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diff --git a/32702-h/32702-h.htm b/32702-h/32702-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..28ac673 --- /dev/null +++ b/32702-h/32702-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,4280 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Romance of the Reaper, by Herbert Newton Casson</title> + <style type="text/css"> + + p {margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em;} + + h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {text-align: center; clear: both;} + + hr {width: 33%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; clear: both;} + + table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;} + + body {margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 12%;} + + .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right; font-style: normal;} + + .blockquot {margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;} + .poem {margin-left:15%; margin-right:15%;} + + .right {text-align: right;} + .center {text-align: center;} + .smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + .smcaplc {text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps;} + + .caption {text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; text-align: center;} + + .figcenter {margin: auto; text-align: center;} + + p.dropcap:first-letter{float: left; padding-right: 3px; font-size: 250%; line-height: 83%; width:auto;} + .caps {text-transform:uppercase;} + + a:link {color:#0000ff; text-decoration:none} + a:visited {color:#6633cc; text-decoration:none} + + .spacer {padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;} + + ins.correction {text-decoration:none; border-bottom: thin solid gray;} + + hr.full { width: 100%; + margin-top: 3em; + margin-bottom: 0em; + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + height: 4px; + border-width: 4px 0 0 0; /* remove all borders except the top one */ + border-style: solid; + border-color: #000000; + clear: both; } + pre {font-size: 85%;} + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Romance of the Reaper, by Herbert Newton +Casson</h1> +<pre> +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre> +<p>Title: The Romance of the Reaper</p> +<p>Author: Herbert Newton Casson</p> +<p>Release Date: June 5, 2010 [eBook #32702]</p> +<p>Language: English</p> +<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p> +<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF THE REAPER***</p> +<p> </p> +<h4>E-text prepared by Tom Roch<br /> + and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br /> + (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net/c/">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br /> + from page images generously made available by<br /> + the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA),<br /> + Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University<br /> + (<a href="http://chla.library.cornell.edu/">http://chla.library.cornell.edu/</a>)<br /> + and<br /> + Internet Archive/American Libraries<br /> + (<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/americana">http://www.archive.org/details/americana</a>)</h4> +<p> </p> +<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;" cellpadding="10"> + <tr> + <td valign="top"> + Note: + </td> + <td> + Images of the original pages are available through + Internet Archive/American Libraries. See + <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/romanceofreaper00cass"> + http://www.archive.org/details/romanceofreaper00cass</a> + <br /> + or<br /> + Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA), + Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University. See + <a href="http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=2936480"> + http://chla.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=chla;idno=2936480</a> + </td> + </tr> +</table> +<p> </p> +<p><b>Transcriber’s Note:</b></p> +<p>Underlined text indicated a correction made by the transcriber. Hover +the cursor over the underlined text and the nature of the correction +will appear.</p> +<p>A more detailed transcriber's note is at the end of the e-book.</p> +<p> </p> +<hr class="full" /> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> +<p> </p> + +<h1>The Romance of the Reaper</h1> +<p> </p><p><a name="front" id="front"></a> </p><p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0002.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">A CHICAGO MOWER IN SIBERIA</p> +<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p> + +<h1>The Romance of the Reaper</h1> +<p> </p> +<h4>By</h4> +<h3>HERBERT N. CASSON</h3> +<p class="center">Author of “The Romance of Steel.”</p> +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center"><i>Illustrated from Photographs</i></p> +<p> </p><p> </p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="quote"> +<tr><td>“And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever<br /> +could make two ears of corn, or two<br /> +blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of<br /> +ground where only one grew before, would<br /> +deserve better of mankind, and do more<br /> +essential service to his country, than the<br /> +whole race of politicians put together.”<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">—<i>Dean Swift.</i></span></td></tr></table> +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center">NEW YORK<br /><ins class="correction" title="original: Doubelday">Doubleday</ins>, Page & Company<br />1908</p> +<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1907, 1908, by</span><br /> +<span class="smcap">Everybody’s Magazine</span></p> +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1908, by<br /> +Doubleday, Page & Company<br /> +Published, May, 1908</span></p> +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION</span><br /> +<span class="smcaplc">INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN</span></p> +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center"><span class="smcaplc">TO THE FARMERS OF THE UNITED STATES</span><br /> +<span class="smcaplc">WHOSE ENERGY AND PROGRESSIVENESS HAVE</span><br /> +<span class="smcaplc">MADE THIS WONDER-STORY COME TRUE</span></p> + + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p> +<h2>PREFACE</h2> + +<p>This is the story of our most useful business. It is a medley of +mechanics, millionaires, kings, inventors and farmers; and it is intended +for the average man and woman, boy and girl. Although I have taken great +pains to make this book accurate, I have written it in the fashion of +romance, because it tells a story that every American ought to know.</p> + +<p>The fact is that the United States owes much more to the Reaper than it +owes to the factory or the railroad or the Wall Street Stock Exchange. +Without the magical grain machinery that gives us cheap bread, the whole +new structure of our civilisation, with all its dazzling luxuries and +refinements, would be withered by the blight of Famine. This may sound +strange and sensational to those who have been bred in the cities, but it +is true.</p> + +<p>The reaper has done more to chase the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> wolf from the door—to abolish +poverty and drudgery and hand-labour, than any other invention of our day. +It has done good without any backwash of evil. It has not developed any +new species of social parasite, as so many modern improvements have done. +It has not added one dollar to the unclean hoard of a stock-gambler, nor +turned loose upon the public a single idle millionaire.</p> + +<p>The reaper is our best guarantee of prosperity. In spite of our periodical +panics, which prove, by the way, that the men who provide us with banks +are not as efficient as the men who provide us with bread, we are certain +to rebound into prosperity and social progress as long as we continue to +make three hundred harvesting machines every working day—one every two +minutes. The rising flood of wheat is bound to submerge the schemers and +the pessimists alike.</p> + +<p>And it is the reaper, too, which has done most to make possible a nobler +human race, by lessening the power of that ancient motive—the Search for +Food. Every harvester that clicks its way through the yellow grain means +more than bread. It means more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span> comfort, more travel, more art and music, +more books and education. In this large fact lies the real Romance of the +Reaper.</p> + +<p>In gathering the material for this book I have been greatly assisted by +Messrs. E. J. Baker, of the <i>Farm Implement News</i>; B. B. Clarke, of the +<i>American Thresherman</i>; Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, Ill; C. W. Marsh, of +De Kalb, Ill.; Edwin D. Metcalf and T. M. Osborne, of Auburn, N. Y., Henry +Wallace, of <i>Wallace’s Farmer</i>, William N. Whiteley, of Springfield, Ohio; +and the officials of the International Harvester Company, who made it +possible for me to have free access to all of its works and to familiarise +myself with its manner of doing business in this country and abroad.</p> + +<p>Also, I take pleasure in reproducing the following editorial note from +<i>Everybody’s Magazine</i>, in which four chapters of this book were first +printed:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>“President Roosevelt in his message of December 3rd said: ‘Modern +industrial conditions are such that combination is not only +necessary, but inevitable.... Corporation and labour union alike have +come to stay. Each, if properly managed, is a source of good, and not +evil.’ If capital combinations can be good, there must be some that +are good. Would it not be a proper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> service to the American people to +tell them of a trust that, while it had reaped the economical +advantages of combination, had yet played fair with the public and +with its competitors? Hence this story of the great Harvester +combine. Before we began to publish Mr. Casson’s articles, we +followed up his investigations with a thorough inquiry of our own, +and we are bound to say that the business methods of this institution +seem to conform to the highest standards of fair play and square +dealing. The International Harvester combine is not a tariff trust. +Its members surrendered dominance in their own business only when the +trend of ‘modern industrial conditions’ and overstrenuous competition +made combination ‘not only necessary, but inevitable.’ The inside +history of the ‘Morganising’ of this group of fighters, as narrated +here, is as humorous as it is fascinating.”</p></div> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="contents"> +<tr><td> </td><td> </td><td><span class="spacer"> </span></td><td align="right"><span class="smcaplc">PAGE</span></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td><td>Preface</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_vii">vii</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcaplc">CHAPTER</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td>The Story of McCormick</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td>The Story of Deering</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td>The International Harvester Company</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td>The American Harvester Abroad</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_126">126</a></td></tr> +<tr><td align="right"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td>The Harvester and the American Farmer</td><td> </td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_161">161</a></td></tr></table> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p> +<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="illustrations"> +<tr><td>A Chicago mower in Siberia</td><td align="right"><a href="#front"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr> +<tr><td> </td><td align="right"><span class="smcaplc">FACING PAGE</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>Cyrus Hall McCormick</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_13">12</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>The Virginian birthplace of the McCormick reaper</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>A model of the first practical reaper</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_26">27</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>William Deering</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>William N. Whiteley</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>C. W. Marsh</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>John F. Appleby</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>E. H. Gammon</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Asa S. Bushnell</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Benjamin H. Warder</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Hon. Thomas Mott Osborne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>David M. Osborne</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>A self-binder in Scotland, with the Wallace Monument in the background</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_63">62</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr.</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>Charles Deering</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Harold McCormick</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>J. J. Glessner</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>W. H. Jones</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>James Deering</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">92</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>American self-binders on the estate of President Fallières, in France</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_134">135</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>King Alphonso of Spain driving an American seeder</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_139">138</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Bismarck having his first view of an American self-binder</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_146">147</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>An American harvester at work in Argentina</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>Gathering in a Finland harvest</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_155">154</a></td></tr> +<tr><td>In the ancient fields of Algiers</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_159">158</a></td></tr></table> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p> +<h1>The Romance of the Reaper</h1> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p> +<h2>The Romance of the Reaper</h2> +<p> </p> +<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2> +<h3><span class="smcap">The Story of McCormick</span></h3> + +<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">This</span> Romance of the Reaper is a true fairy tale of American life—the +story of the magicians who have taught the civilised world to gather in +its harvests by machinery.</p> + +<p>On the old European plan—snip—snip—snipping with a tiny hand-sickle, +every bushel of wheat required three hours of a man’s lifetime. To-day, on +the new American plan—riding on the painted chariot of a self-binding +harvester, the price of wheat has been cut down to <i>ten minutes a bushel</i>.</p> + +<p>“When I first went into the harvest field,” so an Illinois farmer told me, +“it took ten men to cut and bind my grain. Now our hired girl gets on the +seat of a self-binder and does the whole business.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>This magical machinery of the wheat-field solves the mystery of +prosperity. It explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific +agriculture. It accounts for the growth of great cities with their steel +mills and factories. And it makes clear how we in the United States have +become the best fed nation in the world.</p> + +<p>Hard as it may be for this twentieth century generation to believe, it is +true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. +Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine.</p> + +<p>Cut the Kings and their retinues out of history and it is no exaggeration +to say that the human race was hungry for ten thousand years. Even of the +Black Bread—burnt and dirty and coarse, there was not enough; and the few +who were well fed took the food from the mouths of slaves. Even the +nations that grew Galileo and Laplace and Newton were haunted by the +ghosts of Hunger. Merrie England was famine-swept in 1315, 1321, 1369, +1438, 1482, 1527, 1630, 1661, and 1709. To have enough to eat, was to the +masses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> of all nations a dream—a Millennium of Prosperity.</p> + +<p>This long Age of Hunger outlived the great nations of antiquity. Why? +Because they went at the problem of progress in the wrong way.</p> + +<p>If Marcus Aurelius had invented the reaper, or if the Gracchi had been +inventors instead of politicians, the story of Rome would have had a +happier ending. But Rome said: The first thing is empire. Egypt said: The +first thing is fame. Greece said: The first thing is genius. Not one of +them said: The first thing is <i>Bread</i>.</p> + +<p>In the Egyptian quarter of the British Museum, standing humbly in a glass +case between two mummied Pharaohs, is a little group of farm utensils. A +fractured wooden plough, a rusted sickle, two sticks tied together with a +leathern thong, and several tassels that had hung on the horns of the +oxen. A rummaging professor found these in the tomb of Seti I., who had +his will on the banks of the Nile three thousand years ago. Egypt had a +most elaborate government at that time. She had an army and navy, an art +and literature. Yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> her bread-tools were no better than those of the +barbarians whom she despised.</p> + +<p>It is one of the most baffling mysteries of history, that agriculture—the +first industry to be learned, was the last one to be developed. For +thousands of years the wise men of the world absolutely ignored the +problems of the farm. A farmer remained either a serf or a tenant. He was +a stolid drudge—“brother to the ox.” Even the masterful old Pilgrim +Fathers had no ploughs at all—nothing but hoes and sharp sticks, for the +first twelve years of their pioneering.</p> + +<p>Fifty-five years of American Independence went by before the first reaper +clicked its way clumsily into fame, on a backwoods farm in Virginia. At +that time, 1831, the American people were free, but they held in their +hands the land-tools of slaves. They had to labour and sweat in the +fields, with the crude implements that had been produced by ages of +slavery. For two generations they tried to build up a prosperous Republic +with sickles, flails, and wooden ploughs, and they failed.</p> + +<p>There are men and women now alive who can remember the hunger year of +1837,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> when there were wheat bounties in Maine and bread riots in New York +City. Flour mills were closed for lack of wheat. Starving men fell in the +streets of Boston and Philadelphia. Mobs of labourers, maddened by the +fear of famine, broke into warehouses and carried away sacks of food as +though they were human wolves. Even in the Middle West—the prairie +paradise of farmers—many a family fought against Death with the serf’s +weapon of Black Bread.</p> + +<p>Enterprise was not then an American virtue. The few men who dared to +suggest improvements were persecuted as enemies of society. The first iron +ploughs were said to poison the soil. The first railroad was torn up. The +first telegraph wires were cut. The first sewing-machine was smashed. And +the first man who sold coal in Philadelphia was chased from the State as a +swindler.</p> + +<p>Even the railway was a dangerous toy. The telegraph was still a dream in +the brain of Morse. John Deere had not invented his steel plough, nor Howe +his sewing-machine, nor Hoe his printing-press. There were no stoves nor +matches nor oil-lamps. Petroleum<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> was peddled as a medicine at a dollar a +bottle. Iron was $75 a ton. Money was about as reliable as mining stocks +are to-day; and all the savings in all the banks would not now buy the +chickens in Iowa.</p> + +<p>Our total exports were not more than we paid last year for diamonds and +champagne. Chicago was a twelve-family village. There was no West nor +Middle West. Not one grain of wheat had been grown in Minnesota, the +Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, +New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma or Texas.</p> + +<p>The whole structure of civilisation, as we know it, was unbuilt; and most +of its architects and builders were unborn or in the cradle. Spencer was +eleven years of age; Virchow was ten; Pasteur nine; Huxley six; Berthelot +four; and as for Haeckel, Carnegie, Morgan, Edison and their generation, +they had not yet appeared in the land of the living.</p> + +<p>Then came the Reaper.</p> + +<p>This unappreciated machine, about which so little has been written, +changed the face of the world. It moved the civilised nations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> up out of +the bread line. It made prosperity possible; and elevated the whole +struggle for existence to a higher plane.</p> + +<p>Life is still a race—always will be; but not for bread. The lowest prizes +now are gold watches and steam yachts and automobiles. Even the hobo at +the back door scorns bread, unless we apologise for it with meat and jam.</p> + +<p>It is so plentiful—this clean, white bread, that it is scarcely an +article of commerce any longer. In our hotels it is thrown in free of +charge, as though it were a pinch of salt or a glass of water. There is no +“penn’orth of bread” in the bill, as there was in Falstaff’s day.</p> + +<p>Seven bushels of wheat apiece! That is what we eighty-five million people +ate in 1906—twelve thousand million loaves of bread. Such a year of +feasting was new in the history of the world. And yet we sent a thousand +million dollars’ worth of food to other nations.</p> + +<p>Suppose that bread were money, just for one day! What a lesson it would be +on the social value of the reaper! Thirty loaves would be the day’s pay of +a labourer—as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> much as he could carry on his back. Two loaves for a +cigar—three for a shave—five for a bunch of violets—forty for a theatre +ticket—a hundred for a bottle of champagne! Is there anything cheaper +than bread?</p> + +<p>The reaper was America’s answer to Malthus—who scared England into +abolishing the Corn Laws by his proclamation that “the ultimate check to +population is the lack of food.” What would that well-meaning pessimist +think were he now alive, if he were told that the human race is growing +wheat at the rate of ten bushels a year per family? Or that Minnesota and +the Dakotas (names that the world of his day had never heard) produce +enough wheat to feed all the people of England?</p> + +<p>The reaper was America’s answer to the world’s demand for democracy. +Instead of bread riots and red flags and theories of an earthly paradise +in which nobody worked but the Government, the United States invented a +machine that gave democracy a chance. Instead of a guillotine to cut off +the heads of the privileged people who ate too much, it produced a reaper +that gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> everybody enough. This was not a complete answer, nor will +there ever be one, to the riddle of liberty, equality and fraternity. But +it was so much better than theories and riots that it helped to persuade +twenty-five million immigrants to cross the ocean and become shareholders +in the American Republic.</p> + +<p>If it were possible to trace back a strand in the twisted thread of cause +and effect, we would find that many a factory and steel-mill owes its +origin to the flood of wheat-money that came to us from Europe in 1880 and +1881—every dollar of it made by the humble harvester.</p> + +<p>Without this obedient slave of wood and steel, all our railroads and +skyscrapers and automobiles could not save us from famine. If we had to +reap our grain in the same way as the Romans did, it would take half the +men in the United States to feed us on bread alone, to say nothing of the +rest of the menu.</p> + +<p>Like most great things, the reaper was born among humble people and in a +humble way. It was crude at first and dogged by failure. No one man made +it. It was the product of a hundred brains.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>The exact truth about its origin is not known and never will be. What few +facts there were have been torn and twisted by the bitter feuds of the +Patent Office. Every letter and document that exists is controversial. So +I cannot say that the story, as I give it, is entirely true, but only that +it is as near as I can get to the truth after six months of investigation.</p> + +<p>There is evidence to show that Cyrus Hall McCormick completed a practical +reaper in 1831, although the first reaper patent was taken out in 1833 by +an inventive seaman named Obed Hussey, of Baltimore. The young McCormick +did not secure his patent until 1834; but he had given a public exhibition +in Virginia three years before.</p> + +<p>There were nearly a hundred people who saw this exhibition. Not one of +them is now alive; and the story as told by their children has many little +touches of imagination. But in the main, it is very likely to be true.</p> + +<p>It was in the fall of 1831 when Cyrus McCormick hitched four horses to his +unwieldy machine and clattered out of the barnyard into a field of wheat +nearby. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>Horses shied and pranced at the absurd object, which was unlike +anything else on the face of the earth. Dogs barked. Small boys yelled. +Farmers, whose backs were bent and whose fingers were scarred from the +harvest labour, gazed with contemptuous curiosity at the queer contraption +which was expected to cut grain without hands.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0027.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">CYRUS HALL McCORMICK</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>A little group of Negro slaves had spasms of uncomprehending delight in +one corner of the field, not one of them guessing that “Massa” McCormick’s +comical machine was cutting at the chains that bound their children. And a +noisy crowd of white labourers followed the reaper up and down the field +with boisterous enmity; for here was an invention which threatened to +deprive them of the right to work—the precious right to work sixteen +hours a day for three cents an hour.</p> + +<p>The field was hilly and the reaper worked badly. It slewed and jolted +along, cutting the grain very irregularly. Seeing this, the owner of the +field—a man who was Ruff by name and rough by nature, rushed up to +McCormick and shouted—“Here! This won’t do. Stop your horses! Your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> +machine is rattling the heads off my wheat.” “It’s a humbug,” bawled one +of the labourers. “Give me the old cradle yet, boys!” exclaimed a +round-shouldered farmer. The Negroes turned handsprings with delight; and +the whole jeering mob gathered around the discredited machine.</p> + +<p>Just then a fine-looking man rode up on horseback. The crowd made way as +he came near, for they recognised him as the Honourable William Taylor—a +conspicuous politician of that day.</p> + +<p>“Pull down the fence and cross over into my field,” he said to young +McCormick. “I’ll give you a fair chance to try your machine.”</p> + +<p>McCormick quickly accepted the offer, drove into Taylor’s field, which was +not as hilly, and cut the grain successfully for four or five hours. +Although the United States had been established more than fifty years +before, this was the first grain that had ever been cut by machinery. The +Fathers of the Republic had eaten the bread of hand-labour all their +lives, and never dreamed that the human race would ever find a better +way.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>When he arrived home that evening, Cyrus thought that his troubles were +over. He had reaped six acres of wheat in less than half a day—as much as +six men would have done by the old-fashioned method. He had been praised +as well as jeered at. “Your reaper is a success,” said his father, “and it +makes me feel proud to have a son do what I could not do.”