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The Romance of the Reaper

The
Romance of the Reaper

HERBERT N. CASSON

Author of " The Romance of Steel."

Illustrated from
Photographs

"And he gave it for his opinion, that who-
ever could make Xvo ears of corn, or two
blades of grass, to (;row upon a spot of
ground where only one grew before, would
deserve better of mankind, and do more
essential service to his country, than the
whole race of politicians put together."

— Dtan Swift.

NEW YORK

Doubelday, Page & Company

1908

DouBLEDAY, Page & Company

Published, May, 1908

TO THE FARMERS OF THE UNITED STATES
WHOSE ENERGY AND PROGRESSIVENESS HAVE
MADE THIS WONDER-STORY COME TRUE

PREFACE

This is the story of our most useful
business. It is a medley of mechanics, mil-
lionaires, kings, inventors and farmers; and
it is intended for the average man and
woman, boy and girl. Although I have
taken great pains to make this book accurate,
I have written it in the fashion of romance,
because it tells a story that every American
ought to know.

The fact is that the United States owes
much more to the Reaper than it owes to
the factory or the railroad or the Wall Street
Stock Exchange. Without the magical grain
machinery that gives us cheap bread, the
whole new structure of our civilisation, with
all its dazzling luxuries and refinements,
would be withered by the blight of Famine.
This may sound strange and sensational
to those who have been bred in the cities,
but it is true.

The reaper has done more to chase the

viii The Romance of the Reaper

wolf from the door — to abolish poverty
and drudgery and hand-labour, than any
other invention of our day. It has done
good without any backwash of evil. It has
not developed any new species of social
parasite, as so many micdern improvements
have done. It has not added one dollar
to the unclean hoard of a stock-gambler, nor
turned loose upon the public a single idle
millionaire.

The reaper is our best guarantee of pros-
perity. In spite of our periodical panics,
which prove, by the way, that the men who
provide us with banks are not as efficient
as the men who provide us with bread, we
are certain to rebound into prosperity and
social progress as long as we continue to make
three hundred harvesting machines every
working day — one every two minutes. The
rising flood of wheat is bound to submerge
the schemers and the pessimists alike.

And it is the reaper, too, which has done
most to make possible a nobler human race,
by lessening the power of that ancient motive
— the Search for Food. Every harvester that
clicks its way through the yellow grain
means more than bread. It means more

Preface ix

comfort, more travel, more art and music,
more books and education. In this large
fact lies the real Romance of the Reaper.

In gathering the material for this book
I have been greatly assisted by Messrs.
E. J. Baker, of the Farm Implement News;
B. B. Clarke, of the American Thresherman;
Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, 111; C. W.
Marsh, of De Kalb, 111.: Edwin D. Metcalf
and T. M. Osborne, of Auburn, N. Y.,
Henry Wallace, of Wallace's Farmer, William
N. Whiteley, of Springfield, Ohio; and the
officials of the International Harvester Com-
pany, who made it possible for me to have
free access to all of its works and to famil-
iarise myself with its manner of doing
business in this country and abroad.

Also, I take pleasure in reproducing the
following editorial note from Everybody's
Magazine, in which four chapters of this
book were first printed:

"President Roosevelt in his message of December 3rd
said: 'Modern industrial conditions are such that com-
bination is not only necessary, but inevitable . . .
Corporation and labour union alike have come to stay.
Each, if properly managed, is a source of good, and
not evil.' If capital combinations can be good, there
must be some tliat are good. Would it not be a proper

X The Romance of the Reaper

service to the American people to tell them of a trust
that, while it had reaped the economical advantages
of combination, had yet played fair with the public
and with its competitors ? Hence this story of the
great Harvester combine. Before we began to publish
Mr. Casson's articles, we followed up his investigations
with a thorough inquiry of our own, and we are bound
to say that the business methods of this institution
seem to conform to the highest standards of fair play
and square dealing. The International Harvester
combine is not a tariff trust. Its members surrendered
dominance in their own business only when the trend
of 'modern industrial conditions' and overstrenuous
competition made combination 'not only necessary,
but inevitable.' The inside history of the 'Morganis-
ing' of this group of fighters, as narrated here, is as
humorous as it is fascinating."

CONTENTS
Preface

Vll

I. The Story of McCormick . . 3

II. The Story of Deering ... 48

III. The International Harvester

Company 90

IV. The American Harvester Abroad 126

V. The Harvester and the American

Farmer 161

ILLUSTRATIONS
A Chicago mower in Siberia . Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

Cyrus Hall McCormick .... 12
The Virginian birthplace of the

McCormick reaper 22

A model of the first practical reaper . 27

William Deering 51

William N. Whiteley • • • • 53

C. W. Marsh 53

John F. Appleby 53

E. H. Gammon 53

AsaS. Bushnell 60

Benjamin H. Warder .... 60

Hon. Thomas Mott Osborne ... 60

David M. Osborne 60

A self-binder in Scotland, with the
Wallace Monument in the back-
ground 62

Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. ... 85

Charles Deering §5

xiii

xlv The Romance of the Reaper

FACING PAGB

Harold McCormick 92

J. J. Glessner 92

W. H. Jones 92

James Deering 92

American self-binders on the estate of

President Fallieres, in France . . 135
King Alphonso of Spain driving an

American seeder 138

Bismarck having his first view of an

American self-binder .... 147
An American harvester at work in

Argentina 151

Gathering in a Finland harvest . . 154

In the ancient fields of Algiers , . 158

The Romance of the Reaper

CHAPTER I
The Story of McCormick

THIS Romance of the Reaper is a
true fairy tale of American life —
the story of the magicians who have taught
the civilised world to gather in its harvests
by machinery.

On the old European plan — snip —
snip — snipping with a tiny hand-sickle,
every bushel of wheat required three hours
of a man's lifetime. To-day, on the new
American plan — riding on the painted
chariot of a self-binding harvester, the price
of wheat has been cut down to ten minutes a
bushel.

"When I first went into the harvest field,"
so an Illinois farmer told me, "it took ten
men to cut and bind my grain. Now our
hired girl gets on the scat of a self-binder
and does the whole business."
3

4 The Romance of the Reaper

This magical machinery of the wheat-
field solves the mystery of prosperity. It
explains the New Farmer and the miracles
of scientific agriculture. It accounts for
the growth of great cities with their steel
mills and factories. And it makes clear
how we in the United States have become
the best fed nation in the world.

Hard as it may be for this twentieth
century generation to believe, it is true
that until recently the main object of all
nations was to get bread. Life was a Search
for Food — a desperate postponement of
famine.

Cut the Kings and their retinues out of
history and it is no exaggeration to say
that the human race was hungry for ten
thousand years. Even of the Black Bread
— burnt and dirty and coarse, there was
not enough; and the few who were well
fed took the food from the mouths of
slaves. Even the nations that grew Galileo
and Laplace and Newton were haunted
by the ghosts of Hunger. Merrie England
was famine-swept in 1315, 1321, 1369,
1438, 1482, 1527, 1630, 1661, and 1709.
To have enough to eat, was to the masses

The Story of McCormick 5

of all nations a dream — a Millennium of
Prosperity.

This long Age of Hunger outlived the
great nations of antiquity. Why ? Because
they went at the problem of progress in the
wrong way.

If Marcus Aurelius had invented the
reaper, or if the Gracchi had been inven-
tors instead of politicians, the story of
Rome would have had a happier ending.
But Rome said: The first thing is em-
pire. Egypt said: The first thing is fame.
Greece said: The first thing is genius. Not
one of them said: The first thing; is Bread.

In the Egyptian quarter of the British
Museum, standing humbly in a glass case
between two mummied Pharaohs, is a
little group of farm utensils. A fractured
wooden plough, a rusted sickle, two sticks
tied together with a leathern thong, and
several tassels that had hung on the horns
of the oxen. A rummaging professor found
these in the tomb of Seti I., who had his will
on the banks of the Nile three thousand
years ago. Egypt had a most elaborate
government at that tim.e. She had an
army and navy, an art and literature. Yet

6 The Romance of the Reaper

her bread-tools were no better than those
of the barbarians whom she despised.

It is one of the most baffling mysteries of
history, that agriculture — the first industry
to be learned, was the last one to be devel-
oped. For thousands of years the wise men
of the world absolutely ignored the prob-
lems of the farm. A farmer remained
either a serf or a tenant. He was a stolid
drudge — "brother to the ox." Even the
masterful old Pilgrim Fathers had no ploughs
at all — nothing but hoes and sharp sticks,
for the first twelve years of their pioneering.

Fifty-five years of American Independence
went by before the first reaper clicked its
way clumsily into fame, on a backwoods
farm in Virginia. At that time, 1831, the
American people were free, but they held in
their hands the land-tools of slaves. They
had to labour and sweat in the fields, with
the crude implements that had been pro-
duced by ages of slavery. For two genera-
tions they tried to build up a prosperous
Republic with sickles, flails, and wooden
ploughs, and they failed.

There are men and women now alive
who can remember the hunger year of 1837,

The Story of McCormick 7

when there were wheat bounties in Maine
and bread riots in New York City, Flour
mills were closed for lack of wheat. Starv-
ing men fell in the streets of Boston and
Philadelphia. Mobs of labourers, mad-
dened by the fear of famine, broke into ware-
houses and carried away sacks of food as
though they were human wolves. Even in
the Middle West — the prairie paradise of
farmers — many a family fought against
Death with the serf's Vv^eapon of Black
Bread.

Enterprise was not then an American
virtue. The few men who dared to suggest
improvements were persecuted as enemies
of society. The first iron ploughs were said
to poison the soil. The first railroad was
torn up. The first telegraph wires were cut.
The first sewing-machine was smashed.
And the first man who sold coal in Philadel-
phia was chased from the State as a swindler.

Even the railway was a dangerous toy.
The telegraph was still a dream in the brain
of Morse. John Deere had not invented
his steel plough, nor Howe his sewing-machine,
nor Hoe his printing-press. There were
no stoves nor matches nor oil-lamps. Petro-

8 The Romance of the Reaper

leum was peddled as a medicine at a dollar
a bottle. Iron was $75 a ton. Money was
about as reliable as mining stocks are to-day;
and all the savings in all the banks would
not now buy the chickens in Iowa.

Our total exports were not more than we
paid last year for diamonds and champagne.
Chicago was a twelve-family village. There
was no West nor Middle West. Not one
grain of wheat had been grown in Minne-
sota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado,
Kansas, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Mon-
tana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Arizona,
Wyoming, Oklahoma or Texas.

The whole structure of civilisation, as we
know it, was unbuilt; and most of its archi-
tects and builders were unborn or in the
cradle. Spencer was eleven years of age;
Virchow was ten; Pasteur nine; Huxley six;
Berthelot four; and as for Haeckel, Carnegie,
Morgan, Edison and their generation, they
had not yet appeared in the land of the
living.

Then came the Reaper.

This unappreciated machine, about which
so little has been written, changed the face
of the world. It moved the civilised nations

The Story of McCormick 9

up out of the bread line. It made pros-
perity possible; and elevated the whole
struggle for existence to a higher plane.

Life is still a race — always will be; but
not for bread. The lowest prizes now are
gold watches and steam yachts and auto-
mobiles. Even the hobo at the back door
scorns bread, unless we apologise for it
with meat and jam.

It is so plentiful — this clean, white bread,
that it is scarcely an article of commerce
any longer. In our hotels it is thrown in
free of charge, as though it were a pinch
of salt or a glass of water. There is no
"penn'orth of bread" in the bill, as there was
in FalstafF's day.

Seven bushels of wheat apiece! That
is what we eighty-five million people ate in
1906 — twelve thousand million loaves of
bread. Such a year of feasting was new
in the history of the world. And yet we sent
a thousand million dollars' worth of food
to other nations.

Suppose that bread were money, just
for one day! What a lesson it would be on
the social value of the reaper! Thirty loaves
would be the day's pay of a labourer —

10 The Romance of the Reaper

as much as he could carry on his back.
Two loaves for a cigar — three for a shave —
five for a bunch of violets — forty for a
theatre ticket — a hundred for a bottle of
champagne! Is there anything cheaper than
bread ?

The reaper was America's answer to
Malthus — who scared England into abolish-
ing the Corn Laws by his proclamation that
"the ultimate check to population is the
lack of food." What would that well-
meaning pessimist think were he now alive,
if he were told that the human race is grow-
ing wheat at the rate of ten bushels a year
per family ? Or that Minnesota and the
Dakotas (names that the world of his day
had never heard) produce enough wheat
to feed all the people of England ?

The reaper was America's answer to the
world's demand for democracy. Instead of
bread riots and red flags and theories of an
earthly paradise in which nobody worked
but the Government, the United States in-
vented a machine that gave democracy a
chance. Instead of a guillotine to cut off
the heads of the privileged people who ate
too much, it produced a reaper that gave

The Story of McCormick li

everybody enough. This was not a com-
plete answer, nor will there ever be one,
to the riddle of liberty, equality and frater-
nity. But it was so much better than theories
and riots that it helped to persuade twenty-five
million immigrants to cross the ocean "and be-
come shareholders in the American Republic.

If it were possible to trace back a strand
in the twisted thread of cause and effect,
we would find that many a factory and steel-
mill owes its origin to the flood of wheat-
money that came to us from Europe in 1880
and 1881 — every dollar of it made by the
humble harvester.

Without this obedient slave of wood and
steel, all our railroads and skyscrapers and
automobiles could not save us from famine.
If we had to reap our grain in the same way
as the Romans did, it would take half the
men in the United States to feed us on
bread alone, to say nothing of the rest ot
the menu.

Like most great things, the reaper was
born among humble people and in a humble
way. It was crude at first and dogged by
failure. No one man made it. It was the
product of a hundred brains.

12 The Romance of the Reaper

The exact truth about its origin is not
known and never will be. What few facts
there were have been torn and twisted by
the bitter feuds of the Patent Office. Every
letter and document that exists is controver-
sial. So I cannot say that the story, as
I give it, is entirely true, but only that it is
as near as I can get to the truth after six
months of investigation.

There is evidence to show that Cyrus Hall
McCormick completed a practical reaper in
1831, although the first reaper patent was
taken out in 1833 by an inventive seaman
named Obed Hussey, of Baltimore. The
young McCormick did not secure his patent
until 1834 ; but he had given a public exhi-
bition in Virginia three years before.

There were nearly a hundred people who
saw this exhibition. Not one of them is
now alive; and the story as told by their
children has many little touches of imagi-
nation. But in the main, it is very likely
to be true.

It was in the fall of 1831 when Cyrus
McCormick hitched four horses to his
unwieldy machine and clattered out of
the barnyard into a field of wheat nearby.

1. \ 1 , 1 - 1 1 \ 1

The Story of McCormick 13

Horses shied and pranced at the absurd
object, which was unhke anything else on
the face of the earth. Dogs barked. Small
boys yelled. Farmers, whose backs were
bent and whose fingers were scarred from
the harvest labour, gazed with contemptuous
curiosity at the queer contraption which
was expected to cut grain without hands.

A little group of Negro slaves had spasms
of uncomprehending delight in one corner
of the field, not one of them guessing that
"Massa" McCormick's comical machine
was cutting at the chains that bound their
children. And a noisy crowd of white
labourers followed the reaper up and down
the field with boisterous enmity; for here
was an invention which threatened to de-
prive them of the right to work — the pre-
cious right to work sixteen hours a day for
three cents an hour.

The field was hilly and the reaper worked
badly. It slewed and jolted along, cutting
the grain very irregularly. Seeing this,
the owner of the field — a man who was
RufF by name and rough by nature, rushed
up to McCormick and shouted — "Here!
This won't do. Stop your horses! Your

14 The Romance of the Reaper

machine is rattling the heads off my wheat."
"It's a humbug," bawled one of the
labourers. "Give me the old cradle yet,
boys!" exclaimed a round-shouldered farmer.
The Negroes turned handsprings with delight;
and the whole jeering mob gathered around
the discredited machine.

Just then a fine-looking man rode up on
horseback. The crowd made way as he
came near, for they recognised him as the
Honourable William Taylor — a conspic-
uous politician of that day.

" Pull down the fence and cross over into
my field," he said to young McCormick.
"I '11 give you a fair chance to try your
machine."

McCormick quickly accepted the offer,
drove into Taylor's field, which was not as
hilly, and cut the grain successfully for
four or five hours. Although the United
States had been established more than
fifty years before, this was the first grain
that had ever been cut by machinery. The
Fathers of the Republic had eaten the bread
of hand-labour all their lives, and never
dreamed that the human race would ever find
a better way.

The Story of McCormick 15

When he arrived home that evening,
Cyrus thought that his troubles were over.
He had reaped six acres of wheat in less
than half a day — as much as six men
would have done by the old-fashioned
method. He had been praised as well as
jeered at. "Your reaper is a success,"
said his father, "and it makes me feel proud
to have a son do what I could not do."

