take a stand during the early stages of the debate between tractor and draft-animal proponents and therefore became a lightning rod for criticism from both sides. While a multitude of interrelated issues swirled within the controversy, the core question was simple—would draft animals or tractors better serve the nation’s farmers and future? Certainly there existed powerful currents within the agricultural sector that pushed farmers to mechanize. Agricultural engineers, for example, believed that “if a machine could perform a task, it should.” In addition, agricultural engineers “worked hard to create a context in which ‘power farming’ would replace traditional farming.” As far as the agricultural engineering community viewed it, then, machinery was at center stage in America’s agricultural future. From today’s perspective, the outcome may seem inevitable, and because of that one may assume that the shift to tractors would have appeared as such to contemporaries. That, however, is hardly the case since “the mechanical solution was or is not inevitable at all relative prices.”
The USDA sought to understand farm management whether the farm used mules or tractors. In the early-twentieth-century South, however, the efficiency equation did not include tractors. A 1918 United States Department of Agriculture study of an upstate South Carolina county where most farmers grew cotton and plowed with mules found that the mule was “the pivot” around which each farm revolved. The same could be said of practically any cotton farm in the South. Next to man labor, mule labor constituted the largest cost on the farm, larger than the outlay for rent or fertilizer. While man labor cost Belton, South Carolina, farmers nearly 38 cents out of every dollar that went toward producing crops, mule labor cost him 21 cents per dollar. Rent and fertilizer averaged around 16 cents out of each dollar spent on producing a crop. Farm equipment manufacturers estimated that eighty percent of a farm’s operating expenses went for man and horse labor. Added together, man and mule labor, fertilizer, and rent totaled more than ninety percent of production costs on Belton area farms in 1918.
A striking aspect of the Belton study is the treatment of the issue of farm size. The author, A. G. Smith, was far more concerned with good management techniques than he was with size per se. His study examined and developed principles with which he believed “anyone operating a farm under the conditions that prevail on the farms surveyed may… organize and operate his farm with a high probability of success.” Conversely, individual farmers and farms might dictate slight changes in the general plan Smith laid out, “but, with rare exceptions, wide deviations from it probably will be followed by reduced returns.” Small farms were found to be less profitable than larger operations, but overall the scale of farming remained small. The key organizing principle was how many acres each mule worked on a farm. Beginning at eleven acres per animal, Smith calculated that income per mule rose as acreage per mule rose. While the income per mule was $238 at eleven acres, it reached a peak of $422 per mule at the twenty- to twenty-three-acre mark. As acreage worked per mule continued to climb, the profit per mule dropped to $386 at twenty-eight or more acres.
According to the report, a farm’s particular size was not as important as its ability to efficiently utilize its mule labor, since the number of acres per work animal was “an indication of the utilization of the labor and equipment and of the efficiency of the farm organization.” The highest return per work animal fell within specific acreage limits, in this case between twenty and twenty-three acres. The most profitable farms could assign acreages within those boundaries to each mule. Clearly, large farms could be more flexible in this than small farms. For example, using the twenty- to twenty-three-acre rule, a Belton farmer with two hundred acres of cropland could employ nine or ten mules. A farmer with only thirty acres, however, found himself at a disadvantage because thirty acres was too much land for one mule, but not enough to justify two mules. In short, the Belton study found that there existed specific sizes of farms that best suited specific numbers of mules.
The thrust of this analysis, known as the law of recurring efficiency, found that size was important, but that it was more important for a farm to be properly sized so as to use its draft power properly. “Handling the farm,” the report explained “in such a way that the unit of organization can be used at its optimum capacity is therefore one of the important factors in determining the success of a farm.” The favorably sized farms edged out the unfavorably sized farms in other areas, too. They produced crops at the lowest cost, their dwellings had a higher value, they had a lower cost per man and mule day of work, and their average yields of crops were higher. Good farmers organized and operated their farms more efficiently than poor farmers, even before the USDA stepped in to analyze them and make recommendations.
The report concluded, “When a farmer has theforesight and ability to adjust the size of his farm so that the labor and equipment have a high degree of efficiency, he will also usually have the ability to secure yields that are above the average.” The findings of this study, then, would have benefited the less profitable farmers of the Belton area, if they chose to apply the suggestions to their operations. Significantly, the study demonstrated that good farmers organized their operations efficiently and poor farmers did not. In short, some farmers were better at realizing a living from the soil than others, and studies such as this one sought to find what made the good farmers good so that less successful farmers could learn from them.
Size, then, was not the focus of the USDA’s study in Belton. Indeed, the author found that two-mule farms, those having forty-one to forty-five acres, were for their size more profitable than one- or three-mule farms. As the author concluded, “Evidently a two-mule farm with the proper acreage per work animal is the best size of farm for this community.” The USDA did not focus solely upon large farms as better farms, at least in the South in 1918. As time passed, and certainly as technological advance perfected the tractor, size became more important to farmers and to agriculture officials, but as long as the mule remained the “pivot” of farm organization, small farmers could compete with larger operators. Once the lessons of the Midwest became manifest and were applied to the South, however, size and efficiency did become more synonymous in the USDA lexicon. Tractors unbalanced the efficiency equation, and as an unknown variable, questions quickly arose concerning how they would affect farmers’ decisions.
Both tractor manufacturers and the draft-animal industry vied for the attention and blessing of the Department of Agriculture during the early twentieth century; but perhaps because they had the most to lose, horse and mule adherents clamored more loudly than did the tractor industry. No one group or individual raised a more pointed and consistent voice for the continued use of draft animals on farms than Wayne Dinsmore, first as secretary of the American Percheron Society and later as secretary of the Horse Association of America (HAA). The HAA was formed in late 1919 and incorporated on January 15, 1920. In its first eight months, it collected more than $70,000 mainly due to the efforts of its directors. During the 1930s, the association changed its name to the Horse and Mule Association of America, but changed back to its original name in 1948 when the focus shifted to pleasure horses rather than work animals.