</p> + +<p>Two Big Men had given him their approval—William Taylor and a Professor +Bradshaw, of the Female Academy in the town of Lexington, Virginia. The +professor, who was a pompous and positive individual, made a solemn +investigation of the reaper, and then announced, in slow, loud, and +emphatic tones—“That—machine—is—worth—a hundred—thousand—dollars.”</p> + +<p>But if Cyrus McCormick hoped to wake up the following morning and find +himself rich and famous, he was roughly disappointed. The local excitement +soon died out, and in a few days the men in the village store were +discussing Webster’s last speech against Nullification and Andrew +Jackson’s war against the bankers. One old woman expressed the general +feeling by saying that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> young McCormick’s reaper was “a right, smart +curious sort of thing, but it won’t come to much.”</p> + +<p>McCormick was at this time a youth of twenty-two. He had been one of four +pink, helpless babies, born in 1809, who became, each in his own world, +the greatest leader of his day—Darwin, Gladstone, Lincoln, and McCormick. +Like Lincoln, McCormick first learned to breathe in a long cabin—but in +Virginia. He was bred from a fighting race. His father had wrenched a +living from the rocks of Virginia for his family of nine. His grandfather +had fought the English in the Revolution. His great-grandfather had been +an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania; and his great-great-grandfather battled +with a flint-lock against the soldiers of James II., at the siege of +Londonderry.</p> + +<p>The McCormick family, in 1809, had a good deal of what was then called +prosperity. They had enough to eat—a roof that kept out the rain—1,800 +acres of land, or near-land—three saw-mills—two flour-mills, and a +distillery. They had very little money, because there was little to be +had. In the whole United States there was barely as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> much money as would +buy half of the New York Subway.</p> + +<p>The first American McCormicks had a thousand dollars or more when they +resolved to leave Ireland, and they were Scotch enough to invest the whole +amount in linen, which they sold at a high profit in Philadelphia. This +capital enabled them to acquire a small stock of books, tools, and +comforts, which were passed along from father to son.</p> + +<p>Robert McCormick—the father of Cyrus, was himself a remarkable Virginian. +He was quick with his hands in shaping iron and wood. In fact, he was +fairly famous in his county as the inventor of a hemp-brake, a +clover-sheller, a bellows and threshing machine. His mind was greedy for +knowledge; and it was his habit, when the seven children were asleep, to +explore into the mysteries of astronomy until his candle had flickered its +life out. Twenty or more of his letters, which I have seen, are well +written and with a fine use of bookish words.</p> + +<p>The one persistent ambition of his life was to invent a reaper. It is also +true, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> a titbit of a fact for those who believe in prenatal +influences, that during the year in which Cyrus H. McCormick was born, his +father first began the actual construction of a reaping machine.</p> + +<p>Especially during the harvest months, the topic of conversation in the +McCormick home was whether the dream of “reaping grain with horses” could +ever come true. “Reaper,” was one of the first words that baby Cyrus +learned to say; and his favourite play-toy, when he grew older, was the +wreck of his father’s reaper that wouldn’t reap, which lay in rusty +disgrace near the barn-door.</p> + +<p>“Often I have seen Robert McCormick standing over his machine,” said one +of his neighbours. “He would be studying and thinking, drawing down his +under lip, as was his habit when he was puzzling over anything.” His +friends ridiculed him for wasting so much time on a foolish toy, until he +became half ashamed of it himself and quit his experimenting in the +daytime. But at night, he and Cyrus hammered away in the little log +workshop, as though they were a pair of conspirators.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>The romantic mystery of these midnight labours made an indelible mark on +the brain of the boy Cyrus. He grew up to be serious and +self-contained—quite unlike the boys of the neighbourhood. He was not +popular and never cared to be.</p> + +<p>“Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius from a child,” said John Cash, who +worked on the McCormick farm. “He invented the best hillside plough ever +used in this country. He and his father would lock themselves up in the +shop and work for hours on a reaping machine. The neighbours thought they +were both unbalanced to have the idea of cutting grain with horses.”</p> + +<p>Cyrus was always busy making or mending some piece of machinery. He +abhorred the drudgery of the farm; but delighted in any work that had an +idea behind it. He surprised his teacher one morning by bringing to school +a twenty-inch globe of wood, which turned on its axis as the earth does, +and had the seas and continents outlined in ink.</p> + +<p>“That young fellow is ahead of me,” said the amazed teacher.</p> + +<p>At fifteen Cyrus had invented a new grain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> cradle. At twenty-one he +improved a machine which his father had made to break hemp. And at +twenty-two this young country-boy, who had never seen a college, a city, +or a railroad, constructed <i>the first practical American reaper</i>. It was a +clumsy makeshift—as crude as a Red River ox-cart; but it was built on the +right lines. It was not at all handsome or well made or satisfactory; but +it was a reaper that reaped.</p> + +<p>But McCormick soon discovered that it was not enough to invent a reaper. +What the world needed was a man who was strong and dominating enough to +force his reaper upon the unwilling labourers of the harvest fields.</p> + +<p>Tenacity! Absolute indifference to defeat! The lust for victory that makes +a man unconscious of the blows he gives or takes! This was what was +needed, and what Cyrus McCormick possessed, to a greater degree, perhaps, +than any other man in American history.</p> + +<p>Tenacity! It was in his blood. Back of him was the hardiest breed that was +ever mixed into the American blend—the pick of the Scots who fought their +way to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> United States by way of Ireland. These Irish Scots, few as +they were, led the way across the Alleghanies, founded Pittsburgh, made a +trail to Texas, and put five Presidents in the White House.</p> + +<p>And tenacity was bred, as well as born, into Cyrus McCormick. He went +barefooted as a boy, not for lack of shoes, but to make him tough. “I want +my boys to know how to endure hardship,” said his mother. He sat on a slab +bench in the little log school house and learned to read from the Book of +Genesis. He sang Psalms with forty verses, on Sundays, and sat as still as +a graven image during the three-hour sermons, for his father was a +Presbyterian of the old Covenanter brand.</p> + +<p>So it came to pass that Cyrus McCormick clung to his reaper, as John Knox +had to his Bible. “His whole soul was wrapped up in it,” said one of his +neighbours. He grew as indifferent to the rough jokes of the farmers as +Martin Luther was to the sneers of the village priests. The making of +reapers became more than a business. It was a creed—a religion—a new +eleventh commandment.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>By the time he was thirty, he had become a nineteenth century Mohammed, +ready for a world crusade. His war-cry was—Great is the Reaper, and +McCormick is its prophet.</p> + +<p>Like Mohammed, he had his visions of future glory. On one occasion, while +riding on horseback through a wilderness path, the dazzling thought +flashed upon his mind—“Perhaps I may make a million dollars from this +reaper.” This idea remained for years the driving wheel of his brain.</p> + +<p>“The thought was so enormous,” he said afterward, “that it seemed like a +dream—like dwelling in the clouds—so remote, so unattainable, so +exalted, so visionary.”</p> + +<p>Also, like Mohammed, he had a period of preparatory solitude. Soon after +the first exhibition of his reaper, he bought a tract of land and farmed +it alone, with two aged Negroes as housekeepers. Here he lived for more +than a year with no companion except his reaper. He seemed at this time, +too, to have resolved upon a life of celibacy, for I find in one of his +letters an allusion to two young ladies of unusual attractiveness. “They +are pretty, smart and rich,” he writes, “but alas, I have other business +to attend to!”</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0038.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">THE VIRGINIAN BIRTHPLACE OF THE McCORMICK REAPER.</p> +<p> </p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>The two things of which he stood most in need were money and cheaper iron. +So, after thinking over the situation in his lonely cabin, he decided to +build a furnace and make his own iron. His father and a neighbour joined +him in the enterprise. They built the furnace, made the iron, and might +have forgotten the reaper, if the financial earthquake of 1839 had not +shaken them down into the general wreckage. The neighbour who had been +made a partner signed over his property to his mother, and threw the whole +burden of the bankruptcy upon the McCormick family, crushing them for a +time into an abyss of debt and poverty.</p> + +<p>Cyrus McCormick gave up everything he owned to the creditors—everything +except his reaper, which nobody wanted. So far his vision of wealth was +still a dream. Instead of being the possessor of a million, he was eight +years older, and penniless.</p> + +<p>There were four sons and three daughters in the family, and the nine of +them slaved for five years to save the homestead from the auctioneer. Once +the sheriff rode up with a writ, but was so deeply impressed with their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> +energy and uprightness that he rode away with the dreaded paper still in +his pocket.</p> + +<p>Up to this time Cyrus had not sold one reaper. As Mohammed preached for +ten years without converting anyone except his own relatives, so Cyrus +McCormick preached the gospel of the reaper for ten years without success. +Then, in 1841, he sold two for $100 apiece. The next year seven daring +farmers came to the McCormick homestead, each with $100 in his hands.</p> + +<p>This brilliant success brought the whole family into line behind Cyrus, +and the farm was transformed into a reaper factory. Twenty-nine machines, +“fearfully and wonderfully made,” were sold in 1843, and fifty in 1844. +There were troubles, of course. Some buyers failed to pay. A workman who +was sent out on horseback to collect $300, ran away with horse, money and +all. But none of these things moved Cyrus. At last, after thirteen years +of delay, he was selling reapers.</p> + +<p>Best of all, an order for eight had come from Cincinnati. These were the +first reapers that were sold outside of Virginia. They were seen by the +more enterprising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> farmers of Ohio and created a sensation wherever they +were used. Cyrus, who was now a powerful, broad-chested man of thirty-six, +caught a glimpse of his opportunity and sprang to seize it. He saw that +the time had come to leave the backwoods farm—forty miles from a +blacksmith—sixty miles from a canal—one hundred miles from a railway. +So, with $300 in his belt, he set out on horseback for the West.</p> + +<p>Here he saw <i>the prairies</i>. To a man who had spent his life in a hollow of +the Alleghanies, the West was a new world. It was the natural home of the +reaper. The farmers of Virginia might continue forever to harvest their +small, hilly fields by hand, but here—in this vast land ocean, with few +labourers and an infinity of acres, the reaper was as indispensable as the +plough. To reap even one of these new States by hand would require the +whole working population of the country.</p> + +<p>Also, in Illinois, McCormick saw what made his Scotch heart turn cold +within him—he saw hogs and cattle feeding in the autumn wheat-fields, +which could not be reaped for lack of labourers. Five million<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> bushels of +wheat had grown and ripened—enough to empty the horn of plenty into every +farmer’s home. Men and women, children and grandmothers, toiled day and +night to gather in the yellow food. But the short harvest-season rushed +past so quickly that tons of it lay rotting under the hoofs of cattle.</p> + +<p>It was a puzzling problem. It was too much prosperity—a new trouble for +farmers. In Europe, men had been plenty and acres scarce. Here, acres were +plenty and men scarce. Ripe grain—the same in all countries, will not +wait. Unless it is gathered quickly—in from four to ten days, it breaks +down and decays. So, even to the dullest minds, it was clear that there +must be some better way of snatching in the ripened grain.</p> + +<p>The sight of the trampled wheat goaded McCormick almost into a frenzy of +activity. He rode on horseback through Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, +Ohio, and New York, proclaiming his harvest gospel and looking for +manufacturers who would build his reapers. From shop to shop he went with +the zeal of a Savonarola.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0043.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">A MODEL OF THE FIRST PRACTICAL REAPER</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>One morning, in the little town of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> Brockport, New York, he found the +first practical men who appreciated his invention—Dayton S. Morgan and +William H. Seymour. Morgan was a handy young machinist who had formed a +partnership with Seymour—a prosperous store-keeper. They listened to +McCormick with great interest and agreed to make a hundred reapers. By +this decision they both later became millionaires, and also entered +history as the founders of the first reaper factory in the world.</p> + +<p>Altogether, in the two years after he left Virginia, McCormick sold 240 +reapers. This was Big Business; but it was only a morsel in proportion to +his appetite. Neither was it satisfactory. He found himself tangled in a +snarl of trouble because of bad iron, stupid workmen, and unreliable +manufacturers. He cut the Gordian knot by building a factory of his own at +Chicago.</p> + +<p>This was one of the wisest decisions of his life, though at the time it +appeared to be a disastrous mistake. Chicago, in 1847, showed no signs of +its present greatness. As a city, it was a ten-year-old experiment, built +in a swamp, without a railway or a canal. It was ugly and dirty, with a +river<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> that ran in the wrong direction; but it was <i>busy</i>. It was the link +between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes—a central market where wheat +was traded for lumber and furs for iron. It had no history—no ancient +families clogging up the streets with their special privileges. And best +of all, it was a place where a big new idea was actually preferred to a +small old one.</p> + +<p>Chicago did not look at McCormick with dead eyes and demand a certified +cheque from his ancestors. It sized him up in a few swift glances and saw +a thick-set, ruddy man, with the physique of a heavy-weight wrestler, dark +hair that waved in glossy furrows, and strong eyes that struck you like a +blow. It glanced at his reaper and saw a device to produce more wheat. +More wheat meant more business, so Chicago said ——</p> + +<p>“Glad to see you. You’re the right man and you’re in the right place. Come +in and get busy.” William B. Ogden, the first Mayor of Chicago, listened +to his story for two minutes, then asked him how much he wanted for a half +interest. McCormick had little money and no prestige. Ogden<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> had a surplus +of both. So a partnership was arranged, and the new firm plunged toward +prosperity by selling $50,000 worth of reapers for the next harvest.</p> + +<p>At last there had come a break in the clouds, and McCormick found his path +flooded with sunshine. He was no longer a wanderer in the night. He was +the Reaper King—the founder of a new dynasty. As soon as possible he +bought out Ogden, and thenceforth established a one-man business. By 1851 +he was making a thousand reapers a year, and owned one-tenth of the +million dollars he had dreamed of in the Virginian wilderness.</p> + +<p>At this point his life changes. His pioneer troubles are over. There are +no more thousand-mile rides on horseback—no more conflicts with jeering +crowds—no more smashing of reapers by farm labourers. The repeal of the +Corn Laws in England had opened up a new market for our wheat, and the +discovery of gold in California was booming the reaper business by making +money plentiful and labour scarce.</p> + +<p>Suddenly, McCormick looked up from his work in the factory, and saw that +he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> not only rich, but famous. One of his reapers had taken the Grand +Prize at a World’s Fair in England. Even the London <i>Times</i>, which had +first ridiculed his reaper as “a cross between an Astley chariot, a +wheelbarrow and a flying machine,” was obliged to admit, several days +later, that “the McCormick reaper is worth the whole cost of the +Exposition.”</p> + +<p>Seventeen years later, on the imperial farm, near Paris, Napoleon III. +descended from his carriage and fastened the Cross of the Legion of Honour +upon McCormick’s coat. There was a picture that some American-souled +artist, when we have one, will delight to put on canvas. How splendid was +the contrast, and how significant of the New Age of Democracy, between the +suave and feeble Emperor, enjoying the sunset rays of his inherited glory, +and the strong-faced, rough-handed Virginian farmer, who had built up a +new empire of commerce that will last as long as the human race eats +bread!</p> + +<p>From first to last, the stout-hearted old Reaper King received no favours +from Congress or the Patent Office. He built<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> up his stupendous business +without a land grant or a protective tariff. By the time that his Chicago +factory was ten years old, he had sold 23,000 reapers, and cleared a +profit of nearly <ins class="correction" title="Presented as in the original.">$1,300,00</ins>. The dream of his youth had been realised, and +more. All told, in 1859, there were 50,000 reapers in the United States, +doing the work of 350,000 men, saving $4,000,000 in wages, and cramming +the barns with 50,000,000 bushels of grain.</p> + +<p>So, on his fiftieth birthday, the battle-scarred McCormick found himself a +millionaire. He was also married, having fallen in love with Miss Nettie +Fowler, of New York, a young lady of unusual beauty and ability. No +history of the reaper can be complete without a reference to this +remarkable woman, who has been for fifty years, and is to-day, one of the +active factors in our industrial development. No important step has ever +been taken either by her husband or her three sons, until it has received +her approval. And Mrs. McCormick has been much more than a mere adviser. +Her exact memory and keen grasp of the complex details of her husband’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> +business made her practically an unofficial manager. She suggested +economies at the factory, stopped the custom of closing the plant in +midsummer, studied the abilities of the workmen, and on several occasions +superintended the field-trials in Europe.</p> + +<p>Chicago may not know it, but it is true, that its immense McCormick +factory owes its existence to Mrs. McCormick. After the Big Fire of 1871, +when his $2,000,000 plant was in ruins, McCormick concluded to retire. He +still had a fortune of three or four millions and he was sixty-two years +of age. His managers advised him not to rebuild, because of the excessive +cost of new machinery.</p> + +<p>As soon as the fiery cyclone had passed, he and his wife drove to the +wrecked factory. Several hundred of the workmen gathered about the +carriage, and the chief engineer, acting as spokesman, said: “Well, Mr. +McCormick, shall we start the small engine and make repairs, or shall we +start the big engine and make machines?”</p> + +<p>Mr. McCormick turned to his wife and said, “Which shall it be?” It was a +breathless moment for the workmen.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>“Build again at once,” said Mrs. McCormick. “I do not want our boy to grow +up in idleness; I want him to work, as a useful citizen, and a true +American.”</p> + +<p>“<i>Start The Big Engine</i>,” said McCormick. The men threw their hats in the +air and cheered. They sprang at the smoking debris, and began to rebuild +before the cinders were cold.</p> + +<p>Such was the second birth of the vast factory which, in its sixty years, +has created fully 5,000,000 harvesters, and which is now so magically +automatic that, with 6,000 workmen, it can make one-third of all the +grain-gathering machinery of the world.</p> + +<p>Practically nothing has been written about McCormick from the human nature +side. He was one of those Cromwellian men who can only be appreciated at a +distance. He was too absorbed in his work to be congenial and too +aggressive to be popular. He shouldered his way roughly against the +slow-moving crowd; and the people whom he thrust out of his way naturally +did not consider the importance of his life-task.</p> + +<p>Most of the really great men of his day were his friends—Horace Greeley, +for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> instance, and Peter Cooper, Junius Morgan, Abram S. Hewitt, Cyrus W. +Field, and Ferdinand De Lesseps. But among the men of his own trade he +stood hostile and alone.</p> + +<p>“McCormick wants to keep the whole reaper business to himself. He will not +live and let live,” said his competitors. And they had reason to say so. +He did want to dominate. He wanted to make all the harvesting machines +that were made—not one less. He was not at all a modern +“community-of-interest” financier. He was a man of an outgrown school—a +consistent individualist, not only in business, but in politics and +religion as well. There was no compartment in his brain for mergers and +combines—for theories of government ownership—for Higher Criticism and +the new theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin commercialist, a Thomas +Jefferson Democrat, and a John Knox Presbyterian.</p> + +<p>He had worked harder to establish the reaper business than any other man. +He was making reapers when William Deering was five years old, and before +Ralph Emerson and “Bill” Whiteley were born. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> had graduated into +success through a fifteen-year course in failure. The world into which he +was born was as hostile to him as the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel +Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus. He was hard-fibred, because he +had to be. He was the thin end of the wedge that split into fragments the +agricultural obstacle to social progress.</p> + +<p>One careless writer of biographies has said that McCormick began at the +foot of the ladder. This is not correct. When he began, there was no +ladder. <i>He had to build it as he climbed.</i></p> + +<p>The first man who gave battle to McCormick was an erratic genius named +Obed Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a reaper patent in 1833. No two +men were ever more unlike than Hussey and McCormick. Hussey was born in +Nantucket; and he had roamed the frozen North as a whaling seaman. He was +inventive, poetic, and as whimsical as the weather. His delight was in +working out some mechanical problem. His first invention was a machine to +make pins. Soon afterward, while he was living in Cincinnati, +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>constructing a machine to mould candles, a friend said to him:</p> + +<p>“Hussey, why don’t you invent a machine to reap grain?”</p> + +<p>“Are there no such machines?” he asked in surprise.</p> + +<p>“No,” said his friend, “and whoever can invent one will make a fortune.”</p> + +<p>Hussey forsook his candle machine, set to work upon a reaper, and within a +year had one in the fields. Then came a twenty-five-year war with +McCormick, which was waged furiously in the Patent Office, the courts, and +a hundred wheat-fields. Hussey won the opening battle by arriving first at +the Patent Office, although his machine, as claimed by McCormick, was two +years younger. By 1841 Hussey had sold reapers in five states, and ten +years later he shared the honours with McCormick at the London World’s +Fair.</p> + +<p>Both machines were very crude and unsatisfactory. Hussey’s had a better +cutting apparatus and McCormicks was more complete. In the long run, each +adopted the devices of the other, and a better reaper was evolved. Before +many years, it became<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> apparent that Hussey was outclassed. By 1858 he was +left so far behind that he lost his interest in reapers and invented a +steam-plough.</p> + +<p>His first machine was “really a mower,” says Merritt Finley Miller, one of +the two professors who have written on harvesting machinery. It lacked the +master-wheel, the reel and the divider, without which the grain cannot be +rightly handled. When Hussey gave up the contest, his invention was bought +for $200,000 by William F. Ketchum and others, who adapted it into a +mowing-machine.</p> + +<p>“Hussey was a very peculiar man,” said Ralph Emerson. “His machine was +fairly good, but it was a failure in the market, because he would not put +on a reel. He refused to do this, saying he did not invent a reel, and it +would be a falsehood if he put one on. He said that it was contrary to his +principles to sell anything that he had not invented.</p> + +<p>“On one occasion I went to buy a shop licence from him. ‘Have you a +thousand dollars in your pocket?’ he asked. ‘No,’ said I. ‘Can you get me +three thousand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> dollars by daylight to-morrow morning?’ ‘No,’ I answered, +‘but I can get it by noon.’ ‘Well,’ said Hussey, ‘I want to be very +reasonable with you. If you’ll pay me one thousand dollars before you +leave the house, or twenty-five hundred dollars before daybreak to-morrow, +I’ll sell you a licence. Otherwise, it will cost you twelve thousand +dollars.’</p> + +<p>“Several days later I paid him twelve thousand dollars, and as he handed +me the licence, he said—‘Now, don’t say that I never offered you this for +a thousand dollars.’”</p> + +<p>Hussey’s adventurous life was snapped short by a tragic death. While he +was on a train at Baltimore, a little girl was crying for a drink of +water. The kind-hearted old sailor-mechanic got off the train, brought her +a glass of water, and on his way to return the glass, he slipped and fell +between the moving wheels.</p> + +<p>Of all the men who fought McCormick in the earlier days, I found only two +now alive—Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, and William N. Whiteley, of +Springfield, Ohio. Both of these men to-day generously give the old +warrior his due.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>“McCormick was the first man to make the reaper a success in the field,” +said Whiteley, the battle-worn giant of Ohio, where I found him still at +work. “McCormick was a fighter—a bulldog, we called him; but those were +rough days. The man who couldn’t fight was wiped out.”</p> + +<p>Ralph Emerson, now one of the most venerable figures in Illinois, rose +from a sick-bed against his doctors orders, so that he might be +magnanimous to his former antagonist.</p> + +<p>“McCormick’s first reapers were a failure,” said he, speaking slowly and +with great difficulty; “and he owed his preëminence mainly to his great +business ability. His enemies have said that he was not an inventor, but I +say that he was an inventor of eminence.”