Two Big Men had given him their ap-
proval — William Taylor and a Professor
Bradshaw, of the Female Academy in the
town of Lexington, Virginia. The professor,
who was a pompous and positive individual,
made a solemn investigation of the reaper,
and then announced, in slow% loud, and
emphatic tones — "That — machine — is —
worth — a hundred — thousand — dollars."

But if Cyrus McCormick hoped to wake
up the following morning and find himself
rich and famous, he was roughly disap-
pointed. The local excitement soon died
out, and in a few days the men in the village
store were discussing Webster's last speech
against Nullification and Andrew Jackson's
war against the bankers. One old woman
expressed the general feeling by saying that

l6 The Romance of the Reaper

young McCormick's reaper was "a right
smart curious sort of thing, but it won't
come to much.'*

McCormick was at this time a youth of
twenty-two. He had been one of four pink,
helpless babies, born in 1809, who became,
each in his own world, the greatest leader
of his day — Darwin, Gladstone, Lincoln,
and McCormick. Like Lincoln, McCor-
mick first learned to breathe in a long cabin —
but in Virginia. He was bred from a fight-
ing race. His father had wrenched a living
from the rocks of Virginia for his family of
nine. His grandfather had fought the Eng-
lish in the Revolution. His great-grand-
father had been an Indian fighter in Penn-
sylvania; and his great-great-grandfather
battled with a flint-lock against the soldiers
of James H., at the siege of Londonderry.

The McCormick family, in 1809, had a
good deal of what was then called prosperity.
They had enough to eat — a roof that kept
out the rain — 1,800 acres of land, or near-
land — three saw-mills — two flour-mills, and
a distillery. They had very little money,
because there was little to be had. In the
whole United States there was barely as

The Story of McCormick 1/

much money as would buy half of the New
York Subway.

The first American McCormicks had a
thousand dollars or more when they resolved
to leave Ireland, and they were Scotch
enough to invest the whole amount in linen,
which they sold at a high profit in Philadel-
phia. This capital enabled them to acquire
a small stock of books, tools, and comforts,
which were passed along from father to
son.

Robert McCormick — the father of Cyrus,
was himself a remarkable Virginian. He
was quick with his hands in shaping iron
and wood. In fact, he was fairly famous
in his county as the inventor of a hemp-
brake, a clover-sheller, a bellows and
threshing machine. His mind was greedy
for know^ledge; and it was his habit, when
the seven children were asleep, to explore
into the mysteries of astronomy until his
candle had flickered its life out. Twenty
or more of his letters, which I have seen,
are well written and with a fine use of book-
ish words.

The one persistent ambition of his life
was to invent a reaper. It is also true, and

1 8 The Romance of the Reaper

a titbit of a fact for those who beUeve in
prenatal influences, that during the year
in which Cyrus H. McCormick was born,
his father first began the actual construction
of a reaping machine.

Especially during the harvest rnonths,
the topic of conversation in the McCormick
home was whether the dream of "reaping
grain with horses" could ever come true.
"Reaper," was one of the first words that
baby Cyrus learned to say; and his favourite
play-toy, when he grew older, was the wreck
of his father's reaper that would n't reap,
which lay in rusty disgrace near the barn-
door.

"Often I have seen Robert McCormick
standing over his machine," said one of his
neighbours. "He would be studying and
thinking, drawing down his under lip, as
was his habit when he was puzzling over
anything." His friends ridiculed him for
wasting so much time on a fooHsh toy, until
he became half ashamed of it himself and
quit his experimenting in the daytime.
But at night, he and Cyrus hammered away
in the little log workshop, as though they
were a pair of conspirators.

The Story of McCormick 19

The romantic mystery of these midnight
labours made an indehble mark on the brain
of the boy Cyrus. He grew up to be serious
and self-contained — quite unlike the boys
of the neighbourhood. He was not popular
and never cared to be.

"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius
from a child," said John Cash, who worked
on the McCormick farm. "He invented
the best hillside plough ever used in this coun-
try. He and his father would lock themselves
up in the shop and work for hours on a
reaping machine. The neighbours thought
they were both unbalanced to have the
idea of cutting grain with horses."

Cyrus was always busy making or mending
some piece of machinery. He abhorred
the drudgery of the farm; but delighted in
any work that had an idea behind it. He
surprised his teacher one morning by bring-
ing to school a twenty-inch globe of wood,
which turned on its axis as the earth does,
and had the seas and continents outlined
in ink.

"That young fellow is ahead of me,"
said the amazed teacher.

At fifteen Cyrus had invented a new grain

20 The Romance of the Reaper

cradle. At twenty-one he improved a ma-
chine which his father had made to break
hemp. And at twenty-two this young
country-boy, who had never seen a college,
a city, or a railroad, constructed the first
practical American reaper. It was a clumsy
makeshift — as crude as a Red River ox-
cart; but it was built on the right lines. It
was not at all handsome or well made or
satisfactory; but it was a reaper that reaped.

But McCormick soon discovered that it
was not enough to invent a reaper. What
the world needed was a man who was strong
and dominating enough to force his reaper
upon the unwilling labourers of the har-
vest fields.

Tenacity! Absolute indifference to defeat!
The lust for victory that makes a man
unconscious of the blows he gives or takes!
This was what was needed, and what Cyrus
McCormick possessed, to a greater degree,
perhaps, than any other man in American
history.

Tenacity! It was in his blood. Back of
him was the hardiest breed that was ever
mixed into the American blend — the pick
of the Scots who fought their way to the

The Story of McCormick 21

United States by way of Ireland. These
Irish Scots, few as they were, led the way
across the Alleghanics, founded Pittsburgh,
made a trail to Texas, and put five Presi-
dents in the White House.

And tenacity was bred, as well as born,
into Cyrus McCormick. He went bare-
footed as a boy, not for lack of shoes, but to
make him tough. "I want my boys to know
how to endure hardship," said his mother.
He sat on a slab bench in the little log school
house and learned to read from the Book of
Genesis. He sang Psalms with forty verses,
on Sundays, and sat as still as a graven
image during the three-hour sermons, for
his father was a Presbyterian of the old
Covenanter brand.

So it came to pass that Cyrus McCormick
clung to his reaper, as John Knox had to his
Bible. "His whole soul was wrapped up in
it," said one of his neighbours. He grew
as indifferent to the rough jokes of the
farmers as Martin Luther was to the sneers
of the village priests. The making of
reapers became more than a business. It
was a creed — a religion — a new eleventh
commandment.

22 The Romance of the Reaper

By the time he was thirty, he had become
a nineteenth century Mohammed, ready for a
world crusade. His war-cry was — Great
is the Reaper, and McCormick is its prophet.

Like Mohammed, he had his visions of
future glory. On one occasion, while riding
on horseback through a wilderness path,
the dazzling thought flashed upon his mind —
"Perhaps I may make a million dollars
from this reaper." This idea remained for
years the driving wheel of his brain.

"The thought was so enormous," he said
afterward, "that it seemed like a dream —
like dwelling in the clouds — so remote, so
unattainable, so exalted, so visionary."

Also, Hke Mohammed, he had a period of
preparatory solitude. Soon after the first
exhibition of his reaper, he bought a tract of
land and farmed it alone, with two aged
Negroes as housekeepers. Here he lived
for more than a year with no companion
except his reaper. He seemed at this time,
too, to have resolved upon a life of celibacy,
for I find in one of his letters an allusion to
two young ladies of unusual attractiveness.
"They are pretty, smart and rich," he writes,
" but alas, I have other business to attend to! '

The Story of McCormick 23

The two things of which he stood most
in need were money and cheaper iron. So,
after thinking over the situation in his lonely
cabin, he decided to build a furnace and
make his own iron. His father and a
neighbour joined him in the enterprise.
They built the furnace, made the iron, and
might have forgotten the reaper, if the
financial earthquake of 1839 had not shaken
them down into the general wreckage. The
neighbour who had been made a partner
signed over his property to his mother, and
threw the whole burden of the bankruptcy
upon the McCormick family, crushing
them for a time into an abyss of debt and
poverty.

Cyrus McCormick gave up everything
he owned to the creditors — everything ex-
cept his reaper, which nobody wanted. So
far his vision of wealth was still a dream.
Instead of being the possessor of a million,
he was eight years older, and penniless.

There were four sons and three daughters
in the family, and the nine of them slaved
for five years to save the homestead from the
auctioneer. Once the sheriff rode up with a
writ, but was so deeply impressed with their

24 The Romance of the Reaper

energy and uprightness that he rode away
with the dreaded paper still in his pocket-
Up to this time Cyrus had not sold one
reaper. As Mohammed preached for ten years
without converting anyone except his own
relatives, so Cyrus McCormick preached
the gospel of the reaper for ten years without
success. Then, in 1841, he sold two for
^100 apiece. The next year seven daring
farmers came to the McCormick homestead,
each with ^100 in his hands.

This brilliant success brought the whole
family into line behind Cyrus, and the farm
was transformed into a reaper factory.
Twenty-nine machines, "fearfully and
wonderfully made," were sold in 1843, and
fifty in 1844. There were troubles, of
course. Some buyers failed to pay. A
workman who was sent out on horseback
to collect $300, ran away with horse, money
and all. But none of these things moved
Cyrus. At last, after thirteen years of delay,
he was selling reapers.

Best of all, an order for eight had come
from Cincinnati. These were the first rea-
pers that were sold outside of Virginia.
They were seen by the more enterprising

The Story of McCormick 25

farmers of Ohio and created a sensation
wherever they were used. Cyrus, who was
now a powerful, broad-chested man of thirty-
six, caught a gHmpse of his opportunity
and sprang to seize it. He saw that the
time had come to leave the backwoods
farm — forty miles from a blacksmith —
sixty miles from a canal — one hundred
miles from a railway. So, with ^300 in his
belt, he set out on horseback for the West.

Here he saw the prairies. To a man who
had spent his life in a hollow of the Allegha-
nies, the West was a new world. It was the
natural home of the reaper. The farmers
of Virginia might continue forever to harvest
their small, hilly fields by hand, but here —
in this vast land ocean, with few labourers
and an infinity of acres, the reaper was as
indispensable as the plough. To reap even
one of these new States by hand would
require the whole working population of
the country.

Also, in Illinois, McCormick saw what
made his Scotch heart turn cold within
him — he saw hogs and cattle feeding in the
autumn wheat-fields, which could not be
reaped for lack of labourers. Five million

26 The Romance of the Reaper

bushels of wheat had grown and ripened —
enough to empty the horn of plenty into
every farmer's home. Men and women,
children and grandmothers, toiled day and
night to gather in the yellow food. But the
short harvest-season rushed past so quickly
that tons of it lay rotting under the hoofs
of cattle.

It was a puzzling problem. It was too
much prosperity — a new trouble for farmers.
In Europe, men had been plenty and acres
scarce. Here, acres were plenty and men
scarce. Ripe grain — the same in all coun-
tries, will not wait. Unless it is gathered
quickly — in from four to ten days, it breaks
down and decays. So, even to the dullest
minds, it was clear that there must be some
better way of snatching in the ripened grain.

The sight of the trampled wheat goaded
McCormick almost into a frenzy of activity.
He rode on horseback through Illinois,
Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio, and New York,
proclaiming his harvest gospel and looking
for manufacturers who would build his
reapers. From shop to shop he went with
the zeal of a Savonarola.

One morning, in the little town of Brock-

The Story of McCormick 2/

port, New York, he found the first practical
men who appreciated his invention — Dayton
S. Morgan and William H. Seymour. Mor-
gan was a handy young machinist who had
formed a partnership with Seymour — a
prosperous store-keeper. They Hstened to
McCormick with great interest and agreed
to make a hundred reapers. By this decision
they both later became milHonaires, and
also entered history as the founders of the
first reaper factory in the world.

Altogether, in the two years after he left
Virginia, McCormick sold 240 reapers. This
was Big Business; but it was only a morsel
in proportion to his appetite. Neither was
it satisfactory. He found himself tangled
in a snarl of trouble because of bad iron,
stupid workmen, and unreliable manufac-
turers. He cut the Gordian knot by building
a factory of his own at Chicago.

This was one of the wisest decisions of
his life, though at the time it appeared to be
a disastrous mistake. Chicago, in 1847,
showed no signs of its present greatness.
As a city, it was a ten-year-old experiment,
built in a swamp, without a railway or a
canal. It was ugly and dirty, with a river

28 The Romance of the Reaper

that ran in the wrong direction; but it was
busy. It was the Hnk between the Missis-
sippi and the Great Lakes — a central
market where wheat was traded for lumber
and furs for iron. It had no history — no
ancient families clogging up the streets with
their special privileges. And best of all,
it was a place where a big new idea was
actually preferred to a small old one,

Chicago did not look at McCormick with
dead eyes and demand a certified cheque
from his ancestors. It sized him up in a
few swift glances and saw a thick-set, ruddy
man, with the physique of a heavy-weight
wrestler, dark hair that waved in glossy
furrows, and strong eyes that struck you
like a blow. It glanced at his reaper and
saw a device to produce more wheat. More
wheat meant more business, so Chicago
said

"Glad to see you. You 're the right
man and you 're in the right place. Come
in and get busy." William B. Ogden, the
first Mayor of Chicago, listened to his story
for two minutes, then asked him how much
he wanted for a half interest. McCormick
had little money and no prestige. Ogden

The Story of McCormick 29

had a surplus of both. So a partnership
was arranged, and the new firm plunged
toward prosperity by seHing $50,000 worth
of reapers for the next harvest.

At last there had come a break in the
clouds, and McCormick found his path
flooded with sunshine. He was no longer
a wanderer in the night. He was the Reaper
King — the founder of a new dynasty. As
soon as possible he bought out Ogden, and
thenceforth established a one-man business.
By 1 85 1 he was making a thousand reapers
a year, and owned one-tenth of the million
dollars he had dreamed of in the Virginian
wilderness.

At this point his life changes. His pioneer
troubles are over. There are no more
thousand-mile rides on horseback — no more
conflicts with jeering crowds — no more
smashing of reapers by farm labourers.
The repeal of the Corn Laws in England
had opened up a new market for our wheat,
and the discovery of gold in California was
booming the reaper business by making
money plentiful and labour scarce.

Suddenly, McCormick looked up from
his work in the factory, and saw that he was

30 The Romance of the Reaper

not only rich, but famous. One of his
reapers had taken the Grand Prize at a
World's Fair in England. Even the London
Times, which had first ridiculed his reaper
as "a cross between an Astley chariot, a
wheelbarrow and a flying machine," was
obliged to admit, several days later, that
"the McCormick reaper is worth the whole
cost of the Exposition."

Seventeen years later, on the imperial
farm, near Paris, Napoleon III. descended
from his carriage and fastened the Cross of
the Legion of Honour upon McCormick's
coat. There was a picture that some Ameri-
can-souled artist, when we have one, will
delight to put on canvas. How splendid
was the contrast, and how significant of
the New Age of Democracy, between the
suave and feeble Emperor, enjoying the
sunset rays of his inherited glory, and the
strong-faced, rough-handed Virginian farmer,
who had built up a new empire of commerce
that will last as long as the human race
eats bread!

From first to last, the stout-hearted old
Reaper King received no favours from
Congress or the Patent Office. He built

The Story of McCormick 3 1

up his stupendous business without a land
grant or a protective tariff. By the time
that his Chicago factory was ten years old,
he had sold 23,000 reapers, and cleared a
profit of nearly $1,300,00. The dream of
his youth had been realised, and more.
All told, in 1859, there were 50,000 reapers
in the United States, doing the work of
350,000 men, saving $4,000,000 in wages,
and cramming the barns with 50,000,000
bushels of grain.

So, on his fiftieth birthday, the battle-
scarred McCormick found himself a million-
aire. He was also married, having fallen
in love with Miss Nettie Fowler, of New
York, a young lady of unusual beauty and
ability. No history of the reaper can be
complete without a reference to this remark-
able woman, who has been for fifty years,
and is to-day, one of the active factors in
our industrial development. No important
step has ever been taken either by her
husband or her three sons, until it has
received her approval. And Mrs. McCor-
mick has been much more than a mere
adviser. Her exact memory and keen grasp
of the comple.K details of her husband's

32 The Romance of the Reaper

business made her practically an unofficial
manager. She suggested economies at the
factory, stopped the custom of closing the
plant in midsummer, studied the abilities
of the workmen, and on several occasions
superintended the field-trials in Europe.

Chicago may not know it, but it is true,
that its immense McCormick factory owes
its existence to Mrs. McCormick. After
the Big Fire of 1871, when his ^2,000,000
plant was in ruins, McCormick concluded
to retire. He still had a fortune of three or
four millions and he was sixty-two years of
age. His managers advised him not to
rebuild, because of the excessive cost of new
machinery.

As soon as the fiery cyclone had passed,
he and his wife drove to the wrecked factory.
Several hundred of the workmen gathered
about the carriage, and the chief engineer,
acting as spokesman, said: "Well, Mr.
McCormick, shall we start the small engine
and make repairs, or shall we start the big
engine and make machines r'

Mr. McCormick turned to his wife and
said, "Which shall it be ?" It was a breath-
less moment for the workmen.

