This 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.
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 ten minutes a bushel.
“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.”
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.
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.
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 of all nations a dream—a Millennium of Prosperity.
This long Age of Hunger outlived the great nations of antiquity. Why?
Because they went at the problem of progress in the wrong way.
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 Bread.
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 her bread-tools were no better than those of the
barbarians whom she despised.
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.
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.
There are men and women now alive who can remember the hunger year of
1837, 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Then came the Reaper.
This unappreciated machine, about which so little has been written,
changed the face of the world. It moved the civilised nations up out of
the bread line. It made prosperity possible; and elevated the whole
struggle for existence to a higher plane.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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 young McCormick’s reaper was “a right, smart
curious sort of thing, but it won’t come to much.”
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.
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 much money as would
buy half of the New York Subway.
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.
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.
The one persistent ambition of his life was to invent a reaper. It is also
true, and 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.
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.
“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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“That young fellow is ahead of me,” said the amazed teacher.
At fifteen Cyrus had invented a new grain 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 the first practical American reaper. 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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!”
THE VIRGINIAN BIRTHPLACE OF THE McCORMICK REAPER.
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.
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.
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
energy and uprightness that he rode away with the dreaded paper still in
his pocket.
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.
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.
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 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.
Here he saw the prairies. 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A MODEL OF THE FIRST PRACTICAL REAPER
One morning, in the little town of 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.
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.
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 that ran in the wrong direction; but it was busy. 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.
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 ——
“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 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.
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.
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.
Suddenly, McCormick looked up from his work in the factory, and saw that
he was not only rich, but famous. One of his reapers had taken the Grand
Prize at a World’s Fair in England. Even the London Times, 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.”
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!
From first to last, the stout-hearted old Reaper King received no favours
from Congress or the Patent Office. He built 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 $1,300,00. 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.
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
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.
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.
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?”
Mr. McCormick turned to his wife and said, “Which shall it be?” It was a
breathless moment for the workmen.
“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.”
“Start The Big Engine,” 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.
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.
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.
Most of the really great men of his day were his friends—Horace Greeley,
for 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.
“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.
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 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.
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. He had to build it as he climbed.
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,
constructing a machine to mould candles, a friend said to him:
“Hussey, why don’t you invent a machine to reap grain?”
“Are there no such machines?” he asked in surprise.
“No,” said his friend, “and whoever can invent one will make a fortune.”
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
“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 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.’
“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.’”
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
“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.”
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. 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.”
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.
“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.”
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 down, in this same letter, he writes—“Meet
Hussey in Maryland and put him down.”
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.
“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.”
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.
It was this inward spiritual force that made him irresistible. Small men
shrivelled up when he spoke to them.
“The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,” said
one of his attorneys. “If any other man on this earth ever had such a
will, certainly I have not heard of it.”
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.
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.
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?
Could we have swung through four years of Civil War, as we did, without
famine or national insolvency?
Could the West have risen toward its present greatness if its billion
acres had to be harvested by hand?
Could the railways alone, which produce nothing, have given us more food
for less work—the first necessity of a civilised democracy?
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?
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?
As Seward once said, it was the reaper that “pushed the American frontier
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.”
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.
“The reaper is to the North what the slave is to the South,” said Edwin M.
Stanton in 1861. “It releases our young men to do battle for the Union,
and at the same time keeps up the supply of the nation’s bread.”
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.
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 current of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the
Mississippi to the sea.
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.
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.
Such, in one country, is the amazing result which the Reaper has helped to
create. 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.”