</p> + +<p>So, as the gray haze of years enables us to trace the larger outlines of +his work, we can see that McCormick was especially fitted for a task +which, up to his day, had never been done, and which will never need to be +repeated during the lifetime of our earth. He was absolutely mastered by +one idea, as wholly as Copernicus or Columbus.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> His business was his life. +It was not accidental, as with Rockefeller, nor incidental, as with +Carnegie. On one occasion when a friend was joking him about his poor +judgment in outside affairs, he whirled around in his chair and said +emphatically: “I have one purpose in life, and only one—the success and +widespread use of my machines. All other matters are to me too +insignificant to be considered.”</p> + +<p>He made money—ten millions or more. But a hundred millions would not have +bribed him to forsake his reaper. It was as much a part of him as his +right hand. In several of his business letters he writes as though he had +been a Hebrew prophet, charged with a world-message of salvation.</p> + +<p>“But for the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in all our +business,” he writes on one critical occasion, “it has at times seemed +that I would almost sink under the weight of responsibility hanging upon +me. I believe the Lord will help us out.”</p> + +<p>Not that he left any detail to Providence to which he could personally +attend. He was a Puritan of the “trust-in-God-and-keep-your-powder-dry” +species. A little farther<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> down, in this same letter, he writes—“Meet +Hussey in Maryland and <i>put him down</i>.”</p> + +<p>The fountain-springs of his life were wholly within. He acted from a few +basic, unchangeable convictions. If public opinion was with him, he was +gratified; if it was against him he thought no more of it than of the +rustling of the trees when the wind blew.</p> + +<p>“When anyone opposed his plans and showed that they were impossible,” said +one of his superintendents, “I noticed that he never argued; he just went +on working.”</p> + +<p>His brain had certain subjects distinctly mapped out. What he knew—he +knew. He had no hazy imaginings. He lived in a black and white world and +abhorred all half-tints. He was right—always right, and the men who +opposed him were Philistines and false prophets, who deserved to be +consumed by sudden fire from Heaven.</p> + +<p>It was this inward spiritual force that made him irresistible. Small men +shrivelled up when he spoke to them.</p> + +<p>“The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,” said +one of his attorneys. “If any other man on this earth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> ever had such a +will, certainly I have not heard of it.”</p> + +<p>Small and easy undertakings had no interest for him whatever. It was the +impossibility that enraged and inspired him. At the sight of an obstacle +in his path, he rushed forward like a charge of cavalry. When the Civil +War was at its height, he and Horace Greeley, who was very similar to him +in this respect, actually believed that they could stop it. They had +several long conferences in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and +McCormick went so far in 1864 as to prepare a statement of principles +which he fully believed would restore peace and harmony between the North +and the South.</p> + +<p>Such was this massive, unbendable American. As we shall see, he was far +from being the only strong, picturesque figure in the industry. But it +would make many a book to tell in detail the effect of his life work upon +the progress of the United States. It was a New World, truly, that had +been created, alike for the people of the farms and of the cities, in the +year that the victorious old Reaper King was carried to his grave, with a +sheaf of wheat on his breast.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>What if there had been no reapers, and no hunger-insurance, and no cheap +bread! What sort of an American nation would we have, if we were still +using such food-implements as the sickle and the flail?</p> + +<p>Could we have swung through four years of Civil War, as we did, without +famine or national insolvency?</p> + +<p>Could the West have risen toward its present greatness if its billion +acres had to be harvested by hand?</p> + +<p>Could the railways alone, which produce nothing, have given us more food +for less work—the first necessity of a civilised democracy?</p> + +<p>Would our manufacturers be creating new wealth at the rate of sixteen +billions a year, if the reaper had not enriched the farmers and sent half +the farm-hands into the factories?</p> + +<p>And our towering cities—two of them more populous than the thirteen +colonies were, how large would they be and how prosperous if bread were +twenty cents a pound?</p> + +<p>As Seward once said, it was the reaper that “pushed the American frontier +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>westward at the rate of thirty miles a year.” Most of the western +railways were built to the wheat; and it was wheat money that paid for +them. The reaper clicked ahead of the railroad, and civilisation followed +the wheat, from Chicago to Puget Sound, just as the self-binder is leading +the railroad to-day—three hundred miles in front in Western Canada, and +eight hundred miles in Siberia. Even so unyielding a partisan of the +railroads as Marvin Hughitt admitted to me that “the reaper has not yet +received proper recognition for its development of the West.”</p> + +<p>During the Civil War the reaper was doing the work of a million men in the +grain-fields of the North. It enabled a widow, with five sons, to send +them all to the front, and yet gather every sheaf into the barn. It kept +the wolf from the door, and more—it paid our European debts in wheat. It +wiped out all necessity for Negro labour in the wheat States, just as a +cotton-picker will, some day, in the South.</p> + +<p>“The reaper is to the North what the slave is to the South,” said Edwin M. +Stanton in 1861. “It releases our young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> men to do battle for the Union, +and at the same time keeps up the supply of the nation’s bread.”</p> + +<p>Lincoln called out every third man, yet the crops increased. Europeans +could not believe it. They heard in 1861 that we were sending three times +as much wheat to England as we had ever done before. They shook their +heads and said—“Another American story!” when they were told that we were +supporting two vast armies and yet selling other nations enough grain to +feed thirty-five million people. Naturally, no country that clung to the +sickle and flail could be convinced of such a preposterous miracle.</p> + +<p>After the war, the mighty river of wheat that flowed from the West became +so wide and so deep that it poured a yellow stream into every American +home. It began to turn the wheels of fourteen thousand flour-mills. Rich +cities sprang up, like Aladdin palaces, beside its banks—Chicago, St. +Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha, +Des Moines. All of these, and a hundred lesser ones, were nourished into +prosperity by the rising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> current of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the +Mississippi to the sea.</p> + +<p>By 1876 we had become the champion food-producers of the world. A Kansas +farmer was raising six bushels of wheat with as little labour as an +Italian spent to produce one. And there was one doughty Scot—Dalrymple of +Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and +three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by +hand.</p> + +<p>Inevitably, the American Farmer became a financier. In 1876 he earned +twenty-four per cent. He had twenty-seven hundred millions to spend. By +1880 he had begun to buy so much store goods that the United States was +able to write a Declaration of Industrial Independence. Steadily he has +grown richer and wiser, until now he is the owner of a billion-acre farm, +worth thirty dollars an acre, operated with farm machinery that cost him +$900,000,000 and producing, in a single year, seven thousand times the +value of a millionaire.</p> + +<p>Such, in one country, is the amazing result which the Reaper has helped to +create.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> And this is not all. It is now more necessary to the human race +than the railway. It is fighting back famine in fifty countries. Its click +has become the music of an International Anthem. The nations are feeding +each other, in spite of their tariffs and armies. The whole world takes +dinner at the one long table; and the fear of hunger is dying out of the +hearts of men; and the prayer of the Christian centuries is +answered—“Give us this day our daily bread.”</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2> +<h3><span class="smcap">The Story of Deering</span></h3> + +<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">Fifty</span> years ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near +DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent—too American—to be fond of +work for work’s sake. And of all their drudgery, the everlasting stooping +over bundles to bind them into sheaves galled them most. Such +back-breaking toil, they thought, might be well enough for kangaroos, but +it certainly was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.</p> + +<p>“If I didn’t have to walk from bundle to bundle, and hump myself like a +horseshoe, I could do twice as much work,” said one of the brothers.</p> + +<p>“Well,” said the other, “why can’t we fix a platform on the reaper, and +have the grain carried up to us?”</p> + +<p>It was a brilliant idea and a new one. Neither of the young fellows had +ever seen a reaper factory; but they were handy and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> self-reliant. By the +next autumn they were in the field with their new machine, and as they had +expected, they bound the grain twice as quickly as they had the year +before.</p> + +<p>So was born the famous Marsh harvester, which proved to be the half-way +mark in the evolution of the grain-reaping machine. It was the child of +the reaper and the parent of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of +binding grain. But it did more than this—it gave the farmer his first +chance to stand erect, and forced him to be quick, for the two men who +stood on the harvester were compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was +cut. Thus it introduced the factory system, one might say, into the +harvest-field. For the first time the Big Minute made its appearance on +the farm.</p> + +<p>The Marsh boys, never dreaming that they had helped to change the +destinies of nations, took out a flimsy patent on their invention, and +went on with their farm work. Two summers later, as they were at work with +it, their home-made harvester broke down. A farmer from Plano, near +DeKalb, named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He stopped, and, being a man +of unusual abilities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> and discernment, he at once saw the value of the +Marsh machine, even in its disabled state.</p> + +<p>“Boys, you’re on the right track,” he said. “If you can run your machine +ten rods, it can be made to run ten miles. It is superior to anything now +in use.”</p> + +<p>Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went to Plano, arranged a partnership +with a clever mechanic named John F. Hollister, and began to make +harvesters for sale. To their surprise the new machine was not welcomed. +It was received with an almost unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a +“man-killer,” said the farmers. Now, the Marsh brothers were quick, +nervous men, and they had built a machine to suit themselves. But it was +undeniably too fast and nerve-racking for most farmers. The labourers +refused to work with it.</p> + +<p>The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a very ingenious way. They put +<i>girls</i> on their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordinary girls, to be +sure, but vigorous German maidens, who were swift and skilful binders. +Also, they had well-trained men, disguised as hoboes, who mingled in the +crowd around <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>the harvester at times of demonstration, and volunteered to +get aboard of it. To see a girl or a “Weary Willie” binding grain on the +new machine shamed the labourers into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen +of the Marsh harvesters were sold.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0068.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">WILLIAM DEERING</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>In this year one of the Marshes performed a feat that seemed more +appropriate for a circus than for a grain-field. Riding alone on a +harvester, he bound a whole acre of wheat in fifty-five minutes. Little +was heard of this amazing achievement at the time, as the national mind +was distraught over the death grapple of Grant and Lee in Virginia.</p> + +<p>But there was one quick-eyed man in Chicago named Gammon who heard of the +event, and acted upon it so promptly that the goddess of prosperity picked +him out as one of her favourites. Several years before, Gammon had been a +Methodist preacher in Maine. A weak throat had brought his sermons to an +end, and he became a reaper salesman in Chicago. He was shrewd and honest, +and in 1864 his profits were very nearly forty thousand dollars.</p> + +<p>When he heard that W. W. Marsh had bound an acre of grain in fifty-five +minutes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> on a new-fangled reaper, he caught the next train for DeKalb, +and bought a licence to manufacture Marsh harvesters. He took in a +partner—J. D. Easter—and the business inched ahead slowly, until in 1870 +the sales rose to a thousand. Easter and Gammon were driving their small +factory ahead at full speed. If they only could secure enough capital, +they would surprise the world.</p> + +<p>One evening, while Gammon was worrying over this lack, he heard a gentle +knock at the door. He opened it to one of his old acquaintances from +Maine.</p> + +<p>“Mr. Gammon,” said the visitor, “I have about forty thousand dollars of +spare money that I would like to invest in Chicago real estate, and I want +your advice as to the best place to buy.”</p> + +<p>“What!” said Gammon, springing to his feet in delight. “Have you money to +invest? Give it to me and I’ll pay you ten per cent. or make you a partner +in the best business in Illinois.”</p> + +<p>The visitor, whose name was William Deering, knew nothing whatever about +reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained a <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>fair-sized fortune in the +wholesale dry-goods business. But he was a Methodist and had confidence in +the ex-reverend E. H. Gammon; so he passed his $40,000 across the table +and the next day went home to Maine.</p> + +<p> </p> +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="men"> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0071topleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0071topright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">WILLIAM N. WHITELEY</span><br /><small>Photo by Baumgardner, Springfield, O.</small></td> + <td align="center" valign="top"><span class="smcaplc">C. W. MARSH</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0071botleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0071botright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">JOHN F. APPLEBY</span><br /><small>Photo by Rice, Milwaukee</small></td> + <td align="center" valign="top"><span class="smcaplc">E. H. GAMMON</span></td></tr></table> +<p> </p> + +<p>Two years later Deering came down to see how Gammon and the $40,000 were +faring. The books showed a profit of $80,000. So Deering requested that he +be made a partner. A year afterward Gammon fell sick and begged Deering to +come to Illinois and manage the business. Deering consented to be manager +for one year only; but Gammon’s sickness continued.</p> + +<p>“So,” said William Deering, who told me this story, “in that way I got +into the harvester business and had to stay in. But I did not even know, +at that time, the appearance of our own machine.”</p> + +<p>Deering’s competitors at first called him a greenhorn. But they forgot +that he was the only one among them who had been trained in the art of +business. He was already a veteran—a prize winner—in the game of +finance. For thirty years, ever since he began to earn $18 a month in his +father’s woolen mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> in fact, +established the wholesale dry-goods house of Deering, Milliken & Co., +which still stands as one of the largest of its kind. This training was +all the more valuable an asset because of the conditions that prevailed +when Deering entered the harvester trade. For he arrived in that worst of +all years in the last century—1873. The Jay Cooke panic was at its +height. The proudest corporations were falling like grass before a mower. +It was a year of dread and paralysis. But Deering faced these +disadvantages with ability, with sheer, dogged persistence, and with +business training. In seven years he had become one of the greatest of the +harvester kings, and was leading them all up to a higher level.</p> + +<p>We shall understand more clearly what this means if we consider the state +of the trade at the time of his entrance. A man of peaceable and kindly +inclinations, Deering was dragged into a business that was as turbulent as +a bull-fight. For as the reaper had evolved, it had become a bone of +contention, and it remained so from the first patent to the last. The +opening battle was fought by McCormick and Hussey, each claiming to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> have +been the Christopher Columbus of the business. After the gold-rush of 1849 +new types of reapers sprang up on all sides. The crude machines that +merely cut the grain were driven out by others that automatically raked +the cut grain into bundles. These were soon followed by a combined reaper +and mower, which held the field until the Marsh harvester was invented, as +we have seen, at the close of the Civil War.</p> + +<p>Among these different types of reapers, and the numerous variations of +each type, the bitterest rivalries prevailed. There was no pool, no +“gentlemen’s agreement,” no “community of interest.” Indeed, the +“harvester business” was not business. It was a riotous game of “Farmer, +farmer, who gets the farmer?” The excited players cared less for the +profits than for the victories. As fast as they made money, they threw it +back into the game. Mechanics became millionaires, and millionaires became +mechanics. The whole trade was tense with risk and rivalry and excitement, +as though it were a search for gold along the high plateaus of the Rand. +And this in spite of the fact that, with the exception of McCormick,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> +Osborne, and Whiteley, the men who came to be known as reaper kings were +not naturally fighters. No business men were ever gentler than Deering, +Glessner, Warder, Adriance, and Huntley. But the making of reapers was a +new trade. It was like a vast, unfenced prairie, where every settler owned +as much ground as he could defend.</p> + +<p>Each step ahead meant a struggle for patents. Whoever built a reaper had +to defend himself in the courts as well as approve himself in the +harvest-fields. Cyrus H. McCormick, especially, as William Deering soon +learned, wielded the Big Stick against every man who dared to make +reapers. He was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave battle to his +competitors as though they were a horde of trespassers. He was their +common enemy, and the reaper money that was squandered on lawsuits brought +a golden era of prosperity to the lawyers.</p> + +<p>Some of these patent wars shook the country with the crash of hostile +forces. The tide of battle rolled up to the Supreme Court and even into +the halls of Congress. Once, in 1855 when McCormick charged full tilt upon +John H. Manny, who was making<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> reapers at Rockford, Illinois, a three-year +struggle began that was the most noted legal duel of the day.</p> + +<p>McCormick, to make sure of his victory, went into the fight with a battery +of lawyers whom he thought invincible—William H. Seward, E. M. Dickerson, +and Senator Reverdy Johnson. Manny made a giant effort at self-defence by +hiring Abraham Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, Stephen A. Douglas, Peter H. +Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.</p> + +<p>From first to last it was a lawyers’ battle, and McCormick was finally +defeated by Stanton, who made an unanswerably eloquent speech. For this +speech Stanton received $10,000, and Lincoln, who had made no speech at +all, was given $1,000. Yet, in the long run, the man who profited by this +lawsuit was Lincoln; for it was this money that enabled him to carry on +his famous debate with Douglas, and thus made him the inevitable candidate +of the Republican Party.</p> + +<p>McCormick’s most disastrous lawsuit was with D. M. Osborne and the Gordon +brothers, of Rochester. In 1875 the Gordons had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> invented an attachment +for a wire self-binder, and in a careless moment McCormick had signed a +contract promising to make these self-binders and to pay $10 royalty on +every machine. Then a man named Withington appeared with a much better +self-binder. McCormick at once began to make the Withington machine and +was sued by the Gordons.</p> + +<p>At this time McCormick was over seventy years of age, and crippled with +rheumatism; but he believed that the Gordons had deceived him and he +fought them sternly as long as he lived. After his death, his eldest son, +Cyrus, consented to a compromise, whereby Osborne, who was owner of a +share in the Gordon concern, and the Gordons were to be paid $225,000. But +in order to impress upon them the enormity of this amount, he prepared the +money for them in small bills. When they called at the McCormick office in +Chicago, they were taken to a small room on the top floor and shown a +great pyramid of green currency.</p> + +<p>“There is your money,” said McCormick’s lawyer. “Kindly count it and see +if it is not a quarter of a million dollars.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>The three men gasped with mingled ecstasy +and consternation. “B—b—but,” stammered one of them, “how can +we take it away? Can’t you give us a cheque?”</p> + +<p>“That is the right amount, in legal money, gentlemen,” replied the lawyer. +“All I will say is that there are a couple of old valises in the +closet—and I wish you good afternoon.”</p> + +<p>For several hours Osborne and the Gordons literally waded in affluence, +counting the money and packing it in the valises. By the time they had +finished, it was eight o’clock. The building was dark. The elevator was +not running. They were hungry and terrified. Step by step they groped +their trembling way downstairs, and staggered with their treasure through +the perilous streets to the Grand Pacific Hotel. None of them ever forgot +the terror of that night.</p> + +<p>Another warlike Reaper King was “Bill” Whiteley, of Ohio. Whiteley had +invented a combined mower and reaper in 1858, which he named the +“Champion”; and he pushed this machine with an irresistible enthusiasm.</p> + +<p>His mode of attack was not the patent suit, but the field test. This was +the white-hot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> climax of the rivalry among the reaper kings; and it was +great sport for the farmers. It was a reaper circus—a fierce chariot-race +in a wheat-field; and its influence upon the industry was remarkable. It +weeded out the low-grade machines. It spurred on the manufacturers to a +campaign of improvement. It developed American harvesters to the highest +point of perfection. It swung the farmers into the new path of scientific + +agriculture. And it piled expenses so high that few of the reaper kings +escaped disaster.</p> + +<p>A field test was conducted in this fashion: A committee of judges was +appointed, and several acres of ripe grain were selected as the +battle-field. After the field was marked off into equal sections, each +reaper took its place. There were sometimes two reapers and sometimes +forty. The signal was given. “Crack”—the horses leaped; the drivers +shouted; and hundreds of farmers surged up and down in excited crowds.</p> + +<p> </p> +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="men"> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0080topleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0080topright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">ASA S. BUSHNELL</span></td> + <td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">BENJAMIN H. WARDER</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0080botleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0080botright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">HON. THOMAS MOTT OSBORNE</span></td> + <td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">DAVID M. OSBORNE</span></td></tr></table> +<p> </p> + +<p>“All’s fair in a field test,” said the reaper agents who superintended +these contests; though each man said it to himself. They were a hardy and +reckless body of men, half <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>cowboy, half mechanic, and no trick was too +dangerous or too desperate for them. Often the feud was so bitter that +bodyguards of big-fisted “bulldozers” were on the spot to protect the +warrior of their tribe who was in danger. “I had four men with me once who +together weighed 1,000 pounds,” said A. E. Mayer, who is now the general +of an army of 40,000 salesmen. In most tests the machines were shamefully +abused. Self-binders were made to cut and bind stubble as though it were +grain. Mowers were driven full tilt against stumps and hop-poles. Rival +reapers were chained back to back and yanked apart by plunging horses. The +warrior agents exposed the weak points in each other’s machines. They +photographed each other’s breakdowns, and bragged to the limit of their +vocabularies. They raised prices in one town and cut them in the next; for +when their fighting blood was aroused—and that was often—they cared no +more for profits than a small boy cares for his clothes.</p> + +<p>To give only one instance out of hundreds, here is a picture of a field +test that I found in the diary of B. B. Clarke, of Madison, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> is now +the editor of the <i>American Thresherman</i>, but who was in the eighties a +harvester fighter in Indiana.</p> + +<p>“We drove fourteen miles to the wheat-field, which was also the +battle-field,” he wrote, “and found a heavy crop of rank grain, wild pea +vines, morning glories and other vegetation, which tested both machines to +the limit. The bundles were twisted together by the vines into almost a +continuous rope. After adjusting the machine, we had to ‘open the field.’ +This is considered the most severe test, as the machine, the horses and +all are in the grain.</p> + +<p>“A—— drove the team, a magnificent pair of big grays. McK—— watched +the binder, while Y—— and I created sympathy for our cause among the +farmers who had come to see the fight. With a crack of his whip and a +shout to his team, A—— opened the ball. The machine was so crowded with +grain and weeds that the sickle could not be heard fifty feet away. He +cleared the first round without a stop. Then the other machine followed, +but the driver, failing to recognise the necessity of fast driving, +allowed his machine to clog, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>lost the day. We received two hundred +dollars in gold on the spot for our victorious binder.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0083.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">A SELF-BINDER IN SCOTLAND, WITH THE WALLACE MONUMENT IN THE BACKGROUND</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>“On returning to Fort Wayne we found the E—— people, whose headquarters +were separated by a partition wall from ours, had coaxed one of our +customers to cancel his order, and substitute their machine. For this act, +we retaliated and replaced three of their orders the following week, and +while loading these into the farmers’ wagons a fight took place between +the opposing factions. I looked as though I had encountered a flax-hackle. +The next day hostilities opened early with three on our side to six of the +E—— host, requiring a riot alarm and a wagon-load of police to restore +order.