Dinsmore waged a relentless battle against anyone who advocated replacing the nation’s draft animals with tractors. Never content to conduct a defensive battle, Dinsmore, under the HAA’s standard, not only attacked his opponents but also aggressively established his own program designed to convince farmers, first in the Midwest and later in the South, that draft animals made solid economic sense.
Farm power advocates had for some time expressed interest in governmentsponsored research of farm power questions. Society president P.S. Rose announced in 1910 that his group was “unanimously” in favor of seeing farm machinery investigations funded through governmental action. Rose felt it “advisable to have a bill introduced in Congress setting aside a special fund for this work.” Rose was not averse to his own organization playing a key role in carrying out such work, and while he did not mention his preference, his loyalties were clear enough. He corresponded on the letterhead of Gas Review: A Magazine for the Gasoline Engine User.
Despite their deep differences, there was one issue on which the draft and power farming advocates agreed. Both sides encouraged the Department of Agriculture to undertake investigations into the farm power question. The American Society of Agricultural Engineers, for example, early in the twentieth century pushed the department to examine the matter, as well as suggested that it investigate broader issues related to farm machinery. This group submitted to Secretary of Agriculture David Houston a proposal covering the need for and scope of a bureau of agricultural engineering within the USDA.
In the midst of the growing debate between tractor and draft-animal advocates, USDA officials moved to schedule a “Farm Power Conference,” which met in Chicago in October 1919. Representatives from the USDA, state colleges, and numerous trade and agricultural associations comprised the more than thirty committee members at the conference. As the conference date approached, a clear rift developed between “tractor men” and “horse men.” Feelings ran high enough so that each group met separately the morning of the first day before convening jointly in the afternoon. The committee recommended that seven projects be undertaken. The proposed studies covered both sides of the draft animal-tractor debate, but several of the studies sought to standardize how draft animals and tractors could be compared. The recommended studies included: testing and rating farm tractors, determining the working rate of horses, measuring power requirements of machines and implements, developing practical methods of expanding the power of farm horses, determining the mechanical efficiency of horses as power units, increasing the economic efficiency of horses and tractor power by adjusting the size of the farm and combination of enterprises, and compiling accurate data concerning farm power demands and the relative cost of meeting these demands by the various kinds of power on farms.
Both sides of the debate received consideration, but the meeting may have prompted the draft-animal industry to organize and develop countermeasures. One of the committee members was Wayne Dinsmore, then secretary of the Percheron Society of America. It hardly seems coincidental that the Horse Association of America, with Dinsmore as secretary, formed soon after this conference adjourned. Even so, draft-animal proponents seemed somewhat satisfied with the proceedings, for early in 1920 Dinsmore urged the secretary of agriculture to move ahead to secure funding for the studies proposed at the Chicago conference.
Leaders from the horse world and allied industries created the Horse Association of America as a result of the significant inroads made by tractors onto American farms during the World War I era, but an important catalyst for the organization’s zeal was that the Farm Power Conference itself revealed the strength of the tractorization proponents. Supporters included veterinarians, farriers, breed associations, and grain marketers. The economic power and importance of animal-related industries were still significant, although declining in number and strength. Tanning, harness and saddle making, butchering, blacksmithing, and other industries tied to livestock and work animals employed one out of every eleven factory workers and tradesmen in 1890.
At its first annual meeting in 1920, HAA secretary Dinsmore observed that horsemen and horse-related industries had “been living in a fool’s paradise with respect to the horse displacement which has been occurring” over the past decade. Dinsmore explained that draft-animal adherents blindly believed American farmers would never forsake horses and mules. As a result, they did nothing to counter the information disseminated by power farming forces. “So the manufacturers and dealers,” according to Dinsmore, “in other types of motive power have had an absolute clear field, and have been able to make claims that their particular types of motive power were more efficient and much more economical than horses and mules. They have been able to make the claim both in the city and the country, and in the absence of any proof or any information to the contrary, they have been able to get away with it.” In his statement, Dinsmore detailed his vision of the new organization’s primary purpose—educating and informing farmers about the merits of farming with draft animals.
Dinsmore carried out his task vigorously, if not always diplomatically. To Dinsmore, grim times for the draft-animal industry demanded bold measures to save the horse and mule, the American farmer, and the nation itself from the tractor and, to a lesser extent, the automobile and motor truck. Nor was Dinsmore’s a long voice. The president of the Horse Association of America wrote with decided conviction that “the extravagant use of motor transportation in this country has passed far beyond the point of sanity and unless something is done to curtail this needless waste the ultimate result cannot be other than disastrous for the future welfare of the nation.” Hardly self-seeking reactionaries, the HAA officially recognized the worth of the automobile. For example, in 1925 Dinsmore praised the automobile because it had “contributed greatly to equestrian sports [by] making riding clubs, polo fields and hunt clubs easy of access.” In regard to the tractor, however, the HAA’s leadership sounded so urgent because they genuinely believed the American farmer was being misled by the tractor industry, which in the 1920s was often the case.
According to HAA president Fred Williams, tractor propagandists had consistently overstated the ability, range, and utility of their products while understating their costs, limitations, and shortcomings. At the same time, they had inflated horse costs, deprecated the horse’s utility, and both forecast and urged the horse’s “early and complete replacement by mechanical power.” Williams admitted the misinformation was sometimes unintentional, but he added that “in the main the propaganda has been deliberate, carefully planned, adequately financed and tremendously aided by the failure of those who believed in the horse to bring forward any facts in their possession or to seek new ones with which to refute the statements of the motor interests.” Williams, while harshly critical of the motor interests for their methods, did not take a Luddite tack. “Anyone who isn’t blind or a fool,” Williams stated, “will acknowledge the value of the motor vehicle and grant it a permanent place in its proper place.”
