Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work
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Title: Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work
Author: Herbert Newton Casson
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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
His Life and Work
[Illustration: C. H. McCormick (signature)]
CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
His Life and Work
by
HERBERT N. CASSON
Author of
"The Romance of Steel," "The Romance of the Reaper," etc.
Illustrated
[Illustration]
Chicago
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1909
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1909
Published October, 1909
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
The Lakeside Press
R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company
Chicago
INTRODUCTION
Whoever wishes to understand the making of the United States must read
the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one man so truly represented
the dawn of the industrial era,--the grapple of the pioneer with the
crudities of a new country, the replacing of muscle with machinery, and
the establishment of better ways and better times in farm and city
alike. Beginning exactly one hundred years ago, the life of McCormick
spanned the heroic period of our industrial advancement, when great
things were done by great individuals. To know McCormick is to know what
type of man it was who created the United States of the nineteenth
century. And now that a new century has arrived, with a new type of
business development, it may be especially instructive to review a life
that was so structural and so fundamental.
As Professor Simon Newcomb has observed, "It is impressive to think how
few men we should have had to remove from the earth during the past
three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization." From
this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more
indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not
picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor. But he was as
necessary as bread. He fed his country as truly as Washington created it
and Lincoln preserved it. He abolished our agricultural peasantry so
effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries
ever since. And he added an immense province to the new empire of mind
over matter, the expansion of which has been and is now the highest and
most important of all human endeavors.
As the master builder of the modern business of manufacturing farm
machinery, McCormick set in motion so many forces of human betterment
that the fruitfulness of his life can never be fully told. There are
to-day in all countries more than one hundred thousand patents for
inventions that were meant to lighten the labor of the farmer. And the
cereal crop of the world has risen with incredible gains, until this
year its value will be not far from ten thousand millions of
dollars,--very nearly the equivalent of all the gold in coin and jewelry
and bullion.
So, if there is not power and fascination in this story, it will be the
fault of the story-teller, and not of his theme. The story itself is
destined to be told and retold. It cannot be forgotten, because it is
one of those rare life-histories that blazon out the peculiar genius of
the nation under the stress of a new experience. As it is passed on from
generation to generation, it may finally be polished into an Epic of the
Wheat,--the tale of Man's long wrestle with Famine, and how he won at
last by creating a world-wide system for the production and distribution
of the Bread.
H. N. C.
CHICAGO, _September 1, 1909_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER 1
II. THE McCORMICK HOME 13
III. THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER 26
IV. SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING 48
V. THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS 68
VI. THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS 91
VII. THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER 105
VIII. THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE 123
IX. McCORMICK AS A MANUFACTURER 139
X. CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN 154
XI. THE REAPER AND THE NATION 188
XII. THE REAPER AND THE WORLD 203
XIII. GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD 234
INDEX 249
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK _Frontispiece_
OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA 14
THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM, ROCKBRIDGE
COUNTY, VIRGINIA 18
PORTRAIT OF ROBERT McCORMICK 22
PORTRAIT OF MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK 24
NEW PROVIDENCE CHURCH, ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA 28
FACSIMILES FROM MANUSCRIPT BY MR. McCORMICK, GIVING HIS OWN
ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THE REAPER 30
FIRST PRACTICAL REAPING MACHINE 34
THE FIELD ON WHICH THE FIRST McCORMICK REAPER WAS TRIED,
WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA 38
INTERIOR OF BLACKSMITH SHOP IN WHICH C. H. McCORMICK BUILT
HIS FIRST REAPER 42
REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA 50
REAPING WITH SICKLES IN ALGERIA 56
REAPING WITH CRADLES IN ILLINOIS 60
AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA REAPER 64
THE McCORMICK REAPER OF 1847, ON WHICH SEATS WERE PLACED FOR
THE DRIVER AND THE RAKER 70
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1839 76
PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE THE
CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH
STREET BRIDGE 82
MEN OF PROGRESS 96
THE FIRST McCORMICK SELF-RAKE REAPING MACHINE 112
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858 120
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1867 136
McCORMICK REAPER CUTTING ON A SIDE HILL IN PENNSYLVANIA 144
REAPER DRAWN BY OXEN IN ALGERIA 150
THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN 166
HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON 174
PORTRAIT OF CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1883 182
THE WORKS OF THE McCORMICK HARVESTING MACHINE COMPANY 190
McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA 196
CHART SHOWING RELATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF VALUES BY PRODUCING
COUNTRIES OF 1908 OF WORLD'S PRODUCTION OF FIVE
PRINCIPAL GRAINS 206
CHART SHOWING RELATIVE VALUES IN 1908 OF THE WORLD'S
PRODUCTION OF THE FIVE PRINCIPAL GRAINS 206
MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY HARVESTERS
IN LINE 214
HARVESTING IN ROUMANIA 222
HARVESTING HEAVY GRAIN, SOUTH AMERICA 230
INDIANS REAPING THEIR HARVEST, WHITE EARTH, MINNESOTA 236
A HARVEST SCENE UPON A RUSSIAN ESTATE 242
CYRUS HALL McCORMICK HIS LIFE AND WORK
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER
Either by a very strange coincidence, or as a phenomenon of the instinct
of self-preservation, the year 1809, which was marked by famine and
tragedy in almost every quarter of the globe, was also a most prolific
birthyear for men of genius. Into this year came Poe, Blackie, and
Tennyson, the poet laureates of America, Scotland, and England; Chopin
and Mendelssohn, the apostles of sweeter music; Lincoln, who kept the
United States united; Baron Haussemann, the beautifier of Paris;
Proudhon, the prophet of communism; Lord Houghton, who did much in
science, and Darwin, who did most; FitzGerald, who made known the
literature of Persia; Bonar, who wrote hymns; Kinglake, who wrote
histories; Holmes, who wrote sentiment and humor; Gladstone, who
ennobled the politics of the British empire; and McCormick, who gave the
world cheap bread, and whose life-story is now set before us in the
following pages.
None of these eminent men, except Lincoln, began life in as remote and
secluded a corner of the world as McCormick. His father's farm was at
the northern edge of Rockbridge County, Virginia, in a long, thin strip
of fairly fertile land that lay crumpled between the Blue Ridge on the
east and the Alleghanies on the west. It was eighteen miles south of the
nearest town of Staunton, and a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.
The whole region was a quiet, industrious valley, whose only local
tragedy had been an Indian massacre in 1764, in which eighty white
settlers had been put to death by a horde of savages.
The older men and women of 1809 could remember when wolf-heads were used
as currency; and when the stocks and the ducking stool stood in the main
street of Staunton. Also, they were fond of telling how the farmers of
the valley, when they heard that the Revolution had begun in
Massachusetts, carted 137 barrels of flour to Frederick, one hundred
miles north, and ordered it sent forthwith to the needy people of
Boston. This grew to be one of the most popular tales of local
history,--an epic of the patriots who fought for liberty, not with
gunpowder but flour.
By 1809 the more severe hardships of the pioneer days had been overcome.
Houses were still built of logs, but they were larger and better
furnished. In the McCormick homestead, for instance, there was a parlor
which had the dignity of mahogany furniture, and the luxury of books and
a carpet. The next-door county of Augusta boasted of thirteen carriages
and one hundred and two cut-glass decanters. And the chief sources of
excitement had evolved from Indian raids and wolf-hunts into elections,
lotteries, and litigation.
It was perhaps fortunate for the child McCormick that he was born in
such an out-of-the-way nook, for the reason that in 1809 almost the
whole civilized world was in a turmoil. In England mobs of unemployed
men and women were either begging for bread or smashing the new machines
that had displaced them in the factories. In the Tyrol, sixty thousand
peasants, who had revolted from the intolerable tyranny of the
Bavarians, were being beaten into submission. In Servia, the Turks were
striking down a rebellion by building a pyramid of thirty thousand
Servian skulls,--a tragic pile which may still be seen midway between
Belgrade and Stamboul. Sweden was being trampled under the feet of a
Russian army; and the greater part of Holland, Austria, Germany, and
Spain had been so scourged by the hosts of Napoleon as to be one vast
shamble of misery and blood.
In the United States there was no war, but there certainly did exist an
abnormal surplus of adversity. The young republic, which had fewer white
citizens than the two cities of New York and Chicago possess to-day, was
being terrorized in the West by the Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh; and
its flag had been flouted by England, France, and the Barbary pirates.
Its total revenue was much less than the value of last year's hay crop
in Vermont. It was desperately poor, with its people housed for the most
part in log cabins, clothed in homespun, and fed every winter on food
that would cause a riot in any modern penitentiary.
There was no such thing known, except in dreams, as the use of machinery
in the cultivation of the soil. The average farmer, in all civilized
countries, believed that an iron plow would poison the soil. He planted
his grain by the phases of the moon; kept his cows outside in winter;
and was unaware that glanders was contagious. Joseph Jenks, of Lynn, had
invented the scythe in 1655, "for the more speedy cutting of grasse";
and a Scotchman had improved it into the grain cradle. But the greater
part of the grain in all countries was, a century ago, being cut by the
same little hand sickle that the Egyptians had used on the banks of the
Nile and the Babylonians in the valley of the Euphrates.
The wise public men of that day knew how urgent was the need of better
methods in farming. Fifteen years before, George Washington had said,
"I know of no pursuit in which more real and important service can be
rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture." But it was
generally believed that the task was hopeless; and any effort to
encourage inventors had hitherto been a failure. An English society, for
instance, had offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for a
better method of reaping grain, and the only answer it received was from
a traveller who had seen the Belgians reaping with a two-foot scythe and
a cane; the cane was used to push the grain back before it was cut, so
that more grain could be cut at a blow. As to whether or not he received
the prize for this discovery is not recorded.
The city of New York in 1809 was not larger than the Des Moines of
to-day, and not nearly so well built and prosperous. Two miles to the
north of it, through swamps and forests, lay the clearing that is now
known as Herald Square. There was no street railway, nor cooking range,
nor petroleum, nor savings bank, nor friction match, nor steel plow,
neither in New York nor anywhere else. And the one pride and boast of
the city was Fulton's new steamboat, the _Clermont_, which could waddle
to Albany and back, if all went well, in three days or possibly four.
As for social conditions, they were so hopelessly bad that few had the
heart to improve them. The house that we call a "slum tenement" to-day
would have made an average American hotel in 1809. Rudeness and rowdyism
were the rule. Drunkenness was as common, and as little considered, as
smoking is at the present time; there was no organized opposition to it
of any kind, except one little temperance society at Saratoga. There
were no sewers, and much of the water was drawn from putrid wells. Many
faces were pitted with small-pox. Cholera and yellow jack or strange
hunger-fevers cut wide swaths of death again and again among the
helpless people. There was no science, of course, and no sanitation, and
no medical knowledge except a medley of drastic measures which were apt
to be as dangerous as the disease.
The desperate struggle to survive appears to have been so intense that
there was little or no social sympathy. There was very little pity for
the pauper,--he was auctioned off to be half starved by the lowest
bidder; and for the criminal there was no feeling except the utmost
repulsion and abhorrence. It was found, for instance, in 1809, that in
the jail in New York there were seventy-two women, white and black, in
one chairless, bedless room, all kept in order by a keeper with a whip,
and fed like cattle from a tub of mush, some eating with spoons and some
with cups and some with their unwashed hands. And the men's room of that
jail, says this report, "is worse than the women's."
Also, in 1809, the chronic quantity of misery had been terribly
augmented by the Embargo,--that most ruinous invention of President
Jefferson, whereby American ships were swept from the sea, with a loss
to capital of twelve millions a year, and a loss to labor of thirty
thousand places of employment. According to this amazing act of
political folly, every market-boat sailing from New Jersey to New
York--every sailboat or canoe--had to give bail to the federal
government before it dared to leave the dock.
Whatever flimsy little structure of industry had been built up in thirty
years of independence, was thrown prostrate by this Embargo. A hundred
thousand men stood on the streets with helpless hands, begging for work
or bread. The jails were jammed with debtors,--1,300 in New York alone.
The newspapers were overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee-houses
were empty. The ships lay mouldering at the docks. In those
hand-to-mouth days there was no piled-up reserve of food or wealth,--no
range of towering wheat-banks at every port; and the seaboard cities lay
for a time as desolate as though they had been ravaged by a pestilence.
In that darkest year the hardscrabble little republic learned and
remembered one of its most important lessons,--the fact that liberty and
independence are not enough. Here it was, an absolutely free
nation,--_the only free civilized country in the world_,--and yet as
miserable and poor and hungry as though it were a mere province of a
European empire. So, by degrees, there came a change in the American
point of view,--a swing from politicalism to industrialism. The mass of
the people were now surfeited with oratory and politics and war. They
began to settle down to hard facts and hard work. Instead of declaiming
about the rights of man, they began to build roads and weave cloth and
organize stock companies. Slowly they came to realize that a second
Revolution must be wrought,--a Revolution that would enable them to
write a Declaration of Independence against Hunger and Hardship and Hand
Labor.
Up to the year 1809 the chief topics of interest in American
legislatures and grocery stores were the blockades, the Embargo, the
treaties, the badness of Napoleon, the blunders of Jefferson, and the
rudeness of England and France. But after that year the chief topics of
interest came to be of a wholly different sort. They were such as the
tariff, the currency, the building of factories and canals, the opening
of public lands, the problem of slavery, and the development of the
West. The hardy, victorious little nation began to talk less and work
more; and so by a natural evolution of thought the era of George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson came to an end, and the era of Robert
Fulton and Peter Cooper and Cyrus Hall McCormick was in its dawn.
From 1810 to 1820 there was a rush to the land. Twenty million acres
were sold, in most cases for two dollars an acre. Thousands of men who
had been sailors turned their backs on the sea and learned to till the
soil. Town laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day,
tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon scraps of land
that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the
utmost energy and perseverance,--_but with what tools?_ With the wooden
plow, the sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the same rude hand-labor
tools that the nations of antiquity had tried to farm with,--the tools
of failure and slavery and famine.
Such was the predicament of this republic for the first seventy-five
years of its life. It could not develop beyond the struggle for food. It
was chained to the bread-line. It could not feed itself. Not even
nine-tenths of its people could produce enough grain to satisfy its
hunger. Again and again, until 1858, wheat had to be imported by this
nation of farmers. So, as we now look back over those basic years, from
the summit of the twentieth century, we can see how timely an event it
was that in the dark year 1809 the inventor of the Reaper was born.
CHAPTER II
THE McCORMICK HOME
IF we wish to solve the riddle of the Reaper,--to know why it was not
invented in any of the older nations that rose to greatness and perished
in so many instances for lack of bread,--we can find the key to the
answer in the home and the ancestry of the McCormicks. We shall see that
the family into which he was born represented in the highest degree that
new species of farmer,--self-reliant, studious, enterprising, and
inventive,--which was developed in the pioneer period of American
history.
Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was in his most prosperous days
the owner of four farms, having in all 1,800 acres. But his acres were
only one-half of his interests. He owned as well two grist-mills, two
sawmills, a smelting-furnace, a distillery, and a blacksmith-shop. He
did much more than till the soil. He hammered iron and shaped wood, and
did both well, as those can testify who have seen an iron crane and
walnut cabinet that were made by his hands. More than this, he invented
new types of farm machinery,--a hemp-brake, a clover huller, a bellows,
and a threshing-machine.
The little log workshop still stands where Robert McCormick and his sons
hammered and tinkered on rainy days. It is about twenty-four feet
square, with an uneven floor, and a heavy door that was hung in place by
home-made nails and home-made hinges. There was a forge on either side
of the chimney, so that two men could work at the same time; and one
small rusted anvil is all that now remains of its equipment.
[Illustration: OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA
In this shop the first practical reaping machine was built by Cyrus Hall
McCormick in 1831]
As for the McCormick homestead itself, there were so many manufacturing
activities in it that it was literally half a home and half a factory.
Shoes were cobbled, cotton, flax, and wool were spun into yarn, woven
into cloth, and fashioned into clothes for the whole family. The
stockings and mitts and caps were all home-made, and so was the cradle
in which the eight children were rocked. What with the moulding of
candles, and sewing of carpet-rags, and curing of hams, and boiling
of soap, and drying of herbs, and stringing of apples, the McCormick
home was practically a school of many trades for the people who lived
under its roof.
Robert McCormick was an educated man. He was not at all like the poor
serfs who tilled the soil of Europe. He belonged to the same general
class as those other eminent farmers,--Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
Webster, and Clay. He was a reader of deep books and a student of
astronomy. Lawyers and clergymen would frequently drive to his house to
consult with him. And in mechanical pursuits he had an unusual degree of
skill, having been born the son of a weaver and accustomed from babyhood
to the use of machinery.
He was a gentle, reflective man, with a genius for self-reliance in any
great or little emergency. When a new stone church was built, and he
found that his pew was so dark that he could not see to read the hymns,
he promptly cut a small window in the wall,--a peculiarity which is
still pointed out to visitors. On another occasion, with this same
spirit of resourcefulness, he drove the spectre of yellow fever from
the home. This dreaded disease was gathering in a full harvest in the
farm-houses of the county. It had cut down three of Mrs. McCormick's
family,--her father, mother, and brother,--and had swung its fatal
scythe toward the boy Cyrus, who was then five years of age. When the
doctor was called, he insisted that the child should be bled. "But you
bled all the others, and they died," said Robert McCormick quietly;
"I'll have no more bleedings." No remedy for yellow fever, except
bleeding, was known to the doctors of a century ago, so Robert McCormick
at once invented a remedy. He devised a treatment of hot baths, hot
teas, and bitter herbs; and Cyrus was rescued from the fever and
restored to perfect health.
Such a man as Robert McCormick would have been practically impossible in
any other country at that time. There, in that isolated hollow of the
Virginian mountains, he was a citizen of a free country. His vote had
helped to make Thomas Jefferson President. He was a proprietor, not a
serf nor a tenant. He was not compelled to divide up every cord of wood
and bushel of wheat with a king or a landlord. Whatever he earned was
his own. He was an American; and thus, in the endless chain of cause and
effect, we can trace the origin of the Reaper back, if we wish, to
George Washington and Christopher Columbus.
The whole spirit of the young republic pushed towards the invention of
labor-saving machinery,--towards replacing the hoe with the steel plow,
the needle with the sewing-machine, the puddling-furnace with the
Bessemer converter, the sickle with the Reaper. And it is fair to say
that the social forces that represented the American spirit were focused
to a remarkable degree in the home in which Cyrus H. McCormick had his
birth and his education.
There was another contributing influence, too, in the making of
McCormick,--the fact that the blood of his father and mother came to him
in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this inheritance that endowed
him with the tenacity and unconquerable resiliency that enabled him not
only to invent a new machine, but to create a new industry and hold
fast to it against all comers.
The Scotch-Irish! The full story of what the United States owes to this
fire-hardened race has never yet been told,--it is a tale that will some
day be expanded into a fascinating volume of American history. It is not
possible to understand either the character or the success of McCormick
without knowing the Scotch-Irish influences that shaped him.