</p> + +<p>“We had swept the enemy before us, using neck-yokes, pitman rods and even +six shooters in the grand finale. Our expense account for that week +included fifty dollars for lawyers’ fees, which was promptly O. K.’d by +the manager. After all, I had only obeyed instructions, which were to get +the business and hold up prices, ‘peaceably if you can, but forcibly if +you must.’”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>An interesting relic of these fierce days of cut-throat competition was +given to me by Mr. John F. Steward. It reads as follows:—</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">To Agents for the Sale of Harvesting Machinery</span>:</p> + +<p>The undersigned, manufacturers of harvesting machinery, call the +attention of their travelling experts and local agents to a practice +which has grown among them for a few years past, and which has become +so disreputable and is carried to such an extent that we feel it +necessary to bring it to your special notice. <i>It is the habit of +trying to break up sales made by other agents when you have not been +successful in securing the sale.</i> It has become a very common +practice, as soon as a sale is made by one agent, for the agents of +all other machines to try to break up that sale, by +misrepresentations or by lowering the price, or by trying to convince +the purchaser that the machine which he has bargained for is not as +good as the one which the other agent sells. This practice is +disreputable, and should not be tolerated by any manufacturer. We +wish it now thoroughly understood that we will not tolerate this +practice in any agent, and we will be glad to have reports from you +of the agents of any machines who have tried to break up your sales +of our machines in this way. There is nothing that tends more to +demoralise business than this practice, and we wish it stopped.</p> + +<p>Machines should be sold upon their merits, and not by disparaging or +running down other machines. You will find that your customers will +place more reliance upon what you say if you leave all other machines +alone, and show the good features of your own and demonstrate them in +actual work. An agent never makes any progress by running down or +trying to show the defects of others, and you will be better able to +sustain your prices and the reputation of your machines by following +the course indicated above. Therefore, it is our wish that you should +hold to your prices firmly, present your machines in the very best +possible light, and use all honourable means for making a fair and +honest sale; but if you are unfortunate enough to lose your sale, and +some competitor gains it, don’t be persuaded to put yours in the +field by the side of your competitor, or try in any way to break up +the sale; and do not, until the purchaser has discarded another +machine, offer to put one of ours in its place.</p> + +<p>Of course we do not mean by this that you shall stand quietly by and +see other agents break up your sales, or if others habitually do this +that you shall not retaliate, but you must not be the first to +inaugurate this practice. We are always ready to meet fair and honest +competition.</p> + +<p>We want our business conducted in a fair and honourable way, and not +descend to ways that are discreditable to us and to you. No one agent +can expect to sell all the machines that are wanted in his district, +for the poorest machine will have some friends, and, though he may +have the very best one, we do not expect he will make every one see +it. Let the purchaser take the risk. If he buys an inferior machine +he should take the consequences, as if he was deceived or mistaken in +his judgment in buying a horse. In such a case you would not think of +putting your horse in work the purchaser was doing, to show him yours +was the best, with the expectation that he would return the one he +had bought because it did not prove quite equal to yours in drawing a +load or in driving. If you would not in the case of a horse, why +should you, in the case of a mower, reaper, or self-binding +harvester? Our advice to you is:</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>1st. Hold firmly to your prices.</p> + +<p>2d. Sell your own machine. Convince your purchaser that you have the +best machine made.</p> + +<p>3d. Settle for the machine at time of delivery. A machine works much +better after being settled for.</p> + +<p>4th. If you lose the sale do not try to break up the sale of your +competitor. It won’t pay.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0086tmb.jpg" alt="" /><br /> +<a href="images/i0086.jpg"><small>Larger Image</small></a></div> +<p> </p></div> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>The king of the field test was William N. Whiteley. No other reaper king, +in any country, received as much renown from his personal exploits. He was +the Charlemagne of the harvest-field. He was as tall as a sapling and as +strong as a tree. As a professor in the great field school of agriculture, +he has never been surpassed. He could out-talk, outwork, and generally +outwit the men who were sent against him. He was a whole exhibition in +himself. “I’ve seen Bill Whiteley racin’ his horses through the grain and +leanin’ over with his long arms to pick the mice’s nests from just in +front of the knife,” said an old Ohio settler.</p> + +<p>The feat that first made Whiteley famous was performed at Jamestown, Ohio, +in 1867. His competitor was doing as good work as he was; whereupon he +sprang from his seat, unhitched one horse, and finished his course with a +single, surprised steed pulling the heavy machine. His competitor followed +suit, and succeeded fully as well. This enraged Whiteley, who at that time +was as powerful as a young Hercules.</p> + +<p>“I can pull my reaper myself,” he shouted, turning his second horse loose, +and yoking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> his big shoulders into its harness. Such a thing had never +been done before, and has never been done since; but it is true that, in +the passion of the moment, Whiteley was filled with such strength that he +ran the reaper from one side of the field to the other, cutting a full +swath—a deed that, had he done it in ancient Greece, would have placed +him among the immortals. It was witnessed by five hundred farmers, and +fully reported in the press. One of the reporters, as it happened, +representing the <i>Cincinnati Commercial</i>, was a young Ohioan named +Whitelaw Reid, now the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James.</p> + +<p>That ten minutes in a horse collar made $2,000,000 for Whiteley. His +antagonist, <ins class="correction" title="original: Bejamin">Benjamin</ins> H. Warder, was filled with admiration for Whiteley’s +prowess, and at once proposed that they should quit fighting and work in +harmony.</p> + +<p>“Give me the right to make your reaper and I’ll pay you $5 apiece for all +I can sell,” said Warder. “It’s a bargain,” responded Whiteley. And so +there arose the first consolidation in the harvester business.</p> + +<p>Whiteley and Warder did not merge their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> companies; but they divided the +United States into three parts—one for Whiteley, one for his brother +Amos, who also made reapers in Springfield, and one for Warder. They +united in building a malleable iron foundry and a knife works, so that +they could use better materials at a lower cost. They made the first +handsome and shapely machines.</p> + +<p>For twelve years this triple alliance led the way, and all others, even +the mighty McCormick and the sagacious Deering, had to follow. The +“Champion” reaper became the leading machine of the United States, and the +little town of Springfield, Ohio, was known as the “Reaper City.” As many +as 160,000 reapers and mowers were sent out as a year’s work. In all, +2,000,000 of Whiteley’s “Champion” machines have been made in Springfield, +and have sold at a gain of $18,000,000.</p> + +<p>As the millions came pouring in so fast, Whiteley’s head was turned and he +began to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder and from his own partners, +Fassler and Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour, built the biggest +reaper factory in the world,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> became a railroad president, helped to +corner the Chicago wheat market, backed the “Strasburg Clock”—an absurd +self-binder that was as big as a pipe-organ—and came crashing down in a +failure that jarred the farming world from end to end.</p> + +<p>Whiteley lost millions in this crash—and with comparative indifference. +It was never the profits that he fought for. At heart he was a sportsman +rather than a money-maker. He craved the excitement of the race itself +more than the prizes. To win—that was the ambition of his life. And he +did not shrink from spectacular methods to accomplish his ambition.</p> + +<p>For instance, nothing less would satisfy him, when he exhibited at the +Philadelphia Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made daintily of +rosewood and gold. This brought him so sudden a rush of orders from the +East that in one day of the following year he sent seventy loaded cars to +Baltimore. With flags flying and brass bands playing, these cars rolled +off, with orders to travel only by daylight. When they arrived in +Harrisburg, running in three sections, they caught the eye of a railroad +superintendent named<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> McCrea—who is now, by the way, president of the +Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw a chance to advertise his railway as +well as Whiteley’s reapers, so he linked the seventy cars together into +one three-quarter-mile train, put his biggest engine at the front, and +sent the gaudy caravan on its way.</p> + +<p>Whiteley never knew how to be commonplace, even in the smallest matters. +Wherever he went, his trail was marked by stories of his exploits and his +oddities. How he organised the famous “White Plug Hat Brigade” in the +Blaine campaign—how he made a twelve-hour speech to help “Mother” Stewart +close up the saloons of Springfield—how he found a Springfield farmer +using a McCormick reaper, gave him a Whiteley reaper in its place, and +flung the rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign that he was the +monarch of Ohio—how he gathered up a peck of pies after a field test +dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing but pies for half a week—such +is the sort of anecdotes that his life has added to the folklore of the +Western farmers.</p> + +<p>Many a time his vaudeville tactics disgusted and enraged his fellow +manufacturers;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> but he was too big a factor to be ignored. Once, when a +number of reaper kings had met together to see if they could rescue their +business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman opened the discussion with +the question—“What ought we to do to improve the conditions of our +trade?” For a moment there was silence, and then John P. Adriance—as +mild-natured a man as ever lived—said blandly, “Kill Whiteley.”</p> + +<p>With daring originality Whiteley combined a tremendous physical vitality +and a brain that fairly effervesced with inventiveness. He probably holds +the record among the reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents in his +name. And he would work twenty-four hours at a stretch, without a yawn. +One evening he asked a young machinist to remain in the factory and help +him fix a refractory reaper. After working till midnight Whiteley said: +“Well, Jim, I suppose you think you are tired. Go home and have a good +night’s sleep, and come back here in three hours.”</p> + +<p>He dashed with fanatical energy into any undertaking that appealed to his +imagination. Once, when he had too much money, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> bought control of a new +railway that ran through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,—160 miles. He +wanted to know its real value, so, instead of asking the directors a few +questions, as other men would have done, Whiteley travelled over the +entire length of the railroad, <i>on foot</i>.</p> + +<p>When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was time-worn and whitened. Since the +great failure, he has been in the harvester business only intermittently. +He has long outlived his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever, with a new +scheme and a new factory. And he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots +that have been familiar at field tests for more than half a century.</p> + +<p>Of the other Springfield men, Warder was unquestionably the ablest. “He +was the main wheel,” said Whiteley. As a young man of twenty-seven he was +running a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard of the reaper. He was +so impressed with its possibilities that he offered the inventor $30,000 +for a share in it.</p> + +<p>“Young Warder is crazy,” said Springfield people, for at that time $30,000 +was a fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> years later, when +Warder had removed to Washington and become noted among its social +entertainers, his investment had multiplied itself very nearly two +hundredfold.</p> + +<p>Warder had associated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J. +Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a +month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became +Warder’s understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count +on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other +reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J. +Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon +which the International Harvester Company is built.</p> + +<p>Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without +a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient +patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty competitors in +a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way +was left open to him.</p> + +<p>“I’ll beat them,” he said, “by making a better machine.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of +his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until +1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with +wire. It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke, and had been developed to +its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B. +Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was +pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold +between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism, <ins class="correction" title="original: consistingly">consisting</ins> +mainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire +band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success; +but the farmers disliked it.</p> + +<p>“The wire will mix with the straw,” they said, “and our horses and cattle +will be killed.”</p> + +<p>So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to +have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty +of the new machines.</p> + +<p>When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he +was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong +steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut +the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It +seemed magical.</p> + +<p>“What am I to do?” asked the farmer who bought the first of these +machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.</p> + +<p>“Do!” exclaimed John Webster, the Deering mechanic. “Do nothing! <span class="smcap">Drive the +Horses</span>.”</p> + +<p>The amazed farmer started the horses, drove around the field, and came +back swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic—as well he might. For +in the trail of his harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though there were +some kindly genie hidden among its wheels.</p> + +<p>Deering owned, at that time, not much more than a million dollars—the +gleanings of thirty-five industrious years. But he resolved to stake it +all upon this amazing machine. If he lost—he would be a poor man at +fifty-three. If he won—he would be the harvester king of the world.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>“I’ll move the factory to Chicago and make 3,000 of these Appleby +twine-binders at once,” he said.</p> + +<p>His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so the inflexible Deering bought him +out, and from that day he, like his greatest competitor, McCormick, ran a +one-man business.</p> + +<p>“Did you hear the news about Deering?” gossiped his fellow manufacturers. +“Clean crazy on a twine-binder!”</p> + +<p>And, far more discouraging, the magical self-binder itself suddenly became +ill-humored and refused to form its sheaves properly. It was no easy +exploit, as any one may see, to make the first 3,000 of such complex +machines. No other artificial mechanism must so combine strength and +delicacy. No piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected to operate +while it is being jerked over a rough field or along the steep slant of a +hill.</p> + +<p>One day in the early spring of 1880, Deering and his chief +lieutenants—Steward and Dixon—were in a field of rye near Alton, trying +to coax the new harvester to do its work. All day long it was obstinate +and perverse, and the men were at their wits’ end.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>“Well, boys,” said +Deering, “if we can’t do better than this, I’ll lose $1,000,000.”</p> + +<p>“Try one more day,” said Steward. They went to their hotel, and as it +happened to be crowded, the three were placed in a large double room.</p> + +<p>“Steward and Dixon were mad at me the next morning,” said Deering, when he +told me of that critical occasion. “They had nothing at stake, yet they +had lain awake all night; while I was apparently about to lose my only +million, and had slept like a log.”</p> + +<p>That day a slight change was made, and the harvester became good-natured +and obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were sold, and created as much +excitement as 3,000 miracles. They swept away competitors like chaff. Of a +hundred manufacturers seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead of losing +his fortune, Deering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars, +for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became +an acknowledged leader of his class. He had taken the right line of +development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> choked +down their rage and followed—quick march!</p> + +<p>The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the +scout—the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he—the inspired +farm labourer of Wisconsin—who had hurled another great impossibility out +of the way of the world’s farmers.</p> + +<p>He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts +together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness +of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did +much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was +the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the +bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it +out of a branch of a cherry tree.</p> + +<p>Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his +pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him +first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders. +He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes +will do as much for the South as his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> self-binder did for the West. And it +was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the +story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.</p> + +<p>In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one +dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the +farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy +machinery, instead of minding his work.</p> + +<p>One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper. +“How do you like the work, Jack?” asked the farmer.</p> + +<p>“I don’t like it,” said Jack, “and what’s more, I believe I can invent a +machine to tie these bundles.”</p> + +<p>“Ho! ho!” laughed the farmer. “You little fool, you can’t invent +anything.”</p> + +<p>Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his +invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old +man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.</p> + +<p>“Haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.</p> + +<p>“Yes, sir,” replied the old man. “I was the farmer who gave you your first job.”</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>“Well,” said Appleby, “you see I wasn’t a little fool after all.”</p> + +<p>Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was +a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age—in +1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man +who put money back of the boy’s invention. He stood behind it to the +extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless +speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a +little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited +into a thousand.</p> + +<p>When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back, +Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in +Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one +occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth +even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash +of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and +thought only of guns.</p> + +<p>Yet while he lay in the trenches at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> Vicksburg, he whittled out a new +device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him +$500 for it, and then, before Appleby’s eyes, sold a half interest in it +for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him +an inventor for life.</p> + +<p>Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867 +he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie, +Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for +several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the +spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the +machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed +these, and one man—Dr. E. D. Bishop—pulled a roll of money from his +pocket and handed it to the inventor.</p> + +<p>“Take this,” he said, “and make me a partner. Your invention will be a +world’s wonder some day.”</p> + +<p>All told, Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on Appleby’s genius, for which, twelve +years later, he drew out $80,000. This was the first of the many +incidental fortunes scattered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> right and left in the path of the +self-binder, which began in 1880, to sweep forward as gloriously as the +triumphal car of a Roman emperor.</p> + +<p>As for William Deering—the modest manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879 +joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had he sold the 3,000 self-binders +than he found himself floundering neck deep in an unexpected sea of +troubles. There was not a flaw in the binders. They were cutting and tying +the grain with the skill of 60,000 men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand +farmers swore that it was too high.</p> + +<p>Twine was an item that they had never in their lives bought in large +quantities. To pay fifty dollars—the price of a horse—for mere string +that was used once and then flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like +buying daily papers by the thousand, or shoe-laces by the ton. And so it +came about that though Deering had reduced the cost of wheat ten per +cent., he got little thanks for his superb machines—nothing but a loud +and angry roar for better and cheaper twine.</p> + +<p>Deering moved against this new array of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> difficulties with quiet and +inexorable persistence. There were only three binder-twine makers in the +United States, and all warned him that he was pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp. +But Deering pushed on until he met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of +Philadelphia. From the unassuming way in which Deering stated his needs, +Fitler concluded that the order would be a small one.</p> + +<p>“What you want,” he said, “is a single strand twine, which cannot be made +without a new line of machinery. I regret to say that I cannot afford to +do this for one customer.”</p> + +<p>“Well,” said Deering, “I think I may need a good deal in the long run, +though I wish to begin with not more than ten car-loads.”</p> + +<p>Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was dazed, but only for a moment. It +was his chance and he knew it. Years afterward, he was fond of telling how +he “made a million-dollar deal with William Deering in two minutes.”</p> + +<p>Thus, whatever Deering touched, he improved. He became the servant of the +harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as sporting millionaires spent +fortunes on their horses. It was his one extravagance. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> his later +endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass twine, +$35,000 on paper, $43,000 on straw, and failed. Then he spent $165,000 on +flax and succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort of paymaster to a small +mob of inventors who had new ideas or who thought they had. There was one +very able inventor—John Stone—who actually drew his salary and expenses +every week for twenty years, until he had perfected a corn-picking +machine. From first to last, Deering spent “perhaps more than two millions +of dollars” on improvements, according to one of his closest friends.</p> + +<p>The fact is that the Appleby binder had transformed Deering from a man in +business simply to make money, into an enthusiast. While he remained as +careful of the business as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself more +than the profit. He would still fuss if he saw half a dozen nails in the +sweepings, or any other waste of pennies. But he poured the golden flood +of profits back into his factory with a recklessness that amazed his +friends. He pampered his beloved machines with roller bearings and bodies +of steel. He <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>sent them to Europe and showed them to kings. Then, as his +enthusiasm grew, he looked ahead to the time when even the farm-horse +shall be set free from drudgery; and he began to build automobile mowers +and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened, as he worked, into a seer who +saw far past the gain or loss of the present into the splendour of the +future.</p> + +<p> </p> +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="men"> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0106left.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0106right.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center" valign="top"><span class="smcaplc">CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, JR.</span></td><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">CHARLES DEERING</span><br /><small>Photo by Matzene, Chicago</small></td></tr></table> +<p> </p> + +<p>Sagacity—that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William +Deering’s success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his +competitors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There +seemed to be a business compass in his brain.</p> + +<p>He was never a master of men, like McCormick, nor a good mixer among men, +like Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was easily superior to them +both. He knew how to pit his managers one against another, as Carnegie +did; and how to develop a factory into a swift and automatic machine. He +was a statesman of commercialism. He piled up a big fortune, and earned +it.