At approximately the same time, secretary of agriculture E. T. Meredith, who served for approximately one year, wrote that he “was very much interested in the utilization of mechanical power and all the other mechanical problems which are related to agriculture [and that] … every available worker should have his efficiency developed to the fullest possible extent by the utilization of mechanical equipment wherever it is economically feasible.” While the USDA had yet to determine a firm policy in 1920, Meredith’s phrase “wherever it is economically feasible” came very close to expressing the policy settled upon by the department. In short, the USDA ultimately took the position that some farmers would benefit from using tractors while other farmers would be best served by draft animals, and this stance continued well into the twentieth century as cotton farmers confronted mechanization. Ambiguity may have been the most pragmatic avenue for an agency charged to serve all the nation’s farmers, but it led to many misunderstandings.
While the opponents prepared for further clashes, the USDA seemed unprepared to take sides. The department justified not taking a position by stating that no information existed on which to base a judgment. Secretary of agriculture Henry C. Wallace explained that the “effort of the Department in its research work on the problem of farm power is to gather the facts without regard to whether they are favorable to the horse or to the tractor, and let these facts speak for themselves.” Until such scientifically gathered information was available, continued the argument, the department hedged in its responses to the growing number of requests for guidance from farmers after World War I. The USDA preferred to answer inquiries with pamphlets since they were cost effective and usually satisfactory, but in the case of farm power choices it could offer little prepared information to interested individuals or organizations.
H. C. Taylor, chief of the Office of Farm Management, stated in 1920 that while tractor studies were under way, more information needed to be gathered before the department could support tractors. Taylor explained that to endorse “the tractor for all kinds of places might do a very great deal of harm.” Over the long term, Taylor feared that a rapid and ill-advised shift to tractors could leave the nation with a shortage of draft animals, a problem that loomed as a real possibility as the 1920s progressed. Taylor also echoed two arguments that horse proponents often employed. First, he noted the signal changes set in motion when a farmer purchased a tractor. Tractor farmers immediately became “dependent upon the city with all its labor problems for his machinery and for fuel and oil consumed in producing the power.” Taylor noted that while tractors had their place on some farms, the “typical sales agent is not interested in knowing just where this place is as in selling the tractor.”
Many of the confrontations stemmed from the fact that both horse and tractor proponents eyed the department so closely, each jealously accusatory when it suspected the other of misreading or consciously misusing department information to support its own cause. This occurred repeatedly in spite of assurances such as that from Secretary Wallace that the USDA intended only “to gather the facts without regard to whether they are favorable to the horse or to the tractor.” Wallace expected the facts to “speak for themselves.” Facts could be emphasized, neglected, or twisted, however, and Wayne Dinsmore believed it his prerogative to act as the department’s ex officio conscience. For example, he reminded Secretary Wallace before a speech to the Farm Economics Association that the discourse “would not be complete without due heed to the important part which the intelligent use of horses plays in reducing production costs.” Dinsmore hoped Wallace would “take time to place some emphasis” on this point. Significantly, both tractor and horse proponents acknowledged the decisive role that the USDA played in the issue, and equally important is the point that tractor interests lobbied as hard as horse proponents to receive the department’s blessing.
In the absence of a firm policy line and information, organizations on both sides of the farm power issue mustered their own resources and broadcast their own information. In a typical leaflet, the HAA forcefully set forth the promule position under the rubric “A mule is the only fool proof tractor ever built.” Using the Miller Brothers Ranch in Oklahoma, described as the largest diversified farm and ranch in the United States, the pamphlet noted that the ranch had compared tractors to mules through close record keeping and had found that tractors cost three times as much as mules to own and operate under actual farming conditions. A spokesman for the farm left little doubt concerning his position: “We believe all tractors are bad, only some are worse than others. When it comes down to actual facts in dollars and cents, we believe that any farmer who disposes of his horses and intends to do all of his farmwork with tractors, will eventually ‘hit the rocks,’ and that he is only working for the man who sells tractors, for as soon as he has made enough wheat or other farm products to pay for his tractor, it will be necessary for him to purchase another.”
Draft-animal proponents tapped a deep well of distrust that had produced earlier agrarian movements against corporate power. Further, grain and hay crops could be produced on the farm unlike fuel and lubricants for tractors. Draft animals also consumed large amounts of hay and grain, providing a market for farm products. One estimate stated that draft animals normally consumed sixty-eight percent of the nation’s oat crop, forty-five percent of the hay crop, twenty-five percent of its rye crop, and twenty-four percent of its corn crop. Without draft animals in full use, allied industries, including harness makers, blanket manufacturers, feed businesses, veterinarians, horseshoe manufacturers, and farriers, faced hard times as well. The combined arguments were compelling, but only if one shared the same set of assumptions about how American agriculture should operate.
Some observers found the ongoing debate tedious at best. The Progressive Farmer seemed fed up with the issue. In a 1920 article critical of both sides in the debate, the magazine pointed out, “If much of the energy consumed in spreading propaganda in support of the horse and the truck and tractor were expended in the development of a better horse, a better truck and a better tractor, the effort would be worth more in results.” At this point, the magazine viewed the position of both the truck and tractor on farms as “secure.” Even so, it warned that not everyone should purchase them. As time passed, the Progressive Farmer became more open in its support of tractors and related farm machinery that could increase a farmer’s efficiency. At the same time, the magazine did not dismiss draft animals entirely until mules had all but disappeared.