The one man who did more to launch the Scotch-Irish on their conquering
way, so it appears, was John Knox. This preacher-statesman, "who never
feared the face of man," forced Queen Mary from her throne, and
established self-government and a pure religion in Scotland, about
seventy-five years after the discovery of America. This brought English
armies down upon the Scotch, and for very nearly two centuries the
struggle was bitter and desperate, the Scotch refusing to compromise or
to bate one jot or tittle of a covenant which many of them had signed
with their blood.
[Illustration: THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM,
ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
At the height of this conflict, about 300,000 of these Scotch
Covenanters left their ravaged country and set out in a fleet of little
vessels for the north of Ireland. Here they settled in the barren and
boggy province of Ulster, and presto! in the course of two generations
Ulster became the most prosperous, moral, and intelligent section of the
British empire. Its people were, beyond a doubt, the best educated
masses of that period, either in Great Britain or anywhere else. They
were the most skilful of farmers. They wove woollen cloth and the finest
of linen. They built schools and churches and factories. But in 1698,
the English Parliament, jealous of such progressiveness, passed laws
against their manufacturing, and Ulster was overrun, as Scotland had
been, with the police and the soldiery of England.
The Scotch-Irish fought, of course, even against such odds. They had
never learned how to submit. But as the devastation of Ulster continued,
they resolved to do as their great-grandfathers had done,--emigrate to a
new country. They had heard good reports of America, through several of
their leaders who had been banished there by the British government. So
they packed up their movable property, and set out across the wide
uncharted Atlantic Ocean in an exodus for liberty of industry and
liberty of conscience.
By the year 1776 there were more than 500,000 of the Scotch-Irish in
this country. They went first across the Alleghanies, into the new lands
of western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Beyond all
question, they were the hardiest and ablest founders of the republic.
They dissolved the rule of the Cavaliers in Virginia; and in the little
hamlet of Mecklenburg they planned the first defiance of Great Britain
and struck the key-note of the Revolution. They gave Washington
thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet,
and three out of five judges of the first Supreme Court.
Of all classes of settlers in the thirteen colonies, they were the best
prepared and most willing for the struggle with England, for the reason
that they had begun to fight for liberty two hundred and fifty years
before the battle of Bunker Hill. They were not amateurs in the work of
revolution. They were veterans. And so, because they were pioneers and
patriots by nature and inheritance, the Scotch-Irish became, in the
words of John Fiske, "the main strength of our American democracy."
Naturally, they were pathfinders in industry as well as in the matter of
self-government, as many of them had been manufacturers in Ireland.
"Thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers in Ulster went to seek
their bread in America," writes Froude, "and they carried their art and
their tools with them." In one instance, by the failure of the woollen
trade, 20,000 of them were driven to the United States. As might have
been expected, these Scotch-Irish Americans have produced not only five
of our Presidents, but also such merchants as A. T. Stewart; such
publishers as Harper, Bonner, Scribner, and McClurg; and such inventors
as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCormick. They were possibly the
first large body of people who had ever been driven from manufacturing
into farming; and it was not at all surprising, therefore, that the new
profession of making farm machinery should have been born upon a
Scotch-Irish farm.
As for Cyrus H. McCormick, he represented the fourth generation of
American McCormicks. His great-grandfather, Thomas McCormick, quit
Ulster in the troublous days of 1735. He was a soldier at Londonderry;
and later became noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania. His son
Robert, who moved south to Virginia, carried a rifle for American
independence at the battle of Guilford Court-house, North Carolina, in
1781. He was a farmer and weaver by occupation, a typical Ulsterman,
whose farm was a busy workshop of invention and manufacturing.
[Illustration: ROBERT McCORMICK]
On his mother's side, too, Cyrus McCormick had behind him a line of
battling Scotch-Irish. She was the daughter of a Virginian farmer named
Patrick Hall, one of whose forefathers had been driven out of Armagh by
the massacre of 1641. Patrick Hall was the leader of the old-school
Presbyterians in his region of Virginia. So rigid was he in his loyalty
to the faith of the Covenanters, that once when a new minister came
to preach in the little kirk, and lined out a Watts hymn instead of a
psalm of David, Patrick Hall picked up his hat and strode out, followed
by a goodly part of the congregation. He at once built upon his own farm
a new church of limestone, in which no such levity as hymn-singing was
permitted.
Cyrus McCormick's mother inherited her father's strength of character,
without his severity. She was a thorough Celt, impulsive, free-spoken,
and highly imaginative. Judging from the stories about her that are
remembered in the neighborhood, it is evident that she was a woman of
exceptional quality of mind. She was not as studious as her husband, but
quicker and more ambitious. As a girl, she had been strikingly handsome,
with a tall and commanding figure. She was saving and shrewd, with the
Scotch-Irish passion for "getting ahead." She allowed no idle moments in
the home. If the children were dressed before breakfast was ready, out
they went to cut wood or weed the garden. She knew the profession of
housekeeping in all its old-fashioned complexity; and she worked at it
from dawn to starlight, with no rest except the relief of flitting from
one task to another.
"Mrs. McCormick came riding by our farm one day," said an aged neighbor,
"at a time when my father and mother were hurrying to save some hay from
a coming rain-storm. 'If you don't hurry up you'll be too late,' she
said; and then tying her horse to the fence she picked up a rake and
helped with the hay until it was all in the barn. That's the kind of
woman she was,--always full of energy and ready to help."
[Illustration: MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK]
But Mrs. McCormick was much more than industrious. She had a fine pride
in the ownership of beautiful things,--flowers and handsome clothes and
silverware and mahogany furniture. Her flock of peacocks was one of the
sights of the county; and in her later life, when she was for ten years
the sole manager of the farm, she was accustomed to drive about in a
wonderful carriage with folding steps, drawn by prancing horses and
driven by a stately colored coachman,--an equipage of so much style
and grandeur that it is still remembered by the neighbors. "She loved to
drive fast," said one old lady; "and I was much impressed as a little
girl with the startling way in which her horses would come clattering
and dancing up to the door."
Thus there was in the McCormick home the spiritual and imaginative
element that was vital to the development of a man whose whole life was
a battle against the prejudices and "impossibilities" of the world.
Cyrus McCormick was predestined, we may legitimately say, by the
conditions of his birth, to accomplish his great work. From his father
he had a specific training as an inventor; from his mother he had
executive ability and ambition; from his Scotch-Irish ancestry he had
the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that
environed his home came the call for the Reaper, to lighten the heavy
drudgery of the harvest.
CHAPTER III
THE INVENTION OF THE REAPER
Not far from the McCormick homestead was the "Old Field School," built
of logs and with a part of one of the upper logs cut out to provide a
window. Here the boy Cyrus sat on a slab bench and studied five books as
though they were the only books in the world,--Murray's Grammar,
Dilworth's Arithmetic, Webster's Spelling Book, the Shorter Catechism,
and the Bible.
He was a strong-limbed, self-contained, serious-natured boy, always
profoundly intent upon what he was doing. Even at the age of fifteen he
was inventive. One winter morning he brought to school a most elaborate
map of the world, showing the two hemispheres side by side. First he had
drawn it in ink upon paper, then pasted the paper upon linen, and hung
it upon two varnished rollers. This map, which is still preserved,
reveals a remarkable degree of skill and patience; and the fact that a
mere lad could conceive of and create such a map was a week's wonder in
the little community. "That boy," declared the teacher, "is beyond me."
At about this time he undertook to do a man's work in the reaping of the
wheat, and here he discovered that to swing a cradle against a field of
grain under a hot summer sun was of all farming drudgeries the severest.
Both his back and his brain rebelled against it. One thing at least he
could do,--he could make a smaller cradle, that would be easier to
swing; and he did this, whittling away in the evening in the little log
workshop.
"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius," said an old laborer who had
worked on the McCormick farm. "He was always trying to invent
something." "He was a young man of great and superior talents," said a
neighbor. At eighteen he studied the profession of surveying, and made a
quadrant for his own use. This is still preserved, and bears witness to
his good workmanship. From this time until his twenty-second year, there
is nothing of exceptional interest recorded of him. He had grown to be
a tall, muscular, dignified young man. The neighbors, in later years,
remembered him mainly because he was so well dressed on Sundays, in
broadcloth coat and beaver hat, and because of his fine treble voice as
he led the singing in the country church.
Even as a youth he was absorbed in his inventions and business projects.
He had no time for gayeties. In a letter written from Kentucky to a
cousin, Adam McChesney, in 1831, he says: "Mr. Hart has two fine
daughters, right pretty, very smart, and as rich probably as you would
wish; but alas! I have other business to attend to."
[Illustration: NEW PROVIDENCE CHURCH, ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
Ever since Cyrus was a child of seven, it had been the most ardent
ambition of his father to invent a Reaper. He had made one and tried it
in the harvest of 1816, but it was a failure. It was a fantastic
machine, pushed from behind by two horses. A row of short curved sickles
were fastened to upright posts, and the grain was whirled against them
by revolving rods. It was highly ingenious, but the sinewy grain merely
bunched and tangled around its futile sickles; and the poor old
Reaper that would not reap was hauled off the field, to become one of
the jokes of the neighborhood.
This failure did not dishearten Robert McCormick. He persevered with
Scotch-Irish tenacity, but in secret. Hurt by the jests of the
neighbors, he worked thenceforward with the door of his workshop locked,
or at night. He hid his Reaper, too, upon a shelf inside the workshop.
"He allowed no one to see what he was doing, except his sons," said
Davis McCormick, who is now the only living person in the neighborhood
with a memory that extends back to that early period. "Yes," said this
lone octogenarian, "Robert McCormick was a good man, a true Christian;
and he worked for years to make a Reaper. He always kept his plans to
himself, and he told his wife that if visitors came to the house, she
should send one of the children to fetch him, and not allow the visitors
to come to his workshop."
By the early Summer of 1831, Robert McCormick had so improved his Reaper
that he gave it a trial in a field of grain. Again it was a failure. It
did cut the grain fairly well, but flung it in a tangled heap. As much
as this had been done before by other machines, and it was not enough.
To cut the grain was only one-half of the problem; the other half of the
problem, which up to this time no one had solved, was how to properly
handle and deliver the grain after it was cut.
[Illustration: FACSIMILES FROM MANUSCRIPT BY MR. McCORMICK GIVING HIS
OWN ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THE REAPER]
By this time Cyrus had become as much of a Reaper enthusiast as his
father. Also, he had been studying out the reasons for his father's
failure, and working out in his mind a new plan of construction. How
this _new plan_ was slowly moulded into shape by his creative fancy is
now told for the first time. A manuscript, written by Cyrus H. McCormick
himself, and which has not hitherto been made public, gives a complete
description of the process of thought by which he became the inventor of
the first practical Reaper. This account, it may be said in explanation,
was written by Mr. McCormick shortly before the Chicago fire of 1871. It
was to be published at that time, and was in type when the fire came and
left not a vestige of the printery. The original manuscript was
preserved; but the labor of rebuilding his factory prevented him from
carrying out his original design. He wholly forgot his authorship in the
troubles of his city; and so his own story of his invention lay
untouched among the private papers of the family for thirty-eight years.
"Robert McCormick," says this document, "being satisfied that his
principle of operation could not succeed, laid aside and abandoned the
further prosecution of his idea." He had labored for fifteen years to
make a Reaper that would reap, and he had failed.
At this point Cyrus took up the work that his father had reluctantly
abandoned. He had never seen or heard of any Reaper experiments except
those of his father; but he believed he saw a better way, and "devoted
himself most laboriously to the discovery of a _new principle of
operation_."
He showed his originality at the outset by beginning where his father
and all other Reaper inventors had left off,--with the cutting of grain
that lay in a fallen and tangled mass. He faced the problem worst end
first. The Reaper that would cut such grain, he believed, must first
separate the grain that is to be cut from the grain that is left
standing. It must have at the end of its knife a curved arm--a
_divider_. This idea was simple, but in the long history of harvesting
grain no one had thought of it before.
Next, in order to cut this snarled and prostrate grain without missing
any of it, the knife must have two motions: its forward motion, as drawn
by the horses, and also a slashing sideways motion of its own. How was
this to be done? McCormick's first thought was to cut the grain with a
whirling wheel-knife, but this plan presented too many new difficulties.
Suddenly the idea came to him--why not have a straight blade, with a
back and forward motion of its own? This was the birth-idea of the
_reciprocating blade_, which has been used to this day on all
grain-cutting machines. It was not, like the divider, a wholly new
conception; but Cyrus McCormick conceived it independently, and did more
than any one else to establish it as the basic feature of the Reaper.
The third problem was the supporting of the grain while it was being
cut, so that the knife would not merely flatten it to the ground.
McCormick solved this by placing a row of _fingers_ at the edge of the
blade. These fingers projected a few inches, in such a way that the
grain was caught and held in position to be cut. The shape of these
fingers was afterwards much improved, to prevent wet grain from clogging
the slit in which the knife slid back and forth.
A fourth device was still needed to lift up and straighten the grain
that had fallen. This was done by a simple revolving _reel_, such as
fishermen use for the drying of their nets. Several of the abortive
Reapers that had been tried elsewhere had possessed some sort of a reel;
but McCormick made his much larger than any other, so that no grain was
too low to escape it.
The fifth factor in this assembling of a Reaper was the _platform_, to
catch the cut grain as it fell; and from which the grain was to be raked
off by a man who walked alongside of it. The sixth was the idea of
putting the shafts on the outside, or stubble side, of the Reaper,
making it a _side-draught_, instead of a "push" machine. And the
seventh and final factor was the building of the whole Reaper upon one
big _driving-wheel_, which carried the weight and operated the reel and
cutting-blade. The grain-side end of the blade was at first supported by
a wooden runner, and later--the following year--by a small wheel.
[Illustration: FIRST PRACTICAL REAPING MACHINE
Built and used by Cyrus Hall McCormick on Walnut Grove Farm, Va., in
1831]
Such was the making of the first practical Reaper in the history of the
world. It was as clumsy as a Red River ox-cart; but _it reaped_. It was
made on right lines. The "new principle" that the youth McCormick
laboriously conceived in the little log workshop became the basic type
of a wholly new machine. It has never been displaced. Since then there
have been 12,000 patents issued for reaper and mower inventions; but not
one of them has overthrown the type of the first McCormick Reaper. Not
one of the seven factors that he assembled has been thrown aside; and
the most elaborate self-binder of to-day is a direct descendant of the
crude machine that was thus created by a young Virginian farmer in
1831.
The young inventor toiled "laboriously," he says, to complete his Reaper
in time for the harvest of 1831. He was very nearly too late, but a
small patch of wheat was left standing at his request; and one day in
July, with no spectators except his parents and his excited brothers and
sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his Reaper, and drove
against the yellow grain. The reel revolved and swept the gentle wheat
downwards upon the knife. Click! Click! Click! The white steel blade
shot back and forth. The grain was cut. It fell upon the platform in a
shimmering golden swath. From here it was raked off by a young laborer
named John Cash. It was a roughly done specimen of reaping, no doubt.
The reel and the divider worked poorly. But for a preliminary test it
was a magnificent success. Here, at last, was a Reaper that reaped, the
first that had ever been made in any country.
The scene of this first "reaping by horse-power" was then, and is
to-day, one of unusual beauty. The field is near by the farm-house,
rolling in several undulations to the rim of a winding little rivulet.
In the centre of the field is a single tree, a wide-branched white oak,
which was probably born before the first colonists arrived at Jamestown.
And in the background, not more than two miles distant, rise the tall
and jagged crags of the Blue Ridge, twelve sharp peaks flung high from
deep ravines, on which the lights and shades are incessantly
changing,--a most impressive staging for the first act of the drama of
the Reaper.
This McCormick farm, having 600 acres of land, is now owned by the
McCormick family. The whole region has changed but little. Once, and
once only, the great noisy outside world surged into this quiet
valley,--when a Union army under General Butler clattered through it,
burning and destroying, and so close to the McCormick homestead that the
blue uniforms could be seen from its front windows. Doubtless, when
farmers have time to take a proper pride in the history of their own
profession, they will visit the McCormick farm as a spot of historic
interest,--the place where the New Agriculture was born. It is no longer
a difficult place to reach, as it is now possible to lunch to-day in
either Chicago or New York and to-morrow in the same comfortable red
brick farm-house that sheltered the McCormicks in 1831.
Several days after the advent of the Reaper on the home farm, Cyrus
McCormick had improved its reel and divider, and was ready for a public
exhibition at the near-by village of Steele's Tavern. Here, with two
horses, he cut six acres of oats in an afternoon, a feat which was
attested in court in 1848 by his brothers William and Leander, and also
by three of the villagers, John Steele, Eliza Steele, and Dr. N. M.
Hitt. Such a thing at that time was incredible. It was equal to the work
of six laborers with scythes, or twenty-four peasants with sickles. It
was as marvellous as though a man should walk down the street carrying a
dray-horse on his back.
The next year, 1832, Cyrus McCormick came out with his Reaper into what
seemed to him "the wide, wide world." He gave a public exhibition near
the little town of Lexington, which lay eighteen miles south of the
farm. Fully one hundred people were present--several political leaders
of local fame, farmers, professors, laborers, and a group of negroes who
frolicked and shouted in uncomprehending joy.
At the start, it appeared as though this new contraption of a machine,
which was unlike anything else that human eyes had ever seen, was to
prove a grotesque failure. The field was hilly, and the Reaper jolted
and slewed so violently that John Ruff, the owner of the field, made a
loud protest.
"Here! This won't do," he shouted. "Stop your horses. You are rattling
the heads off my wheat."
[Illustration: THE FIELD ON WHICH THE FIRST McCORMICK REAPER WAS TRIED,
WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA]
This was a hard blow to the young farmer-inventor. Several laborers, who
were openly hostile to the machine as their rival in the labor market,
began to jeer with great satisfaction. "It's a humbug," said one. "Give
me the old cradle yet, boys," said another. These men were hardened and
bent and calloused with the drudgery of harvesting. They worked twelve
and fourteen hours a day for less than a nickel an hour. But they were
as resentful toward a Reaper as the drivers of stage-coaches were to
railroads, or as the hackmen of to-day are towards automobiles.
At this moment of apparent defeat, a man of striking appearance, who had
been watching the floundering of the Reaper with great interest, came to
the rescue.
"I'll give you a fair chance, young man," he said. "That field of wheat
on the other side of the fence belongs to me. Pull down the fence and
cross over."
This friend in need was the Honorable William Taylor, who was several
years later a candidate for the governorship of Virginia. His offer was
at once accepted by Cyrus McCormick, and as the second field was fairly
level, he laid low six acres of wheat before sundown. This was no more
than he had done in 1831, but on this occasion he had conquered a larger
and more incredulous audience.
After the sixth acre was cut, the Reaper was driven with great acclaim
into the town of Lexington and placed on view in the court-house square.
Here it was carefully studied by a Professor Bradshaw of the Lexington
Female Academy, who finally announced in a loud and emphatic voice,
"This--machine--is worth--a hundred--thousand--dollars." This praise,
from "a scholar and a gentleman," as McCormick afterwards called him,
was very encouraging. And still more so was the quiet word of praise
from Robert McCormick, who said, "It makes me feel proud to have a son
do what I could not do."
Of all who were present on that memorable summer day, not one is now
alive. Neither in Lexington nor in Staunton--the towns that lay on
either side of the McCormick farm--can we find any one who saw the
Reapers of 1831 and 1832. But among those who testified at various
lawsuits that they had seen the Lexington Reaper operate were Colonel
James McDowell, Colonel John Bowyer, Colonel Samuel Reed, Colonel A. T.
