Modern History — 1900 to 1933 AD

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early 1900s
Patrons of American and European music halls enjoy the antics of a troupe of ten performing black hogs, owned and trained by Edward S. Holder of Indiana. The hogs repertoire includes playing musical instruments, walking a tightrope, balancing on a see-saw and pulling a cart with a dog driver.
1902
"Prices That Stagger Humanity", is the headline of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in a campaign against high meat prices — 18¢ for pork chops or ham; 24¢ a pound for sirloin steak.
Britain imports £50 million worth of meat and £4.1 million worth of fish. The average Englishman consumes more than 56 pounds of cheap imported meat per year, mainly U.S. pork, Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb.
1903
The Harley-Davidson motorcycle is introduced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S. Some 50 Harley-Davidson bikes will be produced by 1906, and by 1917 production will reach 18,000 per year as the "Hog" becomes America's top motorbike.
c. 1904
Most commercial English farms have stopped raising hogs, beef and grain as they cannot compete with imports. They are unable to meet the demand for lard, butter and cheese much of which is imported from Denmark and North America.
1904
Recent remains of a Giant Forest Hog, the last really large animal to be "discovered" by science, are found in East Africa. Soon after, live specimens are seen and captured, though this beast had long been assumed to be either mythical of extinct.
Another version of the legendary origin of the hot dog — food vendors at the St. Louis Worlds Fair introduce a new meat snack, Red Hots. Each pork frank comes with a pair of white cotton gloves to keep the snacker's fingers cool while eating.
Campbell's Pork and Beans is introduced by the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company.
1905
Upton Sinclair exposes U.S. meat-packing conditions in his book, The Jungle. The 308-page best seller has eight pages devoted to such matters as casual meat inspection, deviled ham that is really red-dyed minced tripe, sausage that contains rats killed by poisoned bread and lard that sometimes contains the remains of employees who have fallen into the boiling vats. Many readers turn vegetarian, sales of meat products fall off, and the U.S. Congress is aroused.
Birth of Isadore "Fritz" Freleng (1905-1995), Warner Brothers animator/director, along with Tex Avery (1908-80) and Chuck Jones (1912-2002), of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety.
1906
Feuchtwanger's pork sausage on a bun becomes the snack of choice at baseball games. Chicago cartoonist, Thomas "Tad" Dorgan depicts them as a dachshund inside a frankfurter bun, and dubs them "hot dogs". (see also 1883, 1904)
Sinclair's The Jungle spurs the Meat Inspection Amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill, introduced by Sen. Albert Jeremiah Beveridge (R. Ind.). It passes without dissent, but the measure does not provide for federal funding of the now required meat inspections.
The reference book, The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, is published. Pigs, used as example, simile and metaphor, figure prominently throughout the work as when Bierce defines edible as:
"good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm."
1908
Birth of Tex Avery (1908-1980), Warner Brothers animator/director, along with Chuck Jones (1912-2002), and Isadore "Fritz" Freleng (1905-1995), of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety.
May 30 - Birth of Mel Blanc (1908-1989), creator of the voices of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon characters such as Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety.
1909
November 4 - Pigs fly! A piglet is taken for a 3 1/2 mile joyride in a Voisin biplane by Lord Brabazon, holder of the first pilot's license in the United Kingdom. The piglet goes aloft in a basket tied onto the plane's wing and bearing a sign: "I am the first pig to fly," though he seemed to have little choice in the matter.
1910
An animated cartoon about a pork sausage and a dog, "The Dachshund and the Sausage", is an early production of John Bray, a Brooklyn Eagle cartoonist who pioneers animated motion picture cartoons using a "cel" system he has invented. Bray's method, utilizing several layers of celluloid transparencies, will be used by all future cartoon animators.
1911
A Year of the Pig in the Chinese lunar calendar.
1912
Fourteen wild boars are introduced into the U.S. from Germany by an American, George Moore, for group of English investors. Though released into an enclosed game refuge in the North Carolina Appalachians, most will escape to mate with free-roaming "mountain-rooter" sows to begin a feral swine population that will quickly grow to number more than 1,200.
The film, The Musketeers of Pig Alley starring Lillian Gish premiers.
Birth of Chuck Jones (1912-2002), Warner Brothers animator/director, along with Tex Avery (1908-1980), and Isadore "Fritz" Freleng (1905-1995), of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety.
Humiliating pigtails are abolished in China when Sun Yat-sen and followers topple the Manchus of the 267 year old Ch'ing dynasty and found the Guomindang or Nationalist Party which begins the revolution that will propel China toward 20th Century modernization and acceptance of Western ideas.
