President Calvin Coolidge stands with Kansas “Wheat Girl” Vada Watson and a group of men. She presented him with a tiny bag of wheat. (Library of Congress)
Opinion
By Max McCoy, Kansas Reflector
On Kansas Day in 1925, a 19-year-old farm girl named Vada Watson was whisked to the White House to present President Calvin Coolidge with a tiny sack of wheat.
Her mission? To proclaim Kansas wheat the best in the world.
Kansas Day is just around the corner — Wednesday, Jan. 29, the date in 1861 Kansas was admitted to the Union — so let me turn your attention from the cacophony of current events and dwell, if only for a little while, with Vada’s story.
It is a thoroughly Kansas tale, similar in some ways to “The Wizard of Oz,” with ample amounts of hubris and eventual madness. If Vada was Dorothy Gale, then the wizard was F. Woodville “Woody” Hockaday, a 40-year-old Wichita promoter and highway trailblazer who accompanied her to the White House. I’m thinking of the 1939 movie, not the more complicated and disturbing L. Frank Baum novels.
It must have all seemed like a technicolor dream to Vada, because it all happened so fast. The “Wheat Girl” contest was sponsored by the Kansas Daily Newspaper Advertising Association, in an attempt to show the world that the Sunflower State produced more than “cyclones, grasshoppers and sunflowers.” In the space of fewer than 60 days — from December 1924, when the contest kicked off, to Jan. 29 — she went from being a farm girl studying at a small Christian college to briefly being the best-known ambassador of the Sunflower State.
Nomination ballots were published in newspapers across the state, which was divided into regions for the contest, and there were only two requirements: the girl must be under 22 and have lived on a Kansas farm for the previous two years, with exceptions for stays at college.
Judging by the amount of ink Kansas newspapers devoted to the contest, the competition must have been keen. Ballot tallies were regularly reported. Mary Wheat of Parsons was a contender, but ultimately her name did not carry her. The Hutchinson News-Herald reported on the fierce campaigning and accompanying shenanigans as seriously as it would have a major political contest.
“When the last election day came the Turon Commercial club ordered 10,000 copies of the News and Herald with the ballot in,” the newspaper reported Jan. 3, 1925. “But the order had to be turned down, as it was decided not to sell any extra papers in bulk.”
At Sterling College, the Presbyterian institution where Vada was a student, her campaign was organized by the college president. Her list of supporters at Turon reads like a business directory for the town: physicians, bankers, and merchants were madly clipping ballots.
At the last minute Turon sent 40 “shock troops” to Hutchinson, 34 miles distant, to support Vada. They worked all day in weather that hit 10 below. They rounded up an extra 1,500 ballots for Vada, the Hutchinson paper reported.
“There were frozen hands and frozen feet,” according to the news account, “but there were warm hearts and red-hot enthusiasm. And they put their candidate over.”
Having clinched the nomination of the Hutchinson News-Herald, on Jan. 12 Vada was sent to Topeka to be judged with the other contestants. The Kansas Wheat Girl would be chosen, according to the rules distributed to newspapers, as the “best looking, most intelligent, and most popular farm girl in Kansas.”
Did I mention the contest was in 1925?
After Vada was chosen the winner, she was introduced at the state capitol to Kansas Gov. Ben Paulen, a Fredonia Republican who had been freshly sworn into office. Paulen, who was supported by the Ku Klux Klan, defeated famed Emporia editor William Allen White in the gubernatorial primary.
It was after Vada’s crowning as Kansas Wheat Girl that our wizard enters the story.
Woody Hockaday was born in 1884 in Caldwell and by the age of 14 had moved to Wichita and started a coal delivery business to pay for his education. He and his brother went into the bicycle trade but soon moved into automotive supplies and services. Hockaday offered free air, water, and battery charging and free tire repair for stranded motorists within 10 miles of Wichita.
By 1915, Hockaday had turned his attention to mapmaking — and promotion. From New York to Los Angeles, he hired crews to put signs up along the country’s evolving highways listing distances between towns, and the signs were marked with a big red H — for Hockaday.
“In a program planned to make automobile travel easier, he marked more than 60,000 miles of road with his familiar ‘H’ marker,” the Wichita Beacon noted in his obituary. “He was responsible for the establishment of the zero milestone in Washington, D.C., the starting point of all the highways in the United States.”
Hockaday provided a temporary zero mile marker that was placed on the Ellipse south of the White House, according to the Federal Highway Administration. At the time, he was president of the National Highway Marking Association. A squat stone marker later replaced the temporary one. The idea for a starting point to measure highway distances, according to the highway administration, came from one S.M. Johnson, who relayed his idea through the Army’s Motor Transportation Corps.
The Beacon obit noted Hockaday’s promotion of the Kansas Wheat Girl but also acknowledged his more recent activities.
“In more recent years Hockaday figured in the news with publicity stunts in which he attempted to further the cause of world peace and understanding,” the obituary said.
Hold your questions, because there will be more on those stunts shortly.
The remains of one of Woody Hockaday’s signs giving highway distances in Kansas rests on a tree. (Kansas State Historical Society)
Hockaday’s involvement in the Kansas Wheat Girl campaign was to take Vada from one place to another — by automobile, train, and aircraft. Hockaday was secretary of a booster organization called the “Kansans,” and he and his wife, Grace, chaperoned Vada on her travels. In the first and biggest trip, they went to Washington, D.C., and Vada presented Coolidge with a two-ounce sack of Kansas wheat.