Barclay, Dr. Taylor, William Taylor, John Ruff, John W. Houghawout, John
Steele, James Moore, and Andrew Wallace. There was an old lady, also, in
1885, Miss Polly Carson, who told how she had seen the Reaper hauled
along the road by two horses, which, she said, "had to be led by a
couple of darkies, because they were scared to death by the racket of
the machine." And she expressed the general unbelief of that day, very
likely, by saying, "I thought it was a right smart curious sort of a
thing, but that it wouldn't come to much."
Cyrus McCormick was far from being the first to secure a Reaper patent.
He was the forty-seventh. Twenty-three others in Europe and twenty-three
in the United States had invented machines of varying inefficiency; but
there was not one of these which could have been improved into the
proper shape. Without any exception, the rival manufacturers who rose up
in later years to fight McCormick did him the homage of copying his
Reaper; and certainly none of them attempted to offer for sale any type
of machine that was invented prior to 1831.
A careful study of the pre-McCormick Reapers reveals one fault common to
all,--they were made by theorists, to cut ideal grain in ideal fields.
Some of them, if grain always grew straight and was perfectly willing
to be cut, might have been fairly useful. They assuredly might have
succeeded if grain grew in a parlor. But to cut actual grain in actual
fields was another matter, and quite beyond their power. None of them,
apparently, knew the fundamental difference between a Reaper and a
mower. They did not observe that grain is easy to cut but hard to
handle, while grass is hard to cut and easy to handle; and they
persisted in the assumption that grain could be reaped by a mower.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF BLACKSMITH SHOP IN WHICH C. H. McCORMICK
BUILT HIS FIRST REAPER]
These inventors who failed, but who doubtless blazed the way by their
failures to the final success of McCormick, were not, as he was, a
practical farmer on rough and hilly ground. One was a clergyman, who
devised a six-wheel chariot, with many pairs of scissors, and which was
to be pushed by horses and steered by a rudder that in rough ground
would jerk a man's arm out of joint. A second of these inventors was a
sailor, who experimented with a few stalks of straight grain stuck in
gimlet holes in his workshop floor. A third was an actor, who had
built a Reaper that would cut artificial grain on the stage. A fourth
was a school-teacher, a fifth a machinist, and so on. In no instance can
we find that any one of these pre-McCormick inventors was a farmer, who
therefore knew what practical difficulties had to be overcome.
The farmers, on the other hand, thought first of these difficulties and
scoffed at the parlor inventors. The editor of the "Farmer's Register"
spoke the opinion of most farmers of that time when he said that "an
insurmountable difficulty will sometimes be found to the use of
reaping-machines in the state of the growing crops, which may be twisted
and laid flat in every possible direction. A whole crop may be ravelled
and beaten down by high winds and heavy rains in a single day."
One of the basic reasons, therefore, for the success of Cyrus McCormick
was the fact that he was not a parlor inventor. He was primarily a
farmer. He knew what wheat was and how it grew. And his first aim in
making a reaper was not to produce a mechanical curiosity, nor to
derive a fortune from the sale of his patent, but to cut the grain on
his father's farm.
So far as the pre-McCormick inventors are concerned, the whole truth
about them seems to be that a few invented fractional mowers or reapers
that were fairly good as far as they went, and that most of them
invented nothing that became of any lasting value. Nine-tenths of them
were pathfinders in the sense that they showed what ought _not_ to be
done.
Very little attention would have been given them had it not been for the
persistent effort made by rival manufacturers to detract from
McCormick's reputation as an inventor. This they did in a wholly
impersonal manner, of course, so that they should not be obliged to pay
him royalties, and because his prestige as the original inventor of the
Reaper enabled him to outsell them among the farmers.
But now that the competition of Reaper manufacturers has been tempered
by consolidation, the time has arrived to do justice to Cyrus McCormick
as the inventor of the Reaper. The stock phrase,--"He was less of an
inventor than a business man," which was so widely used against him
during his lifetime, ought now in all fairness to be laid aside. The
fact is, as we have seen, that he was schooled as a boy into an
inventive habit of mind; and that before his invention of the Reaper, he
had devised a new grain-cradle, a hillside plow, and a self-sharpening
plow. There is abundant corroborative evidence in the letters which he
wrote to his father and brothers, instructing them to "make the divider
and wheel post longer," to "put the crank one inch farther back," and so
forth. Also, in the will of Robert McCormick, there is a clause
authorizing the executor to pay a royalty to Cyrus of fifteen dollars
apiece on whatever machines were sold by the family during that season,
showing that the father, who of all men was in the best position to
know, regarded Cyrus as the inventor.
Of all the manufacturers who fought McCormick in the patent suits of
early days, three only have survived to see the passing of the McCormick
Centenary--Ralph Emerson, C. W. Marsh, and William N. Whiteley. In
response to a question as to Cyrus McCormick's place as an inventor,
Mr. Whiteley said: "McCormick invented the divider and the practical
reel; and he was the first man to make the Reaper a success in the
field." Mr. Marsh said: "He was a meritorious inventor, although he
combined the ideas of other men with his own; and he produced the first
practical side-delivery machine in the market." And Mr. Emerson said:
"The enemies of Cyrus H. McCormick have said that he was not an
inventor, but I say that he was an inventor of eminence."
Thus it appears that the invention of the Reaper was not in any sense
unique; it came about by an evolutionary process such as produced all
other great discoveries and inventions. First come the dreamers, the
theorists, the heroic innovators who awaken the world's brain upon a new
line of thought. Then come the pioneers who solve certain parts of the
problem and make suggestions that are of practical value. And then, in
the fulness of time, comes one masterful man who is more of a doer than
a dreamer, who works out the exact combination of ideas to produce the
result, and establishes the new product as a necessary part of the
equipment of the whole human family.
Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the Reaper. He did more--he invented the
business of making Reapers and selling them to the farmers of America
and foreign countries. He held preëminence in this line, with scarcely a
break, until his death; and the manufacturing plant that he founded is
to-day the largest of its kind. Thus, it is no more than an exact
statement of the truth to say that he did more than any other member of
the human race to abolish the famine of the cities and the drudgery of
the farm--to feed the hungry and straighten the bent backs of the
world.
CHAPTER IV
SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING
In 1831 Cyrus McCormick had his Reaper, but the great world knew nothing
of it. None of the 850 papers that were being printed at this time in
the United States had given the notice of its birth. There was the young
inventor, with the one machine that the human race most needed, in a
remote cleft of the Virginian mountains, four days' journey from
Richmond, and wholly without any experience or money or influence that
would enable him to announce what he had done.
He had such a problem to solve as no inventor of to-day or to-morrow can
have. He was not living, as we are, in an age of faith and
optimism--when every new invention is welcomed with a shout of joy. He
confronted a sceptical and slow-moving little world, so different from
that of to-day that it requires a few lines of portrayal.
In general, it was a non-inventive and hand-labor world. There were few
factories, except for the weaving of cotton and woollen cloth. There
was no sewing-machine, nor Bessemer converter, nor Hoe press, nor
telegraph, nor photography. It was still the age of the tallow candle
and stage-coach and tinder-box. Practically no such thing was known as
farm machinery. Jethro Wood had invented his iron plow, but he was at
this time dying in poverty, never having been able to persuade farmers
to abandon their plows of wood. As for steel plows, no one in any
country had conceived of such a thing. James Oliver was a bare-footed
school-boy in Scotland and John Deere was a young blacksmith in Vermont.
Plows were pulled by oxen and horses, not by slaves, as in certain
regions of Asia; but almost every other sort of farm work was done by
hand.
Railways were few and of little account. Eighty-two miles of flimsy
track had been built in the United States; the Baltimore and Ohio was
making a solemn experiment with locomotives, horses, and _sails_, to
ascertain which one of these three was the best method of propulsion.
The first really successful American locomotive was put on the rails in
this year; and Professor Joseph Henry set up his trial telegraph wire
and gave the electric current its first lesson in obedience.
There was no free library in the world in 1831. The first one was
started in Peterborough, N. H., two years later. In England, electoral
reform had not begun, a General Fast had been ordered because of the
prevalence of cholera, and a four-pound loaf cost more than the day's
pay of a laborer. The United States was a twenty-four-State republic,
with very little knowledge of two-thirds of its own territory. The
source of the Mississippi River, for instance, was unknown. To send a
letter from Boston to New York cost the price of half a bushel of wheat.
There was no newspaper in Wisconsin and no house in Iowa. The first sale
of lots was announced in Chicago, but there was then no public building
in that hamlet, nothing but a few log cabins in a swampy waste that was
populous only in wild ducks, bears, and wolves. Forty of the latter were
shot by the villagers in 1834.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRUDE KNIVES IN INDIA]
Of the many eminent men who had the same birth-year as McCormick, Poe
and Mendelssohn had begun to be known as men of genius in 1831. But
Lincoln was then "a sort of clerk" in a village store. Darwin was
setting out on H. M. S. _Beagle_ upon his first voyage as a naturalist.
Gladstone was a student at Oxford. Proudhon was working at the case as a
poor printer. Oliver Wendell Holmes was somewhat aimlessly studying law.
Chopin was on his way to Paris. Tennyson had left college, without a
degree, to devote his life to the service of poetry. Three great men who
had been born earlier, Garrison, Whittier, and Mazzini, began their
life-work in 1831. And science was a babe in the cradle. Herbert
Spencer, Virchow and Pasteur were learning the multiplication table.
Huxley was six and Bertheiot four.
There was no Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, California, nor
Texas. Virginia was the main wheat State. Local famines were of
yearly occurrence. The period between 1816 and 1820 had been
one of severe depression and was bitterly referred to as the
"1800-and-starve-to-death" period. Seventy-five thousand people had
been imprisoned for debt in New York in a single year, and a
workingmen's party had sprung up as a protest against such intolerable
conditions. Even as late as 1837 there was a bread riot in the city of
New York. Five thousand hungry rioters broke into the warehouse of Eli
Hart & Company, and destroyed a great quantity of flour and wheat. Five
hundred barrels of flour were thrown from the windows; and women and
children gathered it up greedily from the dirty gutter where it fell.
So the world that confronted Cyrus McCormick was not a friendly world of
science and invention and prosperity. It was slow and dull and largely
hostile to whoever would teach it a better way of working. And we shall
now see by what means McCormick compelled it to accept his Reaper, and
to give him the credit and pay for his invention.
He was resolved from the first not to be robbed and flung aside as most
inventors had been. Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, had said in
1812: "The whole amount I have received is not equal to the value of the
labor saved in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton had died at
fifty, plagued and plundered by imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and
Hargreaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were mobbed. Arkwright's
mill was burned by incendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood lost
their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the Bastile. And Goodyear, who
gave us rubber, Bottgher, who gave us Sèvres porcelain, and Sauvage, who
gave us the screw propeller, died in poverty and neglect.
But Cyrus McCormick was more than an inventor. He was a
business-builder. In the same resolute, deliberate way in which he had
made his Reaper, he now set to work to make a business. He planned and
figured and made experiments. "His whole soul was wrapped up in his
Reaper," said one of the neighbors. Once while riding home on horseback
in the Summer of 1832, his horse stopped to drink in the centre of a
stream, and as he looked out upon the fields of yellow grain, shimmering
in the sunlight, the dazzling thought flashed upon his brain, "Perhaps I
may make a million dollars from this Reaper." As he said in a letter
written in later years: "This thought was so enormous that it seemed
like a dream-like dwelling in the clouds--so remote, so unattainable, so
exalted, so visionary."
His first step was seemingly a mistake, though it must have contributed
much toward the development of self-reliance and hardihood in his own
character. He received a tract of land from his father, and proceeded
with might and main to farm it alone. There was a small log house on his
land, and here he lived with two aged negro servants and his Reaper.
He needed money to buy iron--to advertise--to appoint agents. And he had
no means of earning money except by farming.
It is very evident that he had not set aside his purpose to make
Reapers, for we find in the _Lexington Union_ of September 28, 1833, the
first advertisement of his machine. He offers Reapers for sale at $50.00
apiece, and gives four testimonials from farmers. But nothing came of
this advertisement. No farmer came forward to buy. The four men who had
given testimonials had only seen the Reaper at work. They were not
purchasers. McCormick was "a voice crying in the wilderness" for _nine
years_ before he found a farmer who had the money and the courage to buy
one of his Reapers.
After living for more than a year on his farm, McCormick saw that as a
means of raising money it was a failure. It had given him a most
valuable period of preparatory solitude, but it had not helped him to
launch the Reaper; so he looked about him for some enterprise that would
yield a larger profit. There was a large deposit of iron ore near by,
and he resolved to build a furnace and make iron. Iron was the most
expensive item in the making of a reaper. At that time it was $50.00 a
ton--two and a half cents a pound. So as he had been unable to establish
the Reaper business with a farm, he now set out to do it with a furnace.
He persuaded his father and the school teacher to become his partners;
and they built the furnace and were making their first iron in
1835--the same year, by the way, in which a babe named Andrew Carnegie
was born in the little Scotch town of Dunfermline.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH SICKLES IN ALGERIA]
For several years the furnace did fairly well. It swallowed the ore and
charcoal and limestone, and poured into the channelled sand little
sputtering streams of fiery metal. Cyrus made the patterns for the
moulds, and, because of his great strength, did much of the heaviest
labor. But the work was so incessant that he had no time to build
Reapers. And in 1839, when the effects of the 1837 panic were felt in
the more remote regions of Virginia, Cyrus McCormick realized to the
full the aptness of that couplet of Hudibras--
"Ah, me, the perils that environ
The man who meddles with cold iron!"
The price of iron fell; debtors were unable to pay; the school teacher
signed over his property to his mother; and the whole burden of the
inevitable bankruptcy fell upon the McCormicks. Cyrus gave up his farm
to the creditors, and whatever other property he had that was saleable.
He did not give up the Reaper, and nobody would have taken it if he
had. Thus far, he had made no progress towards the building of a Reaper
business. Instead of being the owner of a million, or any part of a
million, he was eight years older than when he had begun to seek his
fortune, and penniless.
In this hour of debt and defeat Cyrus became the leader of the family.
Here for the first time he showed that indomitable spirit which was,
more than any other one thing, the secret of his success. At once he did
what he had not felt was possible before--he began to make Reapers.
Without money, without credit, without customers, he founded the first
of the world's reaper factories in the little log workshop near his
father's house. In the year of the iron failure, 1839, he gave a public
exhibition on the farm of Joshua Smith, near the town of Staunton. With
two men and a team of horses he cut two acres of wheat an hour. At this
there was great applause, but no buyers.
The farmers of that day were not accustomed to the use of machinery.
Their farm tools, for the most part, were so simple as to be made
either by themselves or by the village blacksmith. That the Reaper did
the work of ten men, they could not deny. But it was driven by an
expert. "It's all very wonderful, but I'm running a farm, not a circus,"
thought the average spectator at these exhibitions. Also, there was in
all Eastern States at that time a surplus of labor and a scarcity of
money, both of which tended to retard the adoption of the Reaper.
Neither did the business men of Staunton pay any serious attention to
it. There was a Samson Eager at that time who made wagons, a David
Gilkerson who made furniture, a Jacob Kurtz who made spinning wheels,
and an Absalom Brooks who made harness. But none of these men saw any
fortune in the making of Reapers, and Staunton lost its great
opportunity to be a manufacturing centre.
Failure was being heaped on failure, yet Cyrus McCormick hung to his
Reaper as John Knox had to his Bible. He went back to the little log
workshop with a fighting hope in his heart, and hammered away to make a
still better machine.
This was the darkest period in the history of the McCormicks--from 1837
to 1840. Once a constable named John Newton rode up to the farm-house
door with a summons, calling Cyrus and his father before the County
Judge on account of a debt of $19.01. A teamster named John Brains had
brought suit. His bill had been $72.00 and he had been paid more than
three-fourths of the money. But the constable was so impressed with the
honesty and industry of the McCormicks, that he rode back to town
without having served the summons. A little later, Mr. John Brains
received his money; and it may be said that had he accepted, instead, a
five per cent interest in the Reaper, he would have become in twenty
years or less one of the richest men in the county.
As it happened, not one of Cyrus McCormick's creditors thought of such
an idea as seizing the Reaper, or the patent, which had been secured in
1834. If the queer-looking machine, which was regarded as part marvel
and part freak, had been put up to auction in that neighborhood of
farmers, very likely it would have found no bidders. There appeared to
be one man only, a William Massie, who appreciated the ability of Cyrus
McCormick and lent him sums of money on various urgent occasions.
But in 1840 a stranger rode from the north and drew rein in front of the
little log workshop. In appearance he was a rough-looking man, but to
Cyrus he was an angel of light. He had come to buy a Reaper. He had been
one of the spectators at the Staunton exhibition, and he had resolved to
risk $50 on one of the new machines. His name, which deserves to be
recorded in the annals of the Reaper, was Abraham Smith.
[Illustration: REAPING WITH CRADLES IN ILLINOIS]
Several weeks later came two other angels in disguise--farmers who had
heard of the Reaper and who had ridden from their homes on the James
River, a forty-mile journey on horseback through the Blue Ridge
Mountains. These men had never seen a Reaper, but they had faith.
They were notable men. Both ordered machines, and Cyrus McCormick
accepted one of the orders only, as he was not satisfied with the way
his Reaper worked in grain that was wet. It was apt to clog in the
grooves that held the blade. Even in this darkest and most debt-ridden
period of his life, McCormick was much more intent, apparently, upon
making his Reapers work well than upon winning a fortune.
Almost breathlessly, the young inventor waited for the next harvest.
This was the unique difficulty of his task, that he had only a few weeks
once a year to try out his machine and to improve it. He had now sold
two, so that there were three Reapers clicking through the grain-fields
in the Summer of 1840. They failed to operate evenly. Where the grain
was dry, they cut well; but where it was damp, they clogged and at times
refused to cut at all.
Wet grain! This, after nine years of arduous labor, still remained a
stubborn obstacle to the success of the Reaper. It was especially hard
to overcome, because in that primitive neighborhood McCormick could not
secure the best workmanship in the making of the cutting-blade. However,
this obstacle did not daunt him. He gave his blade a more serrated edge,
and to his delight it cut down the wet grain very nearly as neatly as
the dry.
This success had cost him another year, for he sold no machines in 1841.
But he had now, at least, a wholly satisfactory Reaper. Fortified with a
testimonial from Abraham Smith, he fixed the price at $100 and became a
salesman. By great persistence he sold seven Reapers in 1842,
twenty-nine in 1843, and fifty in 1844. At last, after thirteen years of
struggle and defeat, Cyrus McCormick had succeeded; and the home farm
was transformed into a busy and triumphant Reaper factory.
There were new obstacles, of course. A few buyers failed to pay. Four
machines were held on loitering canal-boats until they were too late for
the harvest. There was strong opposition in several places by day
laborers. A trusted workman who was sent out to collect $300 ran away
with both horse and money. But none of these trifles moved the
victorious McCormick. The great stubborn world was about to surrender,
and he knew it.