</p> + +<p>It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of +the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> Lewis Miller, Morgan, +Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all +farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of +men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard +stood a farmer’s son—John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the +loyalty of Steward that he became Deering’s Grand Vizier. He was +inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two +years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen +patents to his credit.</p> + +<p>So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the +skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had +begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two +greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling out in every workday +minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine.</p> + +<p>Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten +back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his +conversation.</p> + +<p>“A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter,” he said; +“and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> perhaps he was right. I wasn’t an inventor, that’s true. All I did +was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I +suppose I was just a promoter.”</p> + +<p>The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty. +Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his +trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said:</p> + +<p>“Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.</p> + +<p>“Well,” said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, “I want to say that +you’re a mighty smart man.”</p> + +<p>Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone, +he leaned over to Webster and said:</p> + +<p>“Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for +making them. I never felt so foolish in my life.”</p> + +<p>He is now eighty-one—older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he +has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times +in wealth.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world. +More—they said, “Presto, change!” and the drudges of the harvest-fields +stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold +myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and +plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.</p> + +<p>Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can +stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads. +And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie +or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.</p> + +<p>The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester +business once—and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the +famous “Binder-Twine Trust” set out with the black flag flying. It was a +skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was +the first and only “easy money” that was ever made in the harvester world. +Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust +in twenty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the +financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.</p> + +<p>No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail +was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at +first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine +crawled out whipped or terrified.</p> + +<p>And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of +competition. <i>Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only +fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and +warfare continued, their business would be destroyed.</i></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2> +<h3><span class="smcap">The International Harvester Company</span></h3> + +<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">For</span> fifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field +of competition. Their armies of agents, drilled in the arts of rivalry, +waged a war in which quarter was neither given nor sought. It was a fight +almost of extermination. Out of two hundred companies that went to battle +with flags waving and drums beating, less than a dozen came home.</p> + +<p>David M. Osborne backed a new self-binder, lost a million, and died of +heartbreak. J. S. Morgan, who had a small factory at Brockport, saw the +immense McCormick and Deering plants and quit. Even the great Whiteley +fell, and Lewis Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the founder of +Chautauqua, went down “like a great tree upon the hills.”</p> + +<p>Walter A. Wood, after forty years of success, took Governor Merriam and +James J.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Hill as partners, and set out to win the West for the Wood +Company. Their factory was the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the +best, and their fame was over all the prairies. Yet after five years of +battling they surrendered; and not one harvester is made to-day west of +Illinois.</p> + +<p>It is a common opinion among harvester men that from first to last there +has been more money put into the business than has ever been taken out—so +enormously wasteful were these years of competition. By 1902 the harvester +business was merely a terrific and destructive war. The agents were +tearing the whole industry to shreds and tatters. So far as the Harvester +Men could see, they must choose between combination and ruin.</p> + +<p>Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were +individualists through and through. The spirit of competition had been +bred in the bone. So, when several of them came together to check this +warfare, it was not of their own free will. It was because they could do +nothing else. They were hurled together by social forces over which they +had no control.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>One by one these battle-worn Westerners came to New York, “on an exploring +expedition,” as one of them said. Here they met Judge Elbert H. Gary, whom +they had known intimately in Chicago. Gary had been William Deering’s +attorney for twenty-five years. He was a farmer’s son, and had risen to be +the official head of the Steel Trust; so that he was the one man who had +an expert knowledge at once of farms, harvesters, and mergers. And +naturally, when the Chicagoans ran to Gary with their tales of woe, he +brought them across Broadway into the office of J. P. Morgan, which had +become in 1902 a sort of Tribunal of Industrial Peace.</p> + +<p>There were four of them—Cyrus H. McCormick, Charles Deering, J. J. +Glessner, and W. H. Jones—and all of them added to the strong preference +for competition a definite opposition to trusts, monopolies, and stock +speculation. They were not the Wall Street type of millionaire. In that +time of booming optimism, they might have made more money in one year by +selling stock than they had made in thirty years by selling harvesters. +But no one of them had <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>tried it. The fact is that they cared more for +the good-will of the farmers and the prestige of their machines than they +did for larger profits. The thing that troubled them most in the proposed +consolidation of properties, one of the Morgan partners told me, was the +fear that prices would in any case have to be raised, because of the +increasing cost of labour and raw materials.</p> + +<p> </p> +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="men"> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0115topleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0115topright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">HAROLD McCORMICK</span><br /><small>Photo by Matzene, Chicago, 1905</small></td> + <td align="center" valign="middle"><span class="smcaplc">J. J. GLESSNER</span></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0115botleft.jpg" alt="" /></td><td align="center" valign="middle"><img src="images/i0115botright.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> +<tr><td align="center"><span class="smcaplc">W. H. JONES</span><br /><small>Photo by Smith, Evanston, Ill.</small></td> + <td align="center" valign="middle"><span class="smcaplc">JAMES DEERING</span><br /><small>Photo by Dyer, Chicago</small></td></tr></table> +<p> </p> + +<p>No wonder that the financiers who undertook to organise them were driven +almost to distraction by their obstinate independence. They had as many +contradictory opinions as a Russian Duma; and it was soon clear that the +only possible way to proceed was to keep them apart until all possible +preliminaries were arranged.</p> + +<p>So the four Harvester Men went back home until the details of the new +combination should be worked out. Then they were summoned again to New +York. As was their custom, they went to different hotels, and each man was +handled separately until he was in an organisable frame of mind. This +master-stroke of diplomacy was accomplished by George W. Perkins—Morgan’s +most versatile partner; and it gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> Perkins a day and a night that he +will never forget. From morning until midnight—from midnight until the +first ray of dawn slanted down Broadway, Perkins dashed from hotel to +hotel like a human shuttle. Deering conceded one point if McCormick would +concede another. Glessner yielded one of his claims, and Jones withdrew +something else. Inch by inch these stubborn men were pushed within tying +distance of each other; and the fifty-year harvester war was about to come +to an end.</p> + +<p>The next day Perkins renewed the struggle, but he was too tired to +continue the cab driving between hotels. He telephoned the four Harvester +Men to meet him at Morgan’s office. As each man climbed up the rusty iron +steps of the Morgan Building he was switched by the big Irish doorkeeper +into one of those large inner rooms at the rear, on the ground floor, +where many a broken business has been mended. Four men in four rooms, with +Perkins flying in and out—such was the way that the great harvester +company was finished. It was a unique situation, as much like an incident +in comic opera as an affair of business. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> Morgan experts knew that +if the four men were allowed to meet, the old hurtful rivalries would +break out afresh and the project might snap off like a broken dream.</p> + +<p>To strengthen the new company with a big surplus of ready money, a +one-sixth interest was sold for twenty millions to Morgan and several +other New York financiers of the “old reliable” sort. Also, a fifth +harvester company, in Milwaukee, was bought from Stephen Bull for about +five millions. And when the last rivet had been clinched and the last nail +driven home, the four Westerners suddenly found themselves sitting around +the same table, in the new International Harvester Company, of Chicago.</p> + +<p>There were several harvester companies that remained independent, but +probably not from choice. I do not know of one that has not, at some stage +of its career, tried to get into a trust. Fifteen companies were merged by +Colonel Conger in 1892, but they were poorly fastened together and soon +fell apart. It is also a fact, though one not before made public, that the +Mutual Life Insurance Company tried to form a second Harvester<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> Combine in +1903, with four large manufacturing companies in the merger, and under the +presidency of E. D. Metcalf, of Auburn, New York. When this project +failed, three independent companies—two in New York and one in Canada, +offered themselves for sale to the Harvester Company. It bought one—the +Osborne—for six millions, and refused the others.</p> + +<p>“We are big enough now,” said Cyrus H. McCormick. “It is not safe for one +company to have a monopoly. What we want to do is to regulate competition, +not to destroy it.”</p> + +<p>Besides the big Osborne Company, which is now the third largest in the +combine, the Harvester Company has bought five smaller concerns, and built +two new plants—one in Canada and one in Sweden. It is like the original +United States—a union of thirteen industrial colonies. Its output has +risen to 700,000 harvesting machines a year, including all varieties; and +its annual revenue is more than seventy-three million dollars.</p> + +<p>With its 25,000 employees and 42,000 agents, this one company is +supporting as many families as there are in Utah or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> Montana. A square +mile of land would be too small to contain its factories. At its hundred +warehouses there is trackage for 12,000 cars. Around its workshops are six +busy railways of its own, whose engines last year pulled out 65,000 +freight-cars, jammed full of machinery for the farmers of the world.</p> + +<p>Its properties are so widespread that no member of the company has seen +them all. To run around their circle would be a trip of 15,000 miles. It +owns 20,000 acres of coal lands in Kentucky, 100,000 acres of trees in +Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, and 40,000,000 tons of ore in the +Wisconsin and Mesaba Ranges. It has staked its money—$120,000,000—upon +the belief that for fifty years longer, at least, the scientists will find +no substitute for bread.</p> + +<p>The fact that Elbert H. Gary, the official head of the Steel Trust, is one +of its directors, has not prevented this self-sufficient company from +owning a complete steel plant, where 2,000 Hungarians make iron from ore, +and steel from iron. It saws its trees into lumber in Missouri, and roasts +its coal into coke in Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in fact, +that if they were contiguous, they would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> make a Harvester City as +spacious as Greater Chicago.</p> + +<p>But the most surprising feature of this unique corporation, to one who +sees it for the first time, is the distracting variety of things that pour +out of its factories. Its business is by no means to make harvesters and +nothing else. Its true character seems to be that of a manufacturing +department store for farmers. As a matter of actual count, I found in its +factories and warehouses thirty-seven different species of machines, +besides all manner of variations of each sort.</p> + +<p>Here you will see, not only a mower to cut the grass, but a tedder (a kind +of steel mule, with an incurably bad temper) to kick and scatter the +new-mown hay, so that it will dry in the sun; a rake to gather it +together; a loader to swing it on the wagon; and a baler to compress it +into bundles.</p> + +<p>Here are the self-binders, not for the grain only, but for corn and rice +as well. For the especial benefit of King Corn, whose tribute to this +Republic has lately swollen to twelve hundred millions a year, the company +is making machines that pluck the corn from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> the stalk with iron hands, +and others that wrench off the husks, shell the corn, and grind it into +several varieties of breakfast food for the four-footed boarders of the +farm.</p> + +<p>Here is a new machine, much less elegant than useful, for flinging manure +over a field. Barefooted women did this work in the old brutal days of +hand labour. But now, thanks to the brain of a canny Canadian farmer, +Joseph S. Kemp, one worker can feed the hungry fields without so much as +soiling the tips of the fingers.</p> + +<p>The farmer’s wife—and there are 10,000,000 of her in the United States, +has been the last one to be considered, in this outpouring of machinery. +But I found at Milwaukee a rebuilt factory belonging to the International, +where 2,500 men are making fifty cream separators and 100 gasolene engines +a day, both designed to make life easier for Mrs. Farmer, as well as for +her husband. Also, it will please her to know that she may soon be honking +her way to town in an automobile buggy, which the big corporation is +making for farmers in a new factory in Akron.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>A harvester company must follow the whims of its customers, almost as much +as though it had newspapers for sale. It must give 10,000,000 farmers what +they want. At the Plano factory I saw 470 different varieties of wheels; +and sixty-one kinds of wooden tongues at McCormick’s.</p> + +<p>“Nothing could be simpler than a tongue,” said Maurice Kane, the chief +mechanical expert of the International. “It is a mere pole. If we suited +ourselves, we should only make two kinds—one for horses and one for oxen. +But the farmers of the world have sixty-one different ideas as to how a +tongue ought to be made, and we must give them what they ask for.”</p> + +<p>The last Minnesota Legislature, in the simplicity of its heart, proposed +to establish a complete harvester plant for $200,000. It may surprise the +members of that Legislature to know that the International has lately +spent twice as much merely to improve one twine factory in St. Paul, and +four times as much to build one warehouse in Chicago. Though it began its +career with sixty million dollars’ worth of equipment, it has been forced +by the pressure of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> its trade to spend sixteen millions more on its +factories. And for lack of a weather prophet, it is obliged to carry over +from five to six million dollars worth of machines each year, which remain +unsold in different countries.</p> + +<p>By its very nature, this industry cannot be carried on in a small way. It +is as essentially mutual and coöperative as life insurance or banking. If +a malicious “green bug” devours the wheat in Kansas, the loss must be made +up by larger sales somewhere else. This, no doubt, is the main reason why +every plant that was ever built to supply a local trade has failed.</p> + +<p>No other manufacturing business carries so many risks or includes so many +factors. It is the most comprehensive industry in the world. It is the +link between the city and the farm. It is both wholesale and retail, +ready-made and made to order, local and international. It must make what +the farmer demands, and yet teach him better methods. It is at once a +factory, a bank and a university.</p> + +<p>Thus, of necessity, the Harvester Company represents in the highest degree +the new<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> American way of manufacturing: everything on a large scale, +elaborate machinery, unskilled workmen, and a vast surplus to drive it +past failures and misfortunes. From its ore mines in the Mesaba Range, +where I saw a steam-shovel heap a fifty ton railroad car in ten swings, to +the lumber yard of the McCormick Works, where 26,000,000 feet of hardwood +are seasoning in the sooty rays of the Chicago sun, it was a panorama of +big production.</p> + +<p>“How many castings did your men make last year?” I asked of the hustling +Irish-American who rules over one of the <ins class="correction" title="original: McCormich">McCormick</ins> foundries.</p> + +<p>“Very nearly 44,000,000, sir,” he replied. “And the gray iron foundry over +there uses three times as much iron as we do, and it made more than +12,000,000.”</p> + +<p>Fifty-six million castings! Merely to count these would take the whole +Minnesota Legislature sixteen days, even though every member worked eight +hours a day and counted sixty castings a minute. Far, far behind are the +simple, old-fashioned days, when a reaping tool was made of two +pieces—the handle and the blade. There are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> now 300 parts in a +horse-rake, 600 in a mower, 3,800 in a binder.</p> + +<p>When McCormick built his first hundred reapers in 1845, he paid four and a +half cents for bolts. That was in the mythical age of hand labour. To-day +fifty bolts are made for a cent. So with guard-fingers. McCormick paid +twenty-four cents each when James K. Polk was in the White House. Now +there is a ferocious machine, which, with the least possible assistance +from one man, cuts out 1,300 guard-fingers in ten hours, at a labour-cost +of six for a cent.</p> + +<p>Also, while exploring one of the Chicago factories, I came upon a herd of +cud-chewing machines that were crunching out chain-links at the rate of +56,000,000 a year. Nearby were four smaller and more irritable automata, +which were biting off pieces of wire and chewing them into linchpins at a +speed of 400,000 bites a day.</p> + +<p>“Take out your watch and time this man,” said Superintendent Brooks of the +McCormick plant. “See how long he is in boring five holes in that great +casting.”</p> + +<p>“Exactly six minutes,” I answered.</p> + +<p>“Well, that’s progress,” observed Brooks.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> “Before we bought that machine, +it was a matter of four hours to bore those holes.”</p> + +<p>In the immense carpenter shop he pointed to another machine. “There is one +of the reasons,” he said, “why the small factories have been wiped out. +That machine cost us $2,500. Its work is to shape poles, and it saves us a +penny a pole; that is profitable to us because we use 300,000 poles a +year.”</p> + +<p>In one of its five twine mills—a monstrous Bedlam of noise and fuzz, +which is by far the largest of its sort in the world—there is enough +twine twisted in a single day to make a girdle around the earth.</p> + +<p>In the paint shop the man with the brush has been superseded—a case of +downright trade suicide. In his place is an unskilled Hungarian with a big +tank of paint. Souse! Into the tank goes the whole frame of a binder, and +the swarthy descendant of Attilla thinks himself slow if he dips less than +four hundred of these in a day. The labour-cost of painting wheels is now +one-fifth of a cent each. Ten at once, on a wooden axle, are swung into +the paint bath without the touch of a finger. And the few belated +brush-men who are left work with frantic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> haste, knowing that they, too, +are being pursued by a machine that will overtake them some day.</p> + +<p>In the central bookkeeping office of the Harvester Company I found some +almost incredible statistics. Here, for instance, are a few of the items +in last year’s bill of expenses:</p> + +<p>Two hundred and thirty-five miles of leather belting, 940 miles of cotton +duck, 2,000 grindstones, 3,000 shovels, 10,000 brooms, 1,670,000 buckles, +1,185,000 pounds paint, 4,000,000 pounds wire, 15,000,000 pounds nails.</p> + +<p>Merely to maintain its experimental department costs this imperial company +$7,000 a week. Here are more than two hundred inventors and designers, +well housed and well salaried, and not tramping from shop to shop, as +inventors did in the good old days. They are paid to think; and the +company is mightily proud of them. But the truth is that all large +corporations which employ an army of unskilled workmen are being compelled +to offset so much mere muscle by a special department of brains.</p> + +<p>There is, besides, a most elaborate system<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> of inspection. In the Deering +factory I saw a squad of ten men who were testing the newly made binders +with straw. “About three out of a hundred need fixing,” said the foreman.</p> + +<p>The chains are tested by a violent pneumatic machine. Every link, even, is +branded with a private mark—Δ. And in the Hamilton plant a new +scheme is being tried—the whole packing gang has become a staff of +inspection. Whenever a man finds a hundred defective pieces, he gets an +extra dollar. One sharp-eyed Scot in the packing-room confided to me that +he had made “as high as two shillin’s a week.”</p> + +<p>Such is the scope of the International Harvester Company, created in 1902. +As to the men who control it, I have had the greatest difficulty in +penetrating back of the business to their personal characteristics. For +they dislike the fierce light that beats upon a rich American.</p> + +<p>Of its president, Cyrus H. McCormick the Second, the first word to be said +is that he is not built on the same lines as his belligerent father. He +would fare badly, very likely, if he were in charge of a +catch-as-catch-can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> business, such as the reaper trade was thirty years +ago. The making of harvesters is, to him, half a duty—to his father, his +workmen, and the machine itself—and half a profession—not a battle nor a +game, as it was with the first Reaper Kings. He has no desire to play a +lone hand in the business world. And his painstaking purpose, as a man of +affairs, is to secure less speculation and more stability, less waste and +more organisation, less friction and more community of interest.</p> + +<p>In all things he is a simple and serious man. I have seen him work from +noon until midnight; but in my opinion, if he really had his choice, he +would prefer a quiet homestead, in the little town of Princeton, where he +could pursue a life devoted to the interests of Princeton University and +the Civic Federation. Even now, whenever he can get free from the +treadmill of his office, his greatest delight is to escape to a camp in +the wild lands of northern Michigan, where he can dress like a fisherman +and forget that he is the servitor of a hundred and twenty millions.</p> + +<p>Harold McCormick, his brother, and a vice-president of the big company, is +a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> boy-hearted man of thirty-five. He has a quick-action brain; but his +strong point is his personal magnetism and likableness. He knows the +harvester business throughout, having been a shirt-sleeve workman in the +factory, an agent at Council Bluffs, and a field expert in several states.</p> + +<p>Most of the stories told about him illustrate his naïve boyishness. For +instance, when he had become an expert in handling the harvester, an +agent-in-chief near Chicago telegraphed for a dozen men. Only eleven +experts were available, so Harold volunteered to be the twelfth. He had +his working-card made out in the usual form, entitling him to $18 a week. +On Saturday night, when the twelve men went to the agent-in-chief for +their wages, he said, “I want all of you to come in and have a conference +with me to-morrow morning at ten o’clock.”</p> + +<p>“Sorry to say, Mr. Blank,” said young McCormick, “that I can’t be here +until Monday.”</p> + +<p>The agent stormed. How could anything be more important to a +three-dollar-a-day man than his job?</p> + +<p>“Well, if you really must know the reason,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> said the berated mechanic, “I +have an appointment to go to church to-morrow morning with the Rockefeller +family.”</p> + +<p>The third brother—Stanley McCormick, worked his way up from labourer to +superintendent of the whole plant. For years he rose at five o’clock every +work-day morning, and walked into the factory at six.</p> + +<p>All three of the McCormicks show a remarkable sense of obligation, almost +of gratitude, to their employees. At the time the International was +organised, Stanley said to the others:</p> + +<p>“What about the men? There are some of them that deserve a share in the +new company, as much as we do.”</p> + +<p>So a list of the old employees was made, from Charlie Mulkey, the old +watchman, to R. G. Brooks, the superintendent, and $1,500,000 was divided +among them. Recently a complete profit-sharing plan, such as Perkins had +worked out for the Steel Trust, was put in working order, and about +$200,000 of extra money have been scattered through the pay-envelopes.</p> + +<p>The two Deerings, who are now chairman and vice-president, were +disciplined in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> the same stern, old-fashioned way as the McCormicks.</p> + +<p>“Put this young man to work at the bottom rung of the ladder,” said +William Deering, when his younger son, James, was graduated from the +university.</p> + +<p>Being in many respects a chip of the old block, James Deering plunged into +business with as much energy as though he had to toil for his millions as +well as inherit them. He became a field expert, and followed the harvest +from Texas to North Dakota. He asked for no favours, but sweltered along +among the Western farmers for several summers. Then he went to the foot of +the ladder in the factory and wrestled with big iron castings and steel +frames. Step by step he worked up, until even his Spartan father was +satisfied and made him the manager of the whole plant.