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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
HIS LIFE AND WORK

UNIVERSITY

ALiFOBtii>

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

HIS LIFE AND WORK

HERBERT N. CASSON

AUTHOR OF

" THK ROMANCE OF STEEL," " THE ROMANCE OF THE REAPER," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

CHICAGO

A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1909

Published October, 1908
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England

R. R. DONNELLEY * SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO

INTRODUCTION

WHOEVER wishes to understand the mak-
ing of the United States must read the
life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one
man so truly represented the dawn of the in-
dustrial 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 Me-
Cormick 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 develop-
ment, 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

[v]

188515

INTRODUCTION

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 ex-
pansion of which has been and is now the
highest and most important of all human en-
deavors.

As the master builder of the modern business
of manufacturing farm machinery, McCormick
set in motion so many forces of human better-
ment 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

[vi]

INTRODUCTION

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.

Hi]

CONTENTS

CHAFTEE

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

XL THE REAPER AND THE NATION . .188

XII. THE REAPER AND THE WORLD . . 203

XIII. GIVE Us THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD . 234

IXJMX . 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. MC-
CORMICK 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 FlRE OF 1871, ON

CHICAGO RIVER, EAST OF RUSH STREET BRIDGE . 82
MEN OF PROGRESS 96

ILLUSTRATIONS

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 PENN-
SYLVANIA 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 MA-
CHINE COMPANY . . . . . . .190

McCoRMicK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA . . .196
CHART SHOWING RELATIVE DISTRIBUTION OF VALUES BY
PRODUCING COUNTRIES OF 1908 OF WORLD'S PRODUC-
TION 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

[zH]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

HIS LIFE AND WORK

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER

TH1ITHER 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

CYRUS HALL McCORMI-CK

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 cur-
rency; 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

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 pop-
ular tales of local history, an epic of the pa-
triots who fought for liberty, not with gun-
powder 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, lot-
teries, and litigation.

It was, perhaps fortunate for the child McCor-
mick 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 Eng-

[3]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

land mobs of unemployed men and women were
either begging for bread or smashing the new
machines that had displaced them in the fac-
tories. In the Tyrol, sixty thousand peasants,
who had revolted from the intolerable tyranny
of the Bavarians, were being beaten into sub-
mission. 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

[4]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

last year's hay crop in Vermont. It was desper-
ately 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 cultiva-
tion 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 con-
tagious. 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 Eu-
phrates.

The wise public men of that day knew how
urgent was the need of better methods in farm-
ing. Fifteen years before, George Washington

[5]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 hope-
lessly bad that few had the heart to improve
them. The house that we call a "slum tene-
ment" to-day would have made an average
American hotel in 1809. Rudeness and rowdy-
ism were the rule. Drunkenness was as com-
mon, 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 sanita-
tion, 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

[7]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 mis-

[9]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

erable 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 Revo-
lution 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 Jef-
ferson, 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

[10]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

lands, the problem of slavery, and the develop-
ment 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 persever-
ance, 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
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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 hun-
ger. 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.

[1*

CHAPTER II

THE McCORMICK HOME

F 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, enter-
prising, 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 ham-
mered iron and shaped wood, and did both well,
as those can testify who have seen an iron crane

[13]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 chir " " that two
men could work at the same time; and one
small rusted anvil is all that now remains of its
equipment.

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,

[14]

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 '11 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 res-
cued 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

[16]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. McCor-
mick 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

[17]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 under-
stand 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 estab-
lished self-government and a pure religion in
Scotland, about seventy-five years after the dis-
covery 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.

At the height of this conflict, about 300,000

[18]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 sec-
tion 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 Amer-
ica, through several of their leaders who had

[19]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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, Ken-
tucky, and Texas. Beyond all question, they
were the hardiest and ablest founders of the
republic. They dissolved the rule of the Cava-
liers 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 colo-
nies, they were the best prepared and most will-
ing 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

[20]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 be-
came, 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 Ire-
land. "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, Bon-
ner, Scribner, and McClurg ; and such inventors
as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCor-
mick. They were possibly the first large body
of people who had ever been driven from manu-
facturing into farming; and it was not at all

[21]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 be-
came noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsyl-
vania. His son Robert, who moved south to
Virginia, carried a rifle for American inde-
pendence 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.

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

[22]

ROBERT McCORMICK

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 sever-
ity. 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 "get-
ting 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

[23]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

of housekeeping in all its old-fashioned com-
plexity; 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 '11 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."

But Mrs. McCormick was much more than
industrious. She had a fine pride in the owner-
ship of beautiful things, flowers and hand-
some 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 -col-
ored coachman, an equipage of so much

MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 "im-
possibilities" 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.

[25]

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 Cate-
chism, 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

[*]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 survey-
ing, 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

[27]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 in-
ventions 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."

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

[23]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Me-
Cormick. He persevered with Scotch-Irish te-
nacity, 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 Mc-
Cormick, 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 McCor-
mick had so improved his Reaper that he gave
it a trial in a field of grain. Again it was a

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 prob-
lem, which up to this time no one had solved,
was how to properly handle and deliver the
grain after it was cut.

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 com-
plete description of the process of thought by
which he became the inventor of the first prac-
tical 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

[30]

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FACSIMILES FROM MANUSCRIPT BY MR. McCORMICK GIVING

US OWN ACCOUNT OK THE ORIGIN OK THE REAPER

v^ < ^

V CAvrf-

HIS LIFE AND WORK

of the printery. The original manuscript was
preserved; but the labor of rebuilding his fac-
tory 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 labori-
ously 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

[311

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 har-
vesting 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 mo-
tion 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 pre-
sented 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 reciprocat-
ing 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.

[*J

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. Mc-
Cormick solved this by placing a row of "fingers
at the edge of the blade. These fingers pro-
jected 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 fisher-
men use for the drying of their nets. Several of
the abortive Reapers that had been tried else-
where 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-

[33]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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.

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 princi-
ple" that the youth McCormick laboriously con-
ceived 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.

[34]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

The young inventor toiled "laboriously," he
says, to complete his Reaper in time for the har-
vest 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 specta-
tors except his parents and his excited brothers
and sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the
shafts of his Reaper, and drove against the yel-
low 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

[35]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 col-
onists arrived at Jamestown. And in the back-
ground, 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 Mc-
Cormick 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 Argicul-
ture was born. It is no longer a difficult place

[36]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 im-
proved 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 at-
tested 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 exhi-
bition near the little town of Lexington, which
lay eighteen miles south of the farm. Fully one

[37]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

hundred people were present several politi-
cal 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 any-
thing else that human eyes had ever seen, was
to prove a grotesque failure. The field was
hilly, and the Reaper jolted and slewed so vio-
lently 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."

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
w r ere 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

[38]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 inter-
est, came to the rescue.

"I '11 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 Wil-
liam Taylor, who was several years later a can-
didate for the governorship of Virginia. His
offer was at once accepted by Cyrus McCor-
mick, 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 Lex-
ington and placed on view in the court-house
square. Here it was carefully studied by a

[39]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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, T as 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 testi-
fied at various lawsuits that they had seen the
Lexington Reaper operate were Colonel James
McDowell, Colonel John Bowyer, Colonel Sam-
uel Reed, Colonel A. T. Barclay, Dr. Taylor,
William Taylor. John Ruff, John W. Hough-
awout, John Steele, James Moore, and Andrew
Wallace. There was an old lady, also, in 1885,
Miss Polly Carson, who told how she had seen

[40]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 im-
proved 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

[41]

CYRUS HALL McCORMlCK

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 an-
other matter, and quite beyond their power.
None of them, apparently, knew the funda-
mental 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.

These inventors who failed, but who doubtless
blazed the way by their failures to the final suc-
cess of McCormick, were not, as he was, a prac-
tical 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,

[4*]

INTERIOR OF BLACKSMITH SHOP IN WHICH C. H. McCORMICK BUILT HIS

FIRST REAPER

* -< -

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Reg-
ister" 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

[43]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 man-
ufacturers has been tempered by consolidation,
the time has arrived to do justice to Cyrus Mc-
Cormick as the inventor of the Reaper. The
stock phrase, "He was less of an inventor

[441

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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-sharpen-
ing 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 Mc-
Cormick in the patent suits of early days, three
only have survived to see the passing of the Mc-
Cormick Centenary Ralph Emerson, C. W.
Marsh, and William N. Whiteley. In response

[45]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 suc-
cess 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 ma-
chine 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 pro-
duced 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 combi-

[46]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

nation 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
preeminence 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
farih to feed the hungry and straighten the
bent backs of the world.

47]

CHAPTER IV

SIXTEEN YEARS OF PIONEERING
N 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 in-
ventor, with the one machine that the human
race most needed, in a remote cleft of the Vir-
ginian mountains, four days' journey from Rich-
mond, 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

[48]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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. Prac-
tically no such thing was known as farm machin-
ery. 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 loco-
motives, horses, and sails, to ascertain which
one of these three was the best method of propul-
sion. The first really successful American loco-

[49]-

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

motive 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 un-
known. 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 an-
nounced 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.

Of the many eminent men who had the same

[50]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Pas-
teur 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

[51]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 thou-
sand 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 McCor-
mick 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 re-
ceived is not equal to the value of the labor saved

[52]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

in one hour by my machines now in use." Fulton
had died at fifty, plagued and plundered by
imitators. Kay, Jacquard, Heathcoat, and Har-
greaves, inventors of weaving machinery, were
mobbed. Arkwright's mill was burned by in-
cendiaries. Gutenberg, Cort, and Jethro Wood
lost their fortunes. Palissy was thrown into the
Bastile. And Goodyear, who gave us rubber,
Bottgher, who gave us Sevres 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, "Per-
haps I may make a million dollars from this

[53]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 noth-
ing came of this advertisement. No farmer came

[54]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 per-
suaded his father and the school teacher to be-
come his partners; and they built the furnace
and were making their first iron in 1835 the

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

same year, by the way, in which a babe named
Andrew Carnegie was born in the little Scotch
town of Dunfermline.

For several years the furnace did fairly well.
It swallowed the ore and charcoal and limestone,
and poured into the channelled sand little sput-
tering 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 prop-
erty to his mother; and the whole burden of
the inevitable bankruptcy fell upon the McCor-
micks. 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

[56]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

nobody would have taken it if he had. Thus
far, he had made no progress towards the build-
ing 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 be-
came 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 exhi-
bition 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

[57]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

either by themselves or by the village black-
smith. 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 Sam-
son 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

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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, in-
stead, 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 McCor-
mick's creditors thought of such an idea as
seizing the Reaper, or the patent, which had
been secured in 1834. If the queer-looking

[59]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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.

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 horse-
back through the Blue Ridge Mountains. These
men had never seen a Reaper, but they had

[60]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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

[61]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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.

[62]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

But none of tMese 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,

[63]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 sup-
ply the Western farmers more efficiently
At this time a friend said to him, "Cyrus,

[641

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McC'ORMICK, OGDEN & CO.

Mill I..- ,.r ,-iK .I,,,,,..,J uu.l lurur.l..i !.* l.ak, -, Ith. r-. Canal or Ituil Koa,l at

AN EARLY ADVERTISEMENT FOR McCORMICK'S PATENT VIRGINIA REAPER

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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, Michi-
gan, 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

[65]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 & Com-
pany in Brockport, N. Y., Henry Bear in
Missouri, Gray & Warner in Illinois, and
A. C. Brown in Cincinnati. These manu-
facturers, and the McCormick family in Vir-
ginia, 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

[66]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

so absorbed in new experiments that when the
harvest time arrived, his machines were not
completed.

The new difficulty was not to get manufac-
turers 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.

[67]

CHAPTER V

THE BUILDING OF THE REAPER BUSINESS

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 remain-
ing 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 ob-
structed by a sand-bar. And the entire region,

[681

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 discour-
agement. 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 an-
nounced by Dr. Morton; but there was no Hoe
press, nor Bessemer steel, nor even so much as a

[69]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

postage stamp. And in the Old World the two
most impressive figures, perhaps, were Living-
stone, the missionary, who was groping his way
to the heart of the Dark Continent, and De-
Lesseps, 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 num-
bered. 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.

Prosperity was still an elusive hope in 1847,
but the spirit of depression was being overcome.

[70]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Mc-
Cormick. The first Tvas 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.

[71]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 McCor-
mick was a much more important event for
Chicago than the "River and Harbor Conven-
tion." He was the first of its big manufacturers.

[72]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 w r ealth 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. Chi-
cago was never obliged to give money, or to lend
it, to railroad companies. The railroads came
into Chicago without the inducement of sub-
sidies, 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 opera-
tions was one of the master-strokes of McCor-
mick's career. At that time, Cleveland, Mil-
waukee, and St. Louis were more prosperous

[73]

CYRUS HALL McCORMlCK

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

[74]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 busi-
ness-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

[75]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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, chris-
tened 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.

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 hospi-
tality 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

[76]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
From a Daguerreotype, taken about

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 '11 give
you $25,000 for a half interest, and we '11 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 mis-
sion. 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 ancj 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,

[77]

CYKUS HALL McCORMICK

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 in-
terests, 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 Mc-
Cormick 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 black-
smith was too busy at his anvil to become an

[781

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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, Mc-
Cormick 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 in-
vention 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 per-
formance 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

[79]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 Mc-
Cormick, 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 four-
square 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

[80]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 gen-
erally followed ever since, except during periods
of over-strenuous competition.

Third, he was one of the first American busi-
ness men who believed heartily in a policy of
Publicity. As early as September 28, 1833, he
began to advertise his Reaper; and his adver-
tisement was nearly a column in length. Also,
in the same paper, he had a half-column adver-
tisement of his hillside plow. This was pub-
licity on a large scale, according to the ideas of
advertising that were then prevalent. Even
George Washington, when advertising an ex-
tensive land scheme in 1773, had not thought

[81]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

of using more than half a column of a Balti-
more 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."

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 in-
crease in the amount of money in circulation.