By 1844 he had done more than sell machines. He had made converts. One
enthusiastic farmer named James M. Hite, who had made a world's record
in 1843 by cutting 175 acres of wheat in less than eight days, was the
first of these apostles of the Reaper. "My Reaper has more than paid for
itself in one harvest," he said; and he gave $1,333 for the right to
sell Reapers in eight counties. Closely after this man came Colonel
Tutwiler, who agreed to pay $2,500 for the right to sell in southern
Virginia. And a manufacturer in Richmond, J. Parker, bought an agency in
five counties for $500; and won the renown of being the first business
man who appreciated the Reaper. All this money was not paid in at once.
Some of it was never paid. But after thirteen years of struggle and
debt, this was Big Business.
Best of all, orders for seven Reapers had come from the West. Two
farmers in Tennessee and one each in Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa,
Illinois, and Ohio, had written to McCormick for "Virginia Reapers," as
they were called in the farm papers of that day. These seven letters, as
may be imagined, brought great joy and satisfaction to the McCormick
family, which was now, under the leadership of Cyrus, devoting its best
energies to the making of Reapers. The Reapers were made and then, when
the question of their transportation arose, Cyrus for the first time saw
clearly that the Virginia farm was not the best site for a factory. To
get the seven Reapers to the West, they had first to be carried in
wagons to Scottsville, then by canal to Richmond, re-shipped down the
James River to the Atlantic Ocean and around Florida to New Orleans,
transferred here to a river boat that went up the Mississippi and Ohio
Rivers to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati in various directions to the
expectant farmers. Four of these Reapers arrived too late for the
harvest of 1844, and two of them were not paid for. Clearly, something
must be done to supply the Western farmers more efficiently.
[Illustration: AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA
REAPER]
At this time a friend said to him, "Cyrus, why don't you go West with
your Reaper, where the land is level and labor is scarce?" His mind was
ripe for this idea. It was the call of the West. So one morning he put
$300 into his belt and set off on a 3,000-mile journey to establish the
empire of the Reaper. Up through Pennsylvania he rode by stage to Lake
Ontario, then westward through Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,
Iowa, and Missouri.
For the first time he saw the _prairies_. So vast, so flat, so fertile,
these boundless plains amazed him. And he was quick to see that this
great land ocean was the natural home of the Reaper. Virginia might, but
the West _must_, accept his new machine.
Already the West was in desperate need of a quicker way to cut grain. As
McCormick rode through Illinois, he saw the most convincing argument in
favor of his Reaper. He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe
wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given
Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more
than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to
save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by
night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the
grain crop is this--it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and
decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days
only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this
short period must lose it.
Truly, the West needed the Reaper; and McCormick's first plan was to
overcome the transportation obstacle by selling licenses to many
manufacturers in many States. By 1846 he had, with herculean energy,
started Fitch & Company and Seymour, Morgan & Company in Brockport, N.
Y., Henry Bear in Missouri, Gray & Warner in Illinois, and A. C. Brown
in Cincinnati. These manufacturers, and the McCormick family in
Virginia, built 190 Reapers for the harvest of 1846. This was
multiplying the business by four, very nearly, but the plan was not
satisfactory. Some manufacturers used poor materials; some had unskilled
workmen; and one became so absorbed in new experiments that when the
harvest time arrived, his machines were not completed.
The new difficulty was not to get manufacturers to make Reapers, but to
get them to make _good_ Reapers. What was to be done? The thought of
having defective Reapers scattered among the farmers was intolerable to
Cyrus McCormick. He pondered deeply over the whole situation. He
considered the fact that the supremacy in wheat was slowly passing from
Virginia to Ohio. He took note of the railroads that were creeping
westward. He remembered the limitless prairies, far out in the sunset
country, that were still uncultivated. Plainly, he must make Reapers in
a factory of his own, so as to have them made well, and he must locate
that factory as near as possible to the prairies, at some point along
the Great Lakes. With the most painstaking diligence he studied the map
and finally he put his finger upon a town--a small new town, which bore
the strange name of _Chicago_.
CHAPTER V
THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS
Of all the cities that Cyrus McCormick had seen in his 3,000-mile
journey, Chicago was unquestionably the youngest, the ugliest, and the
most forlorn. It lacked the comforts of ordinary life, and many of the
necessities. For the most part, it was the residuum of a broken land
boom; and most of its citizens were remaining in the hope that they
might persuade some incoming stranger to buy them out.
The little community, which had absurdly been called a city ten years
before, had at this time barely ten thousand people--as many as are now
employed by a couple of its department stores. It was exhausted by a
desperate struggle with mud, dust, floods, droughts, cholera, debt,
panics, broken banks, and a slump in land values. Other cities ridiculed
its ambitions and called it a mudhole. Its harbor, into which six small
schooners ventured in 1847, was obstructed by a sand-bar. And the entire
region, for miles back from the lake, was a dismal swamp--the natural
home of frogs, wild ducks, and beavers.
The six years between 1837 and 1843 had been to Illinois a period of the
deepest discouragement. There was little or no money that any one could
accept with confidence. Trade was on a barter basis. The State was
hopelessly in debt. It had borrowed $14,000,000 in the enthusiasm of its
first land boom, and now had no money to pay the interest. Even as late
as 1846 there was only $9,000 in the State treasury.
Buffalo was at this time the chief grain market of the United States. We
were selling a little wheat to foreign countries--much less than is
grown to-day in Oklahoma. Hulled corn was the staff of life in Iowa. The
Mormons had just started from Illinois on their 1,500-mile pilgrimage to
the West, through a country that had not a road, a village, a bridge,
nor a well. The sewing-machine had recently been invented by Howe, and
the use of ether had been announced by Dr. Morton; but there was no Hoe
press, nor Bessemer steel, nor even so much as a postage stamp. And in
the Old World the two most impressive figures, perhaps, were
Livingstone, the missionary, who was groping his way to the heart of the
Dark Continent, and DeLesseps, the master-builder of canals, who was now
cutting a channel through the hot sand at Suez.
In Chicago, there was at this time no Board of Trade. The first wheat
had been exported nine years before--as much as would load an ordinary
wagon. There was no paved street, except one short block of wooden
paving. The houses were rickety, unpainted frame shanties, which had not
even the dignity of being numbered. There was a school, a jail, a police
force of six, a theatre, and a fire-engine. But there was no railroad,
nor telegraph, nor gas, nor sewer, nor stock-yards. The only post-office
was a little frame shack on Clark Street, with one window and one clerk;
and one of the lesser hardships of the citizens was to stand in line
here on rainy days.
[Illustration: THE McCORMICK REAPER OF 1847, ON WHICH SEATS WERE PLACED
FOR THE DRIVER AND THE RAKER]
Prosperity was still an elusive hope in 1847, but the spirit of
depression was being overcome. The Federal bankrupt law of 1842 had
broken the deadlock, and the Legislature had passed several "Hard Times"
measures for the relief of debtors. To such an extent had the little
community recovered its confidence that it opened a new theatre,
welcomed its first circus, founded a law-school, launched a new daily
paper called the _Tribune_, and organized a regiment for the Mexican
War.
There were two Chicago events in this year which must have deeply
impressed Cyrus McCormick. The first was the arrival of a horde of
hunger-driven immigrants from Ireland. The famine of 1846, which had
caused 210,000 deaths in that unfortunate island, was driving the
survivors to America; and the people of Chicago showed the warmest
sympathy towards these gaunt, sad-faced newcomers. Even in the depth of
her own depression, Chicago called a special meeting to consider what
could be done to alleviate the suffering of the Irish, and gave several
thousand dollars for their relief.
The second event was the holding of the great "River and Harbor
Convention" in Chicago. This was the first formal recognition of
Chicago by Congress, and gave the greatest possible amount of delight
and reassurance to its citizens. Abraham Lincoln, who had just been
elected to Congress, was there; and Horace Greeley and Thurlow Weed.
There was a grand procession in the muddy little main street. A ship
under full sail was hauled through the city on wheels. The newly
organized firemen, in the glory of red shirts and leather hats, threw a
stream of water over the flag-staff in the public square, and Thurlow
Weed, in a peroration that aroused the utmost enthusiasm, prophesied
that "on the shores of these lakes is a vast country that will in fifty
years support one-quarter of a million people." It is interesting to
notice that had Thurlow Weed lived fifty years after the delivery of
that optimistic prophecy, he would have seen one-quarter of a million
school children in the city of Chicago alone.
As a matter of history, the arrival of McCormick was a much more
important event for Chicago than the "River and Harbor Convention." He
was the first of its big manufacturers. His factory was the largest and
the busiest; and the Reapers that it produced were a most important
factor in the growth of Chicago. Every Reaper shipped to the West was a
feeder of the city. It brought back more wheat. It opened up new
territory. The Reaper gave the farmers of the Middle West an ideal
weapon with which to win wealth from the prairies. And it established
the primary greatness of Chicago as the principal wheat market of the
world.
This incoming flood of wheat gave Chicago its start as a railway and
shipping centre. Chicago was never obliged to give money, or to lend it,
to railroad companies. The railroads came into Chicago without the
inducement of subsidies, because they wanted to carry its wheat. And
ships, too, came more and more readily to Chicago when they found that
they could be sure of a return cargo.
The choice of Chicago as his centre of operations was one of the
master-strokes of McCormick's career. At that time, Cleveland,
Milwaukee, and St. Louis were more prosperous cities; but McCormick
considered one thing only--the making and selling of his Reaper, and he
saw that Chicago, with all its mud and shabbiness, was the link between
the Great Lakes and the Great West. Here he could best assemble his
materials--steel from Sheffield, pig iron from Scotland and Pittsburg,
and white ash from Michigan. And here he could best ship his finished
machines to both East and West.
Chicago, in fact, and the McCormick Reaper, had many characteristics in
common. Both were born at very nearly the same time. Both were cradled
in adversity. Both were unsightly to the artistic eye. Both were linked
closely with the development of the West. And both inevitably achieved
success, because they were fundamentally right--Chicago in location and
the Reaper in design.
At the time that he began to build his Chicago factory, Cyrus McCormick
was no longer a country youth. He was thirty-eight years of age, and a
tall powerful Titan of a man, with a massive head and broad shoulders.
His upper lip was clean-shaven, but he had a thick, well-trimmed beard,
and dark, wavy hair, worn fairly long. His nose was straight and
well-shaped, his mouth firm, and his eyes brown-gray and piercing. In
manner he was resolute and prompt, with a rigid insistence that could
not be turned aside. He had won the prize in the contest of
reaper-inventors; and he was now about to enter a second contest,
against overwhelming odds, with a number of aggressive and competent
business men who had determined that, by right or by might, they would
manufacture McCormick Reapers and sell them to the farmers.
As McCormick had neither money nor credit, it was evident to him that
his first step in business-building must be to secure a partner who had
both of these. He looked about him and selected the man who was
unquestionably the first citizen of Chicago--William B. Ogden. Ogden had
been the first mayor of the little city. He had been from the beginning
its natural leader. He had built the first handsome house, promoted the
first canal, and was now busy in the building of the first railroad
from Chicago to Galena.
William Butler Ogden had been born in the little New York hamlet of
Walton, four years earlier than the birth of McCormick. To use his own
picturesque words, he "was born close to a saw-mill, was early left an
orphan, christened in a mill-pond, taught at a log school-house, and at
fourteen fancied that nothing was impossible, which ever since, and with
some success, I have been trying to prove." Once in Chicago he quickly
made a fortune in real estate, and was generally looked to as the leader
in any large enterprise that promised to help Chicago.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
From a Daguerreotype, taken about 1839]
He was a tall man of striking appearance. At that time he wore no beard,
and with his keen eyes, high forehead, long straight nose, and masterful
under-lip, he would attract attention in any assemblage. By his
hospitality and courtly manners he made many friends for the city. Among
his guests were Webster, Van Buren, Bryant, Tilden, and Miss Martineau.
And when Cyrus McCormick came to him and proposed the building of a
Reaper factory, Ogden was as quick as a flash to see its value to
Chicago. "You are the man we want," said he to McCormick. "I'll give you
$25,000 for a half interest, and we'll start to build the factory at
once."
This partnership helped McCormick greatly. It gave him at once capital,
credit, prestige, and a factory. It enabled him to escape from the
tyranny of small anxieties. It set him free from contract-breaking
manufacturers, who looked upon the making of Reapers merely as business,
and not, as McCormick did, as a mission. He now had his chance to
manufacture on a large scale; and he immediately made plans to sell 500
Reapers for the harvest of 1848. He built the largest factory in
Chicago, on the spot where John Kinzie had built the first house in
1804, and thus once for all was solved the problem of where and how his
Reapers should be made.
For two years it was one of the sights of Chicago to see McCormick and
Ogden walking together to their factory. They were both tall, powerful,
dominating men, and were easily the chief citizens--the Romulus and
Remus of a city that was destined to be more populous than Rome.
But they were not suited as co-workers. Each was too strong-willed for
co-operative action. Also, Ogden was a man of many interests, while
McCormick was absorbed in his Reaper. There was no open quarrel, but in
1849 McCormick said: "I will pay you back the $25,000 that you invested,
and give you $25,000 for profits and interest." Ogden accepted, well
pleased to have doubled his money in two years; and from that time
onward McCormick had no partners except the members of his own family.
Moving at once from one obstacle to another, as McCormick did throughout
the whole course of his life, he now began to create the best possible
_system_ of selling his Reapers to the farmers. This he had to do, for
the reason that there was no means at that time whereby he could offer
them for sale. The village blacksmith was too busy at his anvil to
become an agent. The village storekeeper was not a mechanic, and was
too careful of his reputation among the farmers to offer for sale a
machine that he did not understand. Therefore, McCormick bent all his
energies to this new task of devising a mode of action. He began to
develop what he was apt to call "the finger-ends of the business." And
he created a new species of commercial organization which is by many
thought to be fully as remarkable as his invention of the Reaper.
First, he gave a _Written Guarantee_ with every machine. He had
conceived of this inducement as early as 1842. He "warranted the
performance of the Reaper in every respect," and by this means made
seven sales in that year. In 1848 he had his guarantee printed like an
advertisement, with a picture of the Reaper at the top, and blank spaces
for the farmer, the agent, and two witnesses to sign. The price of the
machine was to be $120. The farmer was to pay $30 cash, and the balance
in six months, on condition that the Reaper would cut one and a half
acres an hour, that it would scatter less grain than the grain-cradle,
that it was well made, and that the raking off could easily be done from
a raker's seat. If the Reaper failed to fulfil these promises, it was to
be brought back and the $30 was to be refunded.
This idea of giving a free trial, and returning the money to any
dissatisfied customer, was at that time new and revolutionary. To-day it
is the code of the department store, and even the mail-order
establishments are in many instances adopting it. It has become one of
the higher laws of the business world. It has driven that discreditable
maxim, "Let the buyer beware," out of all decent commercialism. To
McCormick, who had never studied the selfish economic theories of his
day, there was no reason for any antagonism between buyer and seller. He
trusted his Reaper and he trusted the farmers. And he built his business
foursquare on this confidence.
Second, he sold his Reapers at a _Known Price_. He announced the price
in newspapers and posters. This, too, has since become an established
rule in business; but it was not so sixty years ago. The Oriental method
of chaffering and bargaining was largely in vogue. The buyer got as high
a price as he could in each case. Among merchants, A. T. Stewart was
probably the first to abolish this practice of haggling, and to mark his
goods in plain figures. And in the selling of farm machinery, it was
McCormick who laid down the principle of equal prices to all and special
rebates to none--a principle which has been very generally followed ever
since, except during periods of over-strenuous competition.
Third, he was one of the first American business men who believed
heartily in a policy of _Publicity_. As early as September 28, 1833, he
began to advertise his Reaper; and his advertisement was nearly a column
in length. Also, in the same paper, he had a half-column advertisement
of his hillside plow. This was publicity on a large scale, according to
the ideas of advertising that were then prevalent. Even George
Washington, when advertising an extensive land scheme in 1773, had not
thought of using more than half a column of a Baltimore paper.
McCormick was an efficient advertiser, too, as well as an enterprising
one. When he talked to farmers, he knew what to say. He told the story
of what one of his Reapers had done, and named the time and the farm and
the farmers. He made great use of the argument that the Reaper pays for
itself, and showed that it would cost the farmer less to buy it than
_not_ to buy it.
Among the many testimonials that he got from farmers the one that
pleased him most, and which he scattered broadcast, was one in which a
farmer said: "My Reaper has more than paid for itself in one harvest."
[Illustration: PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE
THE CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH STREET BRIDGE]
In 1849, when the rush to the new gold mines of California began, he was
quick to see his opportunity. This sudden exodus of a hundred thousand
men to the Pacific coast meant much to him, and he knew it. It meant a
decrease in the number of farm laborers and an increase in the amount of
money in circulation. More than this, it meant that Chicago was no
longer a city of the Far West. It was _central_. It was the link between
the banks and factories of the East and the gold mines and prairies of
the West. So McCormick quickly prepared an elaborate advertisement,
warning the farmers that labor would now become scarce and expensive,
that the coming grain crop promised to be a large one, and giving the
names and addresses of ninety-two farmers who were now using his
machines.
The fourth factor in the McCormick System was the appointment of a
_Responsible Agent_ and the building of a storage warehouse at every
competitive point. He did not wait for the business to grow. He pushed
it. He thrust it forward by sending an agent to every danger-spot on the
firing-line. As one of his competitors complained, in an 1848 lawsuit,
McCormick "flooded the country with his machines." He knew that many
farmers would be undecided until the very hour of harvest, when there
would be no time to get a Reaper from Chicago; and therefore he had
supplies of machines stored in various parts of the country. By 1849 he
had nineteen of these agencies.
His plan, with regard to these agents, was to fasten them to him by
exclusive contracts, which forbade them to sell Reapers made by any
other manufacturers. Each agent was given free scope. He was not worried
by detail instructions. He was picked out for his aggressive,
self-reliant qualities, and the whole responsibility of a certain
territory was put upon him. Once a month he made a report; but he stood
or fell by the final showing for the year, which he made in October.
This plan of leaving his men free and putting them upon their mettle,
developed their mental muscle to the utmost. Also, it made them
intensely loyal and combative--a regiment, not of private soldiers, but
generals, each one in charge of his own province, blamed for his defeats
and rewarded for his victories.
The fifth factor in the McCormick System was the _Customers' Good-Will_.
For the good-will of other capitalists or for the applause of the
public in general, no men cared less than McCormick. But he always stood
well with the farmers. "I have never yet sued a farmer for the price of
a Reaper," he said in 1848. This heroic policy he pursued as long as
possible, knowing the fear that all farmers have of contracts that may
lead them into litigation. More than this, he freely gave them credit,
without being safeguarded by any Dun or Bradstreet. He allowed them to
pay with the money that was saved during the harvest. "It is better that
I should wait for the money," he said, "than that you should wait for
the machine that you need." So he borrowed money in Chicago to build the
Reapers, borrowed more money to pay the freight, and then sold them on
time to the farmers.
In some cases he lost heavily, as in Kansas and North Dakota, where the
first settlers were driven off by drought. But as a rule he lost little
by bad debts. Immigrants of twenty nationalities swarmed westward upon
the free land offered to them by the United States Government, and
usually each man found waiting for him at the nearest town one of the
McCormick agents, ready to supply him with a Reaper, whether he had the
money to pay for it or not. As may be imagined, the effect of this
policy upon the settlement and welfare of the West was magical. There
are to-day tens of thousands of Western farmers who date the era of
their prosperity from the day when a McCormick Reaper arrived in all the
glory of its red paint and shining blade, and held its first reception
in the barn-yard.