</p> + +<p>At present there is perhaps no man in the harvester industry who has so +great a variety of attainments as James Deering. He is a shrewd +commercialist, yet he has found time, no one knows how, to master several +languages and to run the whole octave of self-culture.</p> + +<p>Charles Deering, the older of the two<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> brothers, had less farm experience, +as he served for twelve years in Uncle Sam’s navy. He was a lieutenant +when he came ashore to help his father make harvesters. At that time he +did much to solve the binder-twine problem—how to get better twine and +plenty of it. Then, when the drama of consolidation was staged by Morgan, +he took a leading part. Personally, he is a bluff, forceful, but +companionable man, such as one would expect to find on the deck of a +war-ship rather than in the telephone-pestered office of a sky-scraper.</p> + +<p>The two other vice-presidents of the Harvester Company are battle-worn +veterans of the competitive period—J. J. Glessner and William H. Jones. +Glessner, beginning as a bookkeeper in Ohio, has for many years been +regarded as a sort of unofficial peacemaker and balance-wheel of the +trade. Everybody confided in Glessner. He did as much as any one else to +harmonise the warring Harvester Kings; but it is also true that it was the +gentle Glessner who developed competition to the explosive point by +originating the system of canvassing. He poured first oil and then water +on the fire.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>As for William H. Jones, he is a sturdy and genial Welshman, who was born +and bred in a farmhouse. As a boy he reaped wheat with a sickle in the +valleys of Wales. About forty years ago, when he had become an American, +he bought a reaper and a tent, and set out to earn his fortune. By working +twenty hours a day, he had earned enough money, by 1881, to begin making +reapers of his own, at Plano; and he built up a large business.</p> + +<p>The General Manager of this big anti-famine organisation is a young +Illinoisan, named C. S. Funk. “He is the central man,” says Perkins. No +other Chicagoan of his age—he is only thirty-five—has pushed up so +quickly to so high a place, with nothing to help him except his own grit +and ability. To-day he manages a 65,000-man-power corporation; yet it is +very little more than twenty years since he was trudging six miles on a +hot July day, to ask for his first job in a hay-field. Young as he was, he +was then the support of a widowed mother, and there were seven children +younger than he.</p> + +<p>His office, in which I was permitted to take notes for several days, is a +nerve-centre of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> the world. Everything that happens to the human race is +of interest to this alert young chancellor of the Harvester Company. A +drought in Argentina, the green bug in Kansas, a tariff campaign in +Australia, a shortage of farm labour in Egypt, a new railway in Southern +Russia, such are the bulletins that guide him through his day’s work.</p> + +<p>His wide-flung army is officered mainly by farmers’ sons who had a knack +for business or for machinery. His assistant, Alex. Legge, is an ex-cowboy +from Nebraska. Before the era of peace and unity began, Funk and Legge had +fought each other in twenty states.</p> + +<p>“Legge was one of the best fighters I ever knew,” said Funk; “and I think +you might put him down as the most popular man in the company.”</p> + +<p>Maurice Kane, the company’s Chief Improver, and a fine type of the +Irish-American, was born on a small farm near Limerick. He was a farm hand +in Wisconsin when he first saw a harvester, and he has pulled himself up +every inch of the way by his own abilities. A. E. Mayer, the first of an +army of forty thousand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> salesmen, was born on a farm in New York. He is a +sort of human Gatling gun, loaded with the experience of his trade. B. A. +Kennedy, the overlord of the thirteen factories, is a seasoned veteran who +can remember when he stood by the forge of a country blacksmith shop and +hammered out ploughs by hand. Only one of the company’s generals, H. F. +Perkins, began life with such a luxury as a university education. He is in +charge of the raw materials—the coal and iron and lumber and sisal and +flax.</p> + +<p>These are a few of the men who manage this international empire of +bread-machinery. They are all practical men, hard workers, close to the +farm and the farmer. They are not fashionable idlers, nor promoters, nor +Wall Street speculators. And they have no more use for tickers than for +telescopes—a fact which is vitally important, now that they are making +more than half the harvesters of the world.</p> + +<p>Such is the International Harvester Company from the inside. But an +outside view is equally necessary. It is of tremendous interest to +10,000,000 American farmers to know the habits and the disposition of +this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> powerful organisation. As Theodore Roosevelt has said, there are +good combinations and bad ones. Which is the International Harvester +Company?</p> + +<p>In order to get the facts about it at first hand, I interviewed the four +chief competitors of the Harvester Company, three Attorneys-General, seven +editors of farm papers, four professors of agricultural colleges, seven or +eight implement agents, thirty farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, +two state governors, and the Federal Bureau of Corporations. Before I had +gone far, I learned that the big Harvester Company has been beset by a +host of new troubles.</p> + +<p>It is an evidence of the eternal futility of human ambition, that when a +group of warring Harvester Kings had made peace with one another, when +they had healed their wounded and buried their dead, and sat down to enjoy +a future of prosperous tranquillity, up sprang a host of new enemies, +armed and double-armed with weapons from which there seemed to be no sort +of defence. Their outposts were shattered by legislative dynamite. Tariff +walls were built across their paths. And half a dozen giant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> ogres, +otherwise known as Attorneys-General, crashed into their peaceful business +with destructive clubs of law.</p> + +<p>The bigger the organisation the more trouble to protect and preserve it. +This is what Abraham Lincoln learned—what the whole United States +learned, half a century ago; and it is the lesson that the +harvester-makers are studying to-day. It is a new phase of an old fact; it +is the Tragedy of the Trust.</p> + +<p>Some foreign nations, too, have taken their cue from American +Legislatures, and have become almost as hostile to the Chicago company as +though it were exporting roulette wheels and burglars’ jimmies. France +taxed half a million from it last year by a penalising tariff. Australia +has made it a political issue. Germany takes a toll of $11 on every +self-binder, and Austria takes $25. Roumania raised the duty on harvesters +several months ago; and there is a general feeling that the time has come +to check the supremacy that the United States has always had in this line.</p> + +<p>Yet the fact that the Harvester Company has been fined in two states does +not mean that it has taken advantage of its size to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> become a lawbreaker. +The “crime” of which it was declared guilty, was the maintenance of the +old practice of “exclusive contracts,” which has been the almost universal +custom for fifty years. Each agent was pledged not to sell any other +company’s goods. <i>The International abolished this requirement two years +ago, and several of the independent companies still retain it.</i> Until the +merger was organised it was regarded as fair enough. It is one of the most +usual habits of agency business. But the American people are now demanding +that a big company shall be much more “square” and moral than a small +capitalist who is fighting for his life.</p> + +<p>Many of the old methods of the rough-and-tumble days have survived. It is +not possible to say “Presto, change!” to 40,000 battling agents, so that +they shall at once begin to play fair and coöperate. But the general +opinion is that the Combine has raised the harvester business to a higher +level. At one of its branch offices I came accidentally upon a letter +written by Cyrus H. McCormick, in which he forbade the taking of rebates +from railways.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>“You must clearly +understand,” he wrote, “that this company will maintain a policy of absolute obedience to the law.”</p> + +<p>Among the farmers of Iowa and Kansas I found no definite charges against +the harvester combine—nothing but that vague dread of bigness which seems +natural to the average mind, and which even the great-brained Webster had +when he opposed the annexation of Texas and California. Of four farm +editors, one was against all “trusts” on general principles; and the other +three believed that the evils of harvester competition were much greater +than those of consolidation. The bare fact that this one corporation has +$120,000,000 of capital alarms the old-timers. Others have become more +accustomed to the Big Facts of American business.</p> + +<p>“Why,” said one implement dealer, “after all, $120,000,000 is less than +the American farmers earn in a week.”</p> + +<p>He might also have said that it was less than the value of one corn crop +in Iowa, or half as much as the Iowa farmers have now on deposit in their +savings banks. It is very little more than Russell Sage raked in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> through +the wickets of his little money-lending office, or than Marshall Field +accumulated from a single store. In fact, if bread were raised one cent a +loaf for one year in the United States alone, the extra pennies would buy +out the whole “Harvester Trust,” bag and baggage.</p> + +<p>The bulk of the farmers, so far as I could harmonise their opinions, are +now too well accustomed to big enterprises among themselves to be scared +by the Chicago merger. They have at the present time more than five +thousand coöperative companies of their own. And some of these are of +national importance; as, for instance, the powerful Cotton Growers’ Trust, +and the Farmers’ Business Congress, which owns 800 elevators for the +storage of grain.</p> + +<p>“My only objection to the International Harvester Company,” said a +business man in St. Paul, “is that it sells its machinery cheaper in +Europe than it does in the United States.” I investigated this charge, and +found it wholly incorrect. The greater expense and risk of foreign trade +compels the manufacturers to ask almost as high prices as American farmers + +had to pay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> twenty years ago. But there is a quite credible reason for +this rumour. It is simply this—that for some less progressive countries a +crude, old-fashioned reaper is being made, to sell for $45. The modern, +self-rake reaper is too complex for the simple mind of many a Russian +farmer, so he is supplied with a clumsy machine which is $15 cheaper, but +which looked, to my unskilled eye, more than $30 worse.</p> + +<p>No one accuses the “Trust” of having unreasonably raised prices. On the +contrary, it is generally given full credit for holding prices down, in +spite of the fact that it is paying from twenty to eighty per cent. more +for its labour and raw materials than was paid in 1902. Generally +speaking, all farm implements except thrashing-machines are cheaper now +than they were in 1880, when the competition was most strenuous. Binders +have dropped from $325 to $125; hay-rakes from $25 to $16; and mowers from +$80 to $45.</p> + +<p>“I paid $200 for a self-binding harvester twenty-five years ago,” said a +Kansas farmer. “Ten years later I bought another for $140 and in 1907 I +bought one from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> International for $125, which is in my judgment the +best of the three machines.”</p> + +<p>The International has competitors, too—very active and able ones. Binders +are made by 4 large independent companies, mowers by 17, corn-shredders by +18, twine by 26, wagons by 116, and gasolene engines by 124. Of the +thirty-seven different machines made by the International there are only +three—hemp-reapers, corn-shockers, and rice-binders—that are made by no +other company, and even these machines are not protected by any basic +patents. Powerful as the International is, it is still far from the place +where business is one long sweet dream of monopoly.</p> + +<p>The four independent companies that make binders seem to have no fear of +the “Trust.” “We have no fault to find with it,” said President Atwater, +of the Johnson Company. “We don’t want it smashed. Why? Because our +business has doubled since it was organised; and because we would sooner +compete with one company than with a dozen.”</p> + +<p>“The ‘Trust’ was the only thing that saved the whole harvester business +from annihilation,” said the ex-president of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> another independent company, +when I pressed him for his personal opinion, and promised not to use his +name. “The cold fact is really this,” he added, “that the International +Harvester Company has bettered conditions for the farmer, for the +independent companies, and for everybody but itself.”</p> + +<p>“The big combine has never misused its power,” said a third of the +International’s competitors. “Now and then its agents make trouble, just +as ours do, no doubt. But the men at the top have always given us a square +deal.”</p> + +<p>So it is my duty to state that on the whole the Harvester Combine is a +good combination and not a bad one. I have found it radically different +from the get-rich-quick trusts that have been described in recent books +and magazine articles. It is not a monopoly. It is an advocate of free +trade. Its stock is not watered, nor for sale in Wall Street. And the men +at the top are very evidently plain, hard-working, simple-living American +citizens, who are quite content to do business in a live-and-let-live way.</p> + +<p>They are not thoroughly reconciled, even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> yet, to being a merger. They +look back with open regret to the wasteful but adventurous days of +competition. Of the combination the elder Mrs. Cyrus McCormick finely +said:</p> + +<p>“It was a hurt of the heart. Each of our companies was like a family. Each +had a body of loyal agents, who had been comrades through many struggles. +But the terrible increase in expenses compelled us to subdue our feelings +and to coöperate with one another.”</p> + +<p>“I am not a merger man myself,” said William Deering, “although I believe +that the International Harvester Company has been a benefit to the +farmers.”</p> + +<p>Cyrus H. McCormick goes still further. He is a “trust-buster” himself, so +far as the over-capitalised and oppressive leviathans of business are +concerned. He said to me frankly: “Some of the hostility to our company is +inspired by worthy motives, growing out of the general opposition to the +so-called trusts.” And when a North Dakota congressman proposed in 1904 +that the International Harvester Company should be investigated, Cyrus +McCormick at once<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> sent a message that amazed the Bureau of +Corporations—“Please come and investigate us,” he said. “If we’re not +right, we want to get right.”</p> + +<p>“Yes,” said one of the highest officials of the Roosevelt administration, +when I asked him to corroborate this very remarkable story. “It is true +that from 1904 it has been the continued desire of the International +Harvester Company that we should investigate them. In fact, during the +last year (1907) they have urged us with considerable earnestness to make +this investigation.”</p> + +<p>So, this big business has evolved from simple to complex in accordance +with the same laws that rule plants and empires. It has probably not yet +reached its full maturity, for it is greater than any man or any form of +organisation, and the tiny ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no +more than its most obedient retinue. They come and go—quarrel and make +friends—live and die. What matter? The big business, once alive, grows on +through the short centuries, from generation to generation.</p> + +<p>And what does it all mean—this federation of thirteen factory +cities—this coordina<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>tion of muscle and mind and millions—this arduous +development of a new art, whereby a group of mechanics can take a +wagon-load of iron ore and a tree, and fashion them into a shapely +automaton that has the power of a dozen farmers?</p> + +<p><i>It means bread. It means hunger-insurance for the whole human race. As we +shall see in the next chapter, it means that the famine problem has been +solved, not only for the United States, but for all the civilised nations +of the world.</i></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2> +<h3><span class="smcap">The American Harvester Abroad</span></h3> + +<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">The</span> first American reapers that went to Europe were given a royal welcome. +There were two of them—one made by McCormick and one made by Hussey, and +they were exhibited before Albert Edward, the Prince Consort of England, +at a World’s Fair in London in 1851.</p> + +<p>There had been reapers invented in England before this date, but none of +them would reap. All the inventors were mere theorists. They designed +their reapers for ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them was a preacher, +the Rev. Patrick Bell; another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher. James +Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine that cut artificial grain on the +stage. And a machinist named Gladstone made a reaper that also worked well +until he tried it on real grain in a real field.</p> + +<p>But the exhibition of the American reaper<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> in London did not result in its +immediate adoption. There was little demand for harvesters in England +fifty years ago; and in other European countries there was none at all. +Farm labour was cheap—forty cents a day in England and five cents a day +in Russia; and the rush of labourers into factory cities had not yet +begun.</p> + +<p>In the years following 1851, the American reaper did, however, become +popular among the very rich. It became the toy of kings and titled +landowners. By 1864 Europe was buying our farm machinery to the extent of +$600,000. This was less than she buys to-day in a week; but it was a +beginning. Several foreign manufacturers began at this time to make +reapers, notably in Toronto, Sheffield, Paris, and Hamburg. This +competition spurred on the American reaper agents, who were already taking +advantage of the interest shown by royalty in the American reaper. And +from the close of the Civil War on, there was an exciting race, generally +neck and neck, between Cyrus H. McCormick, Sr., and Walter A. Wood, to see +who could vanquish the most of these foreign imitators, and bag the +greatest number of kings and nobilities.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>It was a contest that not only resulted in the triumph of the American +reaper, but also brought the Reaper Kings recognition and reputation +abroad. In 1867 both McCormick and Wood were decorated with the Cross of +the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III.; and later they stood side by side +to receive the Imperial Cross from the hand of the Austrian emperor. +Hundreds of medals and honours were showered upon these two inventor +mechanics; and the French Academy of Science, in a blaze of Gallic +enthusiasm, elected McCormick one of its members, because he had “done +more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man.”</p> + +<p>Many and strange were the exploits of the American Reaper Kings at the +courts and royal farms of the real kings. Unable to speak any language but +their own, unused to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent in the +American fashion, the Reaper Kings plunged from adventure to adventure, +absolutely indifferent to everything but their reapers and success.</p> + +<p>“There is to be a trial of reapers at Rome next June,” wrote David M. +Osborne, a New Yorker who began to export reapers to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> Europe in 1862. +“Think of invading the sacred precincts of that ancient place with Yankee +harvesters. We will wake up the dry bones of these old countries, and +civilise and Christianise them with our farm machinery.”</p> + +<p>C. W. Marsh, inventor of the Marsh Harvester, made a sensational début in +Hungary in 1870. Several grand dukes had arranged for a great contest of +the various sorts of reapers on one of the royal farms in Hungary, so that +the Minister of Agriculture might take notice. When the day arrived, there +were nine reapers at the farm, mostly of European design.</p> + +<p>Marsh’s strange-looking machine seemed to be a combination of reaper and +workbench. But ten minutes after the contest began, Marsh had the race +won. His machine was a new type, the forerunner of the modern self-binder. +It was so made that two men could stand upon it and bind the grain as fast +as it was cut. But on this occasion Marsh could hire no farmer to help him +and was obliged to do the work alone. The judges were stunned with +amazement, therefore, when they found that he had bound<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> three-quarters of +an acre in twenty-eight minutes. Here was a man who could do in half an +hour what few Hungarian peasants could finish in less than a day!</p> + +<p>“He is an athlete,” said one. “A wizard,” said another.</p> + +<p>Before they could recover from their astonishment, Marsh had stored his +harvester, pocketed the prize of forty golden ducats, and hurried away to +his hotel, eager for a bath and a chance to pick the thistles out of his +hands.</p> + +<p>But the grand dukes and miscellaneous dignitaries were not to be escaped +so easily. An officer in gorgeous uniform was sent to find Marsh and bring +him forthwith to the main dining-hall of the city. Here a banquet was +prepared, and a throng of high personages sat down, with Marsh at the head +of the table, cursing his luck and nursing his sore fingers.</p> + +<p>At the close of the banquet, amid great applause, a medal was pinned upon +his coat, and the whole assemblage hushed to hear his reply. Now Marsh, +like two-thirds of the Reaper Kings, could no more make a speech than walk +a rope. On only one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> previous occasion had he faced an audience, and that +was at the age of twelve, when he had recited a scrap from the “Lay of the +Last Minstrel” at a school entertainment. As he rose to his feet, this +poetic fragment came into his mind; and so, half in fun and half in +desperation, Marsh assumed the pose of a Demosthenes and addressed the +banqueters as follows:</p> + +<p class="poem">“O Caledonia! Stern and wild,<br /> +<ins class="correction" title="original: eet">Meet</ins> nurse for a poetic child!<br /> +Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,<br /> +Land of the mountain and the flood,<br /> +Land of my sires! What mortal hand<br /> +Can e’er untie the filial band<br /> +That knits me to thy rugged strand!”</p> + +<p>“That was the first and only speech of my life,” said Mr. Marsh, when I +saw him in his home as DeKalb, where he has retired from business. “But it +certainly established my reputation as an orator in that region of +Hungary.”</p> + +<p>At one famous competition near Paris, in 1879, three reapers were set to +work in fields of equal size. The French reaper led off and finished in +seventy-two minutes. The English reaper followed and lumbered through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> in +sixty-six minutes. Then came the American machine, and when it swept down +its stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the judges were inclined to +doubt either their watches or their eyesight.</p> + +<p>Another of these tournaments, which also did much to advertise the United +States as the only genuine and original reaper country, took place on an +English estate in 1880. There was only one American reaper in the race, +and in appearance it was the clown of the circus. The ship that carried it +had been wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it arrived the machine +was rusted and dingy.</p> + +<p>Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge. He was then a youth of +twenty-one, and equally ready for an adventure or a sale. There was no +time to repaint and polish the machine, so he resolved to convert its +forlorn appearance into an asset.</p> + +<p>“Oil her up so she’ll run like a watch,” he said to his experts. “But +don’t improve her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it off. And go and +hire the smallest, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find.”</p> + +<p>The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering +with newness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> and drawn by a stately team of big Norman horses. The shabby +American reaper arrived last, and met a shout of ridicule as it rolled +into its place. But in the race, “Old Rusty,” as the spectators called it, +swept ahead of the others as though it were an enchanted chariot, winning +the gold medal and an enviable prestige among British farmers.</p> + +<p>In Germany, as in England, the reaper was introduced into general use +through royalty. This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper King named Byron +E. Huntley gave the German emperor and empress their first view of +harvesting on the American plan. The exhibition took place in a +grain-field that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam. At first, the +empress watched the machine from a window; but soon she became so keenly +interested that she went into the field to study it at closer range.</p> + +<p>“I admire you Americans,” she said to the delighted Huntley. “You are so +deft—so ingenious, to make a machine like this.”</p> + +<p>The present Emperor of Germany is not merely interested in American +harvesters; he is an enthusiast. On several occasions<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> he has held +harvester matinées for the benefit of his cabinet ministers, so that they +could see with their own eyes the superiority of machinery to hand-labour. +The first of these matinées was given on one of the Kaiser’s farms, near +the ancient city of Bonn, in 1896; and I was told the story by Sam Dennis, +the Illinois Irishman who was in charge of the harvester.</p> + +<p>Dennis arranged a contest between his one machine and forty Polish women +who cut the grain with old-fashioned sickles. As soon as the emperor and +his retinue had arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given and the +strange race began. On one side of the field were the forty women, bent +and browned by many a day’s toil under the hot sun. On the other side was +Sam Dennis, sitting on his showy harvester.</p> + +<p>“Get ap!” said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a +wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator +into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a +fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0158.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES, IN FRANCE</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>The emperor was radiant with delight. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>Being somewhat of an expert +himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the +differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been +blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that +time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor +pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain +and cutting it without the waste of a handful while the women were +trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in +the stubbled field.</p> + +<p>Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work +than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided +before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women’s +side when Sam Dennis said “Whoa!” to his horses, and condescended to enter +into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers.</p> + +<p>For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally, +although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was +about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> the +harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what +some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a +steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any +rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago, +earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish.</p> + +<p>Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion +a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was +told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day +the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company.</p> + +<p>“Bismarck sat in his carriage,” said Haney, “but he ordered his driver to +follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and +feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he +made a sign to me to stop.”</p> + +<p>“Let me see the thing that ties the knot,” he said.</p> + +<p>“I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of +string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> him a bound sheaf, +so that he could see a knot that had been tied by the machine. The old man +studied it for some time. Then he asked me—‘Can these machines be made in +Germany?’</p> + +<p>“‘No, your Excellency,’ I said. ‘They can be made only in America.’</p> + +<p>“‘Well,’ said Bismarck, speaking very good English, ‘you Yankees are +ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.’”</p> + +<p>When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were +walking together over the President’s estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper +which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field.</p> + +<p>“Do you see that machine?” he remarked. “I bought it from an American +company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest since that time. I +have four of those machines now, and I want to say to you that they are +the most useful articles that come to us from the United States. I am +stating no more than the simple truth when I tell you that without +American harvesters, France would starve.”</p> + +<p>In still other countries the American reaper has been popular with kings +and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> potentates. The Sultan of Turkey and the Shah of Persia each bought +one during the Chicago World’s Fair. And the young King of Spain, who +ordered a mower in 1903, narrowly escaped being minced up by its knives. +Being an impulsive youth, he gave a cry of joy at sight of the handsome +machine, sprang upon the seat, and lashed the horses without first laying +hold of the reins. The horses leaped, and the seventeen-year-old Alphonso +went sprawling. Twenty workmen ran to his help, and one level-headed +American mechanic caught the reins; so the worst penalty that the boy king +had to pay for his recklessness was a tumble and a bad scare.</p> + +<p>In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes at first bought reapers partly as +toys and partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers on their estates +demanded more pay than fifty cents a week, the manager would drive them in +a body to his barn, then throw open the doors and show them five or six +red harvesters.</p> + +<p>“Do you see these American machines?” he would say. “Unless you go back to +work at the same wages, I will reap the grain <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>with these machines, and +you will have no work at all, and no money.” A look at these +machine-devils has usually sent the cowed serfs back to their sickles. But +here and there it has set them to wondering whether or not a +fifty-cent-a-week job was worth having, and so has given them an A B C +lesson in American doctrines.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0163.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>Many of the Russian nobility, too, have begun to learn a trifle about +democracy from the American harvester agents. There is a certain young +baron, for example, whose estate is not far from Riga. Last year, to be in +fashion, he bought a Chicago self-binder. When it arrived, there came with +it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set it up and start it in the field. +In this case, the mechanic was a big German-American named Lutfring, born +in Wisconsin, of “Forty Eighter” stock.</p> + +<p>The baron was evidently impressed by the manly and dignified bearing of +Lutfring, who stood erect while the native workmen were bowing and +cringing in obeisance. And when Lutfring said to him, “Now, Baron Hahn, we +are all barons in my country, but you’ll pardon me if I do this work in +my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> shirt-sleeves,” the baron was so taken by surprise that he offered to +hold Lutfring’s coat. Half an hour later he was at work himself, doing +physical labour for the first time in his life. And when the harvester had +been well launched upon its sea of yellow grain, he took Lutfring—the +baron from Wisconsin—to dinner with him in the castle, and spent the +greater part of the afternoon showing him the family portraits.</p> + +<p>From such beginnings the harvester has advanced, to make in Russia the +greatest conquests it has achieved anywhere. More business is now being +done in the land of the Czar than was done with the whole world in 1885. +One recent shipment, so large as to break all records, was carried from +Chicago to New York on 3,000 freight-cars, and transferred to a chartered +fleet of nine steam-ships, $5,000,000 worth of hunger-insurance.</p> + +<p>During the Russo-Japanese War a striking incident occurred that showed the +respect of the government for American harvesters. Several troop-trains +that were on their way to the front were suddenly side-tracked, to make +way for a long freight train, loaded with heavy boxes. The war generals +and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> grand dukes in charge of the troops were furious. Why should their +trains be pushed to one side and delayed, to expedite a mere consignment +of freight? They telegraphed their indignation to St. Petersburg, and +received a reply from Count Witte. “The freight train must pass,” he said. +“It is loaded with American harvesters. <i>It means bread.</i>”</p> + +<p>As a result of this attitude, there are now some provinces in southern +Russia where not even Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson would find +much fault with the farming. I have secured the figures for the Province +of Kuban, in the Caucasus. Here there are 3,500 thrashing-machines, 5,000 +grain-drills, 37,000 harvesters, 50,000 harrows, 70,000 grain-cleaners, +and 65,000 cultivators. This is a region where, one generation ago, were +only the wooden plough, the sickle, and the flail.</p> + +<p>There is, to be sure, still a dense mass of Russians whose yearly habit it +is to wait until their wheat is dead ripe, then in a few days of frantic +labour to cut down half of it with sickles, leaving the rest to rot in the +fields. And in one Caucasian province,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> richer in its soil than Iowa, it +is the custom of the wandering natives to move every three years to a new +tract of land, in order to avoid the trouble of fertilising the soil.</p> + +<p>“I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia with a piece of board,” said one +agent. “And I have seen their thrashing done by the feet of oxen.” But the +new idea has been planted and is growing. “Russia is the land of +to-morrow,” said another expert. “We have been educating the farmers there +for seventeen years, yet we have only scratched the surface. We who have +lived among the Russian peasants expect great things from them.”</p> + +<p>They have succeeded, then, in their campaign for the supremacy of the +American reaper—the Reaper Kings who enlisted the crowned heads and the +nobility of Europe in their service. By 1899 Europe was a customer at our +farm machinery factories to the extent of twelve millions a year. This +figure was doubled in 1906, and is now increasing by leaps and bounds. All +told, this one industry has brought us $150,000,000 of foreign money in +less than fifty years.</p> + +<p>Europe has sent us emigrants—twenty-five<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> million in the past +seventy-five years. But we have more than replaced them with labour-saving +farm machinery. There were in 1907 as many American harvesters in Europe +as would do the work of eleven million men.</p> + +<p>If our foreign trade goes ahead at its present rate of speed, we shall +soon have Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this exchange of men for +machinery. In the past four years, for instance, Europe has sent us less +than four million emigrants, but we have sent to Europe, in that time, +enough agricultural automata to equal the labour of five million men.</p> + +<p>And this means much to Europe. What with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her +4,000,000 public officials, she has to serve more than twenty-five million +meals a day to men who are non-producers. She has to clothe and house +these governmental millions and their families. How could she do this if +it were not for the eleven million man-power of her American harvesters, +and the half billion bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy from other +countries?</p> + +<p>France must have our harvesters because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> she has been short of men since +the wars of Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers and nine-tenths of a +million officials. Even now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all their +largest grain-fields, she and Germany cannot feed themselves. Spain at one +time exported wheat, but at present is buying 10,000,000 bushels a year. +England grows less than a quarter as much as will feed her people. And +Russia would be famine-swept from end to end, in spite of her 30,000,000 +farmers and her illimitable acres, if she had to depend wholly upon the +sickle and the scythe.</p> + +<p>But the story is by no means ended with Europe. To-day the sun never sets +and the season never closes for American harvesters. They are reaping the +fields of Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in +March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada +in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in +November, and Burma in December. It is always harvest somewhere. The +ripple of the ripened grain goes round the world and the American +harvester follows it.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>Even from this incomplete list one may begin to understand how tremendous +is the task that the International Harvester Company has assumed in +undertaking to cater to the farmers of fifty countries—to adapt itself to +their various customs.</p> + +<p>In Holland, for instance, where the grass is short and thick, a mower must +cut as close as a barber’s clippers; and in Denmark, where moss grows +under the grass, it must cut so high as to leave the moss untouched. The +careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the +“Milwaukee”; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in +a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to +the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six +or eight horses to a big “header,” crack the long whip, and dash at full +gallop over the rough ground.</p> + +<p>There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and +camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain +backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. Australia must have a +monster machine called a “stripper,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> which combs off the heads of the +grain. California and Argentina, because of their dry climate, can use +“headers,” a combination of reaper and thrashing-machine. And so the +American harvester has become a citizen of the world, adopting the +national dress of each country.</p> + +<p>The men who are dealing hand to hand with these problems are no longer the +Reaper Kings, personally introducing their harvesters through royalty and +nobility. These have been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred American +harvester experts. They are all salaried, most of them by the +“International”; and their work is to put the farmers of the world to +school. They are the teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As an example +of the rapidity with which they are sometimes able to teach, take the +Philippines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent nothing whatever for +farming machinery; in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even yet, however, +they do not raise enough rice to feed themselves; and although half of +them are farmers, only one-twentieth of their land is cultivated.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0172.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>“Many of our agents are now living in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>Siberia with their families,” said +C. S. Funk, the General Manager of the International. “They are teaching +the mujiks to grow wheat and harvest it. We have similar missionaries in +South Africa and South America and most of the countries of the world. +Some of them have gone as far as water and rail would carry them, and have +then crossed the mountains with their machinery on the backs of mules, so +that they might teach the natives how to farm on the American plan. All +told, we have more than a thousand such missionaries in foreign +countries.”</p> + +<p>In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who are in control of this army of +teachers. One was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named Couchman, who +handles several nations from Hamburg; and the other was a courteous +commercial diplomat named La Porte, who supervises France, Spain, Italy, +and Northern Africa from his office in Paris. Each is in charge of several +hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our +harvester trade.</p> + +<p>No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> +are only one regiment in the great pay-envelope army of American +mechanics. But they are on the firing-line of the greatest battle against +ignorance and famine that has ever been fought. They are the pioneers of +the new farmer. To show the world’s peasantry how to work with brains and +machinery, to bring them up to the American farmer’s level—that is their +task. What could be more essentially American, or more profitable to the +human race?</p> + +<p>Many European farmers, of course, are easily up to the Kansas level; but +the vast majority have been mistaught that the path of the farmer must +forever be watered with sweat. Many of them are so cramped by the shackles +of drudgery that they cannot even conceive of the value of leisure.</p> + +<p>“Why don’t you use a scythe? Then you could cut twice as much,” said +Horace Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm machinery and +agriculture, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was +a new idea.</p> + +<p>“Because,” he answered stodgily, “I haven’t got twice as much to cut.”</p> + +<p>The quick, handy ways of American<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> farmers are seldom found in other +countries. A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-roller, to give it +weight, and then walk behind it. To ride on the roller himself does not +occur to him. A South German will usually take the reel off his reaper, +and handle the grain by hand. Operating five levers is too great a tax +upon his mind. An Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring drivers—one on +the seat and another astride one of the horses.</p> + +<p>“A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion,” an expert told me, “and I +found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it +together <i>inside</i> his barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to +choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down.”</p> + +<p>Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won +to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the +Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three +hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada—into the new +forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants +were Minnesotans and Dakotans;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> therefore they are not poor. They carried +two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a +harvester-based civilisation in a vast region that will probably some day +have a population of twenty-five million people.</p> + +<p>That billiard-table country—Argentina—stands third among the foreign +patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than +Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of +revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good.</p> + +<p>To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country +has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but +eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River—a +hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea—which moves through its plains +like an irrigating canal.</p> + +<p>The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now +sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International +Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island +continent was greatly furthered when the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>International bought the +sixty-five-acre Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York, which had been +remarkably successful in its Australian, as well as its French, trade.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0177.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the +painted automata from Chicago. “On the road to Mandalay,” and along the +Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from +Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass +and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.</p> + +<p>Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but +Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen +years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or +into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are +irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has +been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across +yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are +for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and +Benares—almost<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far +as I can learn, not one harvesting machine of any kind has entered that +land of mystery and superstition. In a few other countries harvesters are +not numerous. Very few have been sold or will be in Japan. Here are the +smallest farms in the world. A fork and a pair of scissors would seem much +more appropriate implements for such tiny plots. Take the whole arable +area of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will have only the state of +Illinois.</p> + +<p>In India, where a family “lives” on fifty cents a week, where one acre +makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a +ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an +Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich +Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them +set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from +a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers +reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines.</p> + +<p>There are few harvesters in Asia Minor,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> where farmers live almost like +groundhogs—a whole family in one windowless hut of burnt clay. And there +are fewer still in Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile land +will some day be made to work for the human race.</p> + +<p>But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation +is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its +grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere +in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have +done so much to give a “full dinner-pail” to the civilized nations.</p> + +<p>“The world is mine oyster,” says the International Harvester Company. In +the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries +920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000. +It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters +of the world.</p> + +<p>What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the +appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade +from the first a business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> <i>de luxe</i>. In fact, one of the principal +reasons why they quit fighting was that they might handle this world +commerce in an organised way.</p> + +<p>To-day they are not battling with one another on the royal farms of +Europe, like gladiators who make sport for emperors. There is more +business and less adventure. They have a geography of their own, and have +divided the whole world into eight provinces. The “Domestic” Department of +the International comprises the United States and Canada and is managed +from Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and Siberia, has its +headquarters at Hamburg; Western Europe and Northern Africa are handled +from Paris; Great Britain is directed from London; South America from +Buenos Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New Zealand from Christchurch; and +Mexico from Mexico City. Such is the commercial empire that has its seat +at the foot of Lake Michigan.</p> + +<p>Other countries can sell us automobiles and bric-a-brac. They may even get +over our tariff wall with hay and cotton and steel and lumber. But they +have never <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>dared to try to sell us farm machinery. Every harvester in +the United States was made at home.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0182.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">GATHERING IN A FINLAND HARVEST</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>Either one of the two immense harvester plants of Chicago is larger than +the combined plants of England, Germany, and France. France, recently, +made a brilliant dash toward success in the harvester business. M. +Racquet, a journalist, built a great factory at Amiens. He bought the best +American machinery. He allied himself with a savings bank and sold stock +to the farmers. He was protected by a high tariff. But, alas for his +eloquent prospectus! His selling force was too small. His American +machinery made more reapers in a month than he could sell in a year. And +in 1904 he fell into bankruptcy under a debt of ten million francs.</p> + +<p>An American harvester is practically above competition in foreign +countries, and commands an exceptional price. As for tariffs, there is a +wide open door in Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Bulgaria, Brazil, +Servia, and South Germany. But there is a toll-gate fee of $25 per +harvester in Hungary, and $20 in France; and for lack of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> commercial +treaty, the tax has lately been increased in part of Germany, in Hungary, +Switzerland, and Rumania. The harvester companies feel that they have a +substantial grievance against a government that allows them to be not only +hazed and harried at home by tariffs on raw material, but driven out of +foreign markets as well. “The whole world is doing business on a single +street to-day,” said one harvester maker; “but the trouble is that there +are two hundred tariff toll-gates along that street.”</p> + +<p>In self-defence, against these tariffs, the “International” has been +forced to build two foreign factories, one in Canada and one in Sweden. +The Swedish plant is a small affair as yet, making rakes and mowers only; +but the Canadian enterprise supports one-tenth of the city of Hamilton, +and holds about half the Canadian trade. Its worst vexation, so far as I +can tell from a hasty visit, is a lack of Canadian raw materials. Its +chains, bolts, nuts, and canvas aprons come from Chicago, its steel and +coal from Pittsburg, and three-fourths of its lumber from the Southern +states.</p> + +<p>The country that perhaps most disturbs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> the dreams of our harvester +companies, is as far as possible from being one of the great nations. It +is scarcely a country at all—only a scrap of coral reef uprisen at the +foot of Mexico—Yucatan. Yet this is the land on which the United States +depends for binder twine. Manila fibre we can now get from our new +co-Americans—the Filipinos; but there is never enough of it to supply the +millions of self-binders. Only sisal-hemp yields abundantly enough. And +Yucatan is the only spot in the world where sisal can be grown in +commercial quantities.</p> + +<p>Yucatan is smaller than South Carolina, with not quite the population of +Milwaukee. It was once the poorest of the Central American states; but +since the arrival of the twine-binder it has become the richest. It sells +from fifteen to eighteen million dollars’ worth of sisal a year, and the +United States buys it all. <i>Three-fourths of this money is clear profit; +and it is an almost incredible fact that the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan +have a larger net income than the owners of the immense International +Harvester Company.</i></p> + +<p>Roughly speaking, the American farmer pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year for +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>string—mere string, which is used once and then flung away. It is an +extortion and a waste, besides being the only un-American factor in the +whole harvester business.</p> + +<p>How can we save these twelve millions and completely Americanise the +trade? This is a problem that William Deering toiled at for twenty years. +The Harvester Company has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul—a new factory, +which twists twine from flax. A farmer’s son named George H. Ellis has +found a quick and cheap way to clean the flax fibre; and at the time I +visited the factory there were more than three hundred workers at the +spindles. Two million pound of the twine were sold in 1906, so that the +enterprise is no longer an experiment. This means, probably, that the +farmer of the future will grow his own twine. Instead of yielding tribute +to the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than the charges +of the railroad and the factory. The flax will be his own.</p> + +<p>Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country that has been enriched by the +harvester. Elsewhere it is the rule that the common people of the nation +must reach a certain <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>high level before the harvester trade can begin. +Where human labour has little value, it is plainly not worth saving.</p> + +<p> </p> +<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i0187.jpg" alt="" /></div> +<p class="caption">IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS</p> +<p> </p> + +<p>For this reason, the harvester is the best barometer of civilisation. It +cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land +where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women +who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be +intelligent: he must be free.</p> + +<p>To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as “the +country where the reapers come from.” They realise, too, that farm +machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our +national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or +silk from France.</p> + +<p>Why? Read the history of the United States. This was the first country, so +far as we can know, where men of high intelligence went to work <i>en masse</i> +upon the soil, and under such conditions as compelled them to develop a +high degree of mechanical skill. The pioneer American farmer had to be his +own carpenter and blacksmith. He had to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> build his own house and make his +own harness. Consequently, before this Farmers’ Republic was two +generations old, the reaper was born in the little workshop behind the +barn.