[82]

PANORAMIC VIEW SHOWING THE McCORMICK REAPER WORKS BEFORE THE

CHICAGO FIRE OF 1871, ON CHICAGO RIVKR, EAST OF RUSH STREET BRIDGE

HIS LIFE AND WORK

More than this, it meant that Chicago was no
lorger 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 ex-
pensive, 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 compet-
itors complained, in an 1848 lawsuit, McCor-
mick "flooded the country with his machines."
He knew that many farmers would be unde-
cided until the very hour of harvest, when there
would be no time to get a Reaper from Chicago ;

[83]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 aggres-
sive, self-reliant qualities, and the whole respon-
sibility 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 combat-
ive a regiment, not of private soldiers, but
generals, each one in charge of his own prov-
ince, blamed for his defeats and rewarded for
his victories.

The fifth factor in the McCormick System
was the Customers 9 Good-Will. For the good-
will of other capitalists or for the applause of

[84]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 con-
tracts 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 nationali-
ties swarmed westward upon the free land offered
to them by the United States Government, and
usually each man found waiting for him at the

[85]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 settle-
ment 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,

[86]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

became first Speaker of the Iowa Legislature,
then a professor in an agricultural college, and
finally the founder of the Department of Agri-
culture 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 indif-
ferent community, this was the most electrical
in its effects of any plan that has ever been de-
vised. As a pioneering advertisement, it was
unsurpassed. It was nothing less than a con-
test in a field of ripe grain between several ma-
chines 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 in-
vented a practical mowing-machine, and who

[87]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 Mary-
land agent for the McCormick Reaper. Mc-
Cormick, 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,
or because Hussey refused to accept it.

But the field test flourished for more than

F881

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 commod-
ity itself. As often happens, it was in the end
carried too far. It became the most costly
weapon of competition. It introduced all man-
ner 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 McCorrnick had not only solved
the problem of the Reaper; he had worked out

[89]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 hun-
dred rivals; and whether he could duplicate in
the courts the victories that he had won in the
fields.

[90]

CHAPTER VI

THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS
TN 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent
-^ expired. He applied to have it extended,
and at once there began one of the most extra-
ordinary 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, Sew-
ard, Douglas, Harding, Watson, Dickerson,
and Beverdy 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.

[91]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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. Conse-
quently, they combined against him. They
hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured petitions

[92]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 cer-
tainly beat us. Please, therefore, take hold and
help us to beat the common enemy. The sub-
scriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000. . .
Send in also to Patent Office hundreds of re-
monstrances 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

[93]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 coun-
try, 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 w r as not this
consolidation of competitors, but the fact that
a few farmers had signed petitions of protest
against his claim. This was "the most unkind-
est cut of all." But he made no attack upon
them. Manufacturers he would fight, and in-
ventors and lawyers and judges any one and
every one, if need be, except farmers. " HOW T
can the farmers be against me?" he asked in

[94]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 im-
proved 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 Blan-
chard were extended. The protection of in-
ventors had been a national policy an Ameri-
can tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Web-
ster: "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."

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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."

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.

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

He dominated his own lawyers. And he fought
always in an old-fashioned, straight-from-the-
shoulder way that put him at a great disadvan-
tage 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 Whit-
ney, 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 Mc-
Cormick 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

[97]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

may fairly say that the immense McCormick
Company of to-day is no more than the length-
ened 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 law-
yers 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 with-
out 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

[98]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

members of this legal bodyguard. Abraham
Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Edwin M. Stan-
ton, 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 im-
pressed McCormick that in his next law-
suit 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

[99]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

$1,000. This money came to him at the precis^
moment when he needed it most, to enable him
to enter into the famous debate with Douglas
the debate that made him the inevitable can-
didate of the Republican party. It is interest-
ing 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

[100]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

of this trial was a comedy of mishaps. A Mc-
Cormick 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 sur-
plus 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 tele-
graphed 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. Re-
peatedly he won and repeatedly the railroad

[101]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 belong-
ing to a relative of the McCormicks was de-
stroyed 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."

[102]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

For these numerous lawsuits McCormick
paid a terrible price, both in money and friend-
ship. 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 Mc-
Cormick 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 up-
rightness. 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,

[103]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 be-
fore 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 un-
spanable 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.

[104]

CHAPTER VII

THE EVOLUTION OF THE REAPER

all the varieties of difficulties that con-
fronted Cyrus H. McCormick during his
strenuous life, the most baffling and disconcert-
ing 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 abol-
ished 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

[105]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 plat-
form 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

[106]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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, w T ho 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 some-
times woman, who gathered up the bundles of
cut grain, and, making a crude rope of the grain

[107]

CYRUS HALLMcCORMICK

itself, bound it tightly around the middle, mak-
ing 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 in-
ventor 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

[108]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 com-
pelled 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 ?lr.
McCormick, sitting as usual in a large and
comfortable chair.

"My name is Withington," said the stranger.
"I live in Janes ville, Wisconsin. I have here
a model of a machine that will automatically

[109]

CYRUS HALL M c C O R M I C K

bind grain." Now, it so happened that Me Cor-
mick had been kept awake nearly the whole of
the previous night by a stubborn business prob-
lem. He could scarcely hold his eyelids apart.
And when Withington was in the midst of his
explanation, with the intentness of a born in-
ventor, McCormick fell fast asleep.

At such a reception to his cherished machine,
Withington lost heart. He was a gentle, sensi-
tive man, easily rebuffed, and so, when Mc-
Cormick 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 in-
stant 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 Har-
\ :sters ; 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

mo]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. Mc-
Cormick 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 ma-
chine 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 on-
wards 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,

[in]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 binder;:, under the super-
vision 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.

He originated a new method of advertising

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Mc-
Cormick, 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 w r ent into the harvest field to bind
grain. He was not robust, and the hard, stoop-
ing labor under a hot sun would sometimes
bring the blood to his head in a hemorrhage.

[113]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 towns-
people 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

[114]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. Spauld-
ing, 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 w r as 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

[115]

CYRUS HALL McCORMlCK

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 clut-
tered 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 en-
tered the business eight years before with a run-
ning 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

[116]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 tremen-
dously increased the sales. There were 60,000
machines of all kinds sold in 1880, and 250,000
in 1885 And it strikingly decreased the num-

[117]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

her 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 al-
though he was at this time over seventy years
of age, and sorely crippled by rheumatism, he
straightway entered into a trade w r ar with Deer-
ing, 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

[118]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 sub-
way. Manny was dead, and very few were
living of those who had seen the Reaper of 1831.

John P. Adriance, of Poughkeepsie, had sur-
vived. 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, enter-
prise. He had been the office-boy, in 1845, in
the factory where the first hundred McCormick
Reapers were made; and he had been a manu-
facturer on his own account since 1850. He,

[119]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 fam-
ous 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 Piano, 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.

[120]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1858

HIS LIFE AND WORK

Such were the most notable men who, to-
gether with McCormick and Deering, began
in 1880 or soon afterwards to manufacture the
new knot-tying device that had become neces-
sary to the Reaper. As for Cyrus H. McCor-
mick 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 astonish-
ing 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,

[121]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

but, as we shall see, he saw it become the play-
thing of Emperors, the marvel of Siberian plains-
men, 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
Y 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 Ger-
many and France. In Austria and Russia the

[123]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 re-
public, could set them free from the drudgery
of the harvest.

England had been the first European country
to abolish this serfdom. Several centuries be-
fore, 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 Eng-
lish 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

[124]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 pleas-
ure 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 beauti-
ful 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, proud-
est 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

[125]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

diamond had been one of the most precious
treasures of Asia. It had been worn by the
hero Kama. 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 Ex-
position, 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 nick-
named 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

[126]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

Ebrington was there, and Prince Frederick of
Holstein, and several other titled agriculturists.
One other machine was to be tested, besides Mc-
Cormick'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 mis-
hap, 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,"

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 giv-
ing 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 hum-
bugged, --his judgment made up and his sen-
tence ready to be recorded. There was a mo-
ment, 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 McCor-
mick 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

[129]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 un-
pleasant questions that Sidney Smith had
asked in 1820. What have the Americans done,
he had asked, for the arts and sciences ? Where

[130]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 th? 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 wel-
come 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 Expo-
sition was of great service to McCormick. It
enabled him to draw up a new plan of cam-
paign for the foreign trade.

[LSI]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 be-
gin 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

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 hand-
some 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 buy-
ing more than half a million dollars' worth of

[133

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

farm machinery a year from Americans less
than we sell them now in five days. So Mc-
Cormick 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 Mc-
Cormick's; and he gave battle to them at Lon-
don, Lille, and Hamburg. After the Hamburg
contest, Joseph A. Wright, the United States
Commissioner, cabled to New York: "McCor-
mick 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
matinee on the royal estate at Chalons. The
Emperor was present, at first on horseback,
and then on foot. The sun was hot, and pres-
ently 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

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HIS LIFI AND WORK

the Reaper, and watched it automatically cut
and rake off the grain. The Emperor was
delighted. He forgot for the moment his im-
pending troubles, and at once offered Mc-
Cormick 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

[18*]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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."

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 de-
spoiled by invading armies, and where the

[136]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1867
From Paintingr by Cabanel

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Mc-
Cormick 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

[137]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

F I had given up business, I would have
been dead long ago," said Cyrus H. Mc-
Cormick 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, Gentle-
man." 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

[139]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

[140]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. Walk-
ing 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.

[141]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 lead-
ing an army into an unknown country rather
than like the business man of the twentieth cen-
tury, 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, noth-
ing 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

14*

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 out-
side 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

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

for a company which set out to bring mahogany
from San Domingo. He invested $55,000 in
the Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean Railroad, an am-
bitious 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 Amer-
icans 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.

In all these undertakings he lost money, except
in the instances of Chicago real estate and the
Union Pacific. By 1883 he had several hun :
dred 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.

[144]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 diction-
ary, 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

[145]

CYBUS HALL McCORMICK

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 be-
cause 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

[146]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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. In-
stead of being content and complacent, he was
far more likely to be planning a wholly new
policy, on larger lines.

[147]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 de-
partment, protest that the factory was not mak-
ing 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 straight-
way 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 in-
efficiencies, 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 preeminent quality in the character

[148]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

of Cyrus McCormick was not his power of con-
centration, 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-pur-
pose 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 mat-
ters 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

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

made more fuss over a pin-prick," said one of
his valets, "than he did over a surgical opera-
tion." 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 al-
most 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 disheart-
ened. In 1877, after he had made a long hard
struggle to become a United States Senator,

[150]

OF THE

UNIVERSITY

HIS LIFE AND WORK

the news came to him that he was defeated.
"Well," he said, "that's over. What next?"

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

[151]

CYEUS HALL McCORMICK

the factory to be rebuilt, or did she want him
to retire from active business life ? She, think-
ing 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.

[152]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 estab-
lish 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 today. It enabled McCormick to
hold his own in spite of adverse litigation, the
hostility of Congress, the rivalry of other invent-
ors, 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.

[153]

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

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMI.CK

convictions, logical and consistent. What he
knew, he knew. There were no hazy imagin-
ings 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 men-
tioned 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 develop-
ment 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 in-
dividual. 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.

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 might-
ily they actually changed the course of em-
pires 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 pro-
duced. He believed in presbyters in religion,
private capitalists in business, and elected
representatives in government. He was op-
posed 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 liber-
alism of to-day, when too much is left to indi-

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

vidual 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 com-
pelled 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 Cal-
vinistic 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 boy-
hood. Nevertheless, according to the practice
of the Presbyterians, there had to come a time
when he himself openly made his choice. This

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 Mc-
Clung," he said. Half an hour later, old Billy
McClung, who was a universally respected re-
ligious 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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 respon-
sibility 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."

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 per-
secution, 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 principal-
ities, 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."

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 estab-
lish 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 de-
caying 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 edu-
cation to thousands of young men.

Thirteen years later he bought The Interior
and made it what it has remained ever since

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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,
w r as 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 ef-
forts," 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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 will-
ingly permit men of little ability and low char-
acter 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. Pol-
itics, 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 stand-
ing only for himself. He talked of "fundamen-
tal 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

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 man-
agers 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 be-
cause 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 con-
troversy, 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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 re-
fused 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.

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 candi-
date. He was a maker, not a collector, of public
opinion; and instead of pandering to the war

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 im-
possible 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 rep-
resent the Democrats of the North and the
other the Democrats of the South. These con-
ventions 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 reestablish peace.

After the war, too, almost before the nation

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 para-
graph is the ending of an article that he pub-
lished in 1869, protesting against the invasion
of political partisanism into the religious life.

" When are we to look for the return of broth-
erly 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 fore-

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

mothers 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

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

was by temperament and tradition a conser-
vative, 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 polit-
ical 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 might-
ily 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 un-
alterably opposed. He asked for none for him-
self 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."

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 poli-
tician 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 fur-
thered 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 Demo-
cratic Convention at Cincinnati the con-
vention that nominated Hancock as candidate

[171]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 Mc-
Cormick. "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. Mc-
Cormick 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 approach-
able, companionable, and ready to hear what
I had to say. He was not one of those men who

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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

[173]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

the door and asked for food. McCormick heard
their voices and had them brought into the sit-
ting-room, where he happened to be in con-
sultation 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 gentle-
man 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" Mc-
Cormick 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.

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

[174]

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

was soon out of milk. "Have some more milk
to finish your mush, Colonel," said McCormick.
Several minutes later the ColoneFs 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 talk-
ing 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 r 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.

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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral
tang a flavor of the first Psalrn 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 pro-
tested 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."

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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

[177]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 conversa-
tion. He would mention his men by name and

[179]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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 Mc-
Cormick'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

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HIS LIFE AND WORK

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 treat-
ment 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

[181]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

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.

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 hin-
drance to his success, but rather the wisest act of
his life. Mrs. McCormick was a woman of
rare charm, and with a comprehension of busi-
ness 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

r 182 1

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 188.1
His Last Portrait

HIS LIFE AND WORK

an ideal wife for such a man as Cyrus H. McCor-
mick. As he grew older, he depended upon her
judgment more and more; and as Mrs. McCor-
mick 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 devel-
opment of the United States.

Four sons were born, and two daughters
Cyrus Hall, who is now President of the Inter-
national Harvester Company; Robert, who died
in infancy; Harold, Treasurer of the Inter-
national Harvester Company; Stanley, Comp-
troller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita,
now known as Mrs. Emmons Elaine.

Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate hus-
band 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 profound satisfaction
to know that his oldest son would pick up
the McCormick burden and carry it forward.

[183]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

" Cyrus is a great comfort to me," he said to an
intimate friend. "He has excellent judgment
in business matters, and I find myself leaning
on him more and more."

The truth is that there was a tender side to
McConnick's strong nature, which was not seen
by those who met him only upon ordinary
occasions. He was in reality a great dynamo
of sentiment. He was deeply moved by music,
especially by the playing of Ole Bull and the
singing of Jenny Lind, who were his favorites.
He was as fond of flowers as a child. "I love
best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "be-
cause they grew in my mother's garden in
Virginia." Often the tears would come to his
eyes at the sight of mountains, for they re-
minded him of his Virginian home. "Oh,
Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat
crippled in a wheel-chair in a Southern hotel,
"how I wish I could get on a horse and ride on
through those mountains once again!"

McCormick was not in any sense a Grad-
grind of commercialism a man who enriched
his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul.

[184]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

He made money ten millions or more; but
he did so incidentally, just as a man makes
muscle by doing hard work. Several of his
fellow Chicagoans had swept past him in the
million-making race. No matter how much
money came to him, he was the same man, with
the same friendships and the same purposes.
And it is inconceivable that, for any amount
of wealth, he would have changed the ground-
plan of his life.

It is strictly true to say that he was a practical
idealist. He idealized the American Consti-
tution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the Dem-
ocratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church.
He was an Oliver Cromwell of industry. All
his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple
principles and fitted together like a picture
puzzle. There was religion in his business
and business in his religion. He was made
such as he was by the Religious Reformation
of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of the
United States. He was all of one piece
sincere and self -consistent a type of the
nineteenth-century American at his best. He

[185]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

was not sordid. He was not cynical. He was
not scientific. He was a man of faith and
works one of the old-fashioned kind who
laid the foundations and built the walls of
this republic.

He felt that he was born into the world with
certain things to do. Some of these things
were profitable and some of them were not, but
he gave as much energy and attention to the
one as to the other. In 1859, for instance, he
had a factory that was profitable, and a daily
paper and a college that were expensive. He
was struggling to extend his trade at home and
in Europe, to protect his patents, to prevent
the war between the North and South, and to
maintain the simplicity of the Presbyterian
faith. To contend for these interests and
principles was his life. He could not have
done anything else. It was as natural for him
to do so as for a fish to swim or a bird to fly.
Once, towards the end of his life, when he was
sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said
to his wife, " Nettie, life is a battle." He made
this announcement as though it were the dis-

[186]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

covery of a new fact. All his life he had been
much less conscious of the battle itself than of
the cause for which he fought.

In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the
year when wheat is being sown in Spain and
reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the
strong personality before whom obstacles went
down as swiftly and inevitably as grain before
the knife of his machines," was ended. His
last words, spoken in a moment's awakening
from the death-stupor, were "Work, work!"
Not even the dissolution of his body could relax
the fixity of his will. And when he lay in state,
in his Chicago home, there was a Reaper,
modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon
his breast a sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat,
surmounted by a crown of lilies.' These were
the emblems of the work that had been given
him to do, and the evidence of its completion.

[187

CHAPTER XI

THE REAPER AND THE NATION
X \ THEN Cyrus H. McCormick died in 1884
he had provided hunger-insurance for the
United States and the greater part of the civil-
ized world. In that year his own factory made
50,000 harvesting machines, and there were in
use, in all countries, more than 500,000 Mc-
Cormick machines, doing the work of 5,000,000
men in the harvest fields. The United States
was producing wheat at the rate of ten bushels
per capita, instead of four, as it had been in
1847, when McCormick built his first factory in
Chicago. And the total production of wheat
in all lands was 2,240,000,000 bushels
enough to give an abundance of food to 325,-
000,000 people.

Chicago, in 1884, was a powerful city of six
hundred thousand population. It had grown
sixty-fold since McCormick rode into it by stage
in 1845. It had 3,519 manufacturing estab-
lishments, giving work to 80,000 men and

[188]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

women and producing commodities at the rate
of $5,000,000 worth in a week. It was then
what it is to-day the chief Reaper City and
principal granary of the world. The wheat
and flour that were sent out from its ports
and depots in the year that the inventor of the
Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand
million loaves of bread, which, if they were
fairly distributed, would have given about forty
loaves apiece to the families of the human race.
The United States, in 1884, had been for six
years the foremost of the wheat-producing
nations. It had also grown to be first in mining,
railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It
was the land of the highest wages and
cheapest bread an anomaly that foreign
countries could not understand. In the bulk
of its manufacturing, it had forged ahead of all
other nations, even of Great Britain; and yet,
although a vast army of men had been drawn
from its farms to its factories, it had produced
in that year more than half a billion bushels of
wheat six times as much as its crop had been
in the best year of the sickle and the scythe.

[189]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

So, in the span of his business life from
1831 to 1884, McCormick had seen his coun-
try rise from insignificance to greatness, and
he had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that
his Reaper had done much, if not most, to
accelerate this marvellous progress. As we
shall see, the invention of the Reaper was the
right starting-point for the up-building of a
republic. It made all other progress possible,
by removing the fear of famine and the drudgery
of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of
the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, be-
cause it gave him the power of ten men.

The United States as a whole, had paid no
attention to the Reaper until the opening of
the California gold mines in 1849. Then the
sudden scarcity of laborers created a panic
among the farmers, and boomed the sale of all
manner of farm machinery. Two years later
the triumph of the McCormick Reaper at the
London Exposition was a topic of the day and
a source of national pride. And in 1852 the
Crimean War sent the price of wheat skywards,

190

HIS LIFE AND WORK

providing an English market for as much wheat
as American farmers could sell.

But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil
War that the United States learned to really
appreciate the Reaper. By the time that Presi-
dent Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers,
by the time that he had taken every third man
for the Northern armies, the value of the Reaper
was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence,
in this duel between wheat States on the one
side, and cotton States on the other, it was a
Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the
cotton-gin, which made slavery profitable; and
it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick, who
had invented the Reaper, which made the
Northern States wealthy and powerful.

It was the Reaper-power of the North that
offset the slave-power of the South. There
were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861
as could do the work of a million slaves. As
the war went on, the crops in the Northern States
increased. Europe refused to believe such a
miracle; but it was true. Fifty million bushels

[191]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

of American grain went to Europe in 1861, and
fifty-six million bushels in the following year.
More than two hundred million bushels were
exported during the four years of the war. Thus
the Reaper not only released men to fight for
the preservation of the Union. It not only fed
them while they were in the field. It did more.
It saved us from bankruptcy as well as famine,
and kept our credit good among foreign nations
at the most critical period in our history.

After the Civil War came the settling of the
West; and here again the Reaper was indispens-
able. In most cases it went ahead of the rail-
road. The first Reaper arrived in Chicago three
years before the first locomotive. "We had a
McCormick Reaper in 1856," said James Wil-
son; "and at that time there was no railroad
within seventy-five miles of our Iowa farm. The
Reaper worked a great revolution, enabling one
man to do the work that many men had been
doing, and do it better. By means of it the West
became a thickly settled country, able to feed
the nation and to spare bread and meat for the
outside world."

[192]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

When McCormick was a boy, more wheat was
raised in Virginia than in any other State. But
by 1860 Illinois was ahead, and by degrees the
sceptre of the wheat empire passed westwards,
until to-day it is held by Minnesota. What with
the Homestead Act of 1862, and the offer of
McCormick and the other Reaper manufacturers
to sell machines to the farmers on credit, it was
possible for poor men, without capital, to be-
come each the owner of 160 acres of land, and
to harvest its grain without spending a penny
in wages. Thus the immense area of the West
became a populous country, with cities and
railways and State Governments, and producing
one-tenth of the wheat of the world.

The enterprise of these Western farmers
brought in the present era of farm machinery.
It replaced "the man with the hoe" by the man
with the self-binder and steel plow and steam
thresher. It wiped out the old-time drudge of
the soil from American farms, and put in his
stead the new farmer, the business farmer, who
works for a good living and a profit, and not for
a bare existence. Such men as Oliver Dalrym-

[193]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

pie, of North Dakota, led the way by dem-
onstrating what might be done by "bonanza
farms." This doughty Scottish- American se-
cured 30,000 acres of the Red River Valley in
1876, and put it all into wheat. It was such a
wheat-field as never before had been seen in any
country. The soil was turned with 150 gang
plows, sown with 70 drills, and reaped with 150
self-binders. Twelve threshing-machines, kept
busy in the midst of this sea of yellow grain, beat
out the straw and chaff and in the season filled
two freight trains a day with enough wheat in
each train to give two thousand people their
daily bread for a year.

Led on by such pathfinders, American farm-
ers launched out bravely, until now they are
using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of
labor-saving machinery. The whole level of
farm life has been raised. It has been lifted
from muscle to mind. The use of machinery
has created leisure and capital, and these two
have begotten intelligence, education, science, so
that the farmer of to-day lives in a new world,
and is a wholly different person from what

[194]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to
till the soil.

This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be
our best guarantee of prosperity and national
permanence. It was the incoming flood of
wheat money that put the United States on its
feet as a manufacturing nation. The total
amount of this money, from the building of the
first McCormick Reaper factory until to-day, is
the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000, which
may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to
the nation.

Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill,
for instance, a mere convenience to the farmer
himself. It was the link between the city and
the country. It directly benefited all bread-
eaters, and put the whole nation upon a higher
plane. It built up cities, and made them safe,
for the reason that they were not surrounded by
hordes of sickle-and-flail serfs, who would sooner
or later rise up in the throe of a hunger-revolu-
tion and pull down the cities and the palaces into
oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in
1840, only eight per cent of Americans lived in

[195]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

towns and cities; and to-day the proportion
is forty per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and
more plentiful now than it was then; and there
is the most genial and good-natured co-opera-
tion between those who live among paved
streets and those who live in the midst of the
green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no
Goths and Vandals on American farms.

Instead of the^tiny log workshop on the Mc-
Cormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper
was laboriously hammered and whittled into
shape, there is now a McCormick City in the
heart of Chicago the oldest and largest Har-
vester plant in the world. In sixty-two years
of its life, this plant has produced five or six
millions of harvesting machines, and it is still
pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If
it were to ship its yearly output at one time, it
would require a railway caravan of 14,000
freight-cars to carry the machines from the
factory to the farmers.

This McCormick City is one of the industrial
wonders that America exhibits to visiting for-
eigners, and it is so vast that it can only be

[196]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land.
In its buildings there is enough flooring to cover
a 90-acre farm, and if they were all made over
into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and
one story high, it would be very nearly forty
miles long, as far as from Chicago to Joliet.
The population of McCormick City, counting
workers only, is 7,000, whose average wages
are $2.20 a day.

Here you will find a mammoth twine-mill
the largest of its kind in any country. Into this
mill come the bright yellow sisal fibres from
Yucatan and the manila fibres from the Philip-
pines. These fibres are cleaned and strewn
upon endless chains of combs, which jerk and
pull the fibres and finally deliver them to spindles
- 1,680 spindles, which whirl and twist 19,000
miles of twine in the course of a single day,
almost enough to put a girdle around the
earth. Most of this work is done by Polish
girls and women, who are being displaced as
farm laborers in their own country by American
harvesting machines.

This plant is so vast that from one point of

[197]

CYRUS HALL McCORMIC.K

view it seems to be mainly a foundry. Thou-
sands of tons of iron 88,000 tons, to be exact,
pour out of its furnaces every year and are
moulded into 113,000,000 castings. But from
another pqint of view it appears to be a carpenter
shop. In its yard stand as many piles of lum-
ber as would build a fair-sized city 60,000,-
000 feet of it, cut in the forests of Mississippi
and Missouri. And so much of this lumber is
being sawed, planed, and shaped in the various
wood-working shops that eight sawdust-fed
furnaces are needed to supply them with power.
The marvels of labor-saving machinery are
upon every hand, in this McCormick City.
The paint-tank has replaced the paint-brush.
Instead of painting wheels by hand, for instance,
ten of them are now strung on a pole, like beads
on a string, and soused into a bath from which
they come, one minute later, resplendent in
suits of red or blue. The labor-cost of painting
these ten wheels is two cents. Guard-fingers,
for which McCormick paid twenty-four cents
apiece in 1845, are now produced with a labor-
cost of two cents a dozen. And as for bolls,

[198]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

with two cents you can pay for the making of
a hundred. Both bolts and nuts are shaped by
automatic machines which are so simple that
a boy can operate five at once, and so swift that
other boys with wheelbarrows are kept busy
carrying away their finished product.

There is one specially designed machine, with
a battery of augurs, which bores twenty-one
holes at once, thus saving four-fifths of a cent
per board. Another special machine shapes
poles and saves one cent per pole. Such tiny
economies appear absurd, until the immense
output is taken into account. Whoever can
reduce the costs in the McCormick plant one
cent per machine, adds thereby $3,500 a year
to the profits, and helps to make it possible for
a farmer to buy a magical self-binder, built
up of 3,800 parts, for less than the price of a
good horse, or for as much wheat as he can
grow in one season on a dozen acres.

The vast McCormick City has its human side,
too, in spite of all its noise and semi-automatic
machinery. Cyrus McCormick was not one of
those employers who call their men by numbers

[199]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

instead of names, and who have no more regard
for flesh and blood than for iron and steel.
He had worked with his hands himself, and
brought up his sons to do the same. The
feeling of loyalty and friendliness between the
McCormick family and their employees has
from the first been unusually strong. In 1902,
at the suggestion of Stanley McCormick, gifts
to the amount of $1,500,000 were made to the
oldest employees of the business, as rewards for
faithful service and tokens of good-will. Also,
a handsome club-house was built for the comfort
of the men of the McCormick City, and a
rest-room for the women, under the mothering
superintendence of a matron and trained nurse.
But this one McCormick City, immense as
it is, does not by any means represent the sum
total of McCormick's legacy to the United
States. As the founder of the harvesting-
machine business, he deserves credit for an in-
dustry which now represents an investment of
about $150,000,000. With the sole exception
of the Australian stripper, every wheat-reaping
machine is still made on the lines laid down by

[200]

HIS LIFE AND W.ORK

McCormick in 1831. New improvements have
been adopted; but not one of his seven factors
has been thrown aside.