One instance of this deserves to be embodied in the history of the
Reaper. In 1855 a poor tenant farmer, who had been evicted from his
rented land in Ayrshire, Scotland, arrived with his family at the banks
of the Mississippi. There was then no railroad nor stage-coach, so the
whole family walked to a quarter section of land farther west, not far
from where the city of Des Moines stands to-day. The first year they cut
the wheat with the cradle and the scythe, and the following year they
bought a McCormick Reaper. They prospered. The father went back for a
visit to Ayrshire and paid all his creditors. And the eldest son,
James, became first Speaker of the Iowa Legislature, then a professor
in an agricultural college, and finally the founder of the Department of
Agriculture in all its present completeness. To-day we know him as the
Honorable James Wilson, the first official farmer of the United States.
There was one other method in the marketing of farm machinery, which
seems to have been originated by McCormick--the _Field Test_. As a means
of stirring up interest in an indifferent community, this was the most
electrical in its effects of any plan that has ever been devised. As a
pioneering advertisement, it was unsurpassed. It was nothing less than a
contest in a field of ripe grain between several machines that belonged
to rival manufacturers. Sometimes there were only two machines, and in
one grand tournament there were forty. And all the farmers in the county
were invited to come and witness the battle free of charge.
The first of these field tests occurred near Richmond in 1844. McCormick
had challenged Obed Hussey, a Baltimore sailor who had invented a
practical mowing-machine, and who was offering it for sale to cut grain
as well as grass. In this instance McCormick won easily. The judges said
that while the Hussey machine was stronger and simpler, having no reel
nor divider, the McCormick Reaper was lighter, cheaper, scattered less
grain, and was better at cutting grain that was wet and in its method of
delivering the grain.
"Meet Hussey whenever you can and put him down," Cyrus McCormick wrote
to his brothers. In one letter, written the following year, he is so
enthusiastically aggressive in the pursuit of Hussey that he proposes to
his brothers a grand final contest. Hussey is to be dared to sign an
agreement that in case of defeat, he will pay McCormick $10,000 and
become the Maryland agent for the McCormick Reaper. McCormick, on his
part, is to agree that if he is beaten he will pay Hussey $10,000 and
become the Virginia agent for the Hussey machine. Nothing came of this
confident proposal, either because it was not put into effect by
McCormick, because Hussey refused to accept it.
But the field test flourished for more than forty years. It did more in
the earlier days than any other one thing to make talk about the Reaper
and to move the farmers out of the old-fashioned ruts. It provided the
vaudeville element which is necessary in salesmanship where people are
not interested in the commodity itself. As often happens, it was in the
end carried too far. It became the most costly weapon of competition. It
introduced all manner of unfairness and often violence. The most absurd
tests were frequently agreed to. Mowers would be chained back to back
and then forcibly torn apart. Reapers were driven into groves of
saplings. Machines of special strength were made secretly. And so the
warfare raged, until by general consent the field test was abandoned.
These six factors of the McCormick System became the six commandments of
the farm machinery business. They were largely adopted by his
competitors, and exist to-day, with the exception of the exclusive
contract and the field test.
By 1850 McCormick had not only solved the problem of the Reaper; he had
worked out a method of distribution. He had established a new business.
But even this was not enough. He was now beset by a swarm of
manufacturers who sought to deprive him of his patents and of a business
which he naturally regarded as his own. It remained to be seen whether
he could stand his ground when opposed by several hundred rivals; and
whether he could duplicate in the courts the victories that he had won
in the fields.
CHAPTER VI
THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS
In 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent expired. He applied to have it
extended, and at once there began one of the most extraordinary legal
wars ever known in the history of the Patent Office. It continued with
very little cessation until 1865. It enlisted on one side or the other
the ablest lawyers of that period--such giants of the bar as Lincoln,
Stanton, Seward, Douglas, Harding, Watson, Dickerson, and Reverdy
Johnson. The tide of battle rolled from court to court until the final
clash came in the chamber of the Supreme Court and the halls of
Congress. It was perhaps the most Titanic effort that any American
inventor has ever made to protect his rights and to carry out the
purpose of the Patent Law.
McCormick had strong reasons for believing that his patent should be
extended. He was asking for no more than the Patent Office, on other
occasions, had granted to other inventors. A patent was supposed to
protect an inventor for fourteen years, and he had lost half of this
time in making a better machine, and in finding out the best way to
carry on the business. He had received from all sources nearly $24,000,
and most of it had been swallowed up in expenses. He was still a poor
man in 1848. He was no more than on the threshold of prosperity. And his
peculiar difficulty, which gave him a special claim upon the Patent
Commissioners, was the shortness of the harvest season. He had only
three or four weeks in each year in which he could make experiments.
For eight years McCormick's claim was tossed back and forth like a
tennis ball between the Patent Office and Congress. This delay threw the
door wide open to competition. A score of manufacturers built factories
and began to make McCormick Reapers, with trifling variations and under
other names. If McCormick had won his case, they would have had to pay
him a royalty of $25 on each machine. Consequently, they combined
against him. They hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured petitions from
farmers, and raised a hue and cry that one man was "trying to impose a
tax of $500,000 a year upon the starving millions of the world."
One firm of lawyers in Cincinnati sent a letter to these manufacturers
in 1850, saying that, "McCormick can be beaten in the Patent Office, and
must be beaten now or never. If funds are furnished us, we shall surely
beat him; but if they are not furnished us, he will as certainly beat
us. Please, therefore, take hold and help us to beat the _common enemy_.
The subscriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000.... Send in also to
Patent Office hundreds of remonstrances like this: We oppose the
extension of C. H. McCormick's patent. He has made money enough off of
the farmer."
Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the
Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an
indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr.
President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without
inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a
fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there
would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I
know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the
world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with
their papers and their affidavits--men who have no claim to the ear of
the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested
their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from
the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers
to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on
foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick."
What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of competitors,
but the fact that a few farmers had signed petitions of protest against
his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no
attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and
lawyers and judges--any one and every one, if need be, except farmers.
"How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save
the price of the Reaper in a single harvest."
McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third
time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858
he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in
litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit
from the protection of the Patent Office.
Many other inventors were fairly treated by Congress. Fulton, for
example, was presented with a bonus of $76,300. Willmoth, who improved
the turret of a battleship, received $50,000. Professor Page, for making
an electric engine, was given $20,000. Morse was awarded $38,000. The
patents of Goodyear, Kelly, Howe, Morse, Hyatt, Woodworth, and Blanchard
were extended. The protection of inventors had been a national
policy--an American tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Webster: "The
right of an inventor to his invention is a natural right, which existed
before the Constitution was written and which is above the
Constitution."
The benefit of the Reaper to the nation, and the fact that McCormick was
its inventor, were admitted freely enough. Senator Johnson, of Maryland,
estimated in 1858 that the Reaper was then worth to the United States
$55,000,000 a year. D. P. Holloway, the Commissioner of Patents, sang an
anthem of eloquent praise to McCormick in 1861. "He is an inventor whose
fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world," he said.
"His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the
admiration of foreign nations. He will live in the grateful recollection
of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the
harvest." Then, in an abrupt postscript to so fine a eulogy, this
extraordinary Commissioner adds: "But the Reaper is of too great value
to the public to be controlled by any individual, and the extension of
his patent is refused."
[Illustration: PAINTING BY C. SCHUSSELE, PHILADELPHIA, 1861
ENGRAVED ON STEEL BY JOHN SARTAIN, PHILADELPHIA, 1862
MEN OF PROGRESS
STANDING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, Dr. W. T. G. Morton, first man to administer
ether to a patient; 2, J. Bogardus, invented ring spinner (for cotton
spinning), an engraving machine, and dry gas meter; 3, S. Colt,
revolver; 4, Cyrus Hall McCormick, reaper; 5, Joseph Saxton, locomotive
differential pulley and deep sea thermometer; 6, Peter Cooper, founder
of Cooper Union and inventor machine for mortising hubs for carriage
wheels; 7, Prof. J. Henry, inventor of communication by electricity; 8,
E. B. Bigelow, power loom for spinning jenny.
SITTING, LEFT TO RIGHT: 1, C. Goodyear, vulcanizer of rubber; 2, J. L.
Mott, iron manufacturer and inventor; 3. Dr. E. Nott, base burner for
stoves: 4, F. E. Sickles, inventor of cut-off of steam in engine; 5, S.
F. B. Morse, telegraph; 6, H. Burden, cultivator, and machine for making
horseshoes; 7, R. M. Hoe, printing press; 8, I. Jennings; 9, T.
Blanchard, machine for cutting and heading tacks, and lathe for turning
irregular forms: 10, E. Howe, sewing machine.]
The truth seems to be that McCormick was too strong, too aggressive, to
receive fair play at the hands of any legislative body. The note of
sympathy could never be struck in his favor. He personally directed his
own cases. He dominated his own lawyers. And he fought always in an
old-fashioned, straight-from-the-shoulder way that put him at a great
disadvantage in a legal conflict. Also, he was supposed to be much
richer than in reality he was. He had made money by the rise in Chicago
real estate. By 1866 he had become a millionaire. And his entire fortune
was assumed by opposing lawyers to be the product of the Reaper
business.
It is to be said, to the lasting honor of South Carolina, that she gave
a grant of money to Whitney, out of the public treasury, as a token of
gratitude for the invention of the cotton gin. But no wheat State ever
gave, or proposed to give, any grant or vote of thanks to Cyrus
McCormick for the invention of the Reaper. The business that he
established was never at any time favored by a tariff, or franchise, or
patent extension, or tax exemption, or land grant, or monopoly.
Single-handed he built it up, and single-handed he held it against all
comers. If, as Emerson has said, an institution is no more than "the
lengthened shadow of one man," we may fairly say that the immense
McCormick Company of to-day is no more than the lengthened shadow of
this farm-bred Virginian.
By 1855 McCormick realized that the Federal Government was not the
impartial tribunal that he had believed it to be. He saw that he could
not depend upon it for protection, so he made a characteristic
decision--he resolved to protect himself. He, too, would hire a battery
of lawyers and charge down upon these manufacturers who were
unrighteously making his Reaper and depriving him of his patents. He
engaged three of the master lawyers of the American bar, William H.
Seward, E. N. Dickerson, and Senator Reverdy Johnson, and brought suit
against Manny and Emerson, of Rockford, Illinois, for making McCormick
Reapers without a license.
Then came a three-year struggle that shook the country and did much to
shape the history of the American people. Manny and Emerson, who were
shrewd and forceful men, hired twice as many lawyers as McCormick and
prepared to defend themselves. They selected as the members of this
legal bodyguard, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Edwin M. Stanton,
Peter H. Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.
It was a battle of giants. Greek met Greek with weapons of eloquence.
But Stanton out-classed his great co-debaters in a speech of
unanswerable power which unfortunately was not reported. The speech so
vividly impressed McCormick that in his next lawsuit he at once engaged
Stanton. It awoke the brain of Lincoln, as he afterwards admitted; and
drove him back to a more comprehensive study of the law. It gave Lincoln
so high an opinion of Stanton's ability that, when he became President
several years later, he chose Stanton to be his Secretary of War. And it
gripped judge and jury with such effect that McCormick lost his case. It
was a wonderful speech.
Abraham Lincoln, who made no speech at all, was the one who derived the
most benefit in the end from this lawsuit. It not only aroused his
ambitions, but gave him his first big fee--$1,000. This money came to
him at the precise moment when he needed it most, to enable him to enter
into the famous debate with Douglas--the debate that made him the
inevitable candidate of the Republican party. It is interesting to note
how closely the destinies of Lincoln and McCormick were interwoven. Both
were born in 1809, on farms in the South. Both struggled through a youth
of adversity and first came into prominence in Illinois. Both labored to
preserve the Union, and when the War of Secession came it was the Reaper
that enabled Lincoln to feed his armies. Both men were emancipators, the
one from slavery and the other from famine; and both to-day sleep under
the soil of Illinois. No other two Americans had heavier tasks than
they, and none worked more mightily for the common good.
Of all McCormick's lawsuits, and they were many, the most extraordinary
was the famous Baggage Case, which lasted for twenty-three years--from
1862 to 1885. It was probably the best single instance of the man's
dogged tenacity in defence of a principle. The original cause of this
trial was a comedy of mishaps. A McCormick family party of six, with
nine trunks, boarded a train at Philadelphia for Chicago. The train was
about to start, when the baggage-master demanded pay for 200 pounds of
surplus baggage. The amount was only $8.70, but McCormick refused to pay
it. He called his family out of the train and ordered that his trunks be
taken off. The conductor refused to hold the train, and the trunks were
carried away. Mr. McCormick at once saw the president of the railroad,
J. Edgar Thompson, who telegraphed an order for the trunks to be put off
at Pittsburg. The McCormicks set out for Chicago by the next train. At
Pittsburg they learned that the trunks had been carried through to
Chicago. And the next day, in Chicago, when McCormick went to the Fort
Wayne depot, he found it a mass of smoking cinders. It had caught fire
in the night, and the nine trunks had been destroyed.
McCormick sued the railroad for $7,193--the value of the trunks and
their contents. Repeatedly he won and repeatedly the railroad appealed
to higher courts. After twenty years the worn and battered case was
carried up to the nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. They
decided for McCormick. But even then the railroad evaded payment for
three years, until after McCormick's death. Then the president of the
road signed a check for $18,060.79, which was the original value of the
nine trunks plus twenty-three years' interest.
McCormick did not for a moment regard this case as trivial. It involved
a principle. Once when a friend bantered him for fighting so hard over a
small matter, he replied, "My conscience, sir! I don't know what would
become of the American people if there were not some one to stand up for
fair dealing." His victory did much to teach the railroads better
manners and a finer consideration of the travelling public. Soon after
the conclusion of the case, a trunk belonging to a relative of the
McCormicks was destroyed on the New York Central. It value was $1,300,
and one of the railroad's lawyers promptly sent a check, saying, "We
don't want to have a lawsuit with the McCormicks."
For these numerous lawsuits McCormick paid a terrible price, both in
money and friendship. He acquired a reputation as "a man who would law
you to death." He brought down upon himself to a remarkable degree the
hostility of his competitors, and prevented himself from receiving the
full credit and prestige that he deserved. Instead of being revered as
the father of the Reaper business, he was feared as an industrial
Bismarck--a man of unyielding will and indomitable purpose, who regarded
his competitors as a pack of trespassers in an empire that belonged by
right to him.
The truth is that this situation did not arise because of the natural
perversity of either McCormick or his competitors. In his later life,
McCormick proved that he could co-operate with his equals in the most
harmonious way, in a new business enterprise. His competitors, too, were
for the most part men of ability and uprightness. Neither in their
public nor private lives, was there any stain upon the honor of such men
as Wood, Osborne, Adriance, Manny, Emerson, Huntley, Warder. Bushnell,
Glessner, Jones, and Lewis Miller. But these men were all newcomers.
They were beardless striplings compared to McCormick. He had made and
exhibited a successful Reaper twenty years before the first of them
began. His father had grappled with the problem of the Reaper before
most of them were born. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should
have been an unspanable gap between the two points of view. McCormick
stood alone because he _was_ alone. He and the Reaper had grown up
together in long hazardous years of pioneering, through ridicule and
poverty and failure. It was his dream come true. And in the same spirit
with which he had fought to create it, he also fought to hold it, and to
protect it from men to whom it was not a dream and a life-mission, but a
mere machine.
CHAPTER VII
THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER
Of all the varieties of difficulties that confronted Cyrus H. McCormick
during his strenuous life, the most baffling and disconcerting
difficulty was when his Reaper began to grow. For fifteen years--from
1845 to 1860--it had remained unchanged except that seats had been added
for the raker and the driver. It did no more than cut the grain and
leave it on the ground in loose bundles. It had abolished the sickler
and the cradler; but there yet remained the raker and the binder. Might
it not be possible, thought the restless American brain, to abolish
these also and leave no one but the driver?
This at once became a most popular and fascinating problem for
inventors. There was by this time everything to gain and nothing to lose
by improving the Reaper. There was no opposition and no ridicule. To cut
grain by horse-power had become, of course, the only proper way of
cutting it. As many as 20,000 Reapers of all kinds were made in 1860;
and McCormick's factory had grown to be the pride of Chicago. It was 90
by 150 feet in size, two stories high, and gave work to about a hundred
and twenty men.
As early as 1852 a fantastic self-rake Reaper had been invented by a
mechanical genius named Jearum Atkins. This man was a bed-ridden
cripple, who, to while away the tiresome hours of his confinement,
bought a McCormick Reaper, had it placed outside his window, and
actually devised an attachment to it which automatically raked off the
cut grain in bundles. It was a grotesque contrivance. The farmers
nicknamed it the "Iron Man." It consisted of an upright post, with two
revolving iron arms. These arms whirled stiffly around, windmill
fashion, and scraped the grain from the platform to the ground.
An amusing anecdote of this machine was told by Henry Wallace, known to
all farmers of the Middle West as the founder of _Wallace's Farmer_.
"The first Reaper that my father bought," said Mr. Wallace, "was a
McCormick machine that had an 'Iron Man' on it. The first day that it
was driven into the grain it made such a clatter that the horses ran
away. It was certainly a terrifying sight as it rattled through the
wheat, with its long, rake-fingered arms flying and hurling the cut
grain in the wildest disorder. It was as good as a chariot race in a
circus to the crowd of farmers, who had come to see how the new machine
would operate. The next day my father tried again. There had been rain
during the night, and the heavy machine stuck fast in the mud. It had
cost $300, but my father took the 'Iron Man' off, and during the
remainder of that harvest we raked off the grain by hand."
A great variety of self-rake Reapers soon appeared, and after 1860 the
farmers would buy no other kind. Thus a part of the problem had been
solved. The raker was abolished. There now remained the much more
difficult work of supplanting the binder--the man, or sometimes woman,
who gathered up the bundles of cut grain, and, making a crude rope of
the grain itself, bound it tightly around the middle, making what was
called a sheaf. This was hard, back-breaking work, intolerable when the
sun was hot, except to men of the strongest physique. It required not
strength only, but skill. Ninety-nine farmers out of a hundred believed
that it would always have to be done by hand. "How can it be possible,"
they asked, "that a machine which is being dragged by horses over a
rough field can at the same time be picking up grain and tying knots?"
Just then two young farmers near De Kalb came to the rescue by inventing
a new species of machine. It was neither a Reaper nor a self-binder. It
was half-way between the two. It was the missing link. It appeared that
an inventor named Mann had taken a McCormick Reaper and built a moving
platform upon it, in such a way that the grain was carried up to a wagon
which was drawn alongside. These two young farmers had bought a Mann
machine, and one of them, when he saw it in operation, originated a
brilliant idea.
"Why should the grain be carried up to a wagon?" he asked. "Why can't
we put a foot-board on the machine, for two of us to stand on, and then
bind the grain as fast as it is carried up?"