1913
October 7 - Henry Ford begins operation of an "automobile assembly line" at the Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit, Michigan. Ford and engineer Clarence Avery credit their observations of the dis-assembly lines used by Cincinnati and Chicago pork packers as a major inspiration. By simply reversing the process, Ford cut the time required to assemble a motorcar from 12.5 down to 1.5 hours.
1914
Van Camp Sea Food is founded by Indianapolis packer Frank Van Camp whose father Gilbert began packing pork and beans in 1861. Funded by the family's pork fortune, Frank would pioneer making tuna an American staple rather than a costly delicacy.
1915
Carl Sandburg, U.S. poet, publishes the book Chicago Poems. Included is the poem, Chicago wherein Sandburg describes the town as "Hog Butcher for the World."
1916
NATHAN's FAMOUS frankfurters have their beginning in a Coney Island, N.Y., hot dog stand at the corner of Stillwell and Surf Avenues. Nathan Handwerker, a Polish-American, sells his pork franks for 5¢ each — half the price charged by competitors. Nathan works 18 to 20 hours per day with his wife Ida. Offering value and a secret spice recipe, NATHAN's prospers.
1918
British food rationing of sugar, meat, butter, and margarine begins in January. Fresh meat is rationed by price and consumers are required to buy from a particular butcher to avoid deception. Ration books are issued in July and the bacon ration is raised from eight ounces per week to 16 ounces.
1919
Wartime prices in France for pork, beef, mutton, and veal have increased nearly sixfold since 1914.
1920
Botulism from commercially canned food strikes 36 Americans, 23 die, and the U.S. canning industry is motivated by failing sales to impose new production safety standards.
1921
In the "Porkopolis" of Cincinnati, a local auto parts producer Powel Crosley, moves his ham radio station's transmitter, 8CR, from his house to his factory and has it licensed under the call letters WLW. Crosley will organize Crosley Radio Corp. in 1923 and the station will become a 50,000 watt voice of the Midwest's pork and corn belt.
1922
Insulin, commercially extracted from a pig's pancreas, is first used to control diabetes.
1923
A Year of the Pig in the Chinese lunar calendar.
1924
The popular melodrama, Pigs opens on Broadway, starring Wallace Ford.
1926
Hormel Flavor-Sealed Ham is the first U.S. canned ham. The ham, which enjoys immediate success, is canned by a process patented by German inventor Paul Jorn.
British writer, A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh and delights young readers with Pooh-bear, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, Kanga and baby Roo, Owl, and other companions of Christopher Robin.
1928
Pooh and Piglet return, as A.A. Milne publishes the Pooh sequel, The House at Pooh Corner.
1932
Big Bear Super Market, the first large cut-rate self-service grocery store, opens in Elizabeth, N J and offers shoppers pork chops at 10¢ lb. — half that of other stores — and many other "at or below cost" bargains on grocery staples. Big Bear's "Price Crusher" technique is quickly imitated by others as the supermarket revolution gathers force.
1933
Walt Disney Studios releases The Three Little Pigs animation with music and lyrics by Frank Churchill and songs that include "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf".
In Jackson, Tennessee, history's fattest hog, a Poland-China named Big Bill, is killed and stuffed by his owner, Burford Butler. At death, Big Bill was nine feet long and weighed 2,552 pounds with a belly that dragged the ground. About this time, the trend in hog production began to shift to hogs that were much trimmer and very lean.
Typical U.S. food prices: ham 31¢, bacon 22¢, pork chops 20¢, butter 28¢ lb.; bread 5¢ per 20oz. loaf; chicken 22¢ lb.; milk 10¢ qt.; eggs 29¢ doz.; potatoes 2¢ lb.; sugar 6¢ lb..
Stokely-Van Camp is created by a merger of Stokely Bros. and Van Camp. Stokely has grown by acquiring other canning companies, Van Camp has added to its pork and beans and catsup lines by canning hominy, Vienna sausage, New Orleans-style kidney beans and other items.
June - An Emergency Farm Bill becomes law and the Agricultural Adjustment Act sets out to restore farm income by reviving 1909-1914 average prices for hogs, grain, cotton, tobacco and dairy products.
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace orders some 400,000 farrowed pigs destroyed and 330,000 acres of cotton plowed under as limitation procedures to compensate for the fact that the Agricultural Adjustment Act was established after most crops were planted and pigs were farrowed.

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