In 1921 and 1922 the Department of Agriculture found itself in the midst of what one official called “a war to the finish between the power farming people and the horse champions.” A pugnacious Wayne Dinsmore, speaking as secretary of the HAA, squared off against an equally combative Finley Mount, chairman of the Tractor and Thresher Department of the National Association of Farm Equipment Manufacturers. H. C. Taylor, the USDA’s chief of Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates, unintentionally sparked the quarrel during a speech he gave before the November 30, 1921, meeting of the HAA. Taylor, speaking in place of Secretary Wallace, referred to but did not directly cite a study of 286 Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois farms. The report concluded that due to high feed costs in 1920, tractors were cheaper to operate than draft animals, while in the following year, horses had been less expensive to operate. Another survey of farms in central Illinois came out in favor of draft animals as well. Among other points, the author is noted that on a farm growing less than 240 acres of crops, tractor use was probably not economically warranted. The study concluded that “little saving in man labor was effected by the use of the tractor.”
Dinsmore lost little time in preparing a press bulletin using Taylor’s remarks which he released on December 7, 1921. Much to the tractor lobby’s chagrin, the bulletin reported the “big national authorities stood up in the Chicago convention of the Horse Association of America last week, and unreservedly endorsed the horse as the logical power for the farmer and the most economical hauling power for city freighting.”
Power farming advocates took exception to a USDA spokesman assuming such a position, if he had actually done that. Finley Mount went to the source of the remarks to inquire about the matter. Taylor was not apologetic, but he did explain the context of his words and charged any wrongdoing to Dinsmore’s interpretation, not to the speech itself. Taylor’s speech focused on the outlook for the next few years for breeders of draft horses, racehorses, jacks, and mules. He gave Mount two reasons why he believed draft animals “should be able to hold an important place on American farms.” Taylor noted their adaptability to “every variety” of farmwork. He also believed the argument was strong that draft animals could be produced on the farm and fed with farm products. In closing his reply to Mount, Taylor insisted that he did not say what Dinsmore had reported. “In other words,” he concluded that Dinsmore’s release “is his own interpretation of the results of the investigations, not my statement.”
Mount, dissatisfied with Taylor’s reply, appealed to Secretary Wallace that Taylor’s letter was “unsatisfactory.” The advertising manager for International Harvester supported Mount’s offensive. F. W. Heiskel penned a long letter to Mount, which Mount forwarded to Wallace and Taylor, expressing his distress about the USDA’s apparent favoritism. Mount testily wrote, “So long as this negative program is carried on entirely by those having a financial interest in continuing the use of horses, the tractor manufacturers can well ignore the movement, but this becomes more difficult when officials of the Federal Department of Agriculture, who have such a wonderful opportunity to be of real service to American farmers and the country as a whole by taking a fair and unbiased position on this subject and treat both sides strictly on their merits, apparently lend their influence to the Horse Association.”
Mount followed his strongly worded letter with a more conciliatory message written on Valentine’s Day. Most upsetting to the power farming forces was the USDA’s unwillingness to condemn Dinsmore’s widely circulated press releases. Mount observed that Taylor had admitted the bulletin misrepresented his statements, yet Department of Agriculture officials refused to pursue the matter. “What the tractor industry feels it is entitled to ask,” wrote Mount, “is this: Will you Mr. Secretary, permit this thing to go unchallenged in this manner?” Mount followed his letter with a personal visit to the secretary’s office, but Wallace was not in at the time.
While busy indicting the horse interests for misstating the USDA’s position on tractors and draft animals, the tractor industry also took the opportunity to exploit any openings. Tractor proponents seized upon a telegram sent by Secretary Wallace to the St. Paul, Minnesota, Pioneer Press regarding the farm power question. Wallace stated in part that the “Department of Agriculture is making careful study of this power question because we appreciate the need of making the largest possible use of mechanical power which reduces production cost.” Working from the assumption that mechanical power always represented reduced production costs, which the USDA had not determined, the Power Farming Press surely took some pleasure in observing that the “Department must be thoroughly sold on the power-farming idea to express so specific an opinion. This is gratifying to the tractor and power-farming equipment manufacturers, to say the least. Moreover, it is what Power Farming has been urging for years.”
Wayne Dinsmore expressed concern over the misapplication of Wallace’s statement, but assured the secretary that his telegram “was entirely O.K. for it is quite desirable to use mechanical motive power which reduced production costs. Unfortunately, no such mechanical motive power exists and the construction which the Power Farming Press put on your telegram is far from the interpretation you yourself would put on it.” Wallace replied to Dinsmore in a confidential letter in which he stated, “If I stay here much longer I shall be suspicious of everybody and everything. I am beginning to understand why many people in government service seem afraid to open their mouths.” A weary Wallace, at that time attempting to gather a consensus among his staff on how to close the matter, penned what sounded much like a departmental position statement: “Both the horse and mechanical power have places on the farm, and will find their places, whatever may be said or done by the zealous, and perhaps at times over-zealous, parties of either.” He closed by expressing doubt that “discussions” of the type in which the department had been involved served any useful purpose.
Throughout February, March, and April, Wallace attempted to hammer out a viable policy statement guided by experts on his staff. In the end, the department fell back upon its original plan to say as little as possible while conducting studies. A typical policy statement contained several major points. First, it noted that “both the horse and the tractor have a place in American agriculture.” Perhaps hopefully, perhaps naively, the statement observed that “when each finds its place, there will be no conflict of interest between them.” Of the statement, one staffer commented that “it is about what we should say when it is absolutely necessary to say something.” The USDA believed that over the long term some farmers would continue to use draft animals, while others would end up as tractor farmers.
The department surmised correctly, as later information supported, that general rules were not easily developed, but at the same time it set out “to ascertain the truth as rapidly as possible.” In its treatment of tractorization, the department tended to react to changes by studying what was happening or had happened on farms, rather than developing specific, overt policies to shape the use of draft animals or tractors in a particular direction. At the same time, the department’s emphasis on increasing output per man-hour and per acre played a crucial role in how it viewed the horse and tractor confrontation. As one draft-horse advocate and critic of the USDA has commented, “Measurements of efficiency in food production…on the basis solely of human labor expended per lb. or acre are invalid and misleading.”