The Story of McCormick 33

"Build again at once," said Mrs. Mc-
Cormick. " I do not want our boy to grow
up in idleness; I want him to work, as a
useful citizen, and a true American."

"Start The Big Engine," said McCor-
mick. The men threw their hats in the air
and cheered. They sprang at the smoking
debris, and began to rebuild before the
cinders were cold.

Such was the second birth of the vast
factory which, in its sixty years, has created
fully 5,000,000 harvesters, and which is now
so magically automatic that, with 6,000
workmen, it can make one-third of all the
grain-gathering machinery of the world.

Practically nothing has been written about
McCormick from the human nature side.
He was one of those Cromwellian men who
can only be appreciated at a distance. Ke
was too absorbed in his work to be congenial
and too aggressive to be popular. He
shouldered his way roughly against the
slow-moving crowd; and the people whom he
thrust out of his way naturally did not
consider the importance of his life-task.

Most of the really great men of his day
were his friends — Horace Greeley, for in-

34 The Romance of the Reaper

stance, and Peter Cooper, Junius Morgan,
Abram S. Hewitt, Cyrus W. Field, and
Ferdinand De Lesseps. But among the
men of his own trade he stood hostile and
alone.

"McCormick wants to keep the whole
reaper business to himself. He will not
live and let live," said his competitors. And
they had reason to say so. He did want to
dominate. He wanted to make all the
harvesting machines that were made — not
one less. He was not at all a modern
"community-of-interest" financier. He was
a man of an outgrown school — a consistent
individualist, not only in business, but in
politics and religion as well. There was no
compartment in his brain for mergers and
combines — ^for theories of government owner-
ship — for Higher Criticism and the new
theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin
commercialist, a Thomas Jefferson Demo-
crat, and a John Knox Presbyterian.

He had worked harder to establish the
reaper business than any other man. He
was making reapers when William Deering
was five years old, and before Ralph Emer-
son and "Bill" Whiteley were born. He

The Story of McCormick 35

had graduated into success through a fifteen-
year course in failure. The world into
which he was born was as hostile to him as
the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel
Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus.
He was hard-fibred, because he had to be.
He was the thin end of the wedge that split
into fragments the agricultural obstacle to
social progress.

One careless writer of biographies has
said that McCormick began at the foot of the
ladder. This is not correct. When he
began, there was no ladder. He had to
build it as he clunhed.

The first man who gave battle to Mc-
Cormick was an erratic genius named Obed
Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a
reaper patent in 1833. No two men were
ever more unlike than Hussey and Mc-
Cormick. Hussey was born in Nantucket;
and he had roamed the frozen North as a
whaling seaman. He was inventive, poetic,
and as whimsical as the weather. His
delimit was in working; out some mechan-
ical problem. His first invention was a
machine to make pins. Soon afterward,
while he was living in Cincinnati, con-

36 The Romance of the Reaper

structing a machine to mould candles, a
friend said to him:

" Hussey, why don't you invent a machine
to reap grain ?"

"Are there no such machines?" he asked
in surprise.

"No," said his friend, "and whoever can
invent one will make a fortune."

Hussey forsook his candle machine, set to
work upon a reaper, and within a year had
one in the fields. Then came a twenty-five-
year war with McCormick, which was
waged furiously in the Patent Office, the
courts, and a hundred wheat-fields. Hussey
won the opening battle by arriving first at
the Patent Office, although his machine, as
claimed by McCormick, was two years
younger. By 1841 Hussey had sold reapers
in five states, and ten years later he shared
the honours with McCormick at the London
World's Fair.

Both machines were very crude and
unsatisfactory. Hussey's had a better cut-
ting apparatus and McCormick's was more
complete. In the long run, each adopted
the devices of the other, and a better reaper
was evolved. Before many years, it became

The Story of McCormick 3/

apparent that Hussey was outclassed. By
1858 he was left so far behind that he lost
his interest in reapers and invented a steam-
plough.

His first machine was "really a mower,"
says Merritt Finley Miller, one of the two
professors who have written on harvesting
machinery. It lacked the master-wheel, the
reel and the divider, without which the grain
cannot be rightly handled. When Hussey
gave up the contest, his invention was bought
for ;^200,ooo by William F. Ketchum and
others, who adapted it into a mowing-
machine.

"Hussey was a very peculiar man,"
said Ralph Emerson. "His machine was
fairly good, but it was a failure in the market,
because he would not put on a reel. He
refused to do this, saying he did not invent
a reel, and it would be a falsehood if he put
one on. He said that it was contrary to his
principles to sell anything that he had not
invented.

"On one occasion I went to buy a shop
licence from him. 'Have you a thousand
dollars in your pocket?' he asked. 'No,'
said I. 'Can you get me three thousand

38 The Romance of the Reaper

dollars by daylight to-morrow morning ?'
*No,' I answered, 'but I can get it by noon.
'Well,' said Hussey, 'I want to be very
reasonable with you. If you '11 pay me
one thousand dollars before you leave the
house, or twenty-five hundred dollars before
daybreak to-morrow, I '11 sell you a licence.
Otherwise, it will cost you twelve thousand
dollars.*

"Several days later I paid him twelve
thousand dollars, and as he handed me the
licence, he said — 'Now, don't say that I
neverofFeredyou thisfor a thousand dollars.'"

Hussey's adventurous life was snapped
short by a tragic death. While he was on a
train at Baltimore, a little girl was crying
for a drink of water. The kind-hearted
old sailor-mechanic got off the train, brought
her a glass of water, and on his way to return
the glass, he slipped and fell between the
moving wheels.

Of all the men who fought McCormick in
the earlier days, I found only tv/o now
alive — Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, and
William N. Whiteley, of Springfield, Ohio.
Both of these men to-day generously give
the old warrior his due.

The Story of McCormick 39

" McCormick was the first man to make
the reaper a success in the field," said
Whiteley, the battle-worn giant of Ohio,
where I found him still at work. " Mc-
Cormick was a fighter — a bulldog, we
called him; but those were rough days.
The man who could n't fight was wiped out."

Ralph Emerson, now one of the most
venerable figures in Illinois, rose from a
sick-bed against his doctor's orders, so that
he might be magnanimous to his former
antagonist.

" McCormick's first reapers were a failure,"
said he, speaking slowly and with great
difficulty; "and he owed his preeminence
mainly to his great business ability. His
enemies have said that he was not an inven-
tor, but I say that he was an inventor of
eminence."

So, as the gray haze of years enables us
to trace the larger outlines of his work, we
can see that McCormick was especially
fitted for a task which, up to his day, had
never been done, and which will never need
to be repeated during the lifetime of our
earth. He was absolutely mastered by one
idea, as wholly as Copernicus or Columbus.

40 The Romance of the Reaper

His business was his life. It was not acci-
dental, as with Rockefeller, nor incidental,
as with Carnegie. On one occasion when a
friend was joking him about his poor judg-
ment in outside affairs, he whirled around
in his chair and said emphatically: "I
have one purpose in life, and only one —
the success and widespread use of my
machines. All other matters are to me too
insignificant to be considered."

He made money — ten millions or more.
But a hundred millions would not have
bribed him to forsake his reaper. It was
as much a part of him as his right hand.
In several of his business letters he writes
as though he had been a Hebrew prophet,
charged with a world-message of salvation.

" But for the fact that Providence has
seemed to assist me in all our business,"
he writes on one critical occasion, "it has
at times seemed that I would almost sink
under the weight of responsibility hanging
upon me. I believe the Lord will help us out."

Not that he left any detail to Providence
to which he could personally attend. He
was a Puritan of the "trust-in-God-and-keep-
your-powder-dry" species. A little farther

The Story of McCormick 4I

down, in this same letter, he writes —
"Meet Hussey in Maryland and put him
down."

The fountain-springs of his life were
wholly within. He acted from a few basic,
unchangeable convictions. If public opinion
was with him, he was gratified; if it was
against him he thought no more of it than
of the rustling of the trees when the wind blew.

"When anyone opposed his plans and
showed that they were impossible," said one
of his superintendents, " I noticed that he
never argued; he just went on working."

His brain had certain subjects distinctly
mapped out. What he knew — he knew.
He had no hazy imaginings. He lived in a
black and white world and abhorred all
half-tints. He was right — always right,
and the men who opposed him were Philis-
tines and false prophets, who deserved to be
consumed by sudden fire from Heaven.

It was this inward spiritual force that
made him irresistible. Small men shrivelled
up when he spoke to them.

"The exhibition of his powerful will was
at times actually terrible," said one of his
attorneys. "If any other man on this earth

42 The Romance of the Reaper

ever had such a will, certainly I have not
heard of it."

Small and easy undertakings had no
interest for him whatever. It was the
impossibility that enraged and inspired him.
At the sight of an obstacle in his path, he
rushed forward like a charge of cavalry.
When the Civil War was at its height, he
and Horace Greeley, who was very similar
to him in this respect, actually believed that
they could stop it. They had several long
conferences in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New
York, and McCormick went so far in 1864
as to prepare a statement of principles which
he fully believed would restore peace and
harmony between the North and the South.

Such was this massive, unbendable Ameri-
can. As we shall see, he was far from being
the only strong, picturesque figure in the
industry. But it would make many a book
to tell in detail the effect of his life work
upon the progress of the United States. It
was a New World, truly, that had been
created, alike for the people of the farms
and of the cities, in the year that the vic-
torious old Reaper King was carried to his
grave, with a sheaf of wheat on his breast.

The Story of McCormick 43

What if there had been no reapers, and no
hunger-insurance, and no cheap bread! What
sort of an American nation would we have,
if we were still using such food-implements
as the sickle and the flail ?

Could we have swung through four years
of Civil War, as we did, without famine or
national insolvency ?

Could the West have risen toward its
present greatness if its billion acres had to be
harvested by hand ?

Could the railways alone, which produce
nothing, have given us more food for less
work — the first necessity of a civilised
democracy ?

Would our manufacturers be creating
new wealth at the rate of sixteen billions a
year, if the reaper had not enriched the
farmers and sent half the farm-hands into
the factories ?

And our towering cities — two of them
more populous than the thirteen colonies
were, how large would they be and how
prosperous if bread were twenty cents a
pound ?

As Seward once said, it was the reaper
that "pushed the American frontier west-

44 The Romance of the Reaper

ward at the rate of thirty miles a year."
Most of the western railways were built
to the wheat; and it was wheat money that
paid for them. The reaper clicked ahead of
the railroad, and civilisation followed the
wheat, from Chicago to Puget Sound, just
as the self-binder is leading the railroad
to-day — three hundred miles in front in
Western Canada, and eight hundred miles
in Siberia. Even so unyielding a partisan
of the railroads as Marvin Hughitt admitted
to me that "the reaper has not yet received
proper recognition for its development of
the West."

During the Civil War the reaper was doing
the work of a million men in the grain-fields
of the North. It enabled a widow, with
five sons, to send them all to the front, and
yet gather every sheaf into the barn. It
kept the wolf from the door, and more — it
paid our European debts in wheat. It
wiped out all necessity for Negro labour
in the wheat States, just as a cotton-picker
will, some day, in the South.

*'The reaper is to the North what the
slave is to the South," said Edwin M.
Stanton in 1861. "It releases our young

The Story of McCormick 45

men to do battle for the Union, and at the
same time keeps up the supply of the nation's
bread."

Lincoln called out every third man, yet
the crops increased. Europeans could not
believe it. They heard in 1861 that we
were sending three times as much wheat to
England as we had ever done before. They
shook their heads and said — "Another
American story!" when they were told that
we were supporting two vast armies and yet
selling other nations enough grain to feed
thirty-five million people. Naturally, no
country that clung to the sickle and flail
could be convinced of such a preposterous
miracle.

After the war, the mighty river of wheat
that flowed from the West became so wide
and so deep that it poured a yellow stream
into every American home. It began to
turn the wheels of fourteen thousand flour-
mills. Rich cities sprang up, like Aladdin
palaces, beside its banks — Chicago, St.
Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,
Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha, Des Moines.
All of these, and a hundred lesser ones, were
nourished into prosperity by the rising

46 The Romance of the Reaper

current of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the
Mississippi to the sea.

By 1876 we had become the champion
food-producers of the world. A Kansas
farmer was raising six bushels of wheat
with as little labour as an Italian spent to
produce one. And there was one doughty
Scot — Dalrymple of Dakota, who was guil-
lotining more wheat with four hundred
labourers and three hundred harvesters,
than five thousand peasants could garner
by hand.

Inevitably, the American Farmer became
a financier. In 1876 he earned twenty-four
per cent. He had twenty-seven hundred
millions to spend. By 1880 he had begun
to buy so much store goods that the United
States was able to write a Declaration of
Industrial Independence. Steadily he has
grown richer and wiser, until now he is the
owner of a billion-acre farm, v/orth thirty
dollars an acre, operated with farm machinery
that cost him ^900,000,000 and producing,
in a single year, seven thousand times the
value of a millionaire.

Such, in one country, is the amazing
result which the Reaper has helped to create.

The Story of McCormick \^

And this is not all. It is now more necessary
to the human race than the railway. It is
fighting back famine in fifty countries. Its
click has become the music of an International
Anthem. The nations are feeding each
other, in spite of their tariffs and armies.
The whole world takes dinner at the one
long table; and the fear of hunger is dying
out of the hearts of men; and the prayer of
the Christian centuries is answered — "Give
us this day our daily bread."

CHAPTER II
The Story of Deering

FIFTY years ago two young farmers
named Marsh were cutting grain near
DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelli-
gent — too American — to be fond of work
for work's sake. And of all their drudgery,
the everlasting stooping over bundles to bind
them into sheaves galled them most. Such
back-breaking toil, they thought, might be
well enough for kangaroos, but it certainly
was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.

" If I did n't have to walk from bundle to
bundle, and hump myself like a horseshoe,
I could do twice as much work," said one of
the brothers.

"Well," said the other, *'why can't we fix
a platform on the reaper, and have the grain
carried up to us ?"

It was a brilliant idea and a new one.
Neither of the young fellows had ever seen a
reaper factory; but they were handy and

The Story of Deering 49

self-reliant. By the next autumn they were in
the field with their new machine, and as
they had expected, they bound the grain
twice as quickly as they had the year before.

So was born the famous Marsh harvester,
which proved to be the half-way mark in
the evolution of the grain-reaping machine.
It was the child of the reaper and the parent
of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of
binding grain. But it did more than this —
it gave the farmer his first chance to stand
erect, and forced him to be quick, for the
two men who stood on the harvester were
compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was
cut. Thus it introduced the factory system,
one might say, into the harvest-field. For
the first time the Big Minute made its appear-
ance on the farm.

The Marsh boys, never dreaming that
they had helped to change the destinies of
nations, took out a flimsy patent on their
invention, and went on with their farm work.
Two summers later, as they were at work
with it, their home-made harvester broke
down. A farmer from Piano, near DeKalb,
named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He
stopped, and, being a man of unusual abili-

50 The Romance of the Reaper

ties and discernment, he at once saw the
value of the Marsh machine, even in its
disabled state.

" Boys, you 're on the right track," he said.
"If you can run your machine ten rods, it
can be made to run ten miles. It is superior
to anything now in use."

Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went
to Piano, arranged a partnership with a
clever mechanic named John F. Hollister,
and began to make harvesters for sale. To
their surprise the new machine was not
welcomed. It was received with an almost
unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a
"man-killer," said the farmers. Now, the
Marsh brothers were quick, nervous men,
and they had built a machine to suit them-
selves. But it was undeniably too fast and
nerve-racking for most farmers. The labour-
ers refused to work with it.

The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a
very ingenious way. They put girls on
their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordi-
nary girls, to be sure, but vigorous German
maidens, who were swift and skilful binders.
Also, they had well-trained men, disguised
as hoboes, who mingled in the crowd around

WILLIAM DEERINC.

The Story of Deering 51

the harvester at times of demonstration,
and volunteered to get aboard of it. To
see a girl or a "Weary Willie" binding grain
on the new machine shamed the labourers
into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen of the
Marsh harvesters were sold.

In this year one of the Marshes performed
a feat that seemed more appropriate for a
circus than for a grain-field. Riding alone
on a harvester, he bound a whole acre of
wheat in fifty-five minutes. Little was heard
of this amazing achievement at the time,
as the national mind was distraught over the
death grapple of Grant and Lee in Virginia.

But there was one quick-eyed man in
Chicago named Gammon w^ho heard of the
event, and acted upon it so promptly that the
goddess of prosperity picked him out as one
of her favourites. Several years before,
Gammon had been a Methodist preacher in
Maine. A weak throat had brought his
sermons to an end, and he became a reaper
salesman in Chicago. He was shrewd and
honest, and in 1864 his profits were very
nearly forty thousand dollars.