Fully two-thirds of this industry is still being
done by the United States, although four-fifths
of the wheat is grown in other countries. Our
national income, from this one item of harvest-
ing machinery, has risen to $30,000,000 a year
more than we derive from the exportation
of any other American invention. No European
country, apparently, has been able to master
the complexities and multifarious details which
abound in a successful harvester business.

In 1902 the efficiency of the larger American
plants was greatly increased by the organization
of the International Harvester Company, which
has its headquarters in Chicago. The McCor-
mick City is the most extensive plant in this
Company, and McCormick's son who is also
Cyrus H. McCormick is its President. In
this Company sixteen separate plants are co-
ordinated, four of these being in foreign coun-
tries. Its yearly output averages about $75,-
000,000 in value; and in bulk is great enough

[ 201 1

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

to fill 65,000 freight-cars. It has 25,000 work-
men and 35,000 agents. The lumber with
which its yards are filled comes from its own
80,000-acre forest; the steel comes from its
own furnaces and the iron ore from its own
mines. It is so overwhelmingly vast, this new
famine-fighting consolidation, that the value of
its output for one hour is greater than the
$25,000 of capital with which McCormick built
his first factory in Chicago.

So, it is evident that the McCormick Reaper
has been an indispensable factor in the making
of America. Without it, we could never have
had the America of to-day. It has brought good,
and nothing but good, to every country that has
accepted it. It has never been, and never can
be, put to an evil use. It cannot, under any
system of government, benefit the few and not
the many. It is as democratic in its nature as
the American Constitution; and in every foreign
country where it cuts the grain, it is an educator
as well as a machine, giving to the masses of
less fortunate lands an object-lesson in democ-
racy and the spirit of American progress.

[202]

CHAPTER XII

THE REAPER AND THE WORLD

T Ti TE shall now see what the invention of the
^ * Reaper means to the human race as a
whole. We shall leave behind McCormick and
the United States, and survey the field from a
higher standpoint. The selection of wheat as
the first world-food, its abundance made
possible by the Reaper its transportation by
railroads and steamships its storage in elevat-
ors the production of flour the growth of
wheat-banks, wheat-ports, and exchanges the
new wheat empires the international mech-
anism of marketing the conquest of famine
and the stupendous possibilities of the future!
These are the subjects that group themselves
under the general title - - The Reaper and the
World.

To find a world-food, -- that was the begin-
ning of the problem. All human beings wake
up hungry every morning of their lives ; and con-
sequently the first necessity of the day is food.

[ 203 1

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

The search for food is the oldest of instincts.
It is the master-motive of evolution. It has
reared empires up and thrown them down. As
Buckle has show r n, where the national food is
cheap and plentiful, population increases more
rapidly. And as Sir James Crichton-Browne,
in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition,"
maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of
war, disease, and social misery in its various
forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he
says, "than chronic hunger."

"For lack of bread the French Revolution
failed," said Prince Krapotkin. For lack of
bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and
China; the secret of the prevalence of opium is
that the natives use it to prevent hunger-pangs
in time of famine. Once let those countries
have cheap bread, and there may be no more
opium sold there than there is to-day in Kansas.
For lack of bread came the war between Russia
and Japan; what the one nation wanted was a
seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what the
other wanted was more land for the support of
her swarming population. For lack of bread

[204]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

have come most of the crimes of greed and
violence, most of the social systems based on
sordid self-interest, most of the ill-humor that
has postponed the coming of an era of peace on
earth and good-will among men.

Now, of the three main foods of the human
race, flesh, rice, and wheat, wheat is the best
suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too
expensive once the wild game of the forests is
destroyed; and it is not suitable for food in
tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is.
not a flesh-forming food, and so is not suited
for food in cold countries. Wheat is the one
food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux
as for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily
spoiled, as milk and fruits are; and it contains
all the elements that are needed by the body and
in just about the right proportion.

Wheat, to the botanist, is a grass "a de-
graded lily," to quote from Grant Allen. It
was originally a flower that was tamed by man
and trained from beauty to usefulness. We do
not know when or where the prehistoric Bur-
bank lived who undertook this education of the

[205]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has
been a food for at least five thousand years.
We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and
pictured on the stones of the Pyramids. We
know that Solomon sent wheat as a present
to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have
reason to believe that its first appearance was
in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates,
near where the ancient city of Babylon rose
to greatness.

Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and
transient plant a plant of civilization. It
could not. continue to exist without man, and
man, perhaps, could not exist except in the
tropical countries without wheat. Each needs
the other. If the human race were to perish
from the face of the earth, wheat might survive
for three years, but no longer. So close has
this co-operation been between wheat and civil-
ized man, that an eminent German writer, Dr.
Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence
that wheat was the original cause of civilization,
partly because it was the first good and plentiful
food, and partly because it was wheat that

[206]

Chart Showing Relative Distribution of Values by
Producing Countries in 1908 of World's Produc-
tion of Five Principal Grains. Approxi-
mate Value, $9,280,000,000

Chart Showing Relative Values in 1908 of World's

Production of the Five Principal Grains.

Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000

HIS LIFE AND WORK

persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and
his wanderings and to learn the peaceful habits
of agriculture.

In any case, whatever its earlier history may
have been, wheat is to-day the chief food of the
civilized races of mankind. It is the main
support of 600,000,000 people. It has over-
come its natural enemies weeds, fungus
diseases, insects, and drought, and attained
a crop total of 3,500,000,000 bushels a year.
To the intelligent, purposeful nations that have
become the masters of the human race, wheat
is now the staff of life, the milk of Mother Earth,
the essence of soil and air and rain and sunshine.

But, although wheat was known to be the
best food for fifty centuries, it did not until very
recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become
a world-food. Every community ate up its own
w^heat. It had little or none to sell, because, no
matter how much grain the farmers planted,
they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest
gather more than a certain limited quantity into
their barns. All that one man could do, with
his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough

[207]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

wheat to feed ten people for a year. Each
family could do no more than feed one other
family and itself. This was the Tragedy of
the Wheat. There was never enough of it. It
was so precious that none could be sure of it
except the kings and the nobilities. As for the
masses of peasantry who sowed the wheat and
reaped it with hand-sickles, they would almost
as soon have thought of wearing diamonds as
of eating white bread.

Then, in 1831, came the Reaper. It was not
invented in any of the older countries, nor in
any of the great cities of the world. For five
thousand years neither the peasants nor the
kings had conceived of any better way of reap-
ing wheat than with the sickle and the scythe.
/The man who had cut the Gordian knot of
/ Famine was the son of a citizen-farmer, Cyrus
Hall McCormick by name, Scotch-Irish by race,
American by birth, and inventor by heredity
Vand early training.

This new machine, the Reaper, when it was
full-grown into the self-binder, was equal to
forty sickles. With one man to drive it, it

[208]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

could cut and bind enough wheat in one season
to feed four hundred people. In its most highly
developed form, the combined harvester and
thresher, it has become so gigantic a machine
that thirty-two horses are required to haul it.
This leviathan cuts a fifty-foot roadway through
the grain, threshes it and bags it at the rate of
one bag every half-minute. And the total world
production of Reapers of every sort self-
binders, mowers, headers, corn-binders, etc.,
is probably as many as 1,500,000 a year, two-
thirds of them being made in the United States.
Because of this harvesting machinery, the
wheat crop of the world is now nearly twice
what it was in 1879. The American crop has
multiplied six and a half times in fifty years.
Western Canada, Australia, Siberia, and Argen-
tina have become wheat producers. The cost of
growing one bushel in America, with machinery
and high wages, is now about half a dollar,
which is less than the cost in Europe and as low
as the cost in India, where laborers can be
hired for a few pennies a day. With a sickle,
the time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

hours; with a self-binder, it is now ten minutes.
And so, because of these amazing results, the
rattle of the harvester has become an indispen-
sable part of the music of our industrial orches-
tra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph
key, the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of
the sewing-machine, the roar of the Bessemer
converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle
of the steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive.
Next to the Reaper, the most important fac-
tors in this world-mechanism of the bread, are
the Railroad and the Steamboat. These ar-
rived on the scene just at the right time to dis-
tribute the surplus that the Reaper produced.
The Steamboat, and its humble relative, the
barge, came first. The Erie Canal of 1825,
the Suez Canal of 1869, and the Sault Ste.
Marie Canal of 1881, were built largely for
the carrying of the wheat. By 1856 wheat was
on its way from Chicago to Europe; and four
years later the first wheat-ship curved around
Cape Horn from California. Ten years ago
an entirely new kind of ship, a sort of immense
steel bag called a "whaleback," was built to

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HIS LIFE AN'D WORK

carry 250,000 bushels of wheat in a single load.
By this means a ton of wheat is actually carried
thirteen miles for one cent. There are to-day
small barges on the canals of Holland, large ones
on the river Volga, and several thousand steam-
ships on the world's main water-ways, all carry-
ing burdens of wheat. Enough is now being
transported from port to port to give steady
work to fully three hundred steamships and
summer work to very nearly as many more.
There was an exciting contest between the
ship and the car in the earlier days of transpor-
tation, to see which should carry the largest
share of the wheat. About 1869 the car won.
In this year, too, the United States was belted
with a railway, east to west, which meant the
opening up of the first great wheat-empire.
Other railways pushed out into the vast prairies
of the West, lured by the call of the wheat.
They were the pioneers of the world's wheat-
railways. Wheat was their chief freight and
wheat farmers were their chief passengers. At
the outset the grain was shipped in bags. Then
some railway genius invented the grain-car,

CYRUS HALL M c C O R M I C K

which holds as much as twenty or twenty-five
wagons. And to-day one of the ordinary mov-
ing pictures of an American railroad is a sixty-
car train travelling eastward with enough \vheat
in its rolling bins to give bread to a city of ten
thousand people for a year.

The trans-Siberian railway, which is the
longest straight line of steel in the world, was
built largely as a wheat-conveyor. So were the
railways of western Canada, Argentina, and
India. Ever since the advent of the Reaper
wheat has been the prolific mother of railways
and steamships. While the rice nations are
still putting their burdens on ox-carts and on
the backs of camels and elephants, the wheat
nations have built up a system of transportation
that is a daily miracle of cheapness, efficiency,
and speed. This system is not yet finished.
A new line of steamships is about to be set afloat
between Buenos Ayres and Hamburg. The
Erie Canal is being re-made, at a fabulous cost,
so that a steamer with 100,000 bushels of wheat
can go directly from Buffalo to New York.
And an adventurous railway is now pushing its

[212]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

way north from the wheat-fields of western
Canada to the unknown water of Hudson Bay,
whence the wheat will be carried by boat to
London and Liverpool.

To-day it is not the long haul of wheat, .but
the short haul, that is more expensive. It is
cheaper to carry wheat from one country to
another than from the barn to the nearest town.
The average distance that an American farmer
has to haul his grain is nine and a half miles,
and the average cost of haulage is nine cents per
hundred pounds. Thus it has actually become
true that to carry wheat ten miles by wagon
costs more than 2,300 miles by steamship.
Such is the tense efficiency of our wheat-carrier
system that a bushel of grain can now be picked
up in Missouri and sent to the cotton-spinners
of England for a dime.

Associated with this transportation problem
was the matter of storage. There was no sort
of a building known to man, fifty years ago, in
which a million bushels of wheat might be con-
veniently kept. An entirely new kind of build-
ing had to be invented. All the wheat barns

[213]

CYRUS HALL McCORMlCK

were overflowing. All the warehouses were
outgrown. The difficulty was to make a huge
building that could be quickly rilled and emptied.
Then, at the precise moment when he was
needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey, appeared
with a device for elevating grain an endless
carrier to which metal cups were fastened.
From this idea the elevator was born.

The first city that appreciated the usefulness
of this new, unlovely building was Chicago. It
became not only the home of the Reaper, but
also the main storehouse of the wheat. It
erected one after another of these mastodonic
buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand
along the water-front, roomy enough to hold
the entire crop of Holland, Sweden, Greece,
Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these
immense grain-bins have done for the prosperity
of Chicago would require many books to tell
completely. It was largely because of them
that Chicago outgrew Berlin and became the
central metropolis of North America, with
twenty-six railways emptying their freight at

[214]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

her doors and seven thousand vessels a year
arriving at her harbor.

At present Chicago has swung from wheat
to corn and oats, and enabled Minneapolis to
become the greatest actual wheat-storage city
of the world. In Minneapolis the owning of
elevators has become a profession. There are
not only forty-four elevators in the city itself,
but also forty elevator companies that have
built more than two thousand elevators in the
wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo
of all elevators is here a stupendous granary
that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as much as may
be reaped by two thousand self-binders from
seven hundred square miles of land.

Of all American cities, there are only five
others that can put roofs over 10,000,000 bushels
of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head
of these, with twice the storage capacity of
New York. This double city, with the pictur-
esque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hill-
side and Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has
in recent years overtaken all competitors and

[215]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the
world. Buffalo comes next as an elevator city,
having twenty-eight towering buildings of steel
operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even
this famous cataract helps a little in the making
of cheap bread. New York follows closely after
Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis run-
ning neck and neck at quite a distance behind.
It is an odd fact that there is not one elevator
on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless
weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled
outdoors until the day of shipment. This is an
expensive method of handling, as the bags cost
four cents apiece and no machine has as yet
been invented that will pick up and handle a
sack of grain.