This was the origin of the "Marsh Harvester," which held the field for
ten years or longer. It did not abolish the man who bound, but it gave
him a chance to work twice as fast. It compelled him to be quick. It
saved him the trouble of walking from bundle to bundle. It enabled him
to stand erect. And best of all, it put half a dozen inventors on the
right line of thought. Plainly, what was needed now was to teach a Marsh
Harvester to tie knots.
One evening in 1874 a tall man, with a box under his arm, walked
diffidently up the steps of the McCormick home in Chicago, and rang the
bell. He asked to see Mr. McCormick, and was shown into the parlor,
where he found Mr. McCormick, sitting as usual in a large and
comfortable chair.
"My name is Withington," said the stranger. "I live in Janesville,
Wisconsin. I have here a model of a machine that will automatically
bind grain." Now, it so happened that McCormick had been kept awake
nearly the whole of the previous night by a stubborn business problem.
He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart. And when Withington was in the
midst of his explanation, with the intentness of a born inventor,
McCormick fell fast asleep.
At such a reception to his cherished machine, Withington lost heart. He
was a gentle, sensitive man, easily rebuffed, and so, when McCormick
aroused from his nap, Withington had departed and was on his way back to
Wisconsin. For a few seconds McCormick was uncertain as to whether his
visitor had been a reality or a dream. Then he awoke with a start into
instant action. A great opportunity had come to him and he had let it
slip. He was at this time making self-rake Reapers and Marsh Harvesters;
but what he wanted--what every Reaper manufacturer wanted in 1874--was a
self-binder. He at once called to him one of his trusted workmen.
"I want you to go to Janesville," he said. "Find a man named Withington,
and bring him to me by the first train that comes back to Chicago."
The next day Withington was brought back and treated with the utmost
courtesy. McCormick studied his invention and found it to be a most
remarkable mechanism. Two steel arms caught each bundle of grain,
whirled a wire tightly around it, fastened the two ends together with a
twist, cut it loose and tossed it to the ground. This self-binder was
perfect in all its details--as neat and effective a machine as could be
imagined. McCormick was delighted. At last, here was a machine that
would abolish the binding of grain by hand.
A bargain was made with Withington on the spot; and the following July a
self-binder was tried on the Sherwood farm, near Elgin, Illinois. It cut
fifty acres of wheat and bound every bundle without a slip. From this
time onwards no one was needed but a man, a boy, a girl, anybody, who
could hold the reins and drive a team of horses. Of the ten or twelve
sweating drudges who toiled in the harvest-field, all were now to be set
free--the sicklers, cradlers, rakers, binders--every one except the
driver, and he (or she) was to have the glory of riding on the triumphal
chariot of a machine that did all the work itself.
"There were ten men working in my wheat-field in the old days," said an
Illinois farmer. "But to-day our hired girl climbs upon the spring seat
of a self-binder and does the whole business."
McCormick was not the first to make one of these magical machines. There
was an able and enterprising manufacturer in New York State, Walter A.
Wood, who in 1873 had made three Withington binders, under the
supervision of Sylvanus D. Locke, who had been a co-worker with
Withington. McCormick had given Wood his start, as early as 1853, by
selling him a license to make Reapers; and Wood, by his high personal
qualities, had built up a most extensive business. But McCormick was the
first to make self-binders upon a large scale. He made 50,000 of the
Withington machines, and pushed them with irresistible energy.
[Illustration: THE FIRST McCORMICK SELF-RAKE REAPING MACHINE]
He originated a new method of advertising the self-binders among the
farmers. Special flat-cars were provided for him by the railroads. Upon
each one of these cars a binder was placed, in the charge of an expert.
These cars, during the harvest season, were attached to ordinary freight
trains; and whenever the train came to a busy wheat-field it was stopped
for an hour or more, the self-binder was rushed from the car to the
field, and an exhibition of its skill given to the wondering farmers.
Then it was put back on its car, and the train resumed its leisurely
course until it arrived at the next scene of harvesting.
The sensitive-natured inventor, Charles B. Withington, who gave such
timely aid to McCormick, was one of the most romantic knights-errant of
industry in his generation. Born near Akron a year before McCormick
invented his Reaper, he was trained by his father to be a watchmaker. At
fifteen, to earn some pocket-money, he went into the harvest field to
bind grain. He was not robust, and the hard, stooping labor under a hot
sun would sometimes bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage. There
were times after the day's work was done when he was too weary to walk
home, and would throw himself upon the stubble to rest.
At eighteen he set out to find his fortune in the far West, became a
Forty-niner, drifted to Australia, and in 1855 came back to Janesville,
Wisconsin, with three thousand dollars or more in his belt. All this
money he proceeded to fritter away on the invention of a self-rake
Reaper--"a crazy scheme," as the townspeople called it. As it happened,
the whole southern region of Wisconsin was being stirred up at that time
by the speeches of an inventive Madison editor, who went by the name of
"Pump" Carpenter. Carpenter's hobby was that the binding of grain must
be done by machinery. He was eloquent and popular, and his arguments
were substantiated by a little model which he was accustomed to carry
about with him. Withington heard him speak and was converted. He dropped
his self-rake reaper and went to work upon a self-binder. He completed
his first machine in 1872, and was thrust from one discouragement to
another until two years later he met McCormick.
It is a most interesting fact, and certainly not an accidental one, that
the group of noted inventors who together produced the self-binder all
appeared from the region south of Madison, which had been so aroused by
the eloquence of "Pump" Carpenter. Besides C. B. Withington, there were
Sylvanus D. Locke, also of Janesville, H. A. Holmes, of Beloit, John F.
Appleby, of Mazomanie, W. W. Burson, Jacob Behel, George H. Spaulding,
and Marquis L. Gorham, of Rockford.
Until 1880, all went well with McCormick and the Withington self-binder.
Apparently, the process of invention had ceased. The Reaper had become
of age. This miraculous wire-twisting machine was working everywhere
with clock-like precision, and was believed to be the best that human
ingenuity could devise. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a blue sky,
came the news that William Deering had made and sold 3,000 _twine_
self-binders, and that the farmers had all at once become prejudiced
against the use of wire. Wire, they said, got mixed with the straw and
killed their cattle. Wire fell in the wheat and made trouble in the
flour-mills. Wire cut their hands. Wire cluttered up their barn-yards.
They would have no more to do with wire. What they wanted and must have
was _twine_.
William Deering, the newcomer who had caused this disturbance, became in
a flash McCormick's ablest competitor. He had entered the business eight
years before with a running start, having been a successful dry goods
merchant in Maine. His geneology in the harvester industry shows that he
had become an active partner of E. H. Gammon in 1872. Gammon, who had
formerly been a Methodist preacher in Maine, had started as an agent for
Seymour and Morgan of Brockport, which firm had been licensed by
McCormick in 1845. Deering was the first highly skilled business man to
enter the harvester trade. He was not a farmer's son, like McCormick. He
was city-bred and factory trained. And in 1880 he staked practically his
whole fortune upon the making of 3,000 twine self-binders, and won.
Cyrus McCormick saw at a glance that the wire self-binder must go. It
was his policy to give the farmers what they wanted, rather than to
force upon them an unpopular machine. So he called to his aid a
mechanical genius named Marquis L. Gorham--one of those who had been
lured into the quest of a self-binder by the insistence of "Pump"
Carpenter. Gorham's most valuable contribution was a self-sizing device,
by which all bound sheaves were made to be the same size. By the time
that the grain stood ripe and yellow the following season, Gorham had
prepared a twine self-binder that worked well, and McCormick, yielding
to this sudden hostility against wire, pushed the Gorham machine with
the full force of his great organization.
This evolution of the Reaper into the twine self-binder was a momentous
event. It tremendously increased the sales. There were 60,000 machines
of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000 in 1885. And it strikingly
decreased the number of manufacturers. There were a hundred or more
until the appearance of the twine binder: and all but twenty-two fell
out of the race. Some of these were driven out by the expensive war of
patents that now ensued. But most of them gave up the contest for lack
of capital. The era of big production had arrived, and the little
hand-labor shops could not produce an intricate self-binder for the low
price at which they were being sold.
Even McCormick lost heavily at first, before a truce was called in this
battle of the binders. One lawsuit cost him more than $225,000 and one
experiment, with what was called a "low-down" binder, cost him $80,000.
He was as determined as ever not to be beaten; and although he was at
this time over seventy years of age, and sorely crippled by rheumatism,
he straightway entered into a trade war with Deering, which was not
ended until 1902. Many of the older workmen who are now employed in the
McCormick works can remember the stress and strain of those battling
years, and how their indomitable old leader, at times when he was
unable to walk, would have himself pushed in a wheeled chair through the
various buildings of his immense plant, to make sure that every part of
the great mechanism was working smoothly.
Of all the competitors who had fought him in the early days, before the
Civil War, there were few now remaining. Hussey, his first antagonist,
had sold out to a mowing machine syndicate in 1861. Emerson, Seymour,
and Morgan had decided not to make self-binders. Jerome Fassler, of
Springfield, Ohio, took his fortune of two million dollars and went to
New York City in 1882 with a scheme to build a subway. Manny was dead,
and very few were living of those who had seen the Reaper of 1831.
John P. Adriance, of Poughkeepsie, had survived. He was a gentle-natured
man, who was content with a small and safe percentage of the business.
Byron E. Huntley, of Batavia, had also built up a small, but solidly
based, enterprise. He had been the office-boy, in 1845, in the factory
where the first hundred McCormick Reapers were made; and he had been a
manufacturer on his own account since 1850. He, too, was a quiet,
dignified man, very highly esteemed in both the United States and
Europe. Lewis Miller, who deserves most credit as the creator of the
mower, continued to do business at Akron. Mr. Miller was almost equally
famous as a Methodist and the originator of the Chautauqua idea. At
Auburn, N. Y., David M. Osborne was fighting manfully to keep in the
race. He had built seven Reapers as early as 1856; and had made many
friends by his ability and uprightness. At Hoosick Falls, N. Y., there
was Walter A. Wood--a most competent and enterprising man; at Plano,
Illinois, there was William H. Jones--self-made and as honest as the
soil; and at Springfield, Ohio, were the picturesque William N. Whiteley
and the powerful company of Warder, Bushnell, and Glessner. Whiteley was
an inventor who had changed a McCormick Reaper into what he called a
"combined machine"--a combined Reaper and mower. And Warder, Bushnell,
and Glessner had begun to make McCormick Reapers, by means of a license
from Seymour and Morgan, in 1852.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858]
Such were the most notable men who, together with McCormick and Deering,
began in 1880 or soon afterwards to manufacture the new knot-tying
device that had become necessary to the Reaper. As for Cyrus H.
McCormick himself, he lived to see it the universal grain-cutter of all
civilized countries. He lived to see it perfected into one of the most
astonishing mechanisms known to man--an almost rational machine that
cuts the grain, carries it on a canvas escalator up to steel hands that
shape it into bundles, tie a cord around it as neatly as could be done
by a sailor, and cut the cord; after which the bound sheaf is pushed
into a basket and held until five of them have been collected, whereupon
they are dropped carefully upon the ground.
Since 1884 there has been no essential change in the fashion of the
self-binder. It is the same to-day as when McCormick was alive. In the
span of his single life the Reaper was born and grew to its full
maturity. He saw its Alpha and its Omega. Best of all, he saw not only
its humble arrival, in a remote Virginia settlement, but, as we shall
see, he saw it become the plaything of Emperors, the marvel of Siberian
plainsmen, the liberator of the land-serf in twenty countries, and the
bread-machine of one-half of the human race.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CONQUEST OF EUROPE
By 1850 Cyrus H. McCormick was ready for new business. He now had a
factory of his own, and the assistance of his brothers, William and
Leander. He had a score of busy agents and a few thousand dollars in the
bank. He had fought down the ridicule of the farm-hands. It was only six
years since he had set out from his Virginian farm with $300 in his belt
and the Idea of the Reaper in his brain; but in those six years he had
worked mightily and succeeded. His Reapers were now clicking merrily in
more than three thousand American wheat-fields. So, it was a natural
thing that in the first flush of victory, he should look across the sea
for "more worlds to conquer."
There was at that time no general demand for Reapers in any European
country. Labor was plentiful and cheap--forty cents a day in Great
Britain and about half as much in Germany and France. In Austria and
Russia the farm laborers received no wages at all. They were serfs.
There was no economic reason why serfs should be replaced by machinery.
They had first to become free and expensive to employ, before this
Reaper, this product of a free republic, could set them free from the
drudgery of the harvest.
England had been the first European country to abolish this serfdom.
Several centuries before, the ravages of the Black Death had made farm
laborers so scarce that their rights had begun to be respected. Also,
the upgrowth of the factory system and the development of English
shipping had called thousands of men away from the fields, and raised
the wages of those who were left behind. And the falling off in profits
was compelling many English land-owners to study better methods of
farming, and to favor the introduction of farm machinery.
Fortunately for McCormick, he had no sooner begun to think of foreign
trade than there came the famous London Exposition of 1851. This mammoth
Exhibition was to Great Britain what the Chicago World's Fair of 1893
was to the United States--magnificent evidence of industrial progress.
Its main promoter had been Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria,
and its success gave the keenest pleasure to the young Queen. In a
letter written to the King of the Belgians, she thus describes her
impressions upon the opening day:
"My dearest Uncle," she writes, "I wish you could have witnessed the 1st
May, 1851, the _greatest_ day in our history, the _most beautiful_ and
_imposing_ and _touching_ spectacle ever seen, and the triumph of my
beloved Albert. Truly it was astonishing, a fairy scene. Many cried, and
all felt touched and impressed with devotional feelings. It was the
_happiest, proudest_ day in my life, and I can think of nothing else.
You will be astounded at this great work when you see it. The beauty of
the building and the vastness of it all!"
The crowning jewel of this Exposition was the priceless Koh-i-noor
diamond, which the Queen had received from India the previous year, and
had loaned to the Exposition managers. For five thousand years, so the
legend ran, this diamond had been one of the most precious treasures of
Asia. It had been worn by the hero Karna. And it had been so often the
most coveted prize in war that there was a Hindoo saying--"Whoever
possesses the Koh-i-noor has conquered his enemies."
Most of the courts of Europe had sent some dazzling treasure. There were
tapestries from the Viceroy of Egypt, and rugs from the Sultan of
Turkey, and silks from the King of Spain. There were marbles from Paris,
and paintings from Dresden, and embroideries from Vienna. And in the
midst of this resplendent Exposition, surrounded and outshone by the
exhibits of Russia, Austria, and France, lay a shabby collection of odds
and ends from the United States.
For three weeks the American department was the joke of the Exposition.
It was nicknamed the "Prairie Ground." It had no jewels, nor silks, nor
golden candelabra. There were only such preposterous things as Dick's
Press, Borden's Meat Biscuit, St. John's Soap, and McCormick's Reaper.
This last contraption was the most preposterous of all. It was said to
be "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a
flying-machine." It was unlike anything else that English eyes had ever
seen, and by all odds the queerest and most ungainly thing that lay
under the glass roof of the Crystal Palace. Undeniably it was the "Ugly
Duckling" of the American exhibit.
But one day there came to the Reaper booth a remarkable Anglo-Italian
named John J. Mechi. His father had been the barber of George III., and
he himself, by the invention of a "Magic Razor Strop," had made a
fortune. His hobby was scientific farming, and he was hungry for new
methods and new ideas. At the time of the Exposition, his farm, which
lay not far from London, had become the most famous experimental ground
in England. Therefore, when he spied this new contrivance called a
Reaper, he proposed that it be taken out to his farm and put to the
test.
This was done on July twenty-fourth. In spite of a pouring rain, there
were present a group of judges and two hundred farmers. Lord Ebrington
was there, and Prince Frederick of Holstein, and several other titled
agriculturists. One other machine was to be tested, besides McCormick's.
It was put into the grain first and was at once seen to be a failure. It
broke down the grain instead of cutting it. Seeing this mishap, several
of the farmers said to Mr. Mechi, "You had better stop this trial,
because it is destroying your grain." Whereupon Mr. Mechi made one of
the noblest replies that can be found in the annals of progress.
"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a great experiment for the benefit of my
country. When a new principle is about to be established, individual
interests must always give way. If it is necessary for the success of
this test, you may take my seventy acres of wheat."
Then came the McCormick Reaper, driven by an expert named Mackenzie. It
swept down the field like a chariot of war, with whirling reel and
clattering blade--seventy-four yards in seventy seconds. It was a
miracle. Such a thing had never before been seen by Europeans. "This is
a triumph for the American Reaper," said the delighted Mechi. "It has
done its work completely; and the day will come when this machine will
cut all the grain in England. Now," he continued, swinging his hat, "let
us, as Englishmen, show our appreciation by giving three hearty English
cheers."
Horace Greeley, who was present on this occasion, described the victory
of the McCormick Reaper as follows:--"It came into the field to confront
a tribunal already prepared for its condemnation. Before it stood John
Bull--burly, dogged, and determined not to be humbugged,--his judgment
made up and his sentence ready to be recorded. There was a moment, and
but a moment, of suspense; then human prejudice could hold out no
longer; and burst after burst of involuntary cheers from the whole crowd
proclaimed the triumph of the Yankee Reaper. In seventy seconds
McCormick had become famous. He was the lion of the hour; and had he
brought five hundred Reapers with him, he could have sold them all."
Suddenly the "Ugly Duckling" had become a swan. The glory of the Reaper
began to rival that of the Koh-i-noor. McCormick was given not only a
First Prize but a Council Medal, such as was usually awarded only to
Kings and Governments. The London _Times_, which had led the jeering,
became now the loudest in the chorus of approval. "The Reaping machine
from the United States," said the _Times_ editor, "is the most valuable
contribution from abroad, to the stock of our previous knowledge, that
we have yet discovered. It is worth the whole cost of the Exposition."
Also, speaking on behalf of the English people, Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer
said, "For all manly and practical purposes, the place of the United
States is at the head of the poll. Where, out of America, shall we get a
pistol like Mr. Colt's, to kill our eight enemies in a second, or a
reaping machine like Mr. McCormick's, to clear out twenty acres of wheat
in a day?"
On the whole, this Exposition gave the United States its first
opportunity to answer the unpleasant questions that Sidney Smith had
asked in 1820. What have the Americans done, he had asked, for the arts
and sciences? Where are their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys?
Here he was answered by the McCormick Reaper, the Colt revolver, the
Hobbs lock, the Morse telegraph, the Howe sewing-machine, the Deere
plow, and the Hoe press. And, as if to make the triumph of American
invention complete, it was in this year that the yacht _America_ easily
out-classed the famous yachts of England in a great race at Cowes, and
that the American steamer _Baltic_, of the Collins Line, broke all the
ocean records and became the speediest vessel on the high seas.
This Exposition did much for McCormick. It was the first appreciation of
his work, in a large way, that he had received. It was a welcome change
after twenty strenuous years. It gave him the distinction that a
naturally strong nature craved, and secured the friendship of such
eminent men as Junius Morgan, George Peabody, J. J. Mechi, and Lord
Granville. From a business point of view, also, the Exposition was of
great service to McCormick. It enabled him to draw up a new plan of
campaign for the foreign trade.