When he heard that W. W. Marsh had
bound an acre of grain in fifty-five minutes.

52 The Romance of the Reaper

on a new-fangled reaper, he caught the next
train for DeKalb, and bought a Hcence to
manufacture Marsh harvesters. He took
in a partner — J. D. Easter — and the busi-
ness inched ahead slowly, until in 1870 the
sales rose to a thousand. Easter and Gam-
mon were driving their small factory ahead
at full speed. If they only could secure
enough capital, they would surprise the
world.

One evening, while Gammon was worrying
over this lack, he heard a gentle knock at the
door. He opened it to one of his old acquaint-
ances from Maine.

*' Mr. Gammon," said the visitor, " I have
about forty thousand dollars of spare money
that I would like to invest in Chicago real
estate, and I want your advice as to the best
place to buy."

"What!" said Gammon, springing to his
feet in delight. *'Have you money to invest ?
Give it to me and I '11 pay you ten per cent,
or make you a partner in the best business in
Illinois."

The visitor, whose name was William
Deering, knew nothing whatever about
reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained a

rb-to l.y Eaumsrar-lMr. S].ringfieM, 0.

WILLIAM N. WHITELEY

C. W. MARSH

JOHN F. APPLEBY

E. H. GAMMON

The Story of Deering 53

fair-sized fortune in the wholesale dry-goods
business. But he was a Methodist and had
confidence in the ex-reverend E. H. Gam-
mon; so he passed his $40,000 across the
table and the next day went home to Maine.

Two years later Deering came down to see
how Gammon and the $40,000 were faring.
The books showed a profit of $80,000. So
Deering requested that he be made a partner.
A year afterward Gammon fell sick and
begged Deering to come to Illinois and
manage the business. Deering consented
to be manager for one year only; but Gam-
mon's sickness continued.

"So," said William Deering, who told me
this story,_^" in that way I got into the harvester
business and had to stay in. But I did not
even know, at that time, the appearance of
our own machine."

Deering's competitors at first called him a
greenhorn. But they forgot that he was the
only one among them who had been trained
in the art of business. He was already a
veteran — a prize winner — in the game of
finance. For thirty years, ever since he began
to earn $18 a month in his father's woolen
mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had,

54 The Romance of the Reaper

in fact, established the wholesale dry-goods
house of Deering, Milliken & Co., which
still stands as one of the largest of its kind.
This training was all the more valuable an
asset because of the conditions that pre-
vailed when Deering entered the harvester
trade. For he arrived in that worst of all
years in the last century — 1873- The Jay
Cooke panic was at its height. The proudest
corporations were falling like grass before a
mower. It was a year of dread and paralysis.
But Deering faced these disadvantages with
ability, with sheer, dogged persistence, and
with business training. In seven years he had
become one of the greatest of the harvester
kings, and v/as leading them all up to a
higher level.

We shall understand more clearly what
this means if we consider the state of the
trade at the time of his entrance. A man of
peaceable and kindly inclinations, Deering
was dragged into a business that was as
turbulent as a bull-fight. For as the reaper
had evolved, it had become a bone of conten-
tion, and it remained so from the first patent
to the last. The opening battle was fought
by McCormick and Husscy, each claiming to

The Story of Deering 55

have been tlie Christopher Columbus of the
business. After the gold-rush of 1849 new
types of reapers sprang up on all sides. The
crude machines that merely cut the grain
were driven out by otiicrs that automatically
raked the cut grain into bundles. These
were soon followed by a combined reaper and
mower, which held the field until the Marsh
harvester was invented, as we have seen,
at the close of the Civil War.

Among these different types of reapers,
and the numerous variations of each type,
the bitterest rivalries prevailed. There was
no pool, no "gentlemen's agreement," no
"community of interest." Indeed, the
"harvester business" was not business. It
was a riotous game of " Farmer, farmer, who
gets the farmer .?" The excited players cared
less for the profits than for the victories. As
fast as they made money, they threw it back
into the game. Mechanics became m.illion-
aires, and millionaires became mechanics.
The whole trade was tense with risk and
rivalry and excitement, as though it were a
search for gold along the high plateaus
of the Rand. And this in spite of the fact
that, with the exception of McCormick,

56 The Romance of the Reaper

Osborne, and Whiteley, the men who came
to be known as reaper kings were not naturally
fighters. No business men were ever gentler
than Deering, Glessner, Warder, Adriance,
and Huntley. But the making of reapers
was a new trade. It was like a vast, un-
fenced prairie, where every settler owned as
much ground as he could defend.

Each step ahead meant a struggle for
patents. Whoever built a reaper had to
defend himself in the courts as well as approve
himself in the harvest-fields. Cyrus H.
McCormick, especially, as William Deering
soon learned, wielded the Big Stick against
every man who dared to make reapers. He
was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave
battle to his competitors as though they were
a horde of trespassers. He was their com-
mon enemy, and the reaper money that was
squandered on lawsuits brought a golden era
of prosperity to the lawyers.

Some of these patent wars shook the
country with the crash of hostile forces. The
tide of battle rolled up to the Supreme Court
and even into the halls of Congress. Once,
in 1855, when McCormick charged full tilt
upon John H. Manny, who was making

The Story of Deering 57

reapers at Rockford, Illinois, a three-year
struggle began that was the most noted legal
duel of the day.

McCormick, to make sure of his victory,
went into the fight with a battery of lawyers
whom he thought invincible — William H.
Seward, E. M. Dickerson, and Senator
Reverdy Johnson. Manny made a giant
effort at self-defence by hiring Abraham
Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, Stephen A.
Douglas, Peter H. Watson, George Harding,
and Congressman H. Winter Davis.

From first to last it was a lawyers' battle,
and McCormick was finally defeated by
Stanton, who made an unanswerably elo-
quent speech. For this speech Stanton
received ^10,000, and Lincoln, who had made
no speech at all, was given $1,000. Yet, in
the long run, the man who profited by this
lawsuit was Lincoln; for it was this money
that enabled him to carry on his famous
debate with Douglas, and thus made him
the inevitable candidate of the Republican
Party.

McCormick's most disastrous lawsuit was
with D. M. Osborne and the Gordon brothers,
of Rochester. In 1875 the Gordons had

58 The Romance of the Reaper

invented an attachment for a wire self-binder,
and in a careless moment McCormick had
signed a contract promising to make these
self-binders and to pay ^10 royalty on every
machine. Then a man named Withington
appeared with a much better self-binder.
McCormick at once began to make the
Withington machine and was sued by the
Gordons.

At this time McCormick was over seventy
years of age, and crippled with rheumatism;
but he believed that the Gordons had deceived
him and he fought them sternly as long
as he lived. After his death, his eldest son,
Cyrus, consented to a compromise, whereby
Osborne, who was owner of a share in the
Gordon concern, and the Gordons were to be
paid 1^225, 000. But in order to impress
upon them the enormity of this amount, he
prepared the money for them in small bills.
When they called at the McCormick office
in Chicago, they v/ere taken to a small room
on the top floor and shown a great pyramid
of green currency.

"There is your money," said McCormick's
lawyer. "Kindly count it and see if it is not
a quarter of a million dollars."

The Story of Deering 59

The three men gasped with mingled
ecstasy and consternation. " B — b — but,'*
stammered one of them, "how can we take it
away ? Can't you give us a cheque ?"

"That is the right amount, in legal money,
gentlemen," replied the lawyer. "All I will
say is that there are a couple of old valises in
the closet — and I wish you good afternoon."

For several hours Osborne and the Gor-
dons literally waded in affluence, counting
the money and packing it in the valises. By
the time they had finished, it was eight
o'clock. The building was dark. The ele-
vator was not running. They were hungry
and terrified. Step by step they groped
their trembling way downstairs, and stag-
gered with their treasure through the perilous
streets to the Grand Pacific Hotel. None of
them ever forgot the terror of that night.

Another warlike Reaper King was "Bill"
"Whiteley, of Ohio. Whiteley had invented
a combined mower and reaper in 1858,
which he named the "Champion"; and he
pushed this machine with an irresistible
enthusiasm.

His mode of attack was not tne patent suit,
but the field test. This was the white-hot

6o The Romance of the Reaper

climax of the rivalry among the reaper kings;
and it was great sport for the farmers. It
was a reaper circus — a fierce chariot-race
in a wheat-field; and its influence upon the
industry was remarkable. It weeded out the
low-grade machines. It spurred on the
manufacturers to a campaign of improvement.
It developed American harvesters to the
highest point of perfection. It swung the
farmers into the new path of scientific
agriculture. And it piled expenses so
high that few of the reaper kings escaped
disaster.

A field test was conducted in this fashion:
A committee of judges was appointed, and
several acres of ripe grain were selected as
the battle-field. After the field was marked
off into equal sections, each reaper took its
place. There were sometimes two reapers
and sometimes forty. The signal was given.
"Crack" — the horses leaped; the drivers
shouted; and hundreds of farmers surged
up and down in excited crowds.

"All 's fair in a field test," said the reaper
agents who superintended these contests;
though each man said it to himself. They
were a hardy and reckless body of men, half

ASA S. HUSHNELL

BENIAMIN H. WARDER

HON. THOMAS MOTT (isl'.oKM

DAVID M. OSBORNE

The Story of Deering 6l

cowboy, half mechanic, and no trick was too
dangerous or too desperate for them. Often
the feud was so bitter that bodyguards of
big-fisted "bulldozers" were on the spot to
protect the warrior of their tribe who was in
danser. "I had four men with me once

who together weighed i,ooo pounds," said
A. E. Mayer, who is now the general of an
army of 40,000 salesmen. In most tests the
machines were shamefully abused. Self-
binders were made to cut and bind stubble
as though it were grain. Mowers were
driven full tilt against stumps and hop-poles.
Rival reapers were chained back to back and
yanked apart by plunging horses. The
warrior agents exposed the weak points in
each other's machines. They photographed
each other's breakdowns, and bragged to the
limit of their vocabularies. They raised
prices in one town and cut them in the next;
for when their fighting blood was aroused — ■
and that was often — they cared no more
for profits than a small boy cares for his
clothes.

To give only one instance out of hundreds,
here is a picture of a field test that I found
in the diary of B. B. Clarke, of Madison, who

62 The Romance of the Reaper

is now the editor of the American Thresher-
man, but who was in the eighties a harvester
fighter in Indiana.

"We drove fourteen miles to tne wheat-
field, which was also the battle-field," he
wrote, "and found a heavy crop of rank grain,
wild pea vines, morning glories and other
vegetation, which tested both machines to the
limit. The bundles were twisted together
by the vines into almost a continuous rope.
After adjusting the machine, we had to 'open
the field.' This is considered the most
severe test, as the machine, the horses and
all are in the grain.

"A drove the team, a magnificent

pair of big grays. McK watched the

binder, while Y and I created sympathy

for our cause among the farmers who had
come to see the fight. With a crack of his

whip and a shout to his team, A opened

the ball. The machine was so crowded
with grain and weeds that the sickle could
not be heard fifty feet away. He cleared
the first round without a stop. Then the
other machine followed, but the driver,
failing to recognise the necessity of fast
driving, allowed his machine to clog, and

The Story of Deering 63

lost the day. We received two hundred
dollars in gold on the spot for our victorious
binder.

"On returning to Fort Wayne we found

the E people, whose headquarters were

separated by a partition wall from ours,
had coaxed one of our customers to cancel
his order, and substitute their machine.
For this act, we retaliated and replaced
three of their orders the following week,
and while loading these into the farmers'
wagons a fight took place between the
opposing factions. I looked as though I had
encountered a flax-hackle. The next day
hostilities opened early with three on our

side to six of the E host, requiring a

riot alarm and a wagon-load of police to
restore order.

"We had swept the enemy before us,
using neck-yokes, pitman rods and even
six shooters in the grand finale. Our ex-
pense account for that week included fifty
dollars for lawyers' fees, which was promptly
O. K'd by the manager. After all, I had
only obeyed instructions, which were to
get the business and hold up prices, 'peace-
ably if you can, but forcibly if you must.'"

64 The Romance of the Reaper

An interesting relic of these fierce days of
cut-throat competition was given to me by
Mr. John F. Steward. It reads as follows: —

To Agents for the Sals, of Harvesting ;MACniNERy :

The undersigned, manufacturers of harvesting machinery, call the
attention of their travelling experts and local agents to a practice which has
grown among them for a few years past, and which has become so disrepu-
table and is carried to such an extent that we feel it necessary to bring it to
your special notice. // is the habit 0] trying to break up sales made by otiier
agents when yon have not been siiccessjiil in securing the sale. It has
become a very common practice, as soon as a sale is made by one agent, lor
the agents ot all other machines to try to break up that sale, by misrepresen-
tations or by lowering the price, or by trying to convince the purchaser that
the machine which he has bargained for is not as good as the one which the
other agent sells. This practice is disreputable, and should not be tolerated
by any manufacturer. We wish it now thoroughly understood that we will not
tolerate this practice in any agent, and we will be glad to have reports from
you of the agenls.of any machines who have tried to break up your sales of
our machines in this way. There is nothing that tends more to demoralise
business than this practice, and we wish it stopped.

Machines should be sold upon their merits, and not by disparaging or
running down other machines. You will find that your customers will place
more reliance upon what you say if you leave all other machines alone, and
show the good features of your own and demonstrate them in actual work.
An agent never makes any progress by running down or trying to show the
defects of others, and you will be better able to sustain your prices and the
reputation of your machines by following the course indicated above.
Therefore, it is our wish that you should hold to your prices firmly, present
your machines in the very best possible light, and use all honourable means
for making a fair and honest sale ; but if you are unfortunate enough to loss
your sale, and some competitor gains it, don't be persuaded to put yours in
the field by the side of your competitor, or try in any way to break up the
sale ; and do not, until the purchaser has discarded another machine, offer
to put one of ours in its place.

Of course we do not mean by this that you shall stand quietly by and
see other agents break up your sales, or if others habitually do this that you
shall not retaliate, but you must not be the first to inaugurate this practice.
We are always ready to meet fair and honest competition.

We want our business conducted in a fair and honourable way, and not
descend to v/ays that are discreditable to us and to you. No one agent can
expect to seU all the machines that are wanted in liis district, for the poorest
machine will have some friends, and, though he may have the very best one,
we do not expect he will make every one see it. Let the purchaser take the
risk. If he buys an inferior macWne he should take the consequences, as if
he was deceived or mistaken in his judgment in buying a horse. In such a
case you would not think of putting your horse in work the purchaser was
doing, to show him yours was the best, with the expectation that he would
return the one he had bought because it did not prove quite equal to youis
in drawing a load or in driving. If you would not in the case of a horse,
why should you, in the case of a mower, reaper, or self-binding harvester?
Our advice to you is:

The Story of Deering 65

iBt. Hold firmly to your prices.

2d. Sell your own machino. Convince your purchaser
that you have the best machine made.

3d. Settle for the machine at time of delivery. A machino
works much better after being settled for.

4th. If you lose the sale do not try to break up the sale of ""J
your competitor. It won't pay.

66 The Romance of the Reaper

The king of the field test was William
N. Whiteley. No other reaper king, in any
country, received as much renown from his
personal exploits. He was the Charlemagne
of the harvest-field. He was as tall as a
sapling and as strong as a tree. As a pro-
fessor in the great field school of agriculture,
he has never been surpassed. He could out-
talk, outwork, and generally outwit the men
who were sent against him. He was a
whole exhibition in himself. "I 've seen
Bill Whiteley racin' his horses through the
grain and leanin' over with his long arms
to pick the mice's nests from just in front
of the knife," said an old Ohio settler.

The feat that first made Whiteley famous
was performed at Jamestown, Ohio, in 1867.
His competitor was doing as good work as
he was; whereupon he sprang from his seat,
unhitched one horse, and finished his course
with a single, surprised steed pulling the
heavy machine. His competitor followed
suit, and succeeded fully as well. This
enraged Whiteley, who at that time was as
powerful as a young Hercules.

"I can pull my reaper myself," he shouted,
turning his second horse loose, and yoking

The Story of Deering 67

his big shoulders into its harness. Such a
thing had never been done before, and has
never been done since; but it is true that,
in the passion of the moment, Whiteley was
filled with such strength that he ran the
reaper from one side of the field to the other,
cutting a full swath — a deed that, had he
done it in ancient Greece, would have placed
him among the immortals. It was witnessed
by five hundred farmers, and fully reported
in the press. One of the reporters, as it
happened, representing the Cincinnati Com-
mercial, was a young Ohioan named White-
law Reid, now the American Ambassador to
the Court of St. James.

That ten minutes in a horse collar made
;$2,ooo,ooo for Whiteley. His antagonist,
Bejamin H. Warder, was filled with admira-
tion for Whiteley's prowess, and at once
proposed that they should quit fighting and
work in harmony.

"Give me the right to maKe your reaper
and I 'II pay you ^5 apiece for all I can sell,"
said Warder. "It's a bargain," responded
Whiteley. And so there arose the first
consolidation in the harvester business.