The American elevator has now been very
generally adopted as the ideal wheat-bin.
Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz,
have suggested an improvement by using con-
crete instead of steel. And one Russian city,
Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced
a most original feature in the building of ele-
vators by erecting a very large one a quarter of

[216]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

a mile back from the dock, because of the
better view that this site affords of the harbor.
London has no elevators, and never has had,
although it buys more wheat than any other
city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that
the grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To
give bread to London would take the entire
crop of Indiana or Siberia. Neither are there
any elevators of any importance in Paris, Ber-
lin, or Antwerp. Whatever wheat arrives at
these cities is either hurried to the mill or re-
shipped. Wheat is too precious in Europe to
be stored for a year or for two years, as may
happen in Minnesota. Rotterdam has one
elevator only and of moderate size. Neither
Odessa nor Sulina have any of the large pro-
portions, for the reasons that in Odessa the
labor unions have an unconquerable prejudice
against elevators, and in Sulina the grain is
held only a short time and then forwarded else-
where. This Sulina, as a glance at the map
of Europe will show, is the loneliest of all the
wheat-cities. It stands on a heap of gravel at
the mouth of the Danube an oasis of human

[217]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

life in a vast marshy wilderness. The children
born there have never seen a railway; but 1,400
ships leave the stone docks of Sulina every year
laden with enough wheat to feed London, Paris,
and Berlin. To find the exact reverse of Su-
lina, we must go to Buenos Ay res the premier
wheat-city of South America and the gayest of
them all. Built up at first by the cattle trade,
and now depending mainly upon wheat, this
superb city has become the topmost pinnacle
of South American luxury and refinement. It
has several new elevators, erected by the rail-
way companies.

After the Reaper, the Railway, the Steam-
ship, and the Elevator, came the Exchange.
This, too, came first in Chicago, in its modern
form. There was one little grain Exchange in
the Italian city of Genoa, several centuries ago,
and England points back to 1747 as the year
when her first Corn Exchange was born. But
it was the Exchange in Chicago, started by
thirteen men in 1848, that first came into
its full growth and became an arena of inter-
national forces.

[218]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than
a meeting-place for brokers. It is a mechan-
ism. It is a news bureau a parliament
a part of the whispering-gallery of the world.
It not only provides a market where wheat can
at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for
both buyer and seller all the news from every-
where about the wheat, so that no bargain may
be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were
organized there were times when a farmer
would drive twenty miles to the nearest town
with a load of wheat, and find no one to buy it.
Even in Chicago, in the early forties, a farmer
ran the risk of not being able to trade his wheat
for a few groceries.

At present, when a buyer or a seller of wheat
arrives at an Exchange, he goes at once to con-
sult the weather map of the day. From here
he passes to a series of bulletin-boards, which
inform him of the arrival or outgo of wheat at
many cities. One board tells him the visible
supply of wheat in the world, so that he can
easily ascertain, if he wishes to do so, how much
bread the human race ate last week. Other

[219]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

boards have telegrams and cablegrams of
disaster frost in Alberta, hail in Minnesota,
green bug in Texas, rust in Argentina, drought
in Australia, locusts in Siberia, monsoon in
India, and chinch bug in Missouri. Good
news is here, too, as well as bad. There may
be reports of a record-breaking crop in Rou-
mania, an opulent rain in Kansas, a new steam-
ship line from Kurrachee to Liverpool, and the
plowing of a million acres of new land in west-
ern Canada. And also there are, of course,
the records of the latest sales and prices in
other Exchanges.

Thus the farmer can not only find a ready
buyer for his wheat. He can, by means of a
newspaper or a telephone, know what price he
ought to receive, as all the news gathered by the
Exchanges is freely given to the public. Such
is the perfection of the news mechanism that
has been built up around the marketing of the
wheat, that before a Dakota farmer starts out
for town with a load of grain, he can go to the
telephone under his own roof and learn the

[220]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

prices at various cities and the world-conditions
of the wheat trade.

The paper which best deserves to be called
the official journal of the wheat is the Corn
Trade News, of Liverpool; and the building
which best deserves to be called the international
headquarters of the wheat business is the hand-
some new Baltic Exchange, near by the
Bank of England in London. This Baltic
market is so practically international, in fact,
that it is never closed. Whoever wishes to buy
or sell wheat may do so here at any hour of the
day or night. There are no days in this build-
ing and no seasons, for the reason that it is
always noonday and harvest-time in some part
of the world. In this Baltic Exchange, too,
there is now a nucleus for a Wheat Parliament,
organized under the name of the Corn Trade
Association. This society has undertaken to
put the wheat business in order, by establishing
standard contracts, collecting samples of all
wheats, arbitrating disputes, and condemning
all dishonesties of whatever sort.

[221]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

As wheat Exchange cities, London, Liver-
pool, and Chicago outclass all others. Neither
Italy nor France have any central or dominating
market. In Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, and
Amsterdam the Bourses, as the Exchanges
are called, are public buildings, and the members
of each Bourse represent the local situation
and nothing more. One of the most ambitious
and speculative of the European Exchanges is
the one at Budapest, which stands beside a
dainty little park where the brokers eat their
lunch in fine weather; and the youngest of
all Exchanges is the one that was born in Buenos
Ayres in 1908, representing a surplus of a hun-
dred million bushels a year.

Besides the brokers, in their Exchanges, there
must also be inspectors in the marketing of the
wheat. In some countries these inspectors are
government officers, as in Germany and Canada;
and elsewhere they are local officials or private
employees, as in the United States. A carload
of wheat, passing from Dakota to New York,
will probably have from three to six inspections.

Also, the insurance agent takes his place in the

HIS LIFE AND WORK

circle of co-operation when the wheat begins to
move from barn to bakery. He insures the
wheat in the elevators, on the cars, or in the
steamships. He may even insure it against hail
and tornadoes while it is growing. It is so
precious, this brown seed, that we watch over
every step of its progress.

It is the bankers' busy season, too, when the
wheat begins to move. The marketing of the
grain ties up more money than any other yearly
event. "It threatens us with disaster every
fall," said one of the Secretaries of the Treasury,
when making a plea for a more elastic currency.
"We ship half a million dollars a day during
harvest," said the president of a Chicago bank.
"We drew more than five millions of currency
from the East and sent thirty-eight millions to
the country during September and October of
last year," said a third financier, who spoke for
Chicago as a whole. In short, the movement of
the wheat means a matter of five hundred mil-
lions to American bankers; and it is the most
important occurrence of the year to the bankers
of Russia, Canada, Argentina, and Australia.

[223]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

Many a bank, as well as many a railroad, was
founded upon the moving of the wheat.

The broker, the banker, the inspector, and the
insurance agent these four render a useful
service to the wheat that has left home; but
there is a.fifth man about whose usefulness there
is the widest possible difference of opinion
the speculator. From one point of view, the
speculator is the driving-wheel of the whole
wheat trade. By his energy and his impetus
he steadies and equalizes the conflicting forces,
and gives the entire mechanism a continuous
movement. From another point of view, he is
a gambler, reckless and parasitical, who inter-
feres with the natural laws of supply and de-
mand, and snatches an unearned toll from the
wheat bins of the world.

Some of the wheat nations not only permit
speculation in wheat, but practically encourage
it by allowing more privileges to the speculator
than to the ordinary business man. Others are
resolutely stamping it out, as a nuisance and a
crime. The nations that have voted "Yea" on
speculation are Great Britain, Hungary, Sweden,

[224]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

Norway, France, and the United States; and
the nations that have voted "Nay'' are Ger-
many, Holland, Belgium, Australia, Switzer-
land, Greece, and Argentina. Canada has been
divided on the question, since the Province
of Manitoba broke up the Winnipeg Grain
Exchange by legislation in 1908.

In the end, as organization increases, specula-
tion will decline. Chicago will try to push
prices up and London will try to pull them
down; but there will be fewer violent fluctua-
tions. Better methods of farming and a more
reliable system of news-gathering will eliminate
the element of chance to such an extent that the
wheat trade will offer less and less scope for
speculation and no inducements at all to the
reckless plunger. Already the frantic methods
of marketing wheat have been outgrown in
the Exchanges of Liverpool and London. In
neither of these places is there any Wheat Pit,
or any maelstrom of frenzied brokers. Without
any shouting or jostling or wild tumult of any
kind, the English brokers are buying two hun-
dred million bushels of wheat a year, and con-

[225]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

trolling the situation to a greater extent than
any other body of men. This, too, without any
restrictive legislation.

Before wheat was made plentiful by the
Reaper, it was possible for a daring man to
establish a corner or monopoly; but no one has
succeeded in doing this for more than forty years.
The last wheat corner that did not fail was in
1867. Since then every would-be cornerer has
been caught in his own trap. The wheat-
machinery of the world has now become so vast
that no individual can master it. Whoever has
tried it has found that he was being cornered
by the wheat; for as soon as he had raised the
price to an artificial level, the grain has flowed
in upon him and covered him up. The price
of wheat to-day may be temporarily deflected
by schemes and conspiracies, but not for long.
Ultimately it is decided by the state of the crop
and the state of public opinion in the thirty-six
countries that grow wheat and eat bread.

Within the last thirty years, since the Reaper
has come into universal use, the area of the
world's wheat-field has doubled. New coun-

[226]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

tries have arisen, that were only waste places
before. The habitable earth has grown im-
mensely larger. There is more room for both
wheat and men to grow, and less scope for the
forestaller and the monopolist. Just as the
Reaper was the advance-machine of civiliza-
tion across the prairies of the West, so it is
to-day opening up new territories and develop-
ing new resources.

Northwestern Canada, for instance, was a
dozen years ago supposed to be a barren wilder-
ness of snow and ice, in which none but the
hunter and the fur-trader might earn a living.
Then several adventurous Minnesotans went
across and planted wheat. It grew forty
bushels to the acre, and the acres, there were
two hundred million of them, were waiting for
the plow and almost to be had for the asking.
Since then, more than three hundred thousand
American farmers have swept across the line
and joined in the greatest wheat-rush of this
generation. Twelve hundred grain elevators
have been built along the line of the Canadian
Pacific ; and Chicago self-binders rattled through

[227]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

the yellow wheat last Summer two thousand
miles north of St. Louis.

In Argentina, too, and Australia, where the
wheat ripens just in time to decorate the Christ-
mas trees, there is to be seen the same conquest
of nature. Desolate plains are being tamed by
the plow and exploited by the harvesters. In
the semi-arid belt that lies east of the Rocky
Mountains, new kinds of wheat, less thirsty, are
being taught to grow. In Russia and Siberia
a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has
been rescued from idleness in the last fifteen
years. And even in the valley of the Euphrates,
where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new
railway is now being constructed which, when
it is finished, will carry oil and wheat.

By thus opening up new regions to settlement,
the wheat-farmer not only thwarts the monopo-
list and makes the world a larger place to live in,
he does more: he compels the gold to come
out of its vaults in the great cities and to flow
to the outermost parts of the earth. For every
eighteen thousand pounds of wheat that go to
the city, there will go back to the farmer one

[228]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

pound of gold. For every loaf of bread upon a
Londoner's table, there will go a cent and a half
to the man behind the Reaper. And so, the
sale of every wheat-crop means that the gold
will come throbbing out into the arteries of
business, like the blood from the heart, and on
its way back and forth nourish the whole body
of the nation.

It is in the very nature of the wheat trade to
benefit the masses and not the few. The more
wheat that grows, the less danger there is of an
aristocracy of wheat. More wheat means more
luxury in the farmhouse, more traffic on the
railway, and more food in the slums. It
means busier factories and steel-mills, because
the farmer, when he receives his wheat-money,
becomes the customer of the manufacturer.
Thus it was not at all accidental that the wealth
of Buenos Ayres came with the exportation of
wheat, or that the commercial awakening of
Canada followed the opening up of her western
prairies, or that the industrial supremacy of the
United States dates from the immense wheat
harvests that began in 1880 to push the whole

[229]

CYRUS HALL M c C O R M I C K

country forward with the power of $500,000-
000 a year. As one of McCormick's competi-
tors, J. D. Easter of Evanston, once declared,
"It seems as though the McCormick Reaper
started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has
been rolling ever since."

If we wish to know what the Reaper will
eventually do for these new wheat countries,
we have but to glance back over the short his-
tory of our ten prairie States. Here, by the
use of both science and machinery, the New
Farmer has reached his highest level of success.
By 1884 these ten States had twenty million
thriving settlers, riding on forty-two thousand
miles of railway, raising as much wheat in a day
as New England could in a year, and storing
their profits in twenty-five hundred banks. In-
credible as it may seem to Europe and Asia, it
is true that even the poorhouses in Iowa and
Kansas were used last year as storehouses for
wheat. And it is true that in the co-operative
commonwealth called Kansas, at the last
assessment, there were found to be forty-four
thousand pianos and six million dollars' worth

[230]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

of carriages and automobiles. This in a State
where there are no Grand Dukes and where
every man works for a living!

If the lords of Siberia wish to know what may
be done with that famine-swept vastitude
they may come and see that bed of an
ancient sea, which in thirty years has been trans-
formed into the world's greatest bread-land
the Red River Valley. Here the banks are
not only packed with millions, but hundreds
of millions, belonging to the shirt-sleeved pro-
prietors of the soil. Here, in the yellow days
of August, a man may travel for days and see
no limit to the ocean of w r aving, shimmering
wheat, that ripples around him in a vast
sky-bounded circle. Wheat wheat wheat!
Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth
of Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings,
but much to the glory of the common people.
Drop the German Empire down upon this
valley and its expanse of dizzying, swirling
wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly
eclipsed. There would still be enough grain
around the edges to make a golden fringe.

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

The children born and bred in this Red River
Valley have never seen, except in pictures, a
sickle or a flail. Their only conception of a
harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders,
with reels whirling and knives clacking, shall
charge upon the wheat as though each acre
were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make
war until the land is strewn with heaps of fallen
sheaves. Famine, to these children of the
wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling
of the sun. Even the one young State of North
Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food
for herself, and for twelve million people besides.

So, the urgent world-problem is to teach
other nations the lesson of the Red River Val-
ley. There is not yet enough bread so that
we may put a loaf at every plate. To feed the
whole race according to the present American
standard of living would require ten thousand
million bushels three times as much as we
are raising now; and the demand is fast
outgrowing the supply. Sooner or later the
Chinese will learn to eat at least one loaf a
week apiece, and when they do, it will mean

[232]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

that the world's wheat crop must be increased
ten per cent.

More wheat and a more efficient organiza-
tion of wheat agencies that is the programme
of the future. Already one unsuccessful effort
has been made to hold an international Wheat
Congress; and the second attempt may end
more happily. Now that the world has be-
come so small that a cablegram flashes com-
pletely around it in twelve minutes; now that
there are forty-four nations united by The
Hague Conferences and fifty-eight by the Postal
Union; now that war has grown to be so
expensive that one cannon-shot costs as much
as a college education and one battleship as
much as a first-class University, it is quite
probable that the march of co-operation will
continue until there is a Congress, and a cen-
tral headquarters and a Tribunal, which will
represent nothing less than an international
fellowship of the wheat.