In the United States, he had made his appeal directly to the mass of the
farmers. In Europe he could not do this. The vast bulk of the farmers
here were tenants or serfs. But it was also true, he observed, that the
Kings of Europe, and the members of the nobility, were land-owners. Here
was his chance. He would begin at the top. He would sell his Reapers to
the kings.
He noticed that kings and queens were not the remote and inaccessible
personages that he had believed them to be. Prince Albert was plainly
more interested in farm machinery than in the Koh-i-noor. The one prize
which was awarded to him personally was for a model cottage, in which a
workingman's family might live with greater comfort. And one morning,
while McCormick was giving attention to his Reaper, the Queen and her
ten-year-old son (now the King of England) walked past and had a view of
the American Reaping machine that had been so widely ridiculed and
praised.
McCormick had to hurry back to the United States, on account of a
patent suit that was then in full swing; but before he left England he
established an agency in London, and started a vigorous campaign among
the titled land-owners. He prepared a statement, showing that even at
the low rate of wages that were paid on English farms a Reaper would
mean a handsome saving to English wheat-growers. But he did not depend
upon the argument of economy. He placed his reliance also upon the fact
that the Reaper had become the playtoy of kings, and that their fancy
would presently make it the fashion.
Four years later he went with another Reaper to an Exposition at Paris,
won the Gold Medal, and sold his machine to the Emperor. Then, in 1862,
with his wife and young son and daughter, he made his headquarters in
London, and opened up a two-years' campaign in Great Britain, Germany,
and France. Up to this time the foreign trade had grown but slowly. All
European countries combined were not buying more than half a million
dollars' worth of farm machinery a year from Americans--less than we
sell them now in five days. So McCormick exerted himself to the utmost.
He held field tests to awaken the farmers. He advertised and organized.
There were now several dozen other manufacturers in the field, all
making Reapers more or less like McCormick's; and he gave battle to them
at London, Lille, and Hamburg. After the Hamburg contest, Joseph A.
Wright, the United States Commissioner, cabled to New York: "McCormick
has thrashed all nations and walked off with the Gold Medal."
Again, in 1867, McCormick had a notable time at Paris. The Emperor
Napoleon III., then in the last days of his inherited glory, permitted
McCormick to give a sort of Reaper _matinée_ on the royal estate at
Châlons. The Emperor was present, at first on horseback, and then on
foot. The sun was hot, and presently he said to McCormick, "If you will
allow me, I'll come under your umbrella." So the two men, dramatically
different in the tendencies they represented, walked arm in arm behind
the Reaper, and watched it automatically cut and rake off the grain. The
Emperor was delighted. He forgot for the moment his impending troubles,
and at once offered McCormick the Cross of the Legion of Honor. This
was, in all probability, the last time that the coveted Cross was
conferred in France by the hand of a sovereign; and the meeting of the
two men was a highly impressive event, the one man typifying a falling
dynasty that had risen to greatness by the sword, and the other the
founder of a new industry that was destined to bring peace and plenty to
all nations alike.
Two years later, because of the clamor of McCormick's competitors, a
grand Field Test was arranged by the German Government at Altenberg.
Thirty-eight contestants entered the lists, and after a most exciting
tournament the judges awarded the Gold Medal and a special prize of
sixty ducats to McCormick. Such contests, from this time onward, came
thick and fast. Several days later McCormick swept the field at Altona.
In 1873 he was decorated by the Austrian Emperor. And in 1878 the
French Academy of Science elected him a member, for the reason that he
"had done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1867
From Painting by Cabanel]
From that time to the present day the making of Reapers and Harvesters
has remained an American business. An American machine must pay twenty
dollars to enter France, and twenty-five to enter Hungary. But try as
they may, other nations cannot learn the secret of the Reaper. They
cannot produce a machine that is at once so complex, so hardy, and so
efficient. When Bismarck, at the close of his life, was inspecting
several American self-binders which he had bought for his farm at
Fredericksruhe, he asked, "Why do they not make these machines in
Germany?" As we have seen, had he wished a complete answer he would have
had to read the history of the United States. He would have seen that
the Reaper can be produced only in countries where labor receives a high
reward, where farmers own their own acres without fear of being
despoiled by invading armies, and where the average of intelligence
and enterprise is as high in the country as in the city.
In 1898 Europe had become so dependent upon America for its reaping
machinery that 22,000 machines were shipped from the McCormick plant
alone--so many that a fleet of twelve vessels had to be chartered to
carry them. There are now as many American Reapers and Harvesters in
Europe as can do the work of 12,000,000 men. Of all American machines
exported, the Reaper is at the head of the list. It has been the chief
pathfinder for our foreign trade. Four-fifths of all the harvesting
machinery in the world is made in the United States; and one-third,
perhaps more, in the immense factory-city that Cyrus H. McCormick
founded in Chicago in 1847.
It was McCormick's most solid satisfaction, in his later life, to see
foreign nations, one by one, adopt his invention and move up out of the
Famine Zone. No news was at any time more welcome to him than the
tidings that a new territory had been entered. And although the foreign
trade has been vastly multiplied in the past five or six years, he
lived long enough to see his catalogue printed in twenty languages, and
to know that as long as the human race continued to eat bread, the sun
would never set upon the empire of the Reaper.
CHAPTER IX
McCORMICK AS A MANUFACTURER
"If I had given up business, I would have been dead long ago," said
Cyrus H. McCormick in 1884, only a few weeks before his death; and this
statement was by no means an exaggeration. His business was his life. It
was not a definite, walled-off fraction of his life, as with most men.
It was the whole of it. His business was his work, his play, his
religion, his grand opera, his education. There was business even in his
love-letters and his dreams.
McCormick believed in business. He had the sturdy pride of a "John
Halifax, Gentleman." He never wanted to be anything else but a worker.
He never wasted a breath in wishing for an easier life. He worked hard
for twenty-five years after he had made his fortune, because he believed
in work and commerce and the reciprocities of trade. He was never
dazzled nor deflected for a moment by the pomps and pageantries of the
world, and for the glory that springs from war he had very little
respect. In 1847, when offering a place in his factory to his brother
Leander, he writes, "This will be as honorable an enterprise as to go to
Mexico to be shot at." And in later life, in a conversation with General
Lilley, of Virginia, he said, "I expect to die in the harness, because
this is not the world for rest. This is the world for work. In the next
world we will have the rest."
In the vast mass of letters, papers, etc., left by Mr. McCormick, there
is one mention, and only one, of recreation. After his first visit to
the West, in 1844, he wrote to one of his brothers and described a
hunting trip in which he shot three prairie chickens near Beloit. But
during the rest of his life, he was too busy for sport. His energy was
the wonder of his friends and the despair of his employees. His brain
was not quick. It was not marvellously keen nor marvellously intuitive.
But it was at work every waking moment, like a great engine that never
tires.
"He was the most laborious worker I ever saw," said one of his
secretaries. One of the words that annoyed him most was _to-morrow_. He
wanted things done to-day. With regard to every important piece of work,
it was his instinct to "do it now." He abhorred delay and dawdling. Even
as a boy, when sent on an errand, he would set off upon a run. Walking
was too slow. And although he was in France on many occasions, the
French phrase that he knew best was "_Depechez-vous_."
His plan of work, so far as he could be said to have a plan, was
this--_One Thing at a Time, and the Hardest Thing First_. He followed
the line of _most_ resistance. If the hardest thing can be done, he
reasoned, all the rest will follow. And as for all work that was merely
routine, he left as much as possible of it to others.
He was not an organizer so much as a creator and a pioneer. His problem
was not like that which troubles the business men of to-day. He was not
grappling with the evils of competition, nor with the higher questions
of efficiency and "community of interest." He was making a business that
had not existed. He was clearing away obstacles that are now wholly
forgotten. Consequently, as each new difficulty appeared, he had to
consider it in all its details. He could not pass it over to Lieutenant
Number One or Lieutenant Number Two.
McCormick was like a general who was leading an army into an unknown
country rather than like the business man of the twentieth century, who
can travel by time-table and schedule. When an obstacle blocked his
path, it had to be removed; and until it was out of the way, nothing
else mattered. Thus it was impossible for McCormick to have business
hours. Once his mind had applied itself to a problem, he cared nothing
for clocks and watches. Sometimes he would work on through the night,
hour after hour, until the gray light of another day shone in the
window. On all these arduous occasions, he had no idea of time, and he
would allow no distractions nor interruptions. So rigid was this grasp
of his mind that if his body rebelled and he fell asleep, he would
invariably when he woke take up the matter in hand at the exact point at
which it had been left. Not even sleep could detach his mind from a
task that was unfinished.
When anything was going well, he let it alone. As soon as his factory
was in good running order, he gave it little attention. It was managed
first by his brothers, William and Leander, and afterwards by such
thoroughly competent men as Charles Spring and E. K. Butler. The work
that he chose to do himself was invariably new business. He cared little
for the mere making of money. The success always pleased him much more
than the profit. He was at heart a builder, and therefore when he had
finished one structure, he moved off and began another.
It is a remarkable fact that as an investor, also, he had no interest in
businesses that were already established. Stocks were offered to him,
stocks that were safe and sure, but he bought none of them. The money
that he invested outside of his own business was put into pioneering
enterprises. He bought land in Chicago and Arizona. He opened up gold
mines in South Carolina and Montana. He supplied the capital for a
company which set out to bring mahogany from San Domingo. He invested
$55,000 in the Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean Railroad, an ambitious attempt to
join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by rail, which was begun in 1879
and came to an inglorious end several years later. And he was one of
that daring group of Americans who planned and financed the Union
Pacific Railway--the first road that really joined sea to sea and
reached to the farthest acre in the West.
[Illustration: McCORMICK REAPER CUTTING ON A SIDE HILL IN PENNSYLVANIA]
In all these undertakings he lost money, except in the instances of
Chicago real estate and the Union Pacific. By 1883 he had several
hundred thousand dollars invested in gold mines, and yet had not
received one dollar of profit. It was the fascination of pioneering that
had lured him. He saw no charm, as the gambler does, in the risk itself.
The Wall Street game he regarded as child's play. The thing that gripped
him was the developing of new material resources--the colonization of
new lands--the mastery of whatever is hostile to the welfare of the
human race.
Another McCormick trait, which is not usually found in men who have the
pioneering instinct, was _Thoroughness_. He never said, "This is good
enough," or "Half a loaf is better than no bread." He wanted what was
_right_ whether it came to him or went from him. He never believed in a
ninety per cent success. He wanted par. Once his mind was fully aroused
upon a subject, there was no detail too petty for him to consider. He
labored hard to be correct in matters that appeared trifling to other
men. Even in his letters to members of his family, the sentences were
carefully formed, and there were no misspelled words. Once he gave
advice to a younger brother on the importance of spelling words
correctly. "You should carry a dictionary, as I do," he said.
All slovenliness, whether of mind or body, he abhorred. To take thought
about a matter and to do it as it ought to be done, was to him a matter
of character as well as of business. When a telegram was submitted to
him for approval, it was his custom to draw a circle around the
superfluous words. This was a little lesson to his managers on the
importance of brevity and exactness. He insisted that clocks and watches
should be correct, and in his later life carried a fine repeater which
could strike the hour in the night and in which he took an almost boyish
pride. Once, when he had been given the management of a political
campaign in Chicago, he created consternation among the politicians by
the rigid way in which he supervised the expense accounts. "This will
never do," he said. "Things are at loose ends." If a bill was ten cents
too much it went back. One bill for $15 was held up for a week because
it was not properly drawn. The amazed politicians could not understand
such a man,--who would readily sign a check for $10,000, and put it in
the campaign treasury, and yet make trouble about the misplacing of a
dime of other people's money.
McCormick demanded absolute honesty from his employees. One young man
lost his chance of promotion because he was seen to place a two-cent
stamp, belonging to the firm, on one of his personal letters. But once
he had tested a man, and found him to be pure gold, he trusted him
completely. A new employee would be pelted with questions and complete
answers insisted upon. This was often a harsh ordeal. It was irritating
to a man of independent spirit, until he realized that it was a sort of
discipline and examination.
McCormick was always an optimist. He was not one of those who said, "Let
well enough alone."
He never endured unsatisfactory business conditions. When he found that
the freight charges on Reapers from Virginia to Cincinnati were too
high, he arranged to have Reapers built in Cincinnati. When he found
that other manufacturers were apt to be careless as to the quality of
their materials, he built a factory of his own. Again and again in the
course of his life, came the temptation to be satisfied with what he had
already achieved. But he could not endure the thought of being beaten.
Instead of being content and complacent, he was far more likely to be
planning a wholly new policy, on larger lines.
A daring proposition from a competent man always caught his attention.
Once, when he was sitting in his office, he heard E. K. Butler, who was
at that time the head of his sales department, protest that the factory
was not making as many machines as it should. "It is sheer nonsense,"
said Butler, "to say that the factory is producing as much as it can. If
I were at the head of it, I could double the output with very little
extra expense." Most employers would have regarded this sort of talk as
mere boastfulness, but not so McCormick. He knew that Butler was a most
adaptable and competent man, so he called him into the office and
straightway appointed him to be the superintendent of the factory.
Butler was thus put upon his mettle. He went out to the factory resolved
that McCormick's confidence in him should not be overthrown. He routed
the wastes and inefficiencies, and keyed the whole plant up to such a
pitch that, in a remarkably short period, he had made good his boast and
doubled the output without hiring an extra man.
But the preëminent quality in the character of Cyrus McCormick was not
his power of concentration, nor his spirit of pioneering, nor his
thoroughness. It was his strength of will--his _Tenacity_. This was the
motif of his life.
He was not at all a shrewd accumulator of millions, as many have
imagined him. He had not an iota of craft and cunning. Neither was he a
financier, in the modern sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that
he was a farmer-manufacturer, of simple nature but tremendous
resolution, whose one overmastering life-purpose was to teach the wheat
nations of the world to use his harvesting machinery.
"The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,"
said one of his lawyers. "If any other man on this earth ever had such a
will, certainly I have not heard of it."
A drizzle of little annoyances and little matters always irritated him,
but he could stand up alone against a sea of adversity without a
whimper. In fact, he would sooner be asked for a thousand dollars than
for fifty cents. He would storm over the loss of a carpet slipper and
smile blandly at the loss of a lawsuit. "He made more fuss over a
pin-prick," said one of his valets, "than he did over a surgical
operation." He disliked the petty odds and ends of life. His mind was
too massive to adapt itself readily to small matters. But when a great
difficulty came in view, he rose and went at it with a sort of stern
satisfaction and religious zeal. He was so confident of his own
strength, and of the justice of his cause, that it was almost a joy to
him to--
"Breast the blows of circumstance,
And grasp the skirts of happy chance,
And grapple with his evil star."
A defeat never meant anything more to McCormick than a delay. Often, the
harder he was thrown down the higher he would rebound. Again and again
he was thwarted and blocked. In the race of competition, there was a
time when he was beaten by Whiteley, and there was a time when he was
beaten by Deering. Most of his lawsuits were decided against him. But no
one ever saw him crushed or really disheartened. In 1877, after he had
made a long hard struggle to become a United States Senator, the news
came to him that he was defeated. "Well," he said, "that's over. What
next?"
[Illustration: REAPER DRAWN BY OXEN IN ALGERIA]
Usually, McCormick was at his best when the situation was at its worst.
His Titanic work immediately after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 is the
most striking evidence of this. He had been living at the corner of
Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, in New York City, for four years before
the Fire; but he was in Chicago during the greatest of all Illinois
disasters. In one day of fire and terror he saw his city reduced to a
waste of ashes. It was no longer a city. It was two thousand acres of
desolation. He was himself in the midst of the fire-fighting. When his
wife, in response to his telegraphic message, came to him in Chicago two
days later, he met her wearing a half-burned hat and a half-burned
overcoat. His big factory, which was at that time making about 10,000
harvesters a year, was wholly destroyed. In a flash he found himself
without a city and without a business.
But McCormick never flinched. The arrival of a great difficulty was
always his cue. First he ascertained his wife's wishes. Did she wish
the factory to be rebuilt, or did she want him to retire from active
business life? She, thinking of her son, said--"Rebuild." At once
McCormick became the most buoyant and confident citizen in the ruined
city. His great spirit was aroused. He called up one of his attorneys
and sent him in haste to the docks to buy lumber. He telegraphed to his
agents to rush in as much money as they could collect. Every bank in the
city had been burned, so for a time this money was kept by the cashier
in a market basket, and carried at night to a private house. There was
one day as much as $24,000 in the basket. Before the cinders were cool,
McCormick had given orders to build a new factory, larger than the one
that had been burned down. More than this, he had also given orders that
his house in New York should be sold, and that a home should be
established in Chicago. Chicago was his city. He had seen it grow from
10,000 to 325,000. And in this hour of its distress he tossed aside all
other plans and gave Chicago all he had.
His unconquerableness gave heart to others. Several of the wealthiest
citizens, who had lost courage, rallied to the help of the city. One
merchant, who had lost his store, borrowed $100,000 from McCormick and
started again. And so McCormick became not only one of the main builders
of the first Chicago, but also of the second Chicago, which in less than
three years had become larger and finer than the city that was.
It was this steel-fibred tenacity that was the main factor in the
success of McCormick, whether we consider him as a manufacturer or as a
great American. It enabled him to establish the perilous industry of
making harvesting machines--a business so complex and many-sided that
out of every twenty manufacturers who set out to emulate McCormick, only
one survives to-day. It enabled McCormick to hold his own in spite of
adverse litigation, the hostility of Congress, the rivalry of other
inventors, and the calamity of the Great Fire. It was so remarkable, and
so productive of good to his country and to himself, that he will always
remain one of the creative and heroic figures in the early industrial
history of the United States.
CHAPTER X
CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN
Cyrus H. McCormick was a great commercial Thor. He was six feet tall,
weighed two hundred pounds, and had the massive shoulders of a wrestler.
His body was well proportioned, with small hands and feet. His hair,
even in old age, was very dark and waving. His bearing was erect, his
manner often imperious, and his general appearance that of a man built
on large lines and for large affairs.
Men of lesser caliber regarded him with fear, not for any definite
reason, but because, as Seneca has said--"In him that has power, all men
consider not what he has done, but what he may do." He was so strong, so
dominating, so ready to crash through obstacles by sheer bulk of
will-power, that smaller men could never quite subdue a feeling of alarm
while they were in his presence. He was impatient of small talk and
small criticisms and small objections. He had no tact at retail, and he
saw no differences in little-minded people. All his life he had been
plagued and obstructed by the Liliputians of the world, and he had no
patience to listen to their chattering. He was often as rude as Carlyle
to those who tied their little threads of pessimism across his path.
At fashionable gatherings he would now and then be seen--a dignified
figure; but his mind was almost too ponderous an engine to do good
service in a light conversation. If a subject did not interest him, he
had nothing to say. What gave him, perhaps, the highest degree of social
pleasure, was the entertaining, at his house, of such men as Horace
Greeley, William H. Seward, Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, George
Peabody, Junius Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, or some old friend from
Virginia.
His long years of pioneering had made him a self-sufficient man, and a
man who lived from within. He did not pick up his opinions on the
streets. His mind was not open to any chance idea. He had certain clear,
definite convictions, logical and consistent. What he knew, he knew.