</p> + +<p>In the Old World every occupation stood alone and aloof. The mechanics +knew nothing of the farm and the farmer knew nothing of the workshop. +“Every man to his trade,” said Europe, Asia, and Africa. But in the New +World, where trades and classes and nationalities were flung together in a +heterogenous jumble, there sprang up a race of handy, inventive farmers, +set free from the habits and prejudices of their fathers. They were the +first body of men who were competent to solve the problem of farm +machinery.</p> + +<p>And so, the American harvester is much more than a handy device for +cutting grain. It is the machine that makes democracy possible. It reaches +the average man, and more—it pushes the ladder of prosperity down so far +that even the farm labourer can grasp the lowest rung and climb. <i>It has +become one of our national emblems. It is as truly and as exclusively +American as the Stars and Stripes or the Declaration of Independence.</i></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2> +<h3><span class="smcap">The Harvester and the American Farmer</span></h3> + +<p class="dropcap"><span class="caps">If the</span> American Farmer went out of business this year he could clean up +thirty thousand million dollars. And he would have to sell his farm on +credit; for there is not enough money in the whole world to pay him half +his price.</p> + +<p>Talk of the money-mad Trusts! They might have reason to be mad if they +owned the farms, instead of their watered stock. When we remember that the +American Farmer earns enough in seventeen days to buy out Standard Oil, +and enough in fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the Steel Trust off the +industrial map, the story of the trusts seems like the “short and simple +annals of the poor.”</p> + +<p>One American harvest would buy the kingdom of Belgium, king and all. Two +would buy Italy. Three would buy Austria-Hungary.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> And five, at a spot +cash price, would take Russia from the Czar.</p> + +<p>Talk of swollen fortunes! With the setting of every sun, the money-box of +the American Farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-four new millions. +Only the most athletic imagination can conceive of such a torrent of +wealth.</p> + +<p>Place your finger on the pulse of your wrist and count the heart-beats; +one—two—three—four. With every four of those quick throbs, day and +night, a thousand dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the American +Farmer.</p> + +<p>How incomprehensible it would seem to Pericles, who saw Greece in her +Golden Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue of his country is now +no more than one day’s pay for the men who till the soil of this infant +Republic!</p> + +<p>Or, how it would amaze a resurrected Christopher Columbus, if he were told +that the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not nearly as much as the +earnings of the American Farmer’s Hen!</p> + +<p>Merely the crumbs that drop from the Farmer’s table (otherwise known as +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>agricultural exports), have brought him in enough of foreign money since +1892, so that he could, if he wished, settle the railway problem once for +all, by buying every foot of railroad in the United States.</p> + +<p>Such is our New Farmer—a man for whom there is no name in any language. +He is as far above the farmer of the story-books, as a 1908 touring-car is +above a jinrikisha. Instead of being an ignorant hoe-man in a barn-yard +world, he gets the news by daily paper, daily mail, and telephone; and +incidentally publishes seven hundred trade journals of his own. Instead of +being a moneyless peasant, he pays the interest on the mortgage with the +earnings of four days, and his taxes with the earnings of a week. Even +this is less of an expense than it seems, for he borrows the money from +himself, out of his own banks, and spends the bulk of the tax money around +his own properties.</p> + +<p>Farming for a business, not for a living—this is the <i>motif</i> of the New +Farmer. He is a commercialist—a man of the twentieth century. He works as +hard as the Old Farmer did, but in a higher way. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> uses the four +M’s—Mind, Money, Machinery and Muscle; but as little of the latter as +possible.</p> + +<p>Neither is he a Robinson Crusoe of the soil, as the Old Farmer was. His +hermit days are over; he is a man among men. The railway, the trolley, the +automobile and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In +fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches +civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of +the atoms of a crowded city.</p> + +<p>All American farmers, of course, are not of the New variety. The country, +like the city, has its slums. But after having made allowance for +exceptions, it is still true that the United States is the native land of +the New Farmer. He is the most typical human product that this country has +produced, and the most important; for, in spite of its egotistical cities, +the United States is still a farm-based nation.</p> + +<p>There could be no cloth-mills without the wool and cotton of the farm; no +sugar factories without beets; no flour-mills without wheat; no +beef-packing industry without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> cattle. The real business that is now +swinging the whole nation ahead is not the ping-pong traffic of the Stock +Exchanges, but the steady output of twenty millions a day from the fields +and barn-yards. If this farm output were to be cut off, the towering +skyscrapers would fall and the gay palace-hotels would be as desolate as +the temple of Thebes.</p> + +<p>The brain-working farmer is the man behind prosperity. That is the Big +Fact of recent American history. It is he who pays the bills and holds up +the national structure in the whirlwind hour of panic. Last year, for +instance, while banks were tumbling, the non-hysterical farmer was quietly +gathering in a crop that was worth three times all the bank capital in the +United States; and since 1902 he and his soil have produced as much new +wealth as would support Uncle Sam, at his present rate of living, for +fifty years.</p> + +<p>What was called “McKinley Prosperity” was really created by the +agricultural boom of 1897. There had been a general crop failure in +Europe, and the price of wheat had soared above a dollar a bushel. Other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> +nations paid us twelve hundred millions for farm products; and this +unparalleled inpouring of foreign money made us the richest and busiest +nation in the world.</p> + +<p>The supreme fact about the American Farmer is that he has always been just +as intelligent and important as anyone else in the Republic. He put +fourteen of his sons in the White House; and he did his full share of the +working and fighting and thinking and inventing, all the way down from +George Washington to James Wilson.</p> + +<p>He climbed up by self-help. He got no rebates, nor franchises, nor +subsidies. The free land that was given him was worthless until he took +it; and he has all along been more hindered than helped by the meddling of +public officials.</p> + +<p>His best friend has been the maker of farm-machinery. But this is a family +matter. Four-fifths of the Harvester Kings were farmers’ sons; and the +biggest harvester factory is only a development of the small workshop that +always stood beside the barn. There are no two men who are more closely +linked together by the ties of blood and business than the farmer and the +man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> who makes his labour-saving machines. Neither one can hurt the other +without doing injury to himself.</p> + +<p>The inventor of the modern plough, Jethro Wood, was a wealthy Quaker +farmer of New York—a man of such masterful intelligence as to count Clay +and Webster among his friends. The late James Oliver, and David Bradley, +one of his greatest competitors, were born and bred near the furrowed +soil.</p> + +<p>McCormick built his first reaper in a blacksmith shop on a farm. So did +John F. Sieberling, William N. Whiteley, Lewis Miller and C. W. Marsh. And +the man who owned the first of the reaper factories, Dayton S. Morgan, +grew up amid the stumps of a New York farm.</p> + +<p>The American Farmer has always grown <i>ideas</i>, as well as corn and +potatoes. That is the secret of his prosperity. It was out in the +wheat-fields where the idea of a self-binder flashed upon the brain of +John F. Appleby; where Jacob Miller learned to improve the thresher and +George Esterley to build the header and Joseph F. Glidden to invent +barb-wire.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>Before 1850 there was some progress among farmers, but it was as slow as +molasses in Alaska. They were free and independent, and little else. They +had poor homes, poor farms, poor implements.</p> + +<p>Then came the gold-rush to California. What this event did for farmers and +the world can scarcely be exaggerated. It opened up the prairies, fed the +hungry banks with money, lured the farm labourers westward, and compelled +the farmers to use machinery.</p> + +<p>Three years later the Crimean War sent the price of wheat soaring, and the +farmers had a jubilee of prosperity. Away went the log-cabin, the ox-cart, +the grain-cradle, and the flail. In came the frame house, the spring +buggy, the reaper, and the thresher. The farmers began to buy +labour-saving devices. Better still, they began to invent them.</p> + +<p>There is one farm-bred man, named R. C. Haskins, in the Harvester Building +in Chicago, who, in his thirty years of salesmanship, has supervised the +selling of $275,000,000 worth of harvesters to American farmers. And as +for the amount of money represented by our farm machinery of all kinds, +now in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> use, it is very nearly a billion dollars—a total that no other +nation can touch.</p> + +<p>To measure American Farmers by the census is now an outgrown method, for +the reason that each farmer works with the power of five men. The farm has +become a factory. Four-fifths of its work is done by machinery, which +explains how we can produce one-fifth of the wheat of the world, half of +the cotton, and three-fourths of the corn, although we are only six per +cent. of the human race.</p> + +<p>The genie who built Aladdin’s palace in a night was the champion hustler +of the fairy tale countries. But he was not so tremendously superior to +the farm labourer who takes a can of gasolene and cuts fifty cords of wood +in a day, or to the man who milks a herd of sixty cows in two hours, by +machinery.</p> + +<p>To-day farming is not a drudgery. Rather it is a race—an exciting rivalry +between the different States. For years Illinois and Iowa have run neck +and neck in the raising of corn and oats. Minnesota carries the blue +ribbon for wheat, with Kansas breathless in second place. California has +shot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> to the front in the barley race. Texas and Louisiana are tied in the +production of rice. Kentucky is the tobacco champion; and New York holds +the record for hay and potatoes.</p> + +<p>To see the New Farmer at his best, I went to Iowa. No other State has +invested so much money—sixty millions—in labour-saving machinery, so it +can fairly claim to be the zenith of the farming world.</p> + +<p>Here there are twenty thousand women and three hundred thousand men who +have made farming a profession. They are producing wealth at the rate of +five hundred millions a year, nearly sixteen hundred dollars apiece. How? +By throwing the burden of drudgery upon machines.</p> + +<p>Iowa is not so old; she will be sixty-two, this year. She is not so large; +little England is larger. Yet, with her hog-money she could pay the +salaries of all the monarchs of Europe; and with one year’s corn crop she +could buy out the “Harvester Trust,” or build three New York Subways.</p> + +<p>When the Indians sold Iowa to Uncle Sam they got about eight cents an +acre. To give the price exactly, to a cent, it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> $2,877,547.87. When +this money was paid, there were statesmen who protested that it was too +much. Yet this amount was less than the Iowans got for last year’s colts; +it was less than one quarter of the value of the eggs in last years nests. +Every three months, the Iowa hen pays for Iowa.</p> + +<p>Through the courtesy of Mr. Harlan, of the Des Moines Historical Society, +I obtained the addresses of nine old settlers, who went into Iowa with +ox-carts, before 1850, and who are still living. I found that every one of +them had remained on the land and was prosperous. The poorest owned +$7,000, the richest $96,000; and their average wealth was $36,000.</p> + +<p>These fortunes are not made, as in France, by sacrificial economies. The +Iowan is noted as a high liver and a good spender. Here, for instance, is +the menu of a chance supper I enjoyed at the home of an Iowa farmer, nine +miles from Des Moines: Mashed potatoes, poached eggs, hot biscuits, white +bread, fresh butter, honey, jelly, peaches and cream, gooseberry pie, and +good coffee—all served on china, with fine linen tablecloth and napkins. +The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> man of the house was the son of a rack-rented Irish immigrant, who +had been reared “on potatoes and salt, mostly.”</p> + +<p>I found one young county, born since the Civil War, in which five thousand +farmers now own property worth seventy-five millions. They have fourteen +thousand horses, seventeen thousand sheep, sixty thousand cattle, and +ninety thousand hogs. In the furnishing of the homes in this county, so +its Auditor informs me, more than twenty-five thousand dollars have been +spent on the one item of pianos.</p> + +<p>In a small, out-of-the-way town, called Ames, I came upon a farmers’ +college—a veritable Harvard of the soil. Here, on a thousand acres which +fed the wild deer and buffalo in the days of Andrew Jackson, is a college +that equals Princeton and Vassar combined, in the number of its pupils. +Its farm machinery building is the largest of its kind. Five professors +are in charge, and it is a curious fact, showing how new the New Farmer +is, that these professors are obliged to teach without a text-book. As +yet, there is no such thing in the world as a text-book on farm machinery.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>The Iowans pay half a million dollars a year to sustain this college. They +pay it cheerfully. They pay it with a hurrah. Why? Because it is the +biggest money-maker in the State. One little professor, named Holden—the +smallest of the whole hundred and forty, is revered by the Iowans as a +King Midas of the cornfield. He has shown them how to grow ten bushels +more per acre, by using a better quality of seed. This one <i>idea</i>, in a +State where every fourth dollar is a corn dollar, meant an extra twenty +millions last year.</p> + +<p>First in corn, first in farm machinery, and first in the number of her +banks! That is Iowa. There are a few of her villages that have no banks, +but they are conscious of their disgrace. They feel naked and ashamed. In +all, there are as many banks as post-offices, very nearly; and they are +crammed with enough wealth to build three Panama Canals.</p> + +<p>“Money is a trifle tight just now,” said an Iowa banker. This was last +September. “You see, at this time of year, the farm labourers cause a +drain on the currency by keeping their wages in their pockets.” This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> +surprising fact did not seem surprising to the banker. He was himself bred +on the soil—the son of a farm-hand who had become a rich farmer. But to +the financiers of Europe, what an incredible thing is this—that the wages +of the farm-labourers should sway the money market up and down.</p> + +<p>The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city of farm-bred people. It is so +young that some of its old men remember when wolf-hunting was good where +its one skyscraper stands to-day. It has no ancient history and no +souvenirs. A little while ago a lot of industrious people came here poor, +and now they are prosperous and still busy—that is the story of Des +Moines in a sentence.</p> + +<p>In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized +painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as +this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles +an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles +of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months +than all the railways of ancient India made last year.</p> + +<p>Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> Iowans pay the total +self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the +summer’s hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made +Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance +companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its +details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere +city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about +farmers.</p> + +<p>Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample +group—half educators and half statesmen—John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith +Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough, +Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A. +Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. Cummins and our Official +Farmer—James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa. +(One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three +hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand +doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women +who are now alive.</p> + +<p>“I can remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county,” +said Governor Cummins, who is still far from being a man of years.</p> + +<p>“I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a +dozen and butter for four cents a pound,” said John Cownie—a well-known +figure at the Des Moines Capitol.</p> + +<p>One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high +civilisation—a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation +of a thousand years.</p> + +<p>And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story—from +ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The +various States are only patches of one vast grassy plain where</p> + +<p> +<span style="margin-left: 3.5em;">“painted harvesters, fleet after fleet,</span><br /> +Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat.”<br /> +</p> + +<p>“My first experience with the ‘New Farmer,’ as you call him, was in +Texas,” said a Kansas City business man. “I had taken an agency for +harvesters in a section<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> of Texas that was bigger than several dozen +Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first +morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came +a big, roughly dressed man. ‘Come here, Bill,’ said the banker. ‘Maybe +you want some farm machinery.’</p> + +<p>“‘Maybe I do,’ said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on +talking with the banker.</p> + +<p>“Ten minutes later the big fellow looked up from the catalogue and +asked—‘How much do you want for ten of these binders?’ I nearly had a +spell of heart failure, but I gasped the price. He said—‘all right; send +’em along.’</p> + +<p>“‘Don’t you worry about Bill’s credit,’ said the banker, seeing I looked +dazed. ‘He has more than $100,000 in this bank right now.’</p> + +<p>“This was my cue to get busy with the big farmer, and before he left the +bank he had bought a thresher, four traction engines and half a dozen +ploughs.”</p> + +<p>Harvesting by machinery has actually become cheaper than the ancient +method<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> of harvesting by slaves. This surprising fact was first brought to +the notice of Europeans during the Chicago World’s Fair, when forty-seven +foreign Commissioners were taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in North +Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-field very nearly a hundred square miles in +extent, with three hundred self-binders clicking out the music of the +harvest. There were no serfs—no drudges—no barefooted women. And yet +they were told that the labour-cost of reaping the wheat was <span class="smcaplc">LESS THAN A +CENT A BUSHEL</span>.</p> + +<p>It has now become impossible to reap the world’s wheat by hand. As well +might we try to carry coal from mines to factories in baskets. Merely to +have gathered in our own cereal and hay of last year’s growing, would have +been a ten days’ job for every man and woman in the United States, between +the ages of twenty and twenty-six. But even if it had been possible to +return to hand-labour, in the production of the world’s wheat, the extra +cost would have swollen, last year, to a total of $330,000,000—so I am +told by a Wisconsin professor who has made a careful study of the costs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> +of harvesting. This amount is more than equal to the entire revenue of the +International Harvester Company, in the five years of its existence.</p> + +<p>Roughly speaking, the time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been +reduced from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of machinery. Hay now +requires four hours, instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours, instead of +sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-eight hours, instead of one hundred and +nine.</p> + +<p>It is machinery that has so vastly increased the size of the average +American farm. In India, where a farmer’s whole outfit can be bought for +ten dollars, the average farm is half an acre or less. In France and +Germany it is five acres. In England it is nine. But in the United +States—the home of farm machinery, it is one hundred and fifty acres.</p> + +<p>Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American +farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely +ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the +man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> aristocrat of the +West. His year’s work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and +sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting +on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After +harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down +for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East.</p> + +<p>But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country +over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy +to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat; +another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on. +But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the +farmers’ profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking; +and in four years they had changed over to the new policy of <i>Diversified +Farming</i>.</p> + +<p>Instead of putting all their work upon one crop, they planted from three +to a dozen different crops each year. They manufactured their corn into +cattle. They gave the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisation. +They learned to plant better seed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> and to pay attention to the Weather +Bureau. They studied the market reports. And, best of all, they swung over +from muscle to machinery, until to-day the value of the machinery on +American farms is fully a thousand millions.</p> + +<p>All this amazing progress that I have been describing is by no means the +best that the New Farmer will do. It is merely what he has done by the aid +of machinery. What he will do by the aid of <span class="smcap">Science</span> remains to be seen.</p> + +<p>Scientific agriculture is young. It has had to wait until machinery +prepared the way, by giving the farmers time to think, and money to spend. +The first scientist who took notice of farming was the Frenchman, +Lavoisier. He found out the composition of water in 1783, and was in the +midst of many discoveries, when a Paris mob hustled him to the guillotine. +The famous Liebig next appeared and founded the first agricultural +experiment station. Then came Berthelot—the father of synthetic +chemistry, with his sensational announcement—“The soil is alive.”</p> + +<p>To-day the New Farmer finds himself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> touched by Science on all sides. He +knows that there are more living things in one pinch of rich soil than +there are people on the whole globe. He knows that he can take half a +dozen handfuls of earth from different parts of his farm, mix them +together, send one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out exactly the kind +of crop that will give him the best harvest. And more, now that science +has given him a peep into Nature’s factory, he can even feel a sense of +kinship between himself and his acres, because he knows that the same +elements that redden his blood are painting the green hues on his fields +and forests.</p> + +<p>There are now fifteen thousand New Farmers who have graduated from +agricultural colleges; and since the late Professor W. C. Atwater opened +the first American experiment station in 1875, fifty others have sprung +into vigorous life. There is also at Washington an Agricultural Department +which has become the greatest aggregation of farm-scientists in the world. +To maintain this Department Uncle Sam pays grudgingly eleven millions a +year. He pays much more than this to give food and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> blankets to a horde of +lazy Indians, or for the building of two or three warships. But it is at +least more than is being spent on the New Farmer in any other country.</p> + +<p>Step by step farming is becoming a sure and scientific profession. The +risks and uncertainties that formerly tossed the farmer back and forth, +between hope and despair, are being mastered. The Weather Bureau, which +sent half a million warnings last year to the farmers, has already become +so skilful that six-sevenths of its predictions come true. In Kansas, +wheat-growing has become so sure that there has been no failure for +thirteen years. And in the vast South-West, the trick of irrigation is +changing the man-killing desert into a Farmers’ paradise, where there is +nothing so punctual as the crops.</p> + +<p>Already gasolene engines are in use among the New Farmers. The +International Harvester Company made twenty-five thousand of them last +year at Milwaukee, without supplying the demand. These engines, in the +near future, will be operated with alcohol, which the farmers can distil +from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> This is no dream, as there +are now six thousand alcohol engines in use on the farms of Germany alone.</p> + +<p>When this Age of Alcohol arrives, the making of the New Farmer will be +very nearly complete. <i>He will then grow his own power, and know how to +harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil.</i></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<p><b>Transcriber’s Note:</b></p> + +<p>Images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break.</p> + +<p>The text in the list of illustrations is presented as in the original text, but the links +navigate to the page number closest to the illustration’s loaction in this document.</p> + + +<p>Other than the corrections noted by hover information, printer’s +inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained.</p> + +<p>Punctuation has been corrected without note.</p> + +<p> </p> +<hr class="full" /> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF THE REAPER***</p> +<p>******* This file should be named 32702-h.txt or 32702-h.zip *******</p> +<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br /> +<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/2/7/0/32702">http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/7/0/32702</a></p> +<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed.</p> + +<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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