At the time the mule and tractor controversy shifted to the southern United States, the USDA was still content to gather information and let the horse and tractor proponents fight their own battles. Neither side left the department alone after 1922, but by the same token, neither side expected the department, as both had hoped in 1922, to openly endorse one position. The conflict shifted more to the pages of trade journals and agricultural periodicals. Secretary Wallace was not unmindful of the potential repercussions of the internal combustion engine upon agriculture, but he desired quantifiable data instead of impressionistic observations. In a philosophical inquiry, Wallace wrote to H.C. Taylor, chief of the newly created Bureau of Agricultural Economics, regarding the changes in agriculture since the turn of the century. “Twenty years ago,” he noted, “the power on the farm was furnished mostly by horses and windmills. The horses were fed on stuff grown on the farm and this did not require an outlay of cash. Wind was free. All we had to do was to stick a wheel up in the air and harvest it. Now a large part of the power is furnished through engines. We have to pay cash for gasoline and oil and for repairs. Grain and hay formerly eaten by horses is now sold. Have we any way of measuring the effect of this change?” Wallace also alluded to societal changes that had occurred. “Twenty years ago,” he mused, “there was a good deal more swapping of work by the farmers of various communities than there is today. Nowadays not so many care to exchange work. Have we any way of measuring the additional cash outlay because of this change[?]” The department developed methods to measure change. But the USDA did not concern itself at this point with potential repercussions that might be wrought by tractors and other machinery.
Large tractors could clearly pull larger and heavier implements than the small teams of horses or mules most farmers used. Draft-animal forces, led by Wayne Dinsmore, responded to tractor claims of greater efficiency by advocating that farmers hitch larger teams to heavier farm implements. This produced an ideal result in the view of draft-animal proponents—greater efficiency and increased use of draft animals. The HAA took action to educate American farmers on the benefits of the “big hitch.” The organization implemented a paid advertising campaign in the late 1920s, as well as undertaking its own study into the costs of producing, raising, maintaining, and employing horses and mules. In 1929, for example, the HAA mailed more than 106,000 pieces of printed matter. It also received approximately nine hundred cards and nearly sixteen thousand letters. Its publicity campaign boasted 13,119 inches of type in magazines and newspapers with a combined circulation of almost thirty-six thousand. The big-hitch campaign information also reached many southern farmers through the pages of the Progressive Farmer, which summarized the program and gave the address for securing the HAA’s booklet on the topic.
Much of the association’s energy and finances went into producing literature advocating larger teams and carrying out demonstrations of large hitches of draft animals. Not surprisingly, early efforts focused on areas where large teams of animals could be most easily adopted. Big-hitch demonstrations numbered 109 in South Dakota, 380 in Iowa, and 142 in Wisconsin during 1927 and 1928. Southern states also witnessed some demonstrations during 1928. South Carolina hosted four, Georgia seven, Alabama two, Tennessee two, Missouri three, and Texas thirty-three big-hitch demonstrations. The HAA carried on its southern work the next year as well.
The demonstration program attempted with some success to utilize agricultural extension agents to aid its design. For example, Dinsmore distributed an HAA leaflet, Keeping Farm Teams at Low Cost, to every county agent in the United States. In addition, he sent fifty-five copies to the USDA’s Washington office to be distributed among extension staffers there. Dinsmore tested the patience of Department of Agriculture officials at times, however, which resulted in an occasional rebuff. Oklahoma’s state extension director, D.P. Trent, refused to order his staff to participate in HAA big-hitch demonstrations, allegedly because extension programs kept them too busy.
Dinsmore penned an ungracious letter to C. W. Warburton, national director of extension work, in Washington. Dinsmore asked that Warburton “put some pressure on Trent” to cooperate with the HAA. “For some unknown reason,” he continued, Trent “seems to consider it more important to have men go out and show men how to feed cattle than have them go out and show men how to use their teams in such a fashion as to save from $200 to $300 per year, and I am getting weary of it.” Dinsmore then posited that Trent’s personal indignation at not having been contacted in person by Dinsmore might explain his reluctance to cooperate. He concluded in an equally presumptuous fashion, “Anything you can do to line him up will be greatly appreciated, but early action is necessary.”
Warburton’s final reply, although less combative than his original draft, retained a decided edge. He first explained that the federal government would not dictate state-level extension programs, and should it attempt to do so, “that dictation would very promptly and very properly be resented.” Warburton then proceeded to defend Trent and to justify his actions. Taking Dinsmore to task in no uncertain terms, Warburton concluded, ‘if I was in Director Trent’s place I doubt very seriously whether your letter of March 21 would influence me to do the thing you desire. I am quite sure, in fact, that this letter…would make me feel that you were rather officiously trying to dictate my program, and I think I would resent your attitude.” Dinsmore’s reply was curt. He said simply, “I have your letter of March 28th relative to the Oklahoma situation. Apparently we will have to proceed through other channels.”
In spite of episodes in which Dinsmore did not get his way, the working relationship between the HAA and most extension programs usually proved more congenial and productive. Whereas agricultural colleges and extension departments might have been difficult initially to convince, by 1929 Dinsmore could report a significant improvement. He believed that the “agricultural colleges and their extension departments are working with us. They don’t depreciate the tractor, but at the same time they push our work [and] spread our knowledge.” Nor were Dinsmore’s efforts without fruit. Livestock specialist W. R. Hauser noted that several South Dakota farmers were working eight, nine, ten, and twelve horse teams, and doing more work than two or three men had before. Hauser also called the big-hitch demonstration the “best and most interesting and also the most practical” demonstration he had witnessed in fifteen years of extension work.