Whiteley and Warder did not merge their

68 The Romance of the Reaper

companies; but they divided the United
States into three parts — one for Whiteley,
one for his brother Amos, who also made
reapers in Springfield, and one for Warder.
They united in building a malleable iron
foundry and a knife works, so that they
could use better materials at a lower cost.
They made the first handsome and shapely
machines.

For twelve years this triple alliance led
the way, and all others, even the mighty
McCormick and the sagacious Deering, had
to follow. The "Champion" reaper be-
came the leading machine of the United
States, and the little town of Springfield,
Ohio, was known as the "Reaper City."
As many as 160,000 reapers and mowers
were sent out as a year's work. In all,
2,000,000 of Whiteley's "Champion" ma-
chines have been made in Springfield, and
have sold at a gain of ^18,000,000.

As the millions came pouring in so fast,
Whiteley's head was turned and he began
to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder
and from his ov/n partners, Fassler and
Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour,
built the biggest reaper factory in the world,

The Story of Deering 69

became a railroad president, helped to corner
the Chicago wheat market, backed the
"Strasburg Clock" — an absurd self-binder
that was as big as a pipe-organ — and came
crashing down in a failure that jarred the
farminji world from end to end.

Whiteley lost millions in this crash —
and with comparative indifference. It was
never the profits that he fought for. At
heart he was a sportsman rather than a
money-maker. He craved the excitement
of the race itself more than the prizes. To
win — that was the ambition of his life.
And he did not shrink from spectacular
methods to accomplish his ambition.

For instance, nothing less would satisfy
him, when he exhibited at the Philadelphia
Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made
daintily of rosewood and gold. This brought
him so sudden a rush of orders from the East
that in one day of the following year he sent
seventy loaded cars to Baltimore. With
flags flying and brass bands playing, these
cars rolled off, with orders to travel only by
daylight. When they arrived in Harrisburg,
running in three sections, they caught the
eye of a railroad superintendent named

70 The Romance of the Reaper

McCrea — who is now, by the way, president
of the Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw
a chance to advertise his railway as well as
Whiteley's reapers, so he linked the seventy
cars together into one three-quarter-mile
train, put his biggest engine at the front, and
sent the gaudy caravan on its way.

Whiteley never knew how to be common-
place, even in the smallest matters. Wher-
ever he went, his trail was marked by stories
of his exploits and his oddities. How he
organised the famous "White Plug Hat
Brigade" in the Blaine campaign — how
he made a tvv^elve-hour speech to help
"Mother" Stewart close up the saloons of
Springfield — how he found a Springfield
farmer using a McCormick reaper, gave him
a Whiteley reaper in its place, and flung the
rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign
that he was the monarch of Ohio — how he
gathered up a peck of pies after a field test
dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing
but pies for half a week — such is the sort
of anecdotes that his life has added to the
folklore of the Western farmers.

Many a time his vaudeville tactics dis-
gusted and enraged his fellow manufacturers;

The Story of Deering 7 1

but he was too big a factor to be ignored.
Once, when a number of reaper kings had
met together to see if they could rescue their
business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman
opened the discussion with the question —
"What ought we to do to improve the
conditions of our trade?" For a moment
there was silence, and then John P. Adri-
ance — as mild-natured a man as ever
lived— said blandly, "Kill Whiteley."

With daring originality Whiteley combined
a tremendous physical vitality and a brain
that fairly effervesced w^ith inventiveness.
He probably holds the record among the
reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents
in his name. And he would work twenty-
four hours at a stretch, without a yawn. One
evening he asked a young machinist to
remain in the factory and help him fix a
refractory reaper. After working till mid-
night Whiteley said: "Well, Jim, I suppose
you think you are tired. Go home and have
a good night's sleep, and come back here in
three hours."

He dashed with fanatical energy into any
undertaking that appealed to his imagination.
Once, when he had too much money, he

72 The Romance of the Reaper

bought control of a new railway that ran
through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,
— 1 60 miles. He wanted to know its real
value, so, instead of asking the directors a
few questions, as other men would have done,
Whiteley travelled over the entire length of
the railroad, on foot.

When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was
time-worn and whitened. Since the great
failure, he has been in the harvester business
only intermittently. He has long outlived
his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever,
with a new scheme and a new factory. And
he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots
that have been familiar at field tests for
more than half a century.

Of the other Springfield men, Warder
was unquestionably the ablest. "He was
the main wheel," said Whiteley. As a
young man of twenty-seven he was running
a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard
of the reaper. He was so impressed with its
possibilities that he offered the inventor
^30,000 for a share in it.

"Young Warder is crazy," said Spring-
field people, for at that time ^30,000 was a
fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-

The Story of Deering 73

five years later, when Warder had removed
to Washington and become noted among its
social entertainers, his investment had multi-
plied itself very nearly two hundredfold.

Warder had associated with him two
partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J. Glessner.
Bushnell began earning his living in boy-
hood as a clerk at $5 a month, and stumbled
into a business career as a druggist. Then
he became Warder's understudy, and piled
up twice as many millions as he could count
on his fingers. 'As a climax he rose higher in
public life than any other reaper king, by
serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As
for J. J. Glessner, he is still active, and one
of the dozen solid pillars upon which the
International Harvester Company is built.

Such were the strong men whom William
Deering faced v/hen he came, without a shred
of experience, into the harvester world. He
had no ancient patent-rights, like McCor-
mick. He could not outrace thirty com-
petitors in a wheat-field, like Whiteley and
Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One
way was left open to him.

"I'll beat them," he said, "by making a
better machine."

74 The Romance of the Reaper

He set out upon such a search for improve-
ments that, during the rest of his Hfe, inven-
tors fluttered around him like moths around a
candle. Until 1879, the best harvester Vv^as
a self-binder that tied the sheaves with wire.
It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke,
and had been developed to its highest point
of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named
C. B. Withington, who is still living in Wis-
consin. The Withington machine was
pushed by McCormick with great energy,
and fifty thousand v/ere sold between 1877
and 1885. It was a marvelously simple
mechanism, consistingly mainly of two steel
fingers that moved back and forth, and
twisted a wire band around each sheaf of
grain. As a machine it was a complete
success; but the farmers disliked it.

"The wire will mix with the straw," they
said, "and our horses and cattle will be
killed."

So, when Deering met John F. Appleby,
a stocky mechanic who claimed to have
invented a twine self-binder, he at once set
him to work upon fifty of the new machines.

When Deering saw his first Appleby
binder at v/ork in a field of wheat, he was

The Story of Deering 75

enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect
harvester. Its strong steel arms could
flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a
knot, cut the cord, and fling oflT the sheaf,
too quickly for the eye to follow. It seemed
magical.

"What am I to do.?" asked the farmer
who bought the first of these machines, as he
climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut
his grain.

"Do!" exclaimed John Webster, the Deer-
ing mechanic. "Do nothing! Drive the
Horses."

The amazed farmer started the horses,
drove around the field, and came back
swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic
— as well he might. For in the trail of his
harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though
there were some kindly genie hidden among
its wheels.

Deering owned, at that time, not much
more than a million dollars — the gleanings
of thirty-five industrious years. But he
resolved to stake it all upon this amazing
machine. If he lost — he would be a poor
man at fifty-three. If he won — he would
be the harvester king of the world.

76 The Romance of the Reaper

" I 'II move the factory to Chicago and
make 3,000 of these Appleby twine-binders
at once," he said.

His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so
the inflexible Deering bought him out, and
from that day he, like his greatest competitor,
McCormick, ran a one-man business.

"Did you hear the news about Deering?"
gossiped his fellow manufacturers. "Clean
crazy on a twine-binder!"

And, far m.ore discouraging, the magical
self-binder itself suddenly became ill-hum-
ored and refused to form its sheaves properly.
It was no easy exploit, as any one may see,
to make the first 3,000 of such complex
machines. No other artificial mechanism
must so combine strength and delicacy. No
piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected
to operate while it is being jerked over a
rough field or along the steep slant of a hill.

One day in the early spring of 1880, Deer-
ing and his chief lieutenants — Steward and
Dixon — were in a field of rye near Alton,
trying to coax the new harvester to do its
work. All day long it was obstinate and
perverse, and the men were at their wits'
end.

The Story of Deering 77

"Well, boys," said Deering, "if we can't
do better than this, I '11 lose $1,000,000."

"Try one more day," said Steward.
They went to their hotel, and as it happened
to be crowded, the three were placed in a
large double room.

"Steward and Dixon were mad at me the
next morning," said Deering, when he told
me of that critical occasion. "They had
nothing at stake, yet they had lain awake
all night; while I was apparently about to
lose my only million, and had slept like
a log."

That day a slight change was made, and
the harvester became good-natured and
obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were
sold, and created as much excitement as
3,000 miracles. They swept away competi-
tors like chaff. Of a hundred manufacturers
seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead
of losing his fortune, Deering cleared at once
about four hundred thousand dollars, for
profits were large in those experimental
days. Better still, he became an acknowl-
edged leader of his class. He had taken
the right line of development, as McCormick
had in 1831, and all others who could,

78 The Romance of the Reaper

choked down their rage and followed —
quick march!

The man who had found the right path was
John F. Appleby. He was the scout — the Kit
Carson of the harvester business. It was he
— the inspired farm labourer of Wisconsin —
who had hurled another great impossibility
out of the way of the world's farmers.

He did not of course originate the whole
self-binder. But he put the parts together
in the right way and pushed ahead to success
through a wilderness of failure. There was
a notable group of inventors in Rockford
who did much to put him on the right track.
One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was the
originator of the self-sizing device that regu-
lates the size of the bound sheaf. Another,
named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter,
whittling it out of a branch of a cherry tree.

Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-
errant of industry. He takes his pay in
adventure. He dislikes to travel with the
crov/d. When I saw him first, in his Chicago
workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-
binders. He was engaged on the task of
perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes
will do as much for the South as his self-

The Story of Deering 79

binder did for the West. And it was with
some difficulty that I could persuade him to
disentangle the story of the twine-binder
from the various other romances of his life.

In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster
doing chores on a farm for one dollar a week.
Even this rate of pay was too high to the
mind of the farmer who employed him; for
he was always whittling and making toy
machinery, instead of minding his work.

One day, when Appleby was seventeen,
he v.'as binding grain after a reaper. " How
do you like the work, Jack ?" asked the
farmer.

"I don't like it," said Jack, "and what 's
more, I believe I can invent a machine to tie
these bundles."

"Ho! ho!" laughed the farmer. "You
little fool, you can't invent anything."

Twenty-five years later, when Appleby
had made half a million by his invention,
and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis,
he noticed an old man pushing a wheel-
barrow in the factory yard.

"Haven't I seen you before?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," replied the old man. "I was
the farmer who gave you your first job."

So The Romance of the Reaper

"Well," said Appleby, "you see 1 was n't
a little fool after all."

Appleby actually had set to work to invent
a knotting-machine when he was a farm-boy
of seventeen, and had made his first model
at that age — in 1858. A young school-
teacher named Chester W. Houghton was
the first man who put money back of the
boy's invention. He stood behind it to the
extent of fifty dollars, and then became
alarmed at such a reckless speculation, and
quit. Had he been just a little more adven-
turous, and a little more patient, every
dollar of his investment would have fruited
into a thousand.

When the school-teacher deserted him,
and wanted the fifty dollars back, Appleby
was discouraged. The models that had been
made at a gun shop in Palmyra, Wisconsin,
drifted about. They were sold at auction
on one occasion for seventeen cents; and the
buyer thought they were not worth even that,
for he made a present of them to Appleby.
Then came the crash of the Civil War.
Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot
knotters and thought only of guns.

Yet while he lay in the trenches at Vicks-

The Story of Deering 8l

burg, he whittled out a new device for rifles.
After the war, a capitalist saw this device,
gave him ^500 for it, and then, before
Appleby's eyes, sold a half interest in it for
$'j,OQO. This awakened Appleby to the
value of inventions and made him an inventor
for life.

Once more he set to work on his long-
neglected grain-binder, and in 1867 he
drove his first completed machine into a field
near Mazomanie, Wisconsin. The horses
were fractious, and after being jerked along
for several rods, the machine broke down,
to the great delight of the spectators, most
of whom knew Appleby and regarded him
as a crank. But the machine had bound a
couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby
displayed these, and one man — Dr. E. D.
Bishop — pulled a roll of money from his
pocket and handed it to the inventor.

"Take this," he said, "and make me a
partner. Your invention will be a world's
wonder some day."

All told. Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on
Appleby's genius, for which, twelve years
later, he drew out $80,000. This was the
first of the many incidental fortunes scattered

82 The Romance of the Reaper

right and left in the path of the self-binder,
which began in 1880, to sweep forward as
gloriously as the triumphal car of a Roman
emperor.

As for William Deering — the modest
manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879
joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had
he sold the 3,000 self-binders than he found
himself floundering neck deep in an un-
expected sea of troubles. There was not a
flaw in the binders. They were cutting
and tying the grain with the skill of 60,000
men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand
farmers swore that it was too high.

Twine was an item that they had never
in their lives bought in large quantities. To
pay fifty dollars — the price of a horse —
for mere string that was used once and then
flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like
buying daily papers by the thousand, or
shoe-laces by the ton. And so it came
about that though Deering had reduced the
cost of wheat ten per cent., he got little
thanks for his superb machines — nothing
but a loud and angry roar for better and
cheaper twine.

Deering moved against this new array of

The Story of Deering 83

difficulties with quiet and inexorable per-
sistence. There were only three binder-
twine makers in the United States, and all
warned him that he was pursuing a will-o'-
the-wisp. But Deering pushed on until he
met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of
Philadelphia. From the unassuming way in
which Deering stated his needs, Fitler con-
cluded that the order would be a small one.

"What you want," he said, "is a single
strand twine, w^hich cannot be made without
a new line of machinery. I regret to say that
I cannot afford to do this for one customer."

"Well," said Deering, "I think I may need
a good deal in the long run, though I wish to
begin with not more than ten car-loads."

Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was
dazed, but only for a moment. It was his
chance and he knew it. Years afterward,
he was fond of telling how he "made a
million-dollar deal with William Deering in
two minutes."

Thus, whatever Deering touched, he im-
proved. He became the servant of the
harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as
sporting millionaires spent fortunes on their
horses. It was his one extravagance. In

84 The Romance of the Reaper

his later endeavours to make the twine
cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass twine,
;^35,ooo on paper, 1^43,000 on straw, and
failed. Then he spent $165,000 on flax and
succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort
of paymaster to a small mob of inventors
who had new ideas or who thought they had.
There was one very able inventor — John
Stone — who actually drew his salary and
expenses every week for twenty years, until
he had perfected a corn-picking machine.
From first to last, Deering spent "perhaps
more than two millions of dollars" on
improvements, according to one of his
closest friends.

The fact is that the Appleby binder had
transformed Deering from a man in business
simply to make money, into an enthusiast.
While he remained as careful of the business
as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself
more than the profit. He would still fuss if
he saw half a dozen nails in the sweepings, or
any other waste of pennies. But he poured
the golden flood of profits back into his
factory with a recklessness that amazed his
friends. He pampered his beloved machines
with roller bearings and bodies of steel. He

The Story of Deering 85

sent them to Europe and showed them to
kings. Then, as his enthusiasm grew, he
looked ahead to the time when even the
farm-horse shall be set free from drudgery;
and he began to build automobile mowers
and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened,
as he worked, into a seer who saw far past
the gain or loss of the present into the
splendour of the future.

Sagacity — that is, perhaps, the one word
that best explains William Deering's success.
He had an almost supernatural instinct, so
his competitors believed, which kept him in
the right line of progress. There seemed
to be a business compass in his brain.

He was never a master of men, like Mc-
Cormick, nor a good mixer among men, like
Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was
easily superior to them both. He knew how
to pit his managers one against another, as
Carnegie did; and how to develop a factory
into a swift and automatic machine. He was
a statesman of commercialism. He piled up
a big fortune, and earned it.

It was his misfortune not to have been
schooled on a farm, as were most of the
great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley,

86 The Romance of the Reaper

Lewis Miller, Morgan, Johnson, Osborne,
Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes
were all farm -bred. But Deering was
shrewd enough to gather around him a
corps of men who had the experience that he
lacked. At the head of this bodyguard stood
a farmer's son — John F. Steward. Such
were the versatility and the loyalty of Steward
that he became Deering's Grand Vizier. He
was inventive, combative, literary, mechan-
ical, litigious. It is now forty-two years
since Steward began to build harvesters;
and he has ten dozen patents to his credit.

So, what with the mature business experi-
ence of Deering himself, and the skill and
faithfulness of his captains, the little factory
that he had begun to manage in 1872 ex-
panded in thirty years into one of the two
greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling
out in every workday minute two complete
machines and thirty miles of twine.

