Number of words: 310

The story begins with the extraordinary degree to which the American economy revolved around horses before the introduction of the automobile. As one historian has commented, “Every family in the United States in 1870 was directly or indirectly dependent on the horse.” Across the country, there was one horse for every five people. Because a typical horse consumes ten times as many daily calories as a person, many farmers depended on growing food for horses even more than for people.

Pettet went to work with the Census Bureau’s voluminous data and documented what happened after the adoption of the combustion engine. The combination of cars, trucks, and farm machinery between 1920 and 1930 led to a sharp reduction in the nation’s horse population—from 19.8 million documented in the 1920 census to 13.5 million a decade later. It was a decline of almost a third. As the horse population fell, so did demand for the food they ate, principally hay, oats, and corn.

The obvious answer was for farmers to switch to growing crops desired by people instead of horses. That is precisely what happened. As Pettet reported, farmers took eighteen million acres of land that had been devoted to horse feed and used it for the production of cotton, wheat, and tobacco. They flooded the market with these crops, depressing their prices. As prices fell, so did the income of farmers. The total revenue earned by farmers from these three crops fell from $4.9 billion in 1919 to $2.6 billion in 1929 and then to only $857 million in 1932. Additional factors contributed to the decline in farm revenue in the early 1930s, but the impact of the declining horse population, while indirect, was both stark and unmistakable.

Soon the nation’s rural families found it difficult to pay the mortgages on their farms, leading rural banks to start foreclosing on them. But the banks couldn’t keep up with the foreclosures, and soon they had their own problems repaying what they owed to larger banks in the nation’s financial centers. In addition, as Pettet found, many jobs in cities were dependent on agriculture based industries such as packing, manufacturing, and farm machinery. 28 The situation infected the entire country. By 1933, it wasn’t just the horse that had lost its job, but almost thirteen million people, or a quarter of the nation’s labor force.

Excerpted from pages 243 to 244 of ‘Tools and Weapons’ by Brad Smith and Carol Browne