[233]

CHAPTER XIII

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD

T \ 7E have now seen the machinery by which
the wheat is cut, moved, stored, financed,
and marketed. Its next and last step, as wheat,
is to the Flour-mill, whence it goes to the
bakeries, the groceries, and the homes of six
hundred million people. Here, too, there have
had to come new methods since the advent of
the Reaper.

In the Dark Ages of the sickle and the flail,
two flat stones did well enough for a flour-mill.
Even the bread that was found in the ruins of
Pompeii had been made of wheat that was merely
crushed. Later came the mill run by horse-
power or by the energy of a little stream. Such
were the first American mills. The mill that
was operated by George Washington at Mount
Vernon, for instance, was run by water-power
and produced flour that sold for thirteen dollars
a barrel. Rochester, N. Y., was the first Amer-
ican "Flour City"; but the modern flour-mill

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

did not come until it was compelled to come by
the deluge of Reaper wheat that flooded the
markets in 1870.

As usually happens in the case of inventions,
it came where it was not expected. It made its
arrival in the Hungarian city of Budapest in
1874. The "new process," as it was called, was
based upon the use of steel rolls instead of stones.
It was as superior to the old-fashioned way as
the Reaper had been to the sickle or as the
thresher was to the flail. It was amazingly quick
and produced a better flour. By reason of
these new mills, Budapest became at a bound
the foremost "Flour City" of the world, and
held its place against all comers until 1890.

Then the prestige passed to Minneapolis
a young city on the head-waters of the Missis-
sippi, the recent home of the prairie-dog and
the buffalo. Shortly before the Civil War, a
youthful lawyer named William D. Washburn
drifted westwards from Maine until he came to
Minneapolis, at that time a tiny village on the
frontier. He found no clients here, and no law;
but he did find a ledge of limestone rock jutting

[ 235 ]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

across the Mississippi and making the only
large water-fall in all that region. So he threw
aside his legal education and became the organi-
zer of a water-power company and the owner of
a little flour-mill. Soon the long line of Reapers
reached Minneapolis and swept on westwards
into the richest wheat lands that had ever been
known. The wheat overwhelmed the slow old-
fashioned mills, so the ex-lawyer in 1878 adopted
the Budapest system and built a roller-mill that
was the quickest and most automatic of its
kind. Other millers had by this time come to
Minneapolis Pillsbury, Crosby, Christian,
and Dunwoody; and all together they pushed
the flour business until in twelve years they had
become the main millers of the world.

To-day the river of wheat is deepest at Minne-
apolis. Its twenty-two great mills roll 120,-
000,000 bushels into flour as an ordinary year's
work. While the swiftest mill in Athens, in
the age of Pericles, produced no more than two
barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible size
in Minneapolis that fills seventeen thousand
barrels in a twenty -four hours' run enough

[236]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

to give bread to New York State and California.
What the Greeks did in a day the Minnesotans
do in ten seconds. Five million barrels of this
Minneapolis flour is each year scattered among
foreign nations, a fact which informs us that
flour is now not a local product, but part of the
real currency of nations. No doubt the people
who dwell by the Sea of Galilee, whose fathers
were once miraculously fed upon seven loaves
of bread and a few fishes, are now being fed
miraculously upon loaves of bread made from
the flour of Minneapolis.

The making of the bread that is the final
step in this movement of the wheat. As yet,
this is a local process, though not wholly so.
Certain ready-to-eat foods are now being made
from wheat and boxed in such a way that they
may be sent from one country to another. If
we trace back the original of a loaf of bread of
ordinary size, we shall find that it was made
from two-thirds of a pound of flour, which was
rolled from one pound of wheat, containing
about twelve thousand grains that were grown
on forty-eight square feet of land and reaped

[ 237 1

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

by a self-binder in two seconds. When the
wheat was cut in the old-fashioned way, with a
hand-sickle, every loaf of bread required eighty
seconds' labor instead of two.

In a public test made last year in the State
of Washington, wheat was cut, threshed, ground
into flour, arid baked into biscuits in twenty-
three minutes. This is an evidence that all the
machinery for handling grain has now been
brought up to the same high level of speed and
efficiency as the self-binder. It also helps us to
understand the daily marvel of cheap bread
the fact that a hundred loaves of bread are now
delivered one by one at an American working-
man's door for the cost of a seat at the opera or
a couple of song-records by Caruso.

So plentiful is this bread that the loaves baked
from American flour in 1907 would have made
a wall of bread around the earth, or have given
thirty loaves apiece to every human creature;
and so cheap has it become in these latter days
that even in the United States it is not more
than three cents a day per capita. The un-
skilled laborer who receives $1.50 a day, earns

[ 238 ]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

his bread in the first ten minutes, every work day
morning. And the total tax he pays to the men
who make the self-binders is not more than one
tenth of a cent per loaf.

Three-sevenths of the people of the world are
now on a wheat basis. They are the lesser
fraction in point of numbers, but the larger in
point of prosperity and progress. A wheat
map of the globe would be very nearly a map of
modern civilization. As yet, there are many
peasants who gro\v wheat and cannot afford to
eat it. But the number of bread-eaters is stead-
ily increasing, probably at the rate of four or
five million a year.

The nation that eats most bread per capita
is Belgium. After her come France, England,
and the United States. As the Belgians, with
their scanty acres, cannot grow more wheat than
would support them for nine weeks, they are
compelled to import nearly fifty million bushels
a year; and it is this continual influx of grain
that has done most to make Antwerp the third
busiest port in the world and the home of forty
steamship lines.

[ 239 ]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

France is second as an eater, and third as
a grower, of wheat. But it is not an important
factor in the international market, as there is
usually almost an even balance between what
it grows and what it eats. It has very little
either to buy or to sell. Its crops are steady and
large, and by intensive cultivation the thrifty
French are obtaining the same amount of grain
from less and less land.

There are two countries only, Great Britain
and Holland, that impose no tariff upon either
wheat or flour. Neither the British nor the
Dutch will tolerate a bread tax. Both countries
have barely enough land to grow one-quarter
as much wheat as they need, although there was
a period in the early history of England when
it was nicknamed "the Granary of the North,"
because of its many wheat-fields. To-day the
bread on three British tables out of four is
made of wheat brought in a British ship from
some foreign country; and the total amount of
wheat consumed in the United Kingdom is so
great that it requires an army of 93,000 men
with self-binders to cut it and tie it into sheaves.

[240]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

If it had to be reaped with sickles, it would be a
ten-day harvesting for half the able-bodied men
in the two islands.

Germany eats less wheat than Great Britain,
and raises more than twice as much. The Ger-
mans are skilled wheat-farmers. They grow
as much on half an acre of poor soil as Americans
grow on a whole acre of good soil. The Italians
eat very nearly as much as the Germans, and
raise a larger crop by dint of great labor on the
tiny farms and terraced hillsides of Italy. Both
countries tax the bread of the poor by a tariff of
thirty-eight to forty-eight cents a bushel on
foreign wheat. The Austrians and Hungarians,
in spite of a climate of extremes and sudden
changes, manage to supply themselves with more
than ten billion loaves of bread by the tillage of
their own fields, and usually have some flour to
sell to the neighboring countries. The Spanish
cannot quite feed themselves; in addition to the
wheat they grow, they are obliged to buy about
a hundred ship-loads a year. Denmark comes
out even. Portugal buys her bread for four
months of the year. Greece, Norway, and Swe-

[241]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

den raise half enough wheat. The Swiss can
get no more from their valley-farms than will
feed them for ten weeks. And the peasants of
Russia and Roumania, who raise wheat in
abundance, have unfortunately not yet risen to
that luxurious level of life in which white bread
is the e very-day food of the people. Although
Russia has more w^heat to sell than any other
nation, a Russian eats one-third as much wheat
as a Belgian, and there is a famine somewhere
in the vast Russian Empire almost every winter.
Africa is not yet a wheat-eating continent.
Egypt, which was, in the Golden Age of the
Pharaohs, the wheat-centre of the world, now
grows less grain than Oregon; Algeria raises less
than Ohio; and Tunis, from the fields that sur-
round the ruins of ancient Carthage, produces
less grain than Tennessee. India is slowly
shifting from rice to wheat. Many of the fields
that once grew indigo are now yellow with
grain. At present India is the most uncertain
factor in the situation, as it may have eighty
million bushels to sell or none. As it is one-
third as large as the United States, and crowded

HIS LIFE AND WORK

with three times the population, there is always
need of its grain at home. As yet, the Reaper
has not been allowed to extend its benefits to
India. Most of the grain is reaped in the old
slow, wasteful way. It is sown by hand, cut by
sickles, stored in pits, and transported on the
backs of camels. Little Japan is falling into
line as a bread-eating country, growing now as
much wheat as California. And even China,
which is not as a whole on the wheat-map
of the world, has recently begun to grow
wheat in Manchuria and to build flour-mills
at Hong-Kong.

So, the human race will soon be able to feed
itself. It has learned how and needs only to use
to the full the agencies that are already invented
and established. Beginning with the McCor-
mick Reaper in 1831, there has been constructed
a world mechanism of the bread, which prom-
ises to wholly abolish Famine and its brood of
evils. The crude machine that was hammered
and whittled into shape in a log workshop on a
Virginian farm, has now become a System a
McCormick System, that cuts ten million bushels

[243]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

of ripe wheat a day and transports it hither and
thither as handily as though the whole round
earth were girt with belt-conveyors.

That young Virginian farmer who awoke
from his dream and made his dream come true,
made it possible for a few in each country to
provide enough food for all. He found a cure
for Hunger, which had always persisted like a
chronic disease. He heaped the plates on the
tables of thirty-six nations. He took a drudgery
and transformed it into a profession. He in-
structed the wheat-eating races how to increase
the "seven small loaves" so that the multitudes
should be fed. He picked up the task of feeding
the hungry masses the Christly task that had
lain unfulfilled for eighteen centuries, and led
the way in organizing it into a system of inter-
national reciprocity.

To-day there is no longer in most countries
any tragic note in the Epic of the Wheat. There
is no sweating peasant with a hoe. The plow-
man may even sit, it he wishes, upon the sliding
steel knife that slices the soil into furrows, or
upon the steel harrow that combs the clods into

[244]

HIS LIFE AND WORK

soft, loose earth. The sower is no heavy-footed
serf, scattering his grain in handfuls upon the
surface of the soil, where the birds of the air may
devour it. He, too, rides upon a machine with
steel fingers that plant the living seed securely
in the living earth. And when, at the call of the
sun and the rain, the black field becomes green
and ripens from green to gold, its yellow fruitage
is swept down and into barns, not by a horde of
stooping laborers, but by the Grand March of
the Harvesters, the drivers of painted chariots,
who ride against the grain and leave it behind
them in bound sheaves.

Henceforth civilization may be based upon
higher motives than the Search for Food. The
struggle for existence may become the struggle
of the nobler nature for its full development.
The gentle need not be eliminated by the strong.
Instead of contending with one another in an
unbrotherly competition, men may move up-
ward to the higher activities of social self-preser-
vation and organized self-help. By mastering
the problem of the bread, they have opened up
such opportunities for education, for travel, for

[245]

CYRUS HALL McCORMICK

happier homes, for the prosperity and friendship
of the nations, as no previous generation has
ever had. And it is here, it is in this larger and
kindlier civilization, that is now made possible
by the Reaper and the wheat-mechanism which
has grown up around it, that we shall find the
full spiritual value to the world of that stout-
hearted bread-winner of the human race whose
life began among the hills of Old Virginia one
hundred years ago.

THE END

[246]

INDEX

Adams, John, 15

Adriance, John P., 103, 119

Advertisements of Reaper, 54,
81-83, 112, 134

Africa not a wheat-eating
country, 242

Agencies established for sale of
Reapers (about 1844), 63

Agents, Cyrus H. McCor-
mick's plan in regard to, 83,
84,86

Agriculture, Department of, 87

Albert, Prince, 125, 132

Algeria, 242

Allen, Grant, 205

America, yacht, 131

Amsterdam, 222

Antwerp, no grain stored in,
217; Bourse in, 222; third
busiest port in world, 239

Appleby, John F., 115

Argentina, 209, 212, 225, 228

Arkwright, inventor, 53, 131

Armagh massacre of 1641, 22

Athens, mills at, 236

Atkins, Jearum, 106

Augusta County, Virginia, 3

Australia, wheat crop of, 209;
legislation against specula-
tion in, 225; development
of, 228

Australian stripper, 200

Austria in 1809, 4; farm labor-
ers received no wages in,
123; climate and wheat pro-
duction in, 241

Austrian Emperor decorated
Cyrus H. McCormick, 135

Ayrshire, Scotland, 86

Babylon, 206

Baggage Case, 1862-1885, 100

-102; see also Pennsylvania

Railroad

Baltic Exchange, London, 221
Baltic, holder of ocean record,

131
Baltimore and Ohio Railway,

49
Baltimore Convention of 1861,

158, 166
Bankers concerned in moving

of wheat, 223, 224
Barbary pirates, 4
Barclay, Col. A. T., 40
Barge, invention of, 210
Battleship turret, improver of,

95
Bavarians in the Tyrol (1809),

4
Beagle, H. M. S., Darwin's

voyage in, 51

249]

INDEX

Bear, Henry, 66

Behel, Jacob, 115

Belgian method of reaping, 6

Belgians, King of the, 125

Belgium, legislation against
speculation in, 225; con-
sumption of bread per capita
in, 239, 242

Berlin, 214, 217

Berthelot, 51

Bessemer converter, 17, 49, 69,
210

Bismarck, 136

Black Death in England, 124

Blackie, 1

Blaine, Mrs. Emmons, 183

Blanchard, inventor, 95

Blue Ridge Mountains, 2, 36

Board of Trade, none in Chi-
cago when Cyrus H. Mc-
Cormick came, 70

Bonanza farms, 194

Bull, Ole, 184

Bonar, 1

Bonner, Henry, publisher, 21

Bottgher, 53

Bourses, or European Ex-
changes, 222

Bowyer, Col. John, 40

Braila, Roumania, 216

Bradshaw, Prof., 40

Brains, John, 59

Bread, making of, 237, 238;
record time from standing
grain to, 238; cheapness of,
238