Although it was too small to be of any practical use, that little bag of wheat had big political significance. The bag was part of the crop that had been harvested during a photo op in June 1923 by President Warren G. Harding at the wheel of a tractor near Hutchinson. It was a preliminary stop on a western tour by Harding, a then-popular Republican president. Harding died of a heart attack during the tour, on Aug. 2, in San Francisco. Posthumous revelations of
scandal and extramarital affairs tarnished Harding’s legacy.
More lasting was the Sunflower State’s reputation for wheat.
Although Kansas is among the nation’s top producers of wheat, and for many years our license plates proclaimed us “The Wheat State,” it wasn’t always so. The state was known more for its corn harvests, at least until 1874, when Russian Mennonite immigrants brought the hardy Turkey Red wheat with them. About 5,000 migrants came to Kansas to escape religious persecution in Ukraine and, in doing so, were largely responsible for a revolution in the state’s agriculture. Coupled with advances in motorized farming in the decades to come, the stage was set for wheat to become the state’s dominant crop.
In Washington with her little bag of reliquary wheat, Vada was “accorded (the) honors of a foreign dignitary,” reported the Associated Press. Vada was described as a “blue-eyed miss” who raised chickens and cooked for farm hands. She was welcomed by congressmen, cabinet officers and the president himself on the birthday of her home state. She was treated to lunch by Kansas Sens. Charles Curtis and Arthur Capper and was the guest of honor at the annual dinner of the Kansas Society.
Later, Vada and the Hockadays went on a 12-day summer train tour, making stops across the state, singing the “Wheat Song,” and spreading the gospel of agricultural prosperity. Their tour would eventually take her outside of Kansas, all the way to Los Angeles. Hundreds of column inches of newspaper copy were devoted to the Coolidge meeting and the railway wheat tour, but there is precious little in the way of interviews about what Vada thought about it all.
A photograph in the Library of Congress seems to sum up the role Vada played in this theater of commerce: a well-mannered dark-haired girl in a modest dress handing over that tiny sack of wheat to Coolidge in a doorway to an official-looking building. Is it at the White House? Congress? It’s difficult to tell. Whatever the location, Vada and the president are surrounded by a crowd of official-looking white men in suits.
The Kansas wheat boom would continue a few more years. But overproduction would lead to a collapse in prices, and unsustainable farming practices would leave the topsoil with no defense against extreme weather. The Dust Bowl came and reset Kansas agriculture again.
“The long succession of abnormally dry seasons turned a considerable area in western Kansas into a near desert,” the Works Progress Administration publication “Kansas: A Guide to the Sunflower State” said in 1939. “Wheat planting had destroyed the natural coverage of buffalo grass and left the soil exposed to the ravage of drought and wind. By 1934 soil blowing had become a major problem.”
Kansas wheat production eventually rebounded, especially with agricultural advances in the second half of the 20th Century. Yet, drought remains a peril for wheat farmers, with the added dangers of aquifer depletion and climate change, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Something happened to Hockaday in the decade or so after his triumphant wheat tour. By 1936, he had taken to throwing feathers at various politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. The United Press called him a “feathers-tossing peace advocate” who was arrested by Capitol Police after scattering a gunny sack full of chicken feathers in the office of Assistant Secretary of War Harry Woodring. A Democrat, Woodring had been Kansas governor in the early 1930s.
“Shouting his war-cry of ‘feathers instead of bullets,’ Hockaday, garbed in semi-nudist style, loped out of the building before officers could seize him,” UP reported Aug. 7, 1936.
The breech-clouted Hockaday was apprehended after taking refuge near the offices of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Hockaday, who advocated for giving the country back to Native Americans, held rallies in national parks during which he urged people to collect skunks to send to Hitler. He slung feathers in New York to show his displeasure with Wall Street. He crashed an American Legion meeting in Baltimore. He showered Wall Street with feathers in 1936. In Oklahoma City, he rushed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s car and was beaten by the crowd and the Secret Service. He was accused of kidnapping an 11-year-old boy and taking him to the New Jersey statehouse for a protest. Dressed in a Santa Claus costume, he tossed hundreds of live chickens to crowds around Rockefeller Center in 1940, according to the Associated Press. He was repeatedly thrown in jail, in towns big and small.
“They always popped old Woody into the psycho wards,” wrote Robert Ruark in his newspaper column in 1949, lampooning the politicians of his day, “but sometimes I get to wondering if he wasn’t as sane as the people he serenaded.”
Hockaday died of diabetes in 1947 at the Still-Hilldreth psychiatric hospital in Macon, Missouri, according to his death certificate. He was 63.
Vada graduated from Sterling College, taught elementary school, and married Willis Hoskinson, a banker from her hometown. A scholarship to promote post-secondary education in the Turon area is named for Vada and her husband.
She died in 2000, age 94.
That is the story, which concludes with a long and perhaps happy life for Vada but ends on a cipher for Hockaday.
What triggered him to go from being the state’s biggest travel booster to waging a one-man feather war for peace? It is tempting to put it all down to mental illness, but that seems too simple. His madness wasn’t random, it was focused, and while his methods may have been shocking, he knew how to make headlines.
The tragedy is that his demons drove Hockaday beyond the bounds of peaceful protest, into the inexcusable acts of kidnapping a child and rushing a sitting president. We Kansans have always been a little mad, at least since the time of John Brown, but the end of Hockaday’s story has a certain cringe undiluted by time. But Hockaday is as much a part of the kaleidoscopic story of Kansas as winter wheat. He deserves to be remembered, feathers and all.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
This article was republished with permission from the Kansas Reflector. The Kansas Reflector is a non-profit online news organization serving Kansas. For more information on the organization, go to its website at www.kansasreflector.com.
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