Editors of the annual Yearbook of Agriculture included a favorable article on big hitches in 1927, further proof that Dinsmore’s gospel reached many, both in the fields and in Washington. The article’s author mentioned the HAA by name, praised its efforts in cooperation with extension agents, and concluded that big hitches “point a way to a practical way of effectively reducing operating costs, yet retaining on the farm the reliable form of drawbar power which is self-replacing, consumes home-grown fuel, and has the maximum flexibility.” The big-hitch movement, although of restricted usefulness in the south, did echo in the region during the 1930s when a push occurred to convince farmers to use larger mules and one-row equipment.
Despite its successes, the big-hitch program failed to stem the rising tide of tractorization and hardly made any difference in the South, outside isolated areas suited to large teams. While few large teams plowed southern cotton fields, the big-hitch program and the USDA’s stress on efficiency did encourage many southern farmers to switch to two-mule equipment. In South Carolina, for example, one extension official noted in 1930 that the state’s agriculture was going to center, “for a time at least, around this two mule machinery.” Many of the South’s farmers relied upon a single mule for field work and could not dream of using large teams in order to improve efficiency even at the end of the mule era. Still, the example of the HAA is important because it represented an alternative to tractorized American farms and it made its voice heard in many areas of agriculture, the farm, the USDA, and even in engineering circles.
Dinsmore himself belonged to the American Society of Agricultural Engineers and on at least one occasion presented a paper at its annual convention. For his perennial optimism about the place of draft animals on farms of the future, Dinsmore must have understood the daunting odds against his view of the future. For example, he chastised the ASAE for focusing on one side of the issue, especially when tax money funded research. Dinsmore reminded state-employed engineers that they owed taxpayers “the direct duty of increasing, in every possible way, the efficiency of motive power used on their farms, and this duty should take precedence over work designed to bring out and popularize” tractors and other types of machines.
Yet, the HAA’s big-hitch program contained a fatal flaw from the beginning. Although the differences in employing draft animals and tractors are profound, as most observers noted, the HAA’s leadership and that of its opponents were not totally divorced on philosophical grounds. In short, both believed that bigger and faster were better. Dinsmore and the HAA leadership chose to confront tractor forces largely on their own ground by defining efficiency in terms of acres plowed or planted per day or per man-hour. And in this context the big-hitch program was inaugurated. It was a bold stroke and took the battle to the enemy.
In the early years of tractor development, this approach may have made sense. As tractor designers developed smaller, more powerful, and more reliable units, however, draft animals lost the field in terms of pure pulling power. Farmers simply could plow more acres per day with tractors. Tractors could also produce more horsepower per day, particularly after electrical lighting permitted night work. As larger engines were developed, the pure muscle of tractors vastly outclassed that of even large teams of draft animals. Draft animals still held certain advantages, such as the ability to get into wet fields sooner than tractors, but the definition of good farming came more and more to be measured quantitatively—acres covered per day—and with that change the farm horse and mule were doomed. Southern farmers as a whole took longer to convince of this fact, but in time they too accepted the USDA’s and the tractor industry’s definition of efficiency and good farming, or they left the land. Certainly this definition became one of the most common standards employed in extension studies, although it was not the only one. In a sense, then, the battle waged by Dinsmore and the HAA, especially the bighitch program, helped prepare the South for tractors.
While powerful assumptions existed about science and engineering within the USDA, and while the USDA as an institution advocated scientific farming and the use of labor-saving machinery whenever possible, the department was also made up of men who held certain misgivings about tractorization. It is clear that there was some room in the USDA for differing opinions on specific issues, at least until mechanization became an accomplished fact, or nearly so. At that point, the old guard had either retired or had learned that advocating its position within the department would do no good, but vestiges remained into the 1950s.
The pro-draft animal feeling took two forms. On one hand, some USDA officials stood unconvinced that tractor farming was universally as profitable or efficient as horse farming. Efficiency rang as a central theme of USDA rhetoric, but during the early twentieth century, and until the post-World War II era in large parts of the cotton South, tractorization and efficiency did not become fully synonymous. In the end, what may be most surprising about tractorization is how little the USDA really concerned itself with overtly advocating a shift to tractors during the early stages of the debate. Historian Anthony Badger has concluded that governmental intervention, especially in the form of the agricultural New Deal, “was marginal to the major developments— the flight from the land, mechanization, and the consolidation of small farms into larger holdings—that were to revolutionise American agriculture in the next 50 years.” In the end, implement manufacturers and dealers pushed tractors much harder than did any government agency.
The Department of Agriculture remained acutely aware of the rising number of tractors, and the consequent decline of draft animals, through agricultural census returns, reminders from horse and mule advocates, and letters from interested or concerned individuals across the nation. Farmers in touch with local conditions perceived more clearly than officials in Washington the implications of tractorization, especially as the Depression tightened its grip on the nation’s rural areas. One South Dakota farmer struck a theme later echoed by southern observers of tractorization. “Tractors cause the [sic] over production and it encourages corporation farming, which is a great drawback for agriculture. It crowds the small farmer and the beginner out of the game.” In addition, to many observers, tractors led to massive displacement of farm laborers and tenants from the land.
But USDA spokesmen insisted that their agency must view agriculture from a national perspective. One agriculture official responded to a complaint regarding the tractor’s impact on local conditions by admitting that local and specific examples might point out problems with mechanization, but that “the matter can only be considered on a larger scale or national basis.” Many observers linked the rapid rise of tractor use in many parts of the nation during the 1920s with the onset of the Depression. The most vigorous critics of the tractor reflected strong reactionary tendencies. A Texas doctor asserted in a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt that “[a]ll tractor and trucks must be destroyed.” A Nebraska farmer’s proposal went a step further. He believed that the solution to the Depression was “to do away with tractor manufacturing.” Other suggestions sounded less reactionary but aimed at reducing tractor use nonetheless. An Ohio farmer, for example, suggested the government impose a tractor tax punitive enough to curtail tractor purchases.