Largely because of his enterprise the
spectres of Famine are now beaten back
in fifty countries, yet there is not a v/ord of
self-praise in his conversation.

"A man told me once that I was nothing
more than a promoter," he said; "and

The Story of Deering 87

perhaps he was right. I was n't an inventor,
that 's true. All I did was to get the right
men and tell them what I wanted them to do;
so I suppose I was just a promoter."

The few anecdotes that are told of him
relate chiefly to his overmodesty. Once,
when he was travelling through Kansas with
John Webster, one of his trusty men, a big
Westerner loomed up in front of him and
said:

"Are you the Deering that makes the self-
binders ?"

"Yes," replied Deering, blushing as red as
one of his own mowers.

"Well," said the Westerner, shaking him
by the hand, " I want to say that you 're a
mighty smart man."

Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable,
and when the stranger had gone, he leaned
over to Webster and said:

"Think of him saying that I made the
binders when I pay you fellows for making
them. I never felt so foolish in my life."

He is now eighty-one — older than our
oldest railroad. In his lifetime he has seen
his country grow seven times in population
and twenty-four times in wealth.

88 The Romance of the Reaper

He and his fellows have undeniably
doubled the food supply of the world.
More — they said, "Presto, change!" and
the drudges of the harvest-fields stood up
and became men. They have made life
easier and nobler for untold myriads of
people, and have led the way to the brightest
era of peace and plenty that the hunger-
bitten human race has ever known.

Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings
became millionaires. Not one can stand
beside the great financiers of steel and real
estate and railroads. And not one, in his
whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a
Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a
single year.

The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street
meddled with the harvester business once —
and never again. That was twenty-one
years ago, when the famous "Binder-Twine
Trust" set out with the black flag flying.
It was a skyrocket enterprise. James R.
Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This
was the first and only "easy money" that
was ever made in the harvester world. Then
the farmers and the reaper kings rose up
together and smote the Trust in twenty

The Story of Deering 89

legislatures. Its stock became waste paper;
and in the financial hurricane of 1893, it
was the first victim.

No other business shows so tragic a death
roll. For fifty years its trail was marked by
wreckage and disaster. Most of the few
who succeeded at first, failed later. Out of
every ten who plunged into the scrimmage,
nine crawled out whipped or terrified.

And so the Romance of the Reaper was
for fifty years a tragedy of competition. Out
of more than two hundred harvester companies^
only fourteen survived in ig02; and these
realised that if such waste and warfare con-
tinuedy their business would be destroyed.

CHAPTER III
The International Harvester Company

FOR fifty years the Harvester Kings
fought one another in the open field
of competition. Their armies of agents,
drilled in the arts of rivalry, waged a war in
which quarter was neither given nor sought.
It was a fight almost of extermination. Out
of two hundred companies that went to
battle with flags waving and drums beating,
less than a dozen came home.

David M. Osborne backed a new self-
binder, lost a million, and died of heart-
break. J. S. Morgan, who had a small
factory at Brockport, saw the immense
McCormick and Deering plants and quit.
Even the great Whiteley fell, and Lewis
Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the
founder of Chautauqua, went down "like a
great tree upon the hills."

Walter A. Wood, after forty years of suc-
cess, took Governor Merriam and James J.
90

The International Harvester Company 91

Hill as partners, and set out to win the West
for the Wood Company. Their factory was
the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the
best, and their fame was over all the prairies.
Yet after five years of battling they surren-
dered; and not one harvester is made to-day
west of Illinois.

It is a common opinion among harvester
men that from first to last there has been
more money put into the business than has
ever been taken out — so enormously waste-
ful were these years of competition. By
1902 the harvester business was merely a
terrific and destructive war. The agents
were tearing the whole industry to shreds
and tatters. So far as the Harvester Men
could see, they must choose between combina-
tion and ruin.

Not one of them was personally in favour
of combination. They were individualists
through and through. The spirit of compe-
tition had been bred in the bone. So, w^hen
several of them came together to check this
warfare, it was not of their own free will.
It was because they could do nothing else.
They were hurled together by social forces
over which they had no control.

gz The Romance of the Reaper

One by one these battle-worn Westerners
came to New York, "on an exploring expedi-
tion," as one of them said. Here they met
Judge Elbert H. Gary, whom they had
known intimately in Chicago. Gary had
been William Deering's attorney for twenty-
five years. He was a farmer's son, and had
risen to be the official head of the Steel Trust;
so that he was the one man who had an
expert knowledge at once of farms, harvesters,
and mergers. And naturally, when the
Chicagoans ran to Gary with their tales of
woe, he brought them across Broadway into
the office of J. P. Morgan, which had become
in 1902 a sort of Tribunal of Industrial
Peace.

There were four of them — Cyrus H.
McCormick, Charles Deering, J. J. Glessner,
and W. H. Jones — and all of them added
to the strong preference for competition a
definite opposition to trusts, monopolies,
and stock speculation. They were not the
Wall Street type of millionaire. In that
time of booming optimism, they might have
made more money in one year by selling
stock than they had made in thirty years by
selling harvesters. But no one of them had

HAROLD Mccormick

J. J. CI.KSSXER

I'hoto bj Siuith, Kvnuatuu, III.

W. H. lONES

!'1l .1 ■ l-jr iKcr, Chicago

JAMI-S DEHKING

The International Harvester Company 93

tried it. The fact is that they cared more
for the good-will of the farmers and the
prestige of their machines than they did for
larger profits. The thing that troubled
them most in the proposed consolidation
of properties, one of the Morgan partners
told me, was the fear that prices would in
any case have to be raised, because of the
increasing cost of labour and raw materials.

No wonder that the financiers who under-
took to organise them were driven almost to
distraction by their obstinate independence.
They had as many contradictory opinions as
a Russian Duma; and it was soon clear that
the only possible way to proceed was to keep
them apart until all possible preliminaries
were arranged.

So the four Harvester Men went back
home until the details of the new combination
should be worked out. Then they were
summoned again to New York. As was
their custom, they went to different hotels,
and each man was handled separately until
he was in an organisable frame of mind.
This master-stroke of diplomacy was ac-
complished by George W. Perkins — Mor-
gan's most versatile partner; and it gave

94 The Romance of the Reaper

Perkins a day and a night that he will never
forget. From morning until midnight —
from midnight until the first ray of dawn
slanted down Broadway, Perkins dashed
from hotel to hotel like a human shuttle.
Deering conceded one point if McCormick
would concede another. Glessner yielded
one of his claims, and Jones withdrew some-
thing else. Inch by inch these stubborn
men were pushed within tying distance of
each other; and the fifty-year harvester
war was about to come to an end.

The next day Perkins renewed the struggle,
but he was too tired to continue the cab
driving between hotels. He telephoned the
four Harvester Men to meet him at Morgan's
office. As each man climbed up the rusty
iron steps of the Morgan Building he was
switched by the big Irish doorkeeper into
one of those large inner rooms at the rear,
on the ground floor, where many a broken
business has been mended. Four men in
four rooms, with Perkins flying in and out —
such was the way that the great harvester
company was finished. It was a unique
situation, as much like an incident in comic
opera as an affair of business. But the

The International Harvester Company 95

Morgan experts knew that if the four men
were allowed to meet, the old hurtful rivalries
would break out afresh and the project
might snap off like a broken dream.

To strengthen the new company with a
big surplus of ready money, a one-sixth
interest was sold for twenty millions to
Morgan and several other New York finan-
ciers of the "old reliable" sort. Also, a
fifth harvester company, in Milwaukee, was
bought from Stephen Bull for about five
millions. And when the last rivet had been
clinched and the last nail driven home, the
four Westerners suddenly found them-
selves sitting around the same table, in the
new International Harvester Company, of
Chicago.

There were several harvester companies
that remained independent, but probably not
from choice. I do not know of one that has
not, at some stage of its career, tried to get
into a trust. Fifteen companies were merged
by Colonel Conger in 1892, but they were
poorly fastened together and soon fell apart.
It is also a fact, though one not before made
public, that the Mutual Life Insurance
Company tried to form a second Harvester

96 The Romance of the Reaper

Combine in 1903, with four large manu-
facturing companies in the merger, and
under the presidency of E. D. Metcalf, of
Auburn, New York. When this project
failed, three independent companies — two
in New York and one in Canada, offered
themselves for sale to the HarvesterCompany.
It bought one — the Osborne — for six
millions, and refused the others.

"We are big enough now," said Cyrus
H. McCormick. "It is not safe for one
company to have a monopoly. What we
want to do is to regulate competition, not to
destroy it."

Besides the big Osborne Company, which
is now the third largest in the combine, the
Harvester Company has bought five smaller
concerns, and built two new plants — one in
Canada and one in Sweden. It is like the
original United States — a union of thirteen
industrial colonies. Its output has risen to
700,000 harvesting machines a year, including
all varieties; and its annual revenue is more
than seventy-three million dollars.

With its 25,000 employees and 42,000
agents, this one company is supporting as
many families as there are in Utah or Mon-

The International Harvester Company 97

tana. A square mile of land would be too
small to contain its factories. At its hundred
warehouses there is trackage for 12,000
cars. Around its workshops are six busy
railways of its own, whose engines last year
pulled out 65,000 freight-cars, jammed full
of machinery for the farmers of the world.

Its properties are so widespread that no
member of the company has seen them all.
To run around their circle would be a trip
of 15,000 miles. It owns 20,000 acres of coal
lands in Kentucky, 100,000 acres of trees in
Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, and
40,000,000 tons of ore in the Wisconsin and
Mesaba Ranges. It has staked its money —
iS 1 20,0(30,000 — upon the belief that for fifty
years longer, at least, the scientists will find
no substitute for bread.

The fact that Elbert H. Gary, the official
head of the Steel Trust, is one of its directors,
has not prevented this self-sufficient company
from owning a complete steel plant, where
2,000 Hungarians make iron from ore, and
steel from iron. It saws its trees into lumber
in Missouri, and roasts its coal into coke in
Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in
fact, that if they were contiguous, they would

98 The Romance of the Reaper

make a Harvester City as spacious as Greater
Chicago.

But the most surprising feature of this
unique corporation, to one who sees it for
the first time, is the distracting variety of
things that pour out of its factories. Its
business is by no means to make harvesters
and nothing else. Its true character seems
to be that of a manufacturing department
store for farmers. As a matter of actual
count, I found in its factories and ware-
houses thirty- seven different species of ma-
chines, besides all manner of variations of
each sort.

Here you will see, not only a mower to cut
the grass, but a tedder (a kind of steel mule,
with an incurably bad temper) to kick and
scatter the new-mown hay, so that it will dry
in the sun; a rake to gather it together; a
loader to swing it on the wagon; and a baler
to compress it into bundles.

Here are the self-binders, not or the grain
only, but for corn and rice as well. For the
especial benefit of King Corn, whose tribute
to this Republic has lately swollen to twelve
hundred millions a year, the company is
making machines that pluck the corn from

The International Harvester Company 99

the stalk with iron hands, and others that
wrench off the husks, shell the corn, and
grind it into several varieties of breakfast
food for the four-footed boarders of the
farm.

Here is a new machine, much less elegant
than useful, for flinging manure over a field.
Barefooted women did this work in the old
brutal days of hand labour. But now,
thanks to the brain of a canny Canadian
farmer, Joseph S. Kemp, one worker can
feed the hungry fields without so much
as soiling the tips of the fingers.

The farmer's wife — and there are
10,000,000 of her in the United States, has
been the last one to be considered, in this
outpouring of machinery. But I found at
Milwaukee a rebuilt factory belonging to
the International, where 2,500 men are
making fifty cream separators and 100 gaso-
lene engines a day, both designed to make
life easier for Mrs. Farmer, as well as for her
husband. Also, it will please her to know
that she may soon be honking her way to
town in an automobile buggy, which the big
corporation is making for farmers in a new
factory in Akron.

100 The Romance of the Reaper

A harvester company must rollow the
whims of its customers, almost as much as
though it had newspapers for sale. It must
give 10,000,000 farmers what they want.
At the Piano factory I saw 470 different
varieties of wheels; and sixty-one kinds of
wooden tongues at McCormick's.

" Nothing could be simpler than a tongue,"
said Maurice Kane, the chief mechanical
expert of the International. " It is a mere
pole. If we suited ourselves, we should
only make two kinds — one for horses and
one for oxen. But the farmers of the world
have sixty-one different ideas as to how a
tongue ought to be made, and we must give
them what they ask for."

The last Minnesota Legislature, in the
simplicity of its heart, proposed to establish
a complete harvester plant for $200,000.
It may surprise the members of that
Legislature to know that the International
has lately spent twice as much merely to
improve one twine factory in St. Paul, and
four times as much to build one warehouse
in Chicago. Though it began its career
with sixty million dollars' worth of equip-
ment, it has been forced by the pressure of

The International Harvester Company lOl

its trade to spend sixteen millions more on
its factories. And for lack of a weather
prophet, it is obliged to carry over from five
to six million dollars worth of machines
each year, which remain unsold in different
countries.

By its very nature, this industry cannot
be carried on in a small way. It is as essenti-
ally mutual and cooperative as life insurance
or banking. If a malicious "green bug"
devours the wheat in Kansas, the loss must
be made up by larger sales somewhere else.
This, no doubt, is the main reason why every
plant that was ever built to supply a local
trade has failed.

No other manufacturing business carries
so many risks or includes so many factors.
It is the most comprehensive industry in
the world. It is the link between the city
and the farm. It is both wholesale and
retail, ready-made and made to order, local
and international. It must make what the
farmer demands, and yet teach him better
methods. It is at once a factory, a bank
and a university.

Thus, of necessity, the Harvester Company
represents in the highest degree the new

102 The Romance of the Reaper

American way of manufacturing: everything
on a large scale, elaborate machinery, un-
skilled workmen, and a vast surplus to drive
it past failures and misfortunes. From its
ore mines in the Mesaba Range, where I saw
a steam-shovel heap a fifty ton railroad car
in ten swings, to the lumber yard of the
McCormick Works, where 26,000,000 feet of
hardwood are seasoning in the sooty rays of
the Chicago sun, it was a panorama of big
production.

"How many castings did your men make
last year .^" I asked of the hustling Irish-
American who rules over one of the McCor-
mich foundries.

"Very nearly 44,000,000, sir," he replied.
"And the gray iron foundry over there uses
three times as much iron as we do, and it
made more than 12,000,000."

Fifty-six million castings! Merely to
count these would take the whole Minnesota
Legislature sixteen days, even though every
member worked eight hours a day and
counted sixty castings a minute. Far, far
behind are the simple, old-fashioned days,
when a reaping tool was made of two pieces
— the handle and the blade. There are

The International Harvester Company 103

now 300 parts in a horse-rake, 600 in a
mower, 3,800 in a binder.

When McCormick built his first hundred
reapers in 1845, he paid four and a half cents
for bolts. That was in the mythical age of
hand labour. To-day fifty bolts are made
for a cent. So with guard-fingers. McCor-
mick paid twenty-four cents each when
James K. Polk was in the White House-
Now there is a ferocious machine, which,
with the least possible assistance from one
man, cuts out 1,300 guard-fingers in ten
hours, at a labour-cost of six for a cent.

Also, while exploring one of the Chicago
factories, I came upon a herd of cud-chewing
machines that were crunching out chain-
links at the rate of 56,000,000 a year. Near-
by were four smaller and more irritable
automata, which were biting off pieces of
wire and chewing them into linchpins at a
speed of 400,000 bites a day.

"Take out your watch and time this man,"
said Superintendent Brooks of the McCor-
mick plant. "See how long he is in boring
five holes in that great casting."

"Exactly six minutes," I answered.

"Well, that 's progress," observed Brooks.

104 The Romance of the Reaper

" Before we bought that machine, it was a
matter of four hours to bore those holes."

In the immense carpenter shop he pointed
to another machine. "There is one of the
reasons," he said, "why the small factories
have been wiped out. That machine cost us
^2,500. Its work is to shape poles, and it
saves us a penny a pole; that is profitable to
us because we use 300,000 poles a year."

In one of its five twine mills — a mon-
strous Bedlam of noise and fuzz, which is by
far the largest of its sort in the world —
there is enough twine twisted in a single
day to make a girdle around the earth.

In the paint shop the man with the brush
has been superseded — a case of downright
trade suicide. In his place is an unskilled
Hungarian with a big tank of paint. Souse!
Into the tank goes the whole frarn,e of a
binder, and the swarthy descendant of
Attilla thinks himself slow if he dips less
than four hundred of these in a day. The
labour-cost of painting wheels is now one-fifth
of a cent each. Ten at once, on a wooden
axle, are swung into the paint bath without
the touch of a finger. And the few belated
brush-men who are left work with frantic

The International Harvester Company 105

haste, knowing tliat they, too, are being
pursued by a machine that will overtake
them some day.