Bread tax, 240, 241

Brokers, wheat, 219, 222. 224

Brooks, Absalom, 58

Brown, A. C., 66

Brown, Senator, of Miss., 93

Bryant, 76

Buckle, 204

Budapest, Bourse in, 222;
"new process" mills in, 235,
236

Buenos Ayres, 218, 222, 229

Buffalo, N. Y., 69, 216

Bulwer, Sir Henry Lytton,
130

Burson, W. W., 115

Bushnell, Reaper manufac-
turer, 103, 120

Butler, E. K., 143, 148

Butler, Gen., 36

Cablegrams, 233
Calhoun, 164, 178
California, 51, 82, 190, 243
Calvin, John, 156, 157, 168
Canada, grain inspectors in,

222; grain speculation in,

225
Canada (western), wheat crop

of, 209; railways of, 212,

213; development of, 227,

229

Canadian Pacific Railway, 227
Canal, first, in Chicago, 75
Carlyle, 155
Carnegie, Andrew, 56

[250]

INDEX

Carpenter, "Pump," 114, 115,
117

Carson, Miss Polly, 40, 41

Carthage, ruins of, 242

Cash, John, 35

Cavaliers of Virginia, 20

Chalons, Emperor Napoleon's
estate, 134

Chautauqua idea, originator of,
120

Chicago, 4, 30, 31, 37, 50, 67,
68, 70-78, 83, 85, 97, 106,
137, 144, 146, 151-153, 162,
166, 188, 189, 192, 196, 201,
214, 215, 218, 219, 222, 223

Chicago fire of 1871, 30, 151-
153, 182

China, opium traffic of, 204;
future use of wheat in, 232,
243

Chopin, 1, 51

Christian, Minneapolis miller,
236

Cincinnati Democratic Con.
vention, 171

Circus, first, in Chicago, 71

City and town dwellers, pro-
portion of, 195, 196

Civil War, see Secession, War
of

Clay, Henry, 15, 164

Clermont, Fulton's steamboat,
7

Cleveland, Ohio, 73

Collins Line, 131

Colt's pistol, 130, 131

Columbus, Reaper traced back
to, 17

Congress, first recognition of
Chicago by, 72; Lincoln
elected to, 72; patent suits
carried to, 91, 92; how
inventors have been treated
by, 95

Cooper, Peter, 11, 155

Corn stored at Chicago, 215

Corn Trade Association, Lon-
don, 221

Corn Trade News, of Liver-
pool, 221

Corners in wheat, 226

Cort, 53

Cotton-gin, 52, 97, 191

Covenanters, Scotch, 19, 23,
157

Cradle, 5, 27, 45

Crichton-Browne, Sir James,
204

Crimean War, 190

Criminals in period of 1809, 8

Cromwell, 173, 185

Crosby, Minneapolis miller,
236

Cross of the Legion of Honor
given Cyrus H. McCormick
by Emperor Napoleon III,
135

Crystal Palace, London, 127

Dalrymple, Oliver, 193, 194
Darwin, 1, 51

251

INDEX

Davis, H. Winter, 99

Davy, 131

Debates between Lincoln and
Douglas, 100

Deere, John, 49, 131

Deering, William, 115, 116,
118, 121, 150

De Lesseps, 70

Denmark, 241

Department store, free trial
given by, 80

Des Moines, Iowa, 6, 86

Dickerson, E. N., 91, 98

Diet of Worms, 156

Diseases prevalent in 1809, 7

Divider, origin of, 32, 46

Douglas, Stephen A., 91, 99,
100

Driving-wheel of Reaper, 34

Drunkenness in 1809, 7

Duluth-Superior, 215

Dunfermline, Scotland, An-
drew Carnegie's birthplace,
56

Dunwoody, Minneapolis mil-
ler, 236

Duties imposed on American
machines entering Europe,
136

Eager, Samuel, 58
Easter, J. D., 230
Eastern States, labor and
money in (about 1839), 58
Ebrington, Lord, 127, 128

Edward, King, 132
Egypt once wheat-centre of
world and present pro-
duction in, 242
Egyptian tombs, wheat found

in, 206
" 1800 - and - starve - to - death "

period, 51
Elastic currency, demands for,

223

Electric engine, builder of, 95
Electrical experiments, 50
Elevators, grain, 214-217
Embargo (1809), 8-10
Emerson, Ralph, 45, 46, 98,

103, 119

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 97
England, riots in (1809), 3, 4;
U. S. flag flouted by, 4; at
war with Scotland, 18, 19;
with Ireland, 19; Scotch-
Irish ready for war with,
20; conditions in (1831),
50; price of labor in, 123;
labor conditions and farm
machinery in, 124; Corn
Exchange in, 218; specula-
tion in, 224; consumption
of bread in, 239; no tariff
on wheat or flour in, 240;
has lost place as " granary
of the North," 240; con-
trasted with Germany, 241
Erie Canal, 210, 212
Ether, use of, 69
Euphrates, valley of, 228

252]

INDEX

Europe, introduction of Reap-
er into, and trade with, 123-
138; cost of growing wheat
in, 209; American wheat
exported to, 210; wheat
stored in, 217

Exchanges, grain, 218-222

Factories in 1831, 48, 49
Factory, rebuilding of, after
fire, 31, 152, 182; present
size of, 47, 196-200; in Vir-
ginia, poor transportation
from, 64; McCormick's
plan to build his own, 67;
Chicago chosen as site of,
77, 137, 202; largest in
Chicago, 77; in 1860, 106;
output of, 137; at time of
Chicago fire, 151; in 1884,
188

Famine of 1846 in Ireland, 71
Famines, local, 51; in Russia,

242
Farm laborers drawn by 1849

gold rush, 82,83,190
Farm machinery, none in 1809,
5, 11; invention of, 17;
profession of making, 22;
none in 1831, 49; farm-
ers not using (about 1839),
57, 58; fixed prices for, 81;
field test as method of mar-
keting, 87; McCormick's
system of selling, 89; intro-

duction of, in England, 124;
sale of, boomed after 1849,
190; present era of, 193-195

Farmers, increase of (1810
1820), 11, 21; their opin-
ions of early types of mow-
ers and reapers, 43; Mc-
Cormick 's confidence in,
80; advertising among, and
testimonials from, 82; Mc-
Cormick stood well with,
85; his business methods
with, 85; McCormick hurt
by petitions of protest from,
94; credit extended to, 193;
farm machinery used by,
193-195

" Farmer's Register, " 43

Fassler, Jerome, 119

Federal bankrupt law of 1842,
71

Field, Cyrus W., 155

Field tests, 87-89, 134, 135

Fingers on cutting blade, ori-
gin of, 33

Fire department, Chicago,
1846, 72

Fiske, John, 21

Fitch &Co., 66

FitzGerald, 1

Fixed price, Reapers sold at,
80, 81

Flesh food, 205

"Flour Cities, "234, 235

Flour, manufacture of, 234-
237

[253]

INDEX

Flour-mills, 234-237

Food, first necessity, 203, 204;
relation between popula-
tion and, 204; three prin-
cipal articles of, 205

Foreign trade in Reapers, 123,
124, 131-138

Fowler, Miss Nettie, see Mc-
Cormick, Mrs Cyrus H.

France, U. S. flag flouted by,
4; price of labor in, 123; no
central wheat market in,
222; speculation in, 225;
consumption of bread in,
239, 240; wheat grown in,
240; intensive cultivation in,
240

Frederick of Holstein, Prince,
128

Frederick, Virginia, 3

Fredericksruhe, Bismarck 's
estate, 136

Free library, none in 1831, 50

Free trial of Reaper, 80

French Academy of Science
elected Cyrus H. McCor-
mick a member, 136

French Revolution, 156, 204

Froude, 21

Fulton, Robert, 7, 11, 21, 53,
95

Fulton's steamboat, 7

Galatz, 216
Galena, 111., 76

Galilee, Sea of, people who
dwell by the, 237

Gammon, E. H., 116

Garrison, William Lloyd, 51

Gas not used in Chicago when
Cyrus H. McCormick came,
70

Genoa, 218

Gerland, Dr., 206

Germany in 1809, 4; price of
labor in, 123; reasons why
Reapers are not made in, 136 ;
grain inspectors in, 222;
legislation against specu-
lation in, 225; compared
with Red River Valley, 231 ;
compared with Great Brit-
ain, 240; intensive cultiva-
tion in, 241

Gilkerson, David, 58

Gladstone, 2, 51

Glanders, a contagious dis-
ease, 5

Glessner, Reaper manufac-
turer, 103, 120

Gold put in circulation by
wheat, 228, 229

Gold rush to California, 1849,
82, 190

Goodyear, 53, 95

Gorham, Marquis L., 115, 117

Grain-car, invention and use
of, 211, 212

Granville, Lord, 131

Gray & Warner, 66

Great Britain, see England

[254]

INDEX

Greece, 225, 241

Greeley, Horace, 72, 129, 155,

167
Gutenberg, 53

Hague, The, Conferences, 233

Hall, Dr. John, 169

Hall, Patrick, 22, 23

Hamburg, 222

Hancock, candidate for Presi-
dent, 171

Hand-labor, Reaper invented
in era of, 48, 49

"Hard Times" measures in
Legislature, 71

Harding, George, 91, 99

Hargreaves, inventor of weav-
ing machinery, 53

Harper, Henry, publisher, 21

Hart, Eli, & Co., 52

Harvest season only opportu-
nity of testing Reaper, 61,
92

Haussemann, Baron, 1

Hayes, President, 165

Hayes-Tilden controversy, 165

Heathcoat, inventor of weav-
ing machinery, 53

Henry, Joseph, 21,50

Herald Square, New York, 6

Hewitt, Abram S., 155

Kite, James M., 63

Hitt, Dr. N. M., 37

Hobbs lock, 131

Hoe press, 49, 69, 131

Holland in 1809, 4; legisla-
tion against speculation in,
225; no tariff on wheat or
flour in, 240

Holloway, D. P., 96

Holmes, 1, 51

Holmes, H. A., 115

Homestead Act of 1862, 193

Hong-Kong, flour-mills at,
243

Houghawout, John W., 40

Houghton, Lord, 1

Howe, 69, 95, 131

Hudson Bay, 213

Hulled corn, use of, 69

Hungary, speculation in , 224 ;
climate and wheat produc-
tion of, 241

Hunger, evils due to, 204, 205

Huntley, Byron E., 103, 119

Hussey, Obed, 87, 88, 119

Huxley, 51

Hyatt, inventor, 95

Illinois, 64, 65, 69, 100, 151,
193

Immigrants supplied with
Reapers on credit, 85, 86

India, opium traffic of, 204;
cost of wheat production
and labor in, 209, 242; rail-
ways of, 212; area and
population of, 242, 243;
wasteful methods practised
in, 243

[ 255 ]

INDEX

Indian Confederacy of Tecum-
seh, 4

Indian Massacre (1764) in
Rockbridge County, Vir-
ginia, 2

Indiana wheat crop, 217

Indigo displaced by wheat in
India, 242

Inspectors of grain, 222, 224

Insurance agents for wheat,
222-224

Intensive cultivation, 240,
241

Interior, The, 162, 163, 172

International Harvester Com-
pany, 183, 201

Inventors not encouraged, 6;
how treated by Congress and
the Patent Office, 95; rights
of, as stated by Webster,
95

Iowa, 50, 63, 69, 230

Ireland, Scotch Covenanters
in, 19, 21; famine of 1846
in, 71

Irish immigrants in Chicago,
71

Iron furnace operated by
Cyrus H. McCormick, 55-57

" Iron Man," Atkins's self-rake
Reaper, 106, 107

Iron, price of, about 1833, 55,
56

Italy, no central wheat market
in, 222; wheat consumption
and production in, 241

Jacquard, inventor of weaving
machinery, 53

Jails, conditions in, 8, 9

Jamestown colony, 36

Janesville, Wis., 114

Japan, object of, in war with
Russia, 204; more wheat
consumed and raised in,
243

Jefferson, President, 8, 10, 11,
15, 16

Jenks, Joseph, of Lynn, 5

Johnson, Reverdy, 91, 98

Johnson, Senator, of Mary-
land, 96

Jones, William H., 104, 120

Kansas, 51, 85, 204, 230, 231

Kansas City, 216

Kay, inventor of weaving ma-
chinery, 53

Kelly, inventor, 95

Kentucky, Scotch-Irish in, 20

Kinglake, 1

Kinzie, John, 77

Knox, John, 18, 58, 156, 157,
169

Koh-i-noor diamond, 125, 126

Krapotkin, Prince, 204

Kurtz, Jacob, 58

Land sales from 1810 to 1820,
11

[256]

INDEX

Law-school, first in, Chicago,

71
Lexington Female Academy,

Lexington Union, 54
Lexington, Virginia, 37, 39,

40
Licenses to manufacturers of

McCormick's Reaper, 66,

98, 112, 116, 120
Lilley, General, 140
Lincoln, Abraham, 1, 2, 51, 72,

91, 99, 100, 191
Lind, Jenny, 184
Liverpool, 221, 222, 225
Livingstone, 70
Locke, Sylvanus D., 112, 115
Locomotives, early, 49, 50, 192,

210
London Exhibition of 1851,

124-127, 130, 131, 190
London, no grain elevators in,

217; wheat consumption of,

217; Baltic Exchange in,

221, 222; methods of wheat

marketing in, 225
"Low-down" binder, 118
Luther, Martin, 156, 157, 173

Mackenzie,expert Reaper oper-
ator, 128

Mail-order houses, free trial
given by, 80

Manchuria, wheat raised in,
243

Manitoba, Province of, 225

Mann, inventor, 108

Manny and Emerson, of Rock-
ford, 111., 98, 103, 119

Manufacturers licensed to
build McCormick's Reapers,
see under Licenses

Marsh, C. W., 45, 46

"Marsh Harvester," 109, 110

Martineau, Miss, 76

Mary, Queen of Scots, 18

Masses benefited by wheat
trade, 229

Massie, William, 60

Mazzini, 51

McChesney, Adam, 28

McClung, Billy, 159

McClurg, Alexander C., pub-
lisher, 21

McCormick, Miss Anita, see
Blaine, Mrs. Emmons

McCormick Centenary, 45

McCormick City, 196-202

McCormick Company, pres-
ent, 98

McCormick, Cyrus Hall, 2, 3,
11-13, 16-18, 21, 22, 25-28,
30-35, 37-48, 51-68, 71-85,
87-105, 109-113, 115-119,
121-124, 129-191, 193, 195,
198-202, 208, 230, 244, 246