Not surprisingly, Wayne Dinsmore of the HAA offered his analysis and recommendations to the USDA as tractor numbers increased. He pushed for educational programs designed to give horses and mules equal billing with tractors. Dinsmore acknowledged to Secretary Wallace the USDA’s inability to “compel farmers…to put horses or mules in place of trucks and tractors as they wear out.” He did ask the department, however, to point out the benefits of draft animals, especially in terms of consuming excess grain produced on farms. Voices within the USDA complex also expressed concern over farmers unwisely shifting to tractors because of “hard sell” techniques by tractor dealers such as the purchase of a farmer’s draft animals at above-market prices to induce farmers to buy tractors. In reality, this meant that tractor dealers offered a high trade-in value for draft animals. Credit played a role since tractors could be bought on “very liberal credit, sometimes too liberal.” Dealers also used a serious outbreak of equine sleeping sickness to undermine farmer confidence in draft animals. As a result, some observers called for a governmental subsidy to stabilize the draft-animal industry. During the 1930s, much of the nation’s attention turned to the South, where the peculiar social and agricultural systems made both draft-animal and tenant displacement more visible. Agricultural economist Paul Taylor toured the South in 1937 to gather information on the plight of farm tenants, some of whom had been displaced due to farm mechanization. He reported a significant amount of tractor buying in Texas, where conditions such as large fields suited mechanization.
Over time draft-animal advocates within the department disappeared. Even in the face of tenant displacement or the wholesale replacement of horses and mules on farms, the department refused to intervene in the farmer’s decisionmaking process in the matter of farm power. The USDA did not wish to “do anything which might make it harder for the farmer to cultivate his soil.” Crop-control programs clearly intervened in the sense that they limited a farmer’s planted acreage, but officials felt it best to let the farmer “be the judge as to the equipment he uses.” This attitude remained constant throughout the years after the initiation of crop-reduction programs. In 1941 the secretary of the department echoed this view: “We feel that farmers should be free to choose the type of power that they use, and that programs of the Department should be formulated so as not to jeopardize their freedom, either directly or indirectly.
While the USDA did not feel it should dictate what equipment farmers chose, it was involved in promoting power farming in other ways. As early as the World War I era, for example, Virginia Polytechnic Institute hosted power farming demonstrations in conjunction with several equipment manufacturers. In 1919 seven plowing demonstrations were held with more than thirty thousand farmers in attendance. More than ten thousand farmers were reported at one demonstration alone. In 1922, the school held six power demonstrations at which “tractor and modern power implements were shown in operation doing various kinds of work.” Demonstrations of only tractor plowing were discontinued, however, since officials believed that such focused exhibitions had served their purpose in the state. Thousands of farmers attended the more broadly conceived power farming exhibitions.
The decline in plowing demonstrations probably reflected a general trend in research. During the early 1920s, farm machinery projects fell on hard times as agricultural engineering departments found that funding for indefinite or general projects did not materialize as it has in the past. Instead, narrow projects with carefully considered purposes and methods were much more likely to receive funding. In Alabama, for example, the state experiment station narrowed its tractor study to a project concerned with the relationship between tractor wheel slip in the soil and plowing efficiency.
The Department of Agriculture more often than not found itself reacting to changes catalyzed by technological advances. Despite the drawbacks to such a defensive approach, without the ability to dictate fundamental decisions to farmers, the USDA found its policies often one step behind the progress it often encouraged. “Every time a new step in mechanization is taken on a farm,” an undersecretary wrote, “a whole train of effects is started off, some good and some bad—and it is our job to help the farmers meet the bad effects.” The USDA also worked from the assumption that farmers bought and used tractors because they like them. Mordecai Ezekiel, an economist with the USDA, summed up several key points when he explained that farmers “like tractors because of the saving time in their use and the reduced nuisance of caring for horses throughout the year, as well as for their greater economy on the job.”
Such comments invited criticism, as they sprang from bureaucrats whom Wayne Dinsmore branded in a letter to USDA secretary Arthur M. Hyde as “motor-minded” officials. He complained as early as 1930 that the department was filled with individuals biased toward mechanization in general and tractorization in particular. Dinsmore himself heartily supported more efficient farming operations, but he attacked the prejudice against draft animals he found in the USDA. Referring to the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Dinsmore noted that the “qualities that lead men into that field of work,—the scholarly tastes, studious mind, inclination to spend long hours in an office studying figures, charts, maps, graphs and accounts—records of things that have passed—make them mechanically minded.” USDA scientists and bureaucrats, Dinsmore implied, did not understand how the real world of farming operated.
Dinsmore also called attention to individuals within the USDA who had expressed to him “the view that farmers were going to tractorize, wholly or in part, even though it added to their expenses and reduced prices for farm products—that the attempt to obtain ease, to escape chores, would cause a general shift, no matter how detrimental it might prove to farm interest as a whole.” Years later, while speaking at the Horse and Mule Association’s annual meeting, Dinsmore admitted that the view of many individuals in the USDA that tractorization was a foregone conclusion was correct. Optimistic as usual, he nevertheless warned that the crucial factor working against the farm draft animal “is the inclination of the human race to be lazy. We are all alike as far as that goes, and a very large proportion of farmers and farm boys are just too lazy to take care of four good horses or mules, or six of them, to get them up and groom them and take care of them. They want the easiest way out. They want to get their work done in less time.”