In the central bookkeeping office of the
Harvester Company I found some almost
incredible statistics. Here, for instance, are
a few of the items in last year's bill of ex-
penses:

Two hundred and thirty-five miles of
leather belting, 940 miles of cotton duck,
2,000 grindstones, 3,000 shovels, 10,000
brooms, 1,670,000 buckles, 1,185,000 pounds
paint, 4,000,000 pounds wire, 15,000,000
pounds nails.

Merely to maintain its experimental depart-
ment costs this imperial company ^7,000
a week. Here are more than two hun-
dred inventors and designers, well housed
and well salaried, and not tramping from
shop to shop, as inventors did in the good
old days. They are paid to think; and the
company is mightily proud of them. But
the truth is that all large corporations which
employ an army of unskilled workmen are
being compelled to offset so much mere
muscle by a special department of brains.

There is, besides, a most elaborate system

lo6 The Romance of the Reaper

of inspection. In the Deering factory I
saw a squad of ten men who were testing the
newly made binders with straw. "About
three out of a hundred need fixing," said the
foreman.

The chains are tested by a violent pneu-
matic machine. Every Hnk, even, is branded
with a private mark — A . And in the
Hamilton plant a new scheme is being tried
— the whole packing gang has become a
staff of inspection. Whenever a man finds a
hundred defective pieces, he gets an extra
dollar. One sharp-eyed Scot in the packing-
room confided to me that he had made
"as high as two shillin's a week."

Such is the scope of the International
Harvester Company, created in 1902. As to
the men who control it, I have had the greatest
difficulty in penetrating back of the business
to their personal characteristics. For they
dislike the fierce light that beats upon a rich
American.

Of its president, Cyrus H. McCormick the
Second, the first word to be said is that he is
not built on the same lines as his belligerent
father. He would fare badly, very likely, if
he were in charge of a catch-as-catch-can

The International Harvester Company 107

business, such as the reaper trade was thirty
years ago. The making of harvesters is,
to him, half a duty — to his father, his
workmen, and the machine itself — and half
a profession — not a battle nor a game, as it
was with the first Reaper Kings. He has
no desire to play a lone hand in the business
world. And his painstaking purpose, as a
man of affairs, is to secure less speculation
and more stability, less waste and more
organisation, less friction and more com-
munity of interest.

In all things he is a simple and serious man.
I have seen him work from noon until mid-
night; but in my opinion, if he really had his
choice, he would prefer a quiet homestead, in
the little tow^n of Princeton, where he could
pursue a life devoted to the interests of Prince-
ton University and the Civic Federation.
Even now, whenever he can get free from the
treadmill of his office, his greatest delight is
to escape to a camp in the wild lands of
northern Michigan, where he can dress like
a fisherman and forget that he is the servitor
of a hundred and twenty millions.

Harold McCormick, his brother, and a
vice-president of the big company, is a boy-

lo8 The Romance of the Reaper

hearted man of thirty-five. He has a quick-
action brain; but his strong point is his
personal magnetism and Hkableness. He
knows the harvester business throughout*
having been a shirt-sleeve workman in the
factory, an agent at Council Bluffs, and a
field expert in several states.

Most of the stories told about him illus-
trate his naive boyishness. For instance,
when he had become an expert in handling
the harvester, an agent-in-chief near Chicago
telegraphed for a dozen men. Only eleven
experts were available, so Harold volunteered
to be the twelfth. He had his working-card
made out in the usual form, entitling him to
$i8 a week. On Saturday night, when the
twelve men went to the agent-in-chief for
their wages, he said, "I want all of you to
come in and have a conference with me to-
morrow morning at ten o'clock."

"Sorry to say, Mr. Blank," said young
McCormick, "that I can't be here until
Monday."

The agent stormed. How could anything
be more important to a three-dollar-a-day
man than his job .?

"Well, if you really must know the reason,'*

The International Harvester Company 109

said the berated mechanic, "1 have an
appointment to go to church to-morrow
morning with the Rockefeller family."

The third brother — Stanley McCormick,
worked his way up from labourer to superin-
tendent of the whole plant. For years he
rose at five o'clock every work-day morning,
and walked into the factory at si.x.

All three of the McCormicks show a
remarkable sense of obligation, almost of
gratitude, to their employees. At the time
the International was organised, Stanley said
to the others:

"What about the men? There are some
of them that deserve a share in the new
company, as much as we do."

So a list of the old employees was made,
from Charlie Mulkey, the old watchman, to
R. G. Brooks, the superintendent, and
;^ 1, 500,000 was divided among them. Re-
cently a complete profit-sharing plan, such
as Perkins had worked out for the Steel
Trust, was put in working order, and about
$200,000 of extra money have been
scattered through the pay-envelopes.

The two Deerings, who are now chairman
and vice-president, were disciplined in

no The Romance of the Reaper

the same stern, old-fashioned way as the
McCormicks.

"Put this young man to work at the
bottom rung of the ladder," said William
Deering, when his younger son, James, was
graduated from the university.

Being in many respects a chip of the old
block, James Deering plunged into business
with as much energy as though he had to
toil for his millions as well as inherit them.
He became a field expert, and followed the
harvest from Texas to North Dakota. He
asked for no favours, but sweltered along
among the Western farmers for several
summers. Then he went to the foot of the
ladder in the factory and wrestled with big
iron castings and steel frames. Step by step
he worked up, until even his Spartan father
was satisfied and made him the manager
of the whole plant.

At present there is perhaps no man in the
harvester industry who has so great a variety
of attainments as James Deering. He is a
shrewd commercialist, yet he has found time,
no one knows how, to master several languages
and to run the whole octave of self-culture.

Charles Deering, the older of the two

The International Harvester Company m

brothers, had less farm experience, as he
served for twelve years in Uncle Sam's navy.
He was a lieutenant when he came ashore to
help his father make harvesters. At that
time he did much to solve the binder-twine
problem — how to get better twine and
plenty of it. Then, when the drama of
consolidation was staged by Morgan, he took
a leading part. Personally, he is a bluff,
forceful, but companionable man, such as
one would expect to find on the deck of a
war-ship rather than in the telephone-
pestered office of a sky-scraper.

The two other vice-presidents of the
Harvester Company are battle-worn veterans
of the competitive period — J. J. Glessner
and William H. Jones. Glessner, beginning
as a bookkeeper in Ohio, has for many years
been regarded as a sort of unofficial peace-
maker and balance-wheel of the trade.
Everybody confided in Glessner. He did
as much as any one else to harmonise the
warring Harvester Kings; but it is also true
that it was the gentle Glessner who developed
competition to the explosive point by originat-
ing the system of canvassing. He poured
first oil and then water on the fire.

112 The Romance of the Reaper

As for William H. Jones, he is a sturdy and
genial Welshman, who was born and bred in
a farmhouse. As a boy he reaped wheat
with a sickle in the valleys of Wales. About
forty years ago, when he had become an
American, he bought a reaper and a tent, and
set out to earn his fortune. By working twenty
hours a day, he had earned enough money,
by 1 88 1, to begin making reapers of his own,
at Piano; and he built up a large business.

The General Manager of this big anti-
famine organisation is a young Illinoisan,
named C. S. Funk. "He is the central
man," says Perkins. No other Chicagoan
of his age — he is only thirty-five — has
pushed up so quickly to so high a place,
with nothing to help him except his own grit
and ability. To-day he manages a 65,000-
man-power corporation; yet it is very
little more than twenty years since he was
trudging six miles on a hot July day, to
ask for his first job in a hay-field. Young
as he was, he was then the support of a
widowed mother, and there were seven
children younger than he.

His office, in which I was permitted to take
notes for several days, is a nerve-centre of

The International Harvester Company 113

the world. Everything that happens to the
human race is of interest to this alert young
chancellor of. the Harvester Company. A
drought in Argentina, the green bug in
Kansas, a tariff campaign in Australia, a
shortage of farm labour in Egypt, a new
railway in Southern Russia, such are the
bulletins that guide him through his day's
work.

His wide-flung army is officered mainly by
farmers' sons who had a knack for business
or for machinery. His assistant, Alex.
Legge, is an ex-cowboy from Nebraska.
Before the era of peace and unity began,
Funk and Legge had fought each other in
twenty states.

"Legge was one of the best fighters I ever
knew," said Funk; "and I think you might
put him down as the most popular man in the
company."

Maurice Kane, the company's Chief Im-
prover, and a fine type of the Irish-American,
was born on a small farm near Limerick. He
was a farm hand in Wisconsin when he first
saw a harvester, and he has pulled himself up
every inch of the way by his own abilities. A.
E. Mayer, the first of an army of forty thou-

114 The Romance of the Reaper

sand salesmen, was born on a farm in New
York. He is a sort of human Gatling gun,
loaded with the experience of his trade. B.
A. Kennedy, the overlord of the thirteen
factories, is a seasoned veteran who can
remember when he stood by the forge of a
country blacksmith shop and hammered out
ploughs by hand. Only one of the company's
aenerals, H. F. Perkins, began life with such
a luxury as a university education. He is in
charge of the raw materials — the coal and
iron and lumber and sisal and flax.

These are a few of the men who manage
this international empire of bread-machinery.
They are all practical men, hard workers,
close to the farm and the farmer. They are
not fashionable idlers, nor promoters, nor
Wall Street speculators. And they have no
more use for tickers than for telescopes — a
fact which is vitally important, now that
they are making more than half the harvesters
of the world.

Such is the International Harvester Com-
pany from the inside. But an outside view
is equally necessary. It is of tremendous
interest to 10,000,000 American farmers to
know the habits and the disposition of this

The International Harvester Company 115

powerful organisation. As Theodore Roose-
velt has said, there are good combinations
and bad ones. Which is the International
Harvester Company .''

In order to get the facts about it at first
hand, I interviewed the four chief competitors
of the Harvester Company, three Attorneys-
General, seven editors of farm papers, four
professors of agricultural colleges, seven or
eight implement agents, thirty farmers in
Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, two state
governors, and the Federal Bureau of Cor-
porations. Before I had gone far, I learned
that the big Harvester Company has been
beset by a host of new troubles.

It is an evidence of the eternal futility of
human ambition, that when a group of
warring Harvester Kings had made peace
with one another, when they had healed
their wounded and buried their dead, and
sat down to enjoy a future of prosperous
tranquillity, up sprang a host of new enemies,
armed and double-armed with weapons
from which there seemed to be no sort of
defence. Their outposts were shattered by
legislative dynamite. Tariff walls were built
across their paths. And half a dozen giant

Ii6 The Romance of the Reaper

ogres, otherwise known as Attorneys-General,
crashed into their peaceful business with
destructive clubs of law.

The bigger the organisation the more trou-
ble to protect and preserve it. This is what
Abraham Lincoln learned — what the whole
United States learned, half a century ago; and
it is the lesson that the harvester-makers are
studying to-day. It is a new phase of an
old fact; it is the Tragedy of the Trust.

Some foreign nations, too, have taken
their cue from American Legislatures, and
have become almost as hostile to the Chicago
company as though it were exporting rou-
lette wheels and burglars' jimmies. France
taxed half a million from it last year by a
penalising tariff. Australia has made it a
political issue. Germany takes a toll of ^ii
on every self-binder, and Austria takes $2$.
Roumania raised the duty on harvesters
several months ago; and there is a general
feeling that the time has come to check the
supremacy that the United States has always
had in this line.

Yet the fact that the Harvester Company
has been fined in two states does not mean
that it has taken advantage of its size to

The International Harvester Company 117

become a lawbreaker. The "crime" of
which it was declared guilty, was the main-
tenance of the old practice of "exclusive
contracts," which has been the almost
universal custom for fifty years. Each agent
was pledged not to sell any other company's
goods. The International abolished this re-
quirement tivo years ago, and several of the
independent companies still retain it. Until
the merger was organised it was regarded as
fair enough. It is one of the most usual
habits of agency business. But the American
people are now demanding that a big com-
pany shall be much more "square" and
moral than a small capitalist who is fighting
for his life.

Many of the old methods of the rough-and-
tumble days have survived. It is not possi-
ble to say "Presto, change!" to 40,000
battling agents, so that they shall at once
begin to play fair and cooperate. But the
general opinion is that the Combine has
raised the harvester business to a higher
level. At one of its branch offices I came
accidentally upon a letter written by Cyrus
H. McCormick, in which he forbade the
taking of rebates from railways.

Ii8 The Romance of the Reaper

"You must clearly understand," he wrote,
"that this company will maintain a policy of
absolute obedience to the law."

Among the farmers of Iowa and Kansas I
found no definite charges against the har-
vester combine — nothing but that vague
dread of bigness which seems natural to the
average mind, and which even the great-
brained Webster had when he opposed the
annexation of Texas and California. Of
four farm editors, one was against all " trusts "
on general principles; and the other three
believed that the -evils of harvester competi-
tion were much greater than those of consoli-
dation. The bare fact that this one cor-
poration has ^120,000,000 of capital alarms
the old-timers. Others have become more
accustomed to the Big Facts of American
business.

"Why," said one implement dealer, "after
all, $120,000,000 is less than the American
farmers earn in a vv^eek."

He might also have said that it was less
than the value of one corn crop in Iowa, or
half as much as the Iowa farmers have now
on deposit in their savings banks. It is
very little more than Russell Sage raked in

The International Harvester Company 119

through the wickets of his httle money-
lending office, or than Marshall Field ac-
cumulated from a single store. In fact, if
bread were raised one cent a loaf for one
year in the United States alone, the extra
pennies would buy out the whole "Harvester
Trust," bag and baggage.

The bulk of the farmers, so far as I could
harmonise their opinions, are now too well
accustomed to big enterprises among them-
selves to be scared by the Chicago merger.
They have at the present time more than five
thousand cooperative companies of their own.
And some of these are of national importance;
as, for instance, the powerful Cotton Grow-
ers' Trust, and the Farmers' Business Con-
gress, which owns 800 elevators for the
storage of grain.

"My only objection to the International
Harvester Company," said a business man in
St. Paul, "is that it sells its machinery
cheaper in Europe than it does in the United
States." I investigated this charge, and
found it wholly incorrect. The greater
expense and risk of foreign trade compels
the manufacturers to ask almost as high
prices as American farmers had to pay

120 The Romance of the Reaper

twenty years ago. But there is a quite
credible reason for this rumour. It is simply
this — that for some less progressive countries
a crude, old-fashioned reaper is being made,
to sell for ^45. The modern, self-rake
reaper is too complex for the simple mind of
many a Russian farmer, so he is supplied
with a clumsy machine which is ^15 cheaper,
but which looked, to my unsl'illed eye, more
than $30 worse.

No one accuses the "Trust" of having
unreasonably raised prices. On the con-
trary, it is generally given full credit for
holding prices down, in spite of the fact
that it is paying from twenty to eighty per
cent, more for its labour and raw materials
than was paid in 1902. Generally speaking,
all farm implements except thrashing-ma-
chines are cheaper now than they were in 1880,
when the competition was most strenuous.
Binders have dropped from ^325 to ^125;
hay-rakes from $25 to $16; and mowers from
$80 to ^45.

" I paid ^200 for a self-binding harvester
twenty-five years ago," said a Kansas farmer.
"Ten years later I bought another for ^140
and in 1907 I bought one from the Inter-

The International Harvester Company 121

national for ;$I25, which is in my judgment
the best of the three machines."

The International has competitors, too —
very active and able ones. Binders are made
by 4 large independent companies, mowers
by 17, corn-shredders by 18, twine by 26,
wagons by 116, and gasolene engines by 124.
Of the thirty-seven different machines made by
the International there are only three — hemp-
reapers, corn-shockers, and rice-binders — that
are made by no other company, and even these
machines are not protected by any basic
patents. Povv'erful as the International is, it
is still far from the place where business is
one long sweet dream of monopoly.

The four independent companies that
make binders seem to have no fear of the
"Trust." "We have no fault to find with
it," said President Atwater, of the Johnson
Company. "We don't want it smashed.
Why ? Because our business has doubled
since it was organised; and because we
would sooner compete with one company
than with a dozen."

"The 'Trust' was the only thing that
saved the whole harvester business from
annihilation," said the ex-president of an-

122 The Romance of the Reaper

other independent company, when I pressed
him for his personal opinion, and promised
not to use his name. "The cold fact is
really this," he added, "that the International
Harvester Company has bettered conditions
for the farmer, for the independent com-
panies, and for everybody but itself."

"The big combine has never misused its
power," said a third of the International's
competitors. " Now and then its agents
make trouble, just as ours do, no doubt.
But the men at the top have always given us
a square deal."

So it is my duty to state that on the
whole the Harvester Combine is a good
combination and not a bad one. I have
found it radically different from the get-rich-
quick trusts that have been described in
recent books and magazine articles. It is
not a monopoly. It is an advocate of free
trade. Its stock is not watered, nor for
sale in Wall Street. And the men at the top
are very evidently plain, hard-working,
simple-living American citizens, who are
quite content to do business in a live-and-let-
live way.