There were no hazy imaginings in his mind. The main secret of his power
lay in his ability to focus all his energies upon a few subjects. Once,
in 1848, he mentioned the French Revolution in one of his letters. "It
is a mighty affair," he wrote, "and will be likely to stand." But
usually he paid little attention to the world-dramas that were being
enacted. He was too busy--too devoted to affairs which, if he did not
attend to them, would not be attended to at all.
McCormick was a product of the Protestant Reformation, and of the
capitalistic development that came with it. The whole structure of his
character was based upon the two great dogmas of the Reformation--the
sovereignty of God and the direct responsibility of the individual.
Whoever would know the springs at which his life was fed must read the
story of Luther, Calvin, and Knox. They must call to mind the attitude
of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when he faced the men who had the power
to take his life and said, "Here I stand. I can do no other." They must
recollect how these three men, who were leaders of nations, not sects,
stood out alone against the kings and ecclesiasticisms of Europe,
without wealth, without armies, without anything except a higher Moral
Idea, and succeeded so mightily they actually changed the course of
empires and became the pathfinders of the human race.
McCormick was so essentially a result of this religio-economic movement
that it is impossible to separate his religion and his business life. He
was an individualist through and through--as well marked a type of the
Covenanter in commerce as the United States has ever produced. He
believed in presbyters in religion, private capitalists in business, and
elected representatives in government. He was opposed to feudalism and
bureaucracy in all their myriad forms. He held the middle ground, the
_via media_, between the over-organization of the fourteenth century,
when the rights of the individual were forgotten, and the lax liberalism
of to-day, when too much is left to individual whim and caprice, and
when duties and responsibilities are too apt to be ignored.
Above all constituted authorities stood a man's own conscience. This was
McCormick's faith, and it was this that made him the fighter that he
was. It gave him courage and the fortitude that is rarer than courage.
It compelled him to oppose his own political party at the Baltimore
Convention of 1861. It made him stand single-handed against his
fellow-manufacturers, in defence of his rights as an inventor. It
enabled him to beat down the Pennsylvania Railroad, after a twenty-three
year contest, and to prove that a great corporation cannot lawfully do
an injustice to an individual.
McCormick was nourished on this virile Calvinistic faith from the time
when he first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the
Bible. It had been the faith of his fathers for generations, and it was
bred into him from boyhood. Nevertheless, according to the practice of
the Presbyterians, there had to come a time when he himself openly made
his choice. This occasion came in 1834, when McCormick was twenty-five
years of age. A four-day meeting was being held in the little stone
church on his grandfather's farm. Three ministers were in charge. As was
the custom, there was constant preaching from morning until sundown,
with an hour's respite for dinner. At the close of the fourth day, all
who wished to become avowed Christians were requested to stand up. Cyrus
McCormick was there, and he was not a member of the church; yet he did
not stand up. That night his father went to his bedside and gently
reproached him. "My son," he said, "don't you know that your silence is
a public rejection of your Saviour?" Cyrus was conscience-stricken. He
leapt from his bed and began to dress himself. "I'll go and see old
Billy McClung," he said. Half an hour later, old Billy McClung, who was
a universally respected religious leader in the community, was amazed to
be called out of his sleep by a greatly troubled young man, who wanted
to know by what means he might make his peace with his Maker. The next
Sunday this young man stood up in the church, and became in name what
he already was by nature and inheritance--a Christian of the
Presbyterian faith.
After he left home his letters to the members of his family are strewn
with scraps of religious reflection. In 1845, for instance, he writes,
"Business is not inconsistent with Christianity; but the latter ought to
be a help to the former, giving a confidence and resignation, after
using all proper means; and yet I have sometimes felt that I came so far
short of the right _feeling_, so worldly-minded, that I could wish
myself out of the world." On another occasion, when he was struggling
with manufacturers who had broken their contracts, he wrote, "If it were
not for the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in our
business, it has at times seemed that I would almost sink under the
weight of responsibility hanging upon me; but I believe the Lord will
help us out." And after his first visit to New York City, he summed up
his impressions of the metropolis in the following sentence, "It is a
desirable place and people, with regular and good Presbyterian
preaching."
McCormick enjoyed with all his heart the logical, doctrinal sermon. His
favorite Bible passage was the eighth chapter of Romans, that
indomitable victorious chapter that ends like the blast of a trumpet:
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
As it is written, 'for Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are
accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Nay, in all these things we are
more than conquerors through Him that loved us; for I am persuaded that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus, our Lord."
His favorite hymn, which he sang often and with the deepest fervor, was
that melodious prayer that begins--
"O Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight,
On whom in affliction I call,
My comfort by day, and my song in the night,
My hope, my salvation, my all."
In his earlier journeys through the Middle West, McCormick was
distressed at the rough immorality of the new settlements. "I see a
great deal of profanity and infidelity in this country, enough to make
the heart sick," he wrote in 1845. These towns and villages needed more
preachers, and better preachers, he thought. Consequently, soon after he
had acquired his first million dollars, he determined to establish the
best possible college for the education of ministers. He almost stunned
with joy the Western friends of higher education for ministers, by
offering them $100,000 with which to establish a school of theology in
Chicago. This offer was made in 1859--half a century ago, and resulted
in the removal of a moneyless and decaying Seminary at New Albany,
Indiana, to Chicago. Thus was founded the Northwestern Theological
Seminary, afterwards named the McCormick Theological Seminary, which, in
its fifty years of life, has given a Christian education to thousands of
young men.
Thirteen years later he bought _The Interior_ and made it what it has
remained ever since--a religious weekly of the highest rank. These
two--the college and the paper--were his pride and delight. He fathered
them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be
impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his
editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from
his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His
last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he
was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the
corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its
last sentence was typical of McCormick--full of hope and optimism: "I
never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he
said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has
given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has hitherto
shone upon us."
McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon
with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of
the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the
Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself,
but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He
believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and
competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little
ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was
almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in
matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics,
he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your
own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.
What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic
failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was
never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for
his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only
for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other
leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his
time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but
he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent
upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible
language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his
listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he
felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world.
They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly
because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished
them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national
righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one
memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the
Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in
support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and
amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is
too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain
him so far as he is right."
He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests
and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man
of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local
prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He
refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He
had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous
days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the
wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration.
[Illustration: THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN]
He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war,
and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he
bought a daily paper--_The Times_--to explain to Chicago the standpoint
of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the
newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits
that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor
than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of
public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he
opposed it,--put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there
until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck.
He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that
when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and
labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually
believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace
Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the
closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union
and the paths of law.
The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two
conventions--one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other
the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a
board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war
and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband
their armies and reëstablish peace.
After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its
dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of
church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been
preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an
article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of
political partisanism into the religious life.
"When are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian
fellowship," he asked, "so long as those who aspire to fill the high
places of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now that the
great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues settled,
religion and patriotism alike require the exercise of mutual
forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which tend to peace."
For the mere game of party politics Mr. McCormick cared little or
nothing. It was all as irksome to him as the task of governing Geneva
was to John Calvin; but he could not help himself. His political
convictions were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They were
racial traits which his forefathers and foremothers had spent at least
three centuries in developing.
On one occasion Dr. John Hall of New York, seeing how Mr. McCormick was
worried by political obligations, said to him:
"Why do you plague yourself with these uncongenial things? What glory
can you hope to get from politics that will add to what you now possess
as the inventor of the Reaper?"
"Dr. Hall," replied Mr. McCormick, "I am in politics because I cannot
help it. There are certain principles that I have got to stand by, and I
am obliged to go into politics to defend them."
The form of Mr. McCormick's religious faith had been forged by such
preacher-patriots as John Knox and Andrew Melville; and he, like them,
found it as imperative upon his conscience to fight for both civil and
religious liberty. With his whole heart he believed in American
institutions as they had been established by the nation-builders of
1776. He did not want the Constitution to be ignored by Federal
reformers, nor the Union to be broken by secession. He was by
temperament and tradition a conservative, and opposed especially to all
extreme measures and sectional innovations. As he had adapted his Reaper
so that it would cut grain in all States, he could never see why
political policies, too, should not be lifted above the limitations of
geography and made to conserve the welfare of the whole people. As he
said on one strenuous occasion when laboring mightily to beat back the
extremists in his own party: "Is not every government on the face of the
earth established upon the principle of compromise?"
To special privileges of every sort he was unalterably opposed. He asked
for none for himself--no favoring tariff or grant of public land or
monopolistic franchise. "I have been throughout my life," he said,
"opposed to all measures which tend to raise one class of the American
people upon the ruin of others, or one section of our common country at
the expense of another. The country is the common property of all
parties, and all are interested in its prosperity."
All this shows the heroic side of McCormick; but he was not always
heroic. He was a giant, but a most human and simple-natured giant.
Strange as it may sound to those who knew him only with his armor on, it
is true that he could be tender or humorous. There were tears and
laughter in him. There was no cruelty in his strength and no revenge in
his aggressiveness. He was a big, red-blooded, great-hearted man, who
might to-day be threatening to cane a politician who had deceived him,
and to-morrow be playing with his younger children and letting their two
pet squirrels, Zip and Zoe, chase each other around his shoulders.
He was fond of power, not because of its privileges and exemptions, but
because it furthered the work that he had in hand. He was often
surrounded by sycophants--by men who said yes to his yes and no to his
no; and while he accepted this homage with a certain degree of
satisfaction, he was not deceived by it. On one occasion, when he was
attending the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati--the convention that
nominated Hancock as candidate for President,--he was beset by a court
of flatterers and lip-servers. After it was over, he remarked simply to
his valet, "Well, Charlie, there is a lot of farce and humbug about
this."
Dr. Francis L. Patton, who was for years the president of Princeton
University and also at one time editor of _The Interior_, was especially
impressed with this direct naturalness of McCormick. "One meets with all
sorts of men in the course of a lifetime," said Dr. Patton. "There are
patronizing men, pompous men, men who habitually wear a mask of
seriousness, men who clothe themselves with dignity as with a coat of
mail lest you should presume too much or go too far, men whose position
is never defined, and double-minded men with whom you never feel
yourself safe. But Mr. McCormick was not like one of these. There is
that in the possession of power which always tends to make men
imperious. I do not mean to imply that he was altogether free from this
tendency, for he was not. But he was approachable, companionable, and
ready to hear what I had to say. He was not one of those men who are so
uninterestingly self-controlled as to be always the same. There were
times when his mirth was contagious and times when his wrath was kindled
a little. We did not always agree, and sometimes we both grew hot in
argument; but at the end his cheery laugh proclaimed the fact that our
differences had only been the free and easy give-and-take of
friendship."
To see McCormick laugh was a spectacle. There was first a mellowing of
his usual Jovian manner. His gray-brown eyes twinkled. The tense lines
of his face relaxed. Then came a smile and soon a burst of laughter,
shaking his powerful body and putting the whole company for the time
into an uproar of merriment. It was the triumph of the genial and
magnetic side of his nature--the side that was ordinarily repressed by
the pressure of his big affairs.
McCormick had humor, but not wit. His jokes were simple and
old-fashioned, such as Luther and Cromwell would have laughed at. There
was no innuendo and no cynicism. On one occasion two small urchins
knocked at the door and asked for food. McCormick heard their voices
and had them brought into the sitting-room, where he happened to be in
consultation with his lawyer. "Now," said he to the youngsters, "we are
going to put both of you on trial. I will be the judge and this
gentleman will be the prosecutor." Each boy in turn was placed on the
witness-stand, and plied with questions. It was soon clear that neither
of them was telling the truth, so "Judge" McCormick took them in hand
and gave them a serious talk on the folly and wickedness of lying. Then
he gave them twenty-five cents apiece, and sent them down to the kitchen
to eat as much supper as they could hold.
[Illustration: HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON]
At another time a very dignified and self-centred military officer was
taking supper with the McCormick family. The first course, as usual, was
corn-meal mush and milk. This was served in Scotch fashion, with the hot
mush in one bowl and the cold milk in another, and the practice was to
so co-ordinate the eating of these that both were finished at the same
time. The officer planned his spoonfuls badly, and was soon out of
milk. "Have some more milk to finish your mush, Colonel," said
McCormick. Several minutes later the Colonel's mush bowl was empty, at
which McCormick said, "Have some more mush to finish your milk." And so
it went, with milk for the mush and mush for the milk, until the
unfortunate Colonel was hopelessly incapacitated for the four or five
courses that came afterwards.
McCormick was not by any means a teller of stories, but he had a few
simple and well-worn anecdotes that appealed so strongly to his sense of
humor that he told and re-told them many times. There was the story of
the man who stole the pound of butter and hid it in his hat, and how the
grocer saw him and kept talking in the store, beside a hot stove, until
the butter melted and exposed the man's thievery. Another favorite story
was about the pig that found its way into a garden by walking through a
hollow log, and how the gardener fooled the pig by placing the hollow
log in such a way that both ends of it were on the outside of the
garden.
Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral tang--a flavor of the first
Psalm and the eighth chapter of Romans. They were apt to deal with the
troubles of the ungodly who had been caught in their wickedness. There
were times, too, when his sense of humor and his sense of justice would
co-operate in odd ways. Once, when a roast game bird, which had been
sent to him as a gift from the hunter, was left over from supper, he
ordered that his dainty be kept and served for the next day's luncheon.
At luncheon the next day it did not appear. On asking for the game bird,
a roast chicken was set before him, and he at once noticed that it was
not the same bird which he had ordered to be kept. He questioned the
butler, who protested that it was the same. After the meal McCormick
ordered that the servants involved should be called into the
dining-room. From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the
truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he
would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times, "A thief you
can watch, but I detest a liar."
There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon
the great inventor himself. His two youngest sons, Harold and Stanley,
would hide in the hallway when they saw him approaching, and pounce out
upon him with wild yells in small-boy fashion, but they were both
privileged people.
McCormick was a most hearty and hospitable man. He was an ideal person
for such a life-work--the abolition of famine. He was fond of food and
plenty of it. He loved to see a big table heaped with food. The idea of
hunger was intolerable to him. He might well have been posing for a
statue of the deity of Plenty, as he squared himself around to the long,
family dinner-table, with his napkin worn high and caught at his
shoulders by a white silk band that went around his neck, and with a
complacent, "Now, then," plunged the carving-fork into a crisp and
fragrant fowl that lay on the platter in front of him.
The fact that McCormick seldom made a social call was not due to his own
choosing, but because of the many worries and compulsions of his life.
Once, when confiding in an intimate friend, he said, "It pains me very
much to think how little I am known by my neighbors, but I seem to be
always too busy to meet them." He was not at all, as many have thought
because of his strenuous life, a man of harsh and rough exterior. There
was nothing rough about him except his strength. He was irreproachable
in dress and personal appearance. He did not drink, smoke, nor swear.
And his manners and language, on formal occasions, were those of a
dignified gentleman of the old school--a Calhoun, or a Van Buren.
He was not a hard-natured man, except when he was battling for his
rights and his principles. He would often turn from an overwhelming mass
of business to play with one of his children. He was as ready to forgive
as he was to fight. He never cherished resentments or personal grudges.
He knew that life was a conflict of interests and policies; and when he
forgave, his forgiveness was free and full, and not a formal ceremony.
It was as honest and as spontaneous as his wrath. He was one of the few
men who could freely pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us."
His fame and honors and intimacies with people of rank never made him
less democratic in his sympathies. He always had a profound respect for
the man or woman who did useful work, if the work was done well. Once,
when a poor woman went to him for advice about some trifling thing that
she had invented, he turned from his work and explained to her, with the
utmost patience and courtesy, the things that she wished to know. With
his trusted employees, too, he was usually kindly and sometimes jovial.
"I had only one brush with him in thirty-five years," said one of his
cashiers. "The last time that I saw him, he met me on the street and
said, 'Hello, Sellick, have you got lots of money? Can you give me a
hundred thousand dollars to-day?' 'Yes, sir,' I answered. 'Well, I'm
glad I don't need it,' he said with a laugh."
The loyalty of his workmen and his agents was always a source of pride
to McCormick. It was one of the favorite topics of his conversation. He
would mention his men by name and tell of their exploits with the
deepest satisfaction. On one occasion, when a body of agents made a
united demand for higher salaries, there was one agent in Minnesota who
refused to take part in the movement. "I don't want to force Mr.
McCormick," he said. "I have worked for him for nearly thirty years, and
I know that he is a just man, and that he will do what is right." Not
long afterwards, McCormick was told of this man's action, and he
immediately showed his appreciation by making the agent a present of a
carriage and fine team of horses.
There was one man who was wholly in McCormick's power--a negro named
Joe, who, by the custom that prevailed in the South before the Civil
War, was a slave and the property of McCormick. They were of the same
age, and had played together as boys. Joe grew up to be a tall,
straight, intelligent negro, and his master was very fond of him. He is
mentioned frequently in McCormick's letters, usually in a considerate
way. Years before the Civil War McCormick gave Joe his freedom, and some
land and a good cabin. Now and then, even in the stress and strain of
his business-building, he would stop to write Joe a short letter of good
wishes and advice. There was no other one thing, perhaps, which proved
so convincingly the essential kindliness of his nature as his treatment
of Joe.
In his family relations, too, McCormick was a man of tenderness and
devotion. When his father died, in 1846, he was struck down by sorrow.
"Many a sore cry have I had as I have gone around this place and found
no father," he wrote to his brother William. And as soon as he was
solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his
mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly
believe her eyes. "I feel like the Queen of Sheba," she said to her
neighbors when she returned to Virginia; "the half was never told."
McCormick helped his younger brothers--William and Leander, by making
them his partners. William died in 1865--a great and irreparable loss.
He was a man of careful mind and rare excellence of character,
especially able in matters of detail--a point in which Cyrus McCormick
was not proficient. The two men were well suited as partners. Cyrus
planned the work in large outlines, and broke down the obstacles that
stood in the way; while William added the details and supervised the
carrying out of the plan. Leander, who also held a high place in the
business in its earlier days, withdrew from it later, and died in 1900.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1883
His Last Portrait]
Until 1858 McCormick had thought himself too busy to be married. But in
that year he met Miss Nettie Fowler, of New York, and changed his mind.
It was soon apparent that his marriage was not to be in any sense a
hindrance to his success, but rather the wisest act of his life. Mrs.
McCormick was a woman of rare charm, and with a comprehension of
business affairs that was of the greatest possible value to her husband.
She was at all times in the closest touch with his purposes. By her
advice he introduced many economies at the factory, and rebuilt the
works after the Great Fire of 1871. The precision of her memory, and the
grasp of her mind upon the multifarious details of human nature and
manufacturing, made her an ideal wife for such a man as Cyrus H.
McCormick. As he grew older, he depended upon her judgment more and
more; and as Mrs. McCormick is still in the possession of health and
strength, it may truly be said that for more than half a century she has
been a most influential factor in the industrial and philanthropic
development of the United States.
Four sons were born, and two daughters--Cyrus Hall, who is now President
of the International Harvester Company; Robert, who died in infancy;
Harold, Treasurer of the International Harvester Company; Stanley,
Comptroller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita, now known as Mrs.
Emmons Blame.
Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate husband and father. He took the
utmost delight in his home and its hospitalities; and invariably brought
his whole household with him whenever the growth of his business obliged
him to visit foreign countries. In the last few years of his life it
gave him the most profou
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