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Among the documents I was lucky enough to study on last week's Ag School (This Time It's All About the Eggs) Tour were several issues of The Cooperative Poultryman from the early 1920's.  As I mentioned, albeit in a cheap-and-easy-joke context, on another page of note, The Cooperative Poultryman is a magazine dedicated to poultry co-ops.  It is not, I repeat, not, Lady Chatterley's Lover with a poultryman replacing the gardener.  I found some pretty nifty information in there on everything from marketing plans to improved devices for feeding chicks to discussions on the best breeds for meat and eggs to a fairly scathing editorial in response to another poultry journal editor's suggestion that an organization be formed to encourage people to eat more eggs.  (Considering that the American agribusiness landscape is now rich with such organizations and check-off programs, it is particularly interesting to read of a time when this still a hot-button issue among farmers.)  I also found something...well, you be the judge.

The "something" in question is a tiny little blurb from the June-July 1924 edition of The Cooperative Poultryman, part of a column of tiny little blurbs collected under the heading "Why Not?"  Keeping in mind that we all carry cultural baggage, and that the baggage of today is not the baggage of 80 years ago, and keeping in mind further that the mission of The Cooperative Poultryman is to provide support and assistance for poultry cooperatives, assistance that includes responding vigorously to the critics of cooperatives; keeping all that in mind, I was still surprised by their tweaking of a newspaper belonging to that Captain of Industry and plutocratic nutjob, Henry Ford:

Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent recently made itself ridiculous by printing a series of articles pretending to show that Jews were dominating cooperative marketing and using it to exploit the farmers for their own gain.  There are a hundred Jews in the commission business and speculating on produce exchanges for every one that is connected with cooperative marketing.

It was 81 years ago, says my left brain to my right brain.  Things were different then.  It doesn't work.  My right brain is still incredulous at this editorial response, and at the idea that the correct answer to Co-ops are run by greedy exploitative Jews! was not Henry Ford is not just a plutocratic nutjob, he's an anti-Semite!,  but rather, Nuh-uh!  Your team has WAY more Jews than our team, you big stupidhead!  I realize I'll have to develop a thicker skin, historical-perspective-wise, if I want to get any work done without stopping every hour or so to gibber frantically, but for now, color me flummoxed, boggled and any other moldy old verb that would indicate either staggering naivete or just plain stupidity.