Another strong factor in the tractorization equation, which Dinsmore hit upon in his letter to Hyde, was the idea that tractorization, for all of its revolutionary implications, and perhaps partly because of them, meshed with the nation’s technological evolution. In 1920 Secretary Meredith explained that technological innovation in agriculture “may be regarded as an inevitable result of the progress of modern industrialism.” As such, the shift from draft animals to tractors had to be faced, not as a boon or threat, but as a fact of modern agricultural practice. Secretary of agriculture Ezra Taft Benson expressed in the 1950s his own “regret” over the decline of draft animals, but like Meredith believed that it had been “inevitable.” He further noted that the sense of loss he and his generation felt so keenly “was not so prevalent among the younger generation.” Even before USDA policies began to alter the nation’s, and especially the South’s, agricultural landscape, Secretary Hyde called attention to the fact that the “gas driven vehicle had a vast reaction upon the farm market.” Evidently dismissing critics such as the HAA’s Dinsmore, he commented that “[n]obody is critical of this for the reason that it is merely one of those modern economic shifts which will always occur.”
Some of the acceptance of tractorization within the USDA, as well as on the part of farm journals, rested upon the sincere belief that the tractor would materially benefit the small producer by enabling him to compete with larger farmers. Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s restrictions, grain farmers who utilized tractors could sell all their produce, while horse farmers needed a portion of their grain to feed draft animals. While the Department of Agriculture pressed for increased farm production, its officials did not believe such an emphasis would lead inevitably to huge, corporate farms. “We definitely don’t want our farms to become soulless factories,” stated Secretary Clinton P. Anderson immediately after the Second World War, for “[t]o allow our machines and our impetus toward bigness to bring that about would be to take the American spirit out of farming.” Mechanization and family farming were inextricably linked in the USDA’s view, perhaps revealing a misreading of the tractor’s long-term implications for agriculture. The Department of Agriculture stood for and promoted at once the family farm, scientific farming, mechanization, and increased levels of productivity in agriculture. Indeed, secretary Ezra Taft Benson strongly denied any USDA bias against small farms. He stated, “My whole endeavor as Secretary has been to promote the Administration’s efforts to safeguard the family type farm.”
As an article in Southern Agriculturist highlighted, tractors did hold certain benefits for small landowners and tenants alike. Frank Rudy, a Tennessee tenant farmer, owned no land but did own a tractor. Rudy personified the successful tenant who used his machine “to increase leisure time and diversify crops.” He tilled several hundred acres of cropland with his “mechanized mule”—200 acres of wheat, 250 acres of corn, and some tobacco. But Rudy did not hold exclusively to cash-crop farming. He accepted the gospel of diversified farming and the tenets of the live-at-home program pushed by extension agents and farm journals. Apart from his grain crops, Rudy raised lespedeza, clover, a one-hundred-head herd of Hereford cattle, truck and home-use garden produce, pigs, chickens, and horses. Despite his love for horses, Rudy found the benefits of his tractor too numerous to warrant using draft animals. Horses became more of a leisure activity for Rudy. Some of the tractor’s positive points included its economy, its belt power, and its ability to work longer hours than horses when necessity dictated. Rudy noted in particular the utility of the belt pulley with which he sawed wood and ground feed, only two of the numerous chores that he “could not do with any number of teams.” “Farming with a tractor is a pleasure,” concluded Rudy.
Rudy believed his livelihood, prosperity, and success were tightly bound to his tractor. His rejection of draft animals reflected a widening conviction throughout the South — based largely on the Midwestern experience and USDA observations, and reinforced more often than not by the southern agricultural press — that successful farmers hitched their equipment to tractors, not to mules or horses. Frank Rudy disproved the stereotypical view that the southern tenant farmer “is typically a victim of oppression whose day is an unending cycle of backbreaking toil, and whose share of the landlord’s bounty is a mere pittance.” That view of a South peopled with innumerable Jeeter Lesters and Dorothea Lange photography subjects was, according to the article’s writer, “still present in the minds of some Northern sociologists, economists, professors and misguided social workers,” who were disappointed when they met men like Frank Rudy. To tractor proponents, the machine heralded a way to remake Tobacco Road into a modernized, prosperous South, finally unhitched from inefficient, backward farming techniques and ready to meet the bright future seated on a tractor, not stumbling over clods behind a one-mule plow. The machine, not the mule, exemplified the modern South.
Agricultural journals reflected to some extent the ambivalence that even the most progressive-minded southerners could feel about mechanization. The Progressive Farmer was arguably the leading farm journal published in the South. In 1926, it boasted a circulation of 475,000. The editor estimated that there were five readers per subscription, so that the journal had more than two million readers. Its pages reflect the uncertainties, on one level, of farm mechanization. Its July 29, 1922, cover, for example, highlighted two draft horses with the caption, “The tractor has its place, but so have fine animals like these.” On another and broader level, however, the journal demonstrates how quickly the various assumptions about what farming should be led to the ultimate demise of the mule, although the final result would not be seen for decades. The journal consistently argued for greater efficiency, and over time that term became equated with tractors and mechanized agriculture. By the mid-1950s, a regular column appeared entitled “The March of Machinery” which reflected changing assumptions about the centrality of tractors and the demise of mules. One 1956 column, for example, featured six new tractor models.
The Corn Belt scenario replayed itself in the South, but by the 1930s and 1940s, the USDA had become more confident that tractorization was inevitable and, in the South, positive, because of the depressed state of southern agriculture. Throughout the process, however, some ambivalence remained about the actual gains and losses for the South. The agricultural shifts which the Mid-west underwent during the 1920s, and which fueled much of the clash between draft-animal and tractor proponents, may seem far removed by time and geography from the Depression-era South. Yet, the conclusions that the department developed in the 1920s, the studies it undertook, and the unsure approach it demonstrated toward the issue as a whole carried over directly into its relationship with southern agriculture as the South struggled with mules and tractors in the coming decades. The surprising fact about southern tractorization may be how little the USDA directly involved itself in the process, often preferring instead to watch and study events as they unfolded rather than attempting specifically to direct them. Even in the cotton South, where complete mechanization had to await the development of specialized equipment and techniques, the machine ultimately won out over the animal.