McCormick, Mrs. Cyrus H.,
182, 183

McCormick, Cyrus H., Jr.,
163, 183, 184, 201

McCormick, Davis, 29

257]

INDEX

McCormick family, 13, 17, 22-
25, 64, 66, 78

McCormick, Harold, 183

McCormick home in Rock-
bridge County, Virginia, 2,
3, 13-16, 25, 35-37, 40, 48,
62

McCormick, Leander, 37, 123,
140, 143, 181, 182

"McCormick Plan," 167

McCormick, Robert, 13-17,
22, 25, 28-31, 40, 45, 104,
181

McCormick, Mrs. Robert, 23-
25, 181

McCormick, Robert, son of
Cyrus H. McCormick, 183

McCormick, Stanley, 183, 200

McCormick System, 243

McCormick Theological Semi-
nary, 162, 163

McCormick, Thomas, 22

McCormick, Miss Virginia,
183

McCormick, William, 37, 123,
143, 181, 182

McDowell, Col. James, 40

Mechi, John J., 127-129, 131

Mecklenburg, Virginia, 20

Melville, Andrew, 169

Mendelssohn, 1, 51

Mexican War, Chicago organ-
ized regiment for, 71

Michigan white ash used in
manufacture of Reapers, 74

Miller, Lewis, 104, 120

Milwaukee, 73
Minneapolis, 215, 235-237
Minnesota, 51, 193, 217
Mississippi River, 50
Missouri, 63
Moore, James, 40
Morgan, Junius, 131, 155
Mormons, 69
Morse, 21, 95, 131
Morton, Dr., 69
Mount Vernon flour-mill, 234
Mower, Miller's, 120

Napoleon, 4, 10
Napoleon III, Emperor, 134,

135

Nebraska, 51
New Albany, Ind., Seminary,

162

New England, 230
"New process" flour-mills, 235
New York City, 4, 6, 8, 9, 37,

52, 119, 160, 216
Newspapers in 1831, 50
Newton, John, 59
Niagara Falls, power from,

216

North Dakota, 85, 232
Northwestern Theological

Seminary, 162
Norway, speculation in grain

in, 225; wheat production

in, 241, 242
Novorossisk, Russia, grain

elevator at, 216, 217

[258]

INDEX

Oats stored at Chicago, 215
Odessa, 217

Ogden, William B., 75-78
Ohio, 64, 67, 242
Oklahoma, 69
Oliver, James, 49
Opium traffic, 204
Oregon, 242

Oriental method of chaffering

and bargaining, vogue of, 81

Osborne, David M., 103, 120

Pacific coast, no grain eleva-
tors on, 216

Page, Prof., 95

Palissy, 53

Papers in 1831, 48

"Parcimony in Nutrition," 204

Paris Exposition (1855), 133

Paris, no grain stored in, 217;
Bourse in, 222

Parker, J., 63

Pasteur, 51

Patent, Cyrus H. McCor-
mick's first, "on Reaper, 59;
expiration of original, 91;
suits over extension of, 91-
98

Patent Law, 91

Patent Office, 91-93, 95, 185

Patents for Reaper and mower
inventions, 34, 41; suits
over, 45, 90-98; for self-
binders, 118

Patton, Dr. Francis L., 172
Paupers in period of 1809, 8
Paved streets, none in Chicago

when Cyrus H. McCormick

came, 70

Peabody, George, 131, 155
Peavey, F. H., 214
Pennsylvania Railroad, 158;

see also Baggage Case
Pericles, mills in time of,

236

Peterborough, N. H., 50
Photography, 49
Pillsbury, Minneapolis miller,

236

Pittsburg, Pa., 74
Platform on Reaper, origin of,

Plow, hillside, 45, 81
Plow, iron, thought to poison

soil, 5; invention of, 49
Plow, self-sharpening, 45
Poe, 1, 51
Police force of Chicago in

1847, 70

Polish female laborers, 197
Pompeii, bread found in ruins

of, 234

Poorhouses used as store-
houses for wheat, 230
Portugal, 241
Post-office, Chicago, in 1847,

Postage in 1831, 50
Postage stamps, 70
Postal Union, 233

[ 259 ]

INDEX

"Prairie Ground," American
display at London Exhibi-
tion of 1851, 126

Prairies, need of Reapers to
harvest on the, 65, 73; uncul-
tivated before advent of
Reaper, 67

Prairie States, ten, 230

Presbyterian Church, 158, 185,
186

Princeton University, 172

Protestant Reformation, 156,
185

Proudhon, 1, 51

Publicity, Cyrus H. McCor-
mick believed in policy of, 81

Puddling-furnace, 17

Pyramids, wheat pictured on,
206

Railway from Chicago to Ga-
lena, 76

Railways in 1831, 49; extend-
ing westward, 67; none
reaching Chicago when Cy-
rus H. McCormick came,
70; Chicago becomes a
centre for, 73; preceded by
Reaper in West, 192; dis-
tribution of food-stuffs by,
210, 211; building of trans-
continental, 211; across Si-
beria, 212; in western
Canada, Argentina, ancf In-
dia, 212; as wheat-convey-
ors, 212; converging at

Chicago, 214; in Prairie
States, 230

Ready-to-eat foods, 237

Reaper, McCormick, 13, 17,
28-48, 52-67, 73-76, 78-86,
88, 89, 92, 95-98, 100, 103-
108, 110-113, 115, 117, 119-
124, 126-135, 137, 138, 147,
166, 169, 170, 188-193, 195,
196, 200-203, 208, 210, 212,
214, 226, 227, 230, 243-246

Reapers of all makes, total
annual production of, 209

Reciprocating blade, origin of,
32

Red River Valley, 194, 231,
232

Reed, Col. Samuel, 40

Reel, origin of, 33, 46

Republican party, 100

Revolutionary War, 3, 20

Rice, 205, 212, 242

Riots in 1837, 52

"River and Harbor Conven-
tion," Chicago, 71, 72

Rochester, N. Y., 234

Rockbridge County, Virginia,
McCormick farm in, 2

Rotterdam, wheat stored in,
217

Roumania, 242

Roumanian cities use concrete
grain elevators, 216

Rubber manufacture, inventor
of, 53

Ruff, John, 38, 40

[260]

INDEX

Russia, farm laborers received
no wages in, 123; in war
with Japan, 204; develop-
ment of, 228; wheat produc-
tion, consumption, and ex-
portation in, 242; famines
in, 242

Russian army in Sweden
(1809), 4

Russo-Japanese War, 204

Sailors become farmers, 11

St. Louis, Mo., 73, 216

Sales system of Cyrus H. Mc-

Cormick, 47, 78 et seq.
Saratoga, N. Y., 7
Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 210
Sauvage, inventor of screw

propeller, 53
School attended by Cyrus H.

McCormick, 26
Scotch-Irish, the, 17-23, 25, 29
Scotland, 18, 74
Screw propeller, inventor of, 53
Scribner, Charles, publisher,

Scythe, invention of, 5
Secession, War of, 100, 166-

168, 191, 192
Self-binders, 110-115, 117,118,

121, 208-210, 238
Self-rake Reapers, 106, 107,

110, 114
Self-sizing device, Gorham's

invention of, 117

Seneca, quoted, 154

Serfs, 15, 124

Servia, conditions in (1809), 4

Sevres porcelain, 53

Seward, William H., 91, 98,

155
Sewerage, none in Chicago

when Cyrus H. McCormick

came, 70
Sewing-machine, 17, 49, 60,

131,210
Seymour, Morgan & Co., 66,

116, 119, 120

Sheffield steel used in manu-
facture of Reapers, 74
Sherwood farm, near Elgin,

111., Ill
Shipping, Chicago becomes

centre for, 73, 215
Siberia, Russia seeking seaport

for, 204; wheat crop of, 209,

217; railway across, 212;

development of, 228; might

take lesson from Red River

Valley, 231

Sickle, its use in 1809, 5
Side-draught construction of

Reaper, 33, 34
Side-delivery machine, first

practical, 46
Skulls, pyramid of, 4
Slaves, work of, 191
Smith, Abraham, 60, 62
Smith, Joshua, 57
Smith, Sidney, 130
Social conditions in 1809, 7-9

[261]

INDEX

Solomon, 206

South Carolina, 97

Spain, in 1809, 4; wheat im-
ported by, 241

Spaulding, George H., 115

Speculators, grain, 224, 225

Spencer, Herbert, 51

Spring, Charles, 143

Stanton, Edwin M., 91, 99

Staunton, Virginia, 2, 40, 57,
58, 60

Steamboat, invention of, 210

Steele, Eliza, 37

Steele, John, 37, 40

Steele's Tavern, Virginia, 37

Stewart, A. T., 21,81

Stock-yards not located at
Chicago when Cyrus H.
McCormick came, 70

Storage of wheat, 213, 214

Suez Canal, 70, 210

Sulina, 217, 218

Surveying, Cyrus H. McCor-
mick 's study of, 27

Sweden in 1809, 4; specula-
tion in grain in, 224; wheat
production in, 241, 242

Switzerland, 225, 242

Taylor, Dr., 40
Taylor, Hon. William, 39, 40
Tecumseh, 4
Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean

Railroad, 144
Telegraph, 49, 50, 70, 131, 210

Telephone, 210

Temperance society at Sara-
toga, 7

Tennessee, Scotch-Irish in, 20;
first Reaper purchased in,
63; comparison of grain
production of, 242

Tennyson, 1, 51

Texas, Scotch-Irish in, 20;
not in the Union in 1831,
51

Theatres in early Chicago, 70,
71

Thompson, J. Edgar, 101

Tilden, 76, 165

Times, Chicago, 166

Times, London, 130

Town and city dwellers, pro-
portion of, 195, 196

Town laborers become farm-
ers, 11

Trans-Siberian railway, 212

Transportation charges on
wheat, 213

Transportation of Reapers
from Virginia farm, 64

Tribune, of Chicago, founded,
71

Trolley, introduction of, 210

Tunis, 242

Turks in Servia (1809), 4

Tutwiler, Colonel, 63

Twine-mill in' McCormick
factory, Chicago, 197

Twine self-binders, 115-118,
121

[262]

INDEX

Tyre, King of, 206
Tyrol, riot in (1809), 4

Ulster, county of, 19, 21, 22
Union Army in Rockbridge

County, Virginia, 36
Union Pacific Railway, 144
United States, in 1809, 4 et
seq.; Scotch-Irish in, 18-21;
papers printed in (1831), 48;
railways in (1831), 49; ex-
tent and development of
(1831), 50; Buffalo chief
grain market of, 69; London
Exposition display from, 126;
inventions credited to, 130;
reasons why Reapers were
invented in, 136, 201; Mc-
Cormick's place in history
of, 153 ; production of wheat
in, 188, 189; manufacturing
and labor in (1884), 189;
Reaper little used in, until
after 1849, 190; Reaper ap-
preciated in, 191; industrial
supremacy of, 195, 229;
harvesting machinery indus-
try in, 201; wheat crop of,
209; cost of production of
wheat in, 209; railway across,
211 ; grain inspection in, 222;
speculation in, 225; culti-
vation of semi-arid land in,
228; consumption of bread
in, 239; area and popula-

tion of, compared with In-
dia, 242, 243

Van Buren, Martin, 76, 178
Vermont hay crop, relative

value of, 5

Victoria, Queen, 125, 132
Virchow, 51
"Virginia Reapers," 64
Virginia, Scotch-Irish in, 20;

main wheat State in 1831, 51,

193; supremacy passing to

Ohio, 67

Wages of harvesters at time
of introduction of Reaper,
38

Wallace, Andrew, 40

Wallace, Henry, 106, 107

Wallace's Farmer, 106

Walton, N. Y., 76

Warder, Reaper manufacturer,
103, 120

Warehouses at Reaper agen-
cies, 83, 84

Warfare, expenses of modern,
233

Washburn, William D., 235,
236

Washington, George, 5, 6, 11,
15,17,20,81,234

Washington State, 238

Watson, Peter H., 91,99

Watt, 131

[ 263 ]

INDEX

Weaving machinery, inventors
of, 53

Webster, Daniel, 15, 76, 95,
164

Weed, Thurlow, 72,

West, orders for Reapers from
the, 63; transportation to the,
64; McCormick visits the,
65; need of quicker method
of cutting grain in the,
65, 66; Chicago helped by
use of Reaper in, 73; Mc-
Cormick 's policy devel-
oped the, 86; Reaper pre-
ceded railway in the, 192;
wheat crop of the, 193;
railways in the, 211; Reap-
er advance-machine of civ-
ilization in, 227

Wet grain, adaptation of the
Reaper to cut, 33, 61, 62

" Whaleback" grain ships, 210

Wheat, 51, 67, 69, 70, 73, 188-
196,201,203,205^5^.

Wheat Congress, international,
233

Wheat-ships, 210-213

Whiteley, William N., 45, 46,
120, 150

Whitney, Eli, 52, 97, 191
Whittier, 51

Willmoth, improver of battle-
ship turret, 95
Wilson family from Ayrshire,

Scotland, 86
Wilson, Hon. James, 86, 87,

192
Winnipeg Grain Exchange,

225
Wire self-binders displaced

by twine self-binders, 115

117

Wisconsin, 50, 63, 114
Withington, Charles B., 109-

115

Wood, Jethro, 49, 53
Wood, Walter A., 103, 112, 120
Woodworth, inventor, 95
World's Fair, Chicago, 1893,

124

Wright, Joseph A., 134
Written guarantees given with

McCormick Reapers, 79

Yellow fever in the McCor-
mick family, 16

264

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