They are not thoroughly reconciled, even

The International Harvester Company 1 23

yet, to being a merger. They look back
with open regret to the wasteful but adven-
turous days of competition. Of the com-
bination the elder Mrs. Cyrus McCormick
finely said:

"It was a hurt of the heart. Each of our
companies was like a family. Each had a
body of loyal agents, who had been comrades
through many struggles. But the terrible
increase in expenses compelled us to subdue
our feelings and to cooperate with one
another."

"I am not a merger man myself," said
William Deering, "although I believe that
the International Harvester Company has
been a benefit to the farmers."

Cyrus H. McCormick goes still further.
He is a "trust-buster" himself, so far as the
over-capitalised and oppressive leviathans of
business are concerned. He said to me
frankly: "Some of the hostility to our
company is inspired by worthy motives,
growing out of the general opposition to the
so-called trusts." And when a North Dakota
congressman proposed in 1904 that the
International Harvester Company should be
investigated, Cyrus McCormick at once

124 The Romance of the Reaper

sent a message that amazed the Bureau of
Corporations — " Please come and investi-
gate us," he said. "If we 're not right, we
want to get right."

"Yes," said one of the highest officials of
the Roosevelt administration, when I asked
him to corroborate this very remarkable
story. "It is true that from 1904 it has been
the continued desire of the International
Harvester Company that we should investi-
gate them. In fact, during the last year
(1907) they have urged us with considerable
earnestness to make this investigation."

So, this big business has evolved from
simple to complex in accordance with the
same laws that rule plants and empires.
It has probably not yet reached its full
maturity, for it is greater than any man or
any form of organisation, and the tiny
ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no
more than its most obedient retinue. They
come and go — quarrel and make friends —
live and die. What matter ? The big busi-
ness, once alive, grows on through the short
centuries, from generation to generation.

And what does it all mean — this federa-
tion of thirteen factory cities — this coordina-

The International Harvester Company 125

tion of muscle and mind and millions —
this arduous development of a new art,
whereby a group of mechanics can take a
wagon-load of iron ore and a tree, and
fashion them into a shapely automaton that
has the power of a dozen farmers ?

// means bread. It means Jiunger-insur-
ance for the whole human race. As we shall
see in the next chapter, it jneans that the
famine problem has been solved , not only for
the United States, but for all the civilised
nations of the world.

CHAPTER IV
The American Harvester Abroad

THE first American reapers that went
to Europe were given a royal welcome.
There were two of them — one made by
McCormick and one made by Hussey, and
they were exhibited before Albert Edward,
the Prince Consort of England, at a World's
Fair in London in 1851.

There had been reapers invented in
England before this date, but none of them
would reap. All the inventors were mere
theorists. They designed their reapers for
ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them
was a preacher, the Rev. Patrick Bell;
another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher.
James Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine
that cut artificial grain on the stage. And a
machinist named Gladstone made a reaper
that also worked well until he tried it on real
grain in a real field.

But the exhibition of the American reaper
126

The American Harvester Abroad 12/

in London did not result in its immediate
adoption. There was little demand for
harvesters in England fifty years ago; and in
other European countries there was none at
all. Farm labour was cheap — forty cents
a day in England and five cents a day in
Russia; and the rush of labourers into
factory cities had not yet begun.

In the years following 1851, the American
reaper did, however, become popular among
the very rich. It became the toy of kings
and titled landowners. By 1864 Europe was
buying our farm machinery to the extent of
$600,000. This was less than she buys to-day
in a week; but it was a beginning. Several
foreign manufacturers began at this time to
make reapers, notably in Toronto, Sheffield,
Paris, and Hamburg. This competition
spurred on the American reaper agents, who
were already taking advantage of the interest
shown by royalty in the American reaper. And
from the close of the Civil War on, there was
an exciting race, generally neck and neck,
between Cyrus H. McCormick, Sr., and
Walter A. Wood, to see who could vanquish
the most of these foreign imitators, and bag
the greatest number of kings and nobilities.

128 The Romance of the Reaper

It was a contest that not only resulted in
the triumph of the American reaper, but also
brought the Reaper Kings recognition and
reputation abroad. In 1867 both McCor-
mick and Wood were decorated with the
Cross of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon
III.; and later they stood side by side to
receive the Imperial Cross from the hand of
the Austrian emperor. Hundreds of medals
and honours were showered upon these two
inventor mechanics; and the French Academy
of Science, in a blaze of Gallic enthusiasm,
elected McCormick one of its members,
because he had "done more for the cause of
agriculture than any other living man."

Many and strange were the exploits of the
American Reaper Kings at the courts and
royal farms of the real kings. Unable to
speak any language but their own, unused
to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent
in the American fashion, the Reaper Kings
plunged from adventure to adventure, abso-
lutely indifferent to everything but their
reapers and success.

"There is to be a trial of reapers at Rome
next June," wrote David M. Osborne, a New
Yorker who began to export reapers to

The American Harvester Abroad 129

Europe in 1862. ** Think of invading the
sacred precincts of that ancient place with
Yankee harvesters. We will wake up the
dry bones of these old countries, and civilise
and Christianise them with our farm ma-
chinery."

C. W. Marsh, inventor of the Marsh
Harvester, made a sensational debut in
Hungary in 1870. Several grand dukes had
arranged for a great contest of the various
sorts of reapers on one of the royal farms
in Hungary, so that the Minister of Agri-
culture might take notice. When the day
arrived, there were nine reapers at the farm,
mostly of European design.

Marsh's strange-looking machine seemed
to be a combination of reaper and work-
bench. But ten minutes after the contest
began, Marsh had the race won. His
machine was a new type, the forerunner of
the modern self-binder. It was so made
that two men could stand upon it and bind
the grain as fast as it was cut. But en this
occasion Marsh could hire no farmer to help
him and was obliged to do the work alone.
The judges were stunned with amazement,
therefore, when they found that he had bound

130 The Romance of the Reaper

three-quarters of an acre in twenty-eight
minutes. Here was a man who could do in
half an hour what few Hungarian peasants
could finish in less than a day!

" He is an athlete," said one. "A wizard,"
said another.

Before they could recover from their
astonishment, Marsh had stored his harvester,
pocketed the prize of forty golden ducats,
and hurried away to his hotel, eager for a
bath and a chance to pick the thistles out of
his hands.

But the grand dukes and miscellaneous
dignitaries were not to be escaped so easily.
An officer in gorgeous uniform was sent to
find Marsh and bring him forthwith to the
main dining-hall of the city. Here a ban-
quet was prepared, and a throng of high
personages sat down, with Marsh at the
head of the table, cursing his luck and
nursing his sore fingers.

At the close of the banquet, amid great
applause, a medal was pinned upon his coat,
and the whole assemblage hushed to hear
his reply. Now Marsh, like two-thirds of
the Reaper Kings, could no more make a
speech than walk a rope. On only one

The American Harvester Abroad 131

previous occasion had he faced an audience,
and that was at the age of twelve, when he
had recited a scrap from the **Lay of the
Last Minstrel" at a school entertainment.
As he rose to his feet, this poetic fragment
came into his mind; and so, half in fun and
half in desperation. Marsh assumed the pose
of a Demosthenes and addressed the ban-
queters as follows:

*' O Caledonia ! Stern and wild,
eet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! What mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!"

*'That was the first and only speech of my
life," said Mr. Marsh, when I saw him in his
home as DeKalb, where he has retired from
business. "But it certainly established my
reputation as an orator in that region of
Hungary."

At one famous competition near Paris, in
1879, three reapers were set to work in fields
of equal size. The French reaper led off
and finished in seventy-two minutes. The
English reaper followed and lumbered through

132 The Romance of the Reaper

in sixty-six minutes. Then came the Ameri-
can machine, and when it swept down its
stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the
judges were incHned to doubt either their
watches or their eyesight.

Another of these tournaments, which also
did much to advertise the United States as
the only genuine and original reaper country,
took place on an English estate in 1880.
There was only one American reaper in the
race, and in appearance it was the clown of
the circus. The ship that carried it had been
wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it
arrived the machine was rusted and dingy.

Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge.
He was then a youth of twenty-one, and
equally ready for an adventure or a sale.
There was no time to repaint and polish the
machine, so he resolved to convert its forlorn
appearance into an asset.

"Oil her up so she '11 run like a watch,'*
he said to his experts. "But don't improve
her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it
off. And go and hire the smallest, scrub-
biest, toughest pair of horses you can find.'*

The next day five or six foreign reapers
were on hand, each glittering with newness

The American Harvester Abroad 133

and drawn by a stately team of big Norman
horses. The shabby American reaper ar-
rived last, and met a shout of ridicule as it
rolled into its place. But in the race, "Old
Rusty," as the spectators called it, swept
ahead of the others as though it were an
enchanted chariot, winning the gold medal
and an enviable prestige among British
farmers.

In Germany, as in England, the reaper was
introduced into general use through royalty.
This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper
King named Byron E. Huntley gave the
German emperor and empress their first
view of harvesting on the American plan.
The exhibition took place in a grain-field
that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam.
At first, the empress watched the machine
from a window; but soon she became so
keenly interested that she went into the field
to study it at closer range.

"I admire you Americans," she said to the
delighted Huntley. "You are so deft — so
ingenious, to make a machine like this."

The present Emperor of Germany is not
merely interested in American harvesters;
he is an enthusiast. On several occasions

134 The Romance of the Reaper

he has held harvester matinees for the
benefit of his cabinet ministers, so that they
could see with their own eyes the superiority
of machinery to hand-labour. The first of
these matinees was given on one of the
Kaiser's farms, near the ancient city of Bonn,
in 1896; and I was told the story by Sam
Dennis, the Illinois Irishman who was in
charge of the harvester.

Dennis arranged a contest between his one
machine and forty Polish women who cut
the crain with old-fashioned sickles. As
soon as the emperor and his retinue had
arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given
and the strange race began. On one side
of the field were the forty women, bent and
browned by many a day's toil under the hot
sun. On the other side was Sam Dennis,
sitting on his showy harvester.

"Get ap!" said Dennis to the big German
horses, and the grain fell in a wide swath
over the clicking knife, swept upward on the
canvas elevator into the swift steel arms and
fingers, and was flung to the ground in a
fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with
a knotted string.

The emperor was radiant with delight.

The American Harvester Abroad 137

him a bound sheaf, so that he could see a
knot that had been tied by the machine.
The old man studied it for some time. Then
he asked me — 'Can these machines be
made in Germany ?'

"'No, your Excellency,' I said. 'They
can be made only in America.'

"'Well,' said Bismarck, speaking very
good English, 'you Yankees are ingenious
fellows. This is a wonderful machine.'"

When Loubet was President of France,
he and Seth Low, of New York, were walk-
ing together over the President's estate.
Loubet pointed to a reaper which was being
driven through a yellow wheat-field.

"Do you see that machine ?" he remarked.
"I bought it from an American company in
1870, and I have used it in every harvest
since that time. I have four of those ma-
chines now, and I want to say to you that they
are the most useful articles that come to us
from the United States. I am stating no
more than the simple truth when I tell you
that without American harvesters, France
would starve."

In still other countries the American
reaper has been popular with kings and

138 The Romance of the Reaper

potentates. The Sultan of Turkey and the
Shah of Persia each bought one during the
Chicago World's Fair. And the young King
of Spain, who ordered a mower in 1903,
narrowly escaped being minced up by its
knives. Being an impulsive youth, he gave
a cry of joy at sight of the handsome machine,
sprang upon the seat, and lashed the horses
without first laying hold of the reins. The
horses leaped, and the seventeen-year-old
Alphonso went sprawling. Twenty work-
men ran to his help, and one level-headed
American mechanic caught the reins; so
the worst penalty that the boy king had to
pay for his recklessness was a tumble and a
bad scare.

In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes
at first bought reapers partly as toys and
partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers
on their estates demanded more pay than
fifty cents a week, the manager would drive
them in a body to his barn, then throw open
the doors and show them five or six red
harvesters.

"Do you see those American machines?"
he would say. ** Unless you go back to
work at the same wages, I will reap the grain

i =i

The American Harvester Abroad I39

with these machines, and you will have no
work at all, and no money." A look at
these machine-devils has usually sent the
cowed serfs back to their sickles. But
here and there it has set them to wondering
whether or not a fifty-cent-a-week job was
worth having, and so has given them an
ABC lesson in American doctrines.

Many of the Russian nobility, too, have
begun to learn a trifle about democracy
from the American harvester agents. There
is a certain young baron, for example,
whose estate is not far from Riga. Last
year, to be in fashion, he bought a Chicago
self-binder. When it arrived, there came
with it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set
it up and start it in the field. In this case,
the mechanic was a big German-American
named Lutfring, born in Wisconsin, of
"Forty Eighter" stock.

The baron was evidently impressed by the
manly and dignified bearing of Lutfring, who
stood erect while the native workmen were
bowing and cringing in obeisance. And
when Lutfring said to him, "Now, Baron
Hahn, we are all barons in my country, but
you '11 pardon me if I do this work in my

140 The Romance of the Reaper

shirt-sleeves," the baron was so taken by
surprise that he offered to hold Lutfring's
coat. Half an hour later he was at v/ork
himself, doing physical labour for the first
time in his life. And when the harvester
had been well launched upon its sea of yellow
grain, he took Lutfring — the baron from
Wisconsin — to dinner with him in the
castle, and spent the greater part of the
afternoon showing him the family portraits.

From such beginnings the harvester has
advanced, to make in Russia the greatest
conquests it has achieved anywhere. More
business is now being done in the land of the
Czar than was done with the whole world
in 1885. One recent shipment, so large as to
break all records, was carried from Chicago
to New York on 3,000 freight-cars, and
transferred to a chartered fleet of nine steam-
ships, $5,000,000 worth of hunger-insurance.

During the Russo-Japanese War a striking
incident occurred that showed the respect
of the government for American harvesters.
Several troop-trains that were on their way to
the front were suddenly side-tracked, to
make way for a long freight train, loaded
with heavy boxes. The war generals and

The American Harvester Abroad I4I

grand dukes in charge of the troops were
furious. Why should their trains be pushed
to one side and delayed, to expedite a mere
consignment of freight ? They telegraphed
their indignation to St. Petersburg, and
received a reply from Count Witte. "The
freight train must pass," he said. "It is
loaded with American harvesters. // means
hread.^*

As a result of this attitude, there are now
some provinces in southern Russia where not
even Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson
would find much fault with the farming. I
have secured the figures for the Province of
Kuban, in the Caucasus. Here there are
3,500 thrashing-machines, 5,000 grain-drills,
37,000 harvesters, 50,000 harrows, 70,000
grain-cleaners, and 65,000 cultivators. This
is a region where, one generation ago, were
only the wooden plough, the sickle, and the
flail.

There is, to be sure, still a dense mass of
Russians whose yearly habit it is to wait
until their wheat is dead ripe, then in a few
days of frantic labour to cut down half of it
with sickles, leaving the rest to rot in the
fields. And in one Caucasian province,

1 42 The Romance of the Reaper

richer in its soil than Iowa, it is the custom
of the wandering natives to move every
three years to a new tract of land, in order
to avoid the trouble of fertilising the soil.

"I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia
with a piece of board," said one agent. "And
I have seen their thrashing done by the feet
of oxen." But the new idea has been
planted and is growing. " Russia is the
land of to-morrow," said another expert.
"We have been educating the farmers there
for seventeen years, yet we have only
scratched the surface. We who have lived
among the Russian peasants expect great
things from them."

They have succeeded, then, in their
campaign for the supremacy of the American
reaper — the Reaper Kings who enlisted the
crowned heads and the nobility of Europe in
their service. By 1899 Europe was a custo-
mer at our farm machinery factories to the
extent of twelve millions a year. This
figure was doubled in 1906, and is now
increasing by leaps and bounds. All told,
this one industry has brought us $150,000,000
of foreign money in less than fifty years.

Europe has sent us emigrants — twenty-

The American Harvester Abroad 143

five million in the past seventy-five years.
But we have more than replaced them w^ith
labour-saving farm machinery. There were
in 1907 as many American harvesters in
Europe as would do the work of eleven
million men.

If our foreign trade goes ahead at its
present rate of speed, we shall soon have
Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this
exchange of men for machinery. In the
past four years, for instance, Europe has
sent us less than four million emigrants,
but we have sent to Europe, in that time,
enough agricultural automata to equal the
labour of five million men.

And this means much to Europe. What
with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her 4,000,000
public officials, she has to serve more than
twenty-five million meals a day to men who
are non-producers. She has to clothe and
house these governmental millions and their
families. How could she do this if it were
not for the eleven million man-power of her
American harvesters, and the half billion
bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy
from other countries ^

France must have our harvesters because

144 The Romance of the Reaper

she has been short of men since the wars of
Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers
and nine-tenths of a million officials. Even
now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all
their largest grain-fields, she and Germany
cannot feed themselves. Spain at one time
exported wheat, but at present is buying
10,000,000 bushels a year. England grows
less than a quarter as much as will feed her
people. And Russia would be famine-swept
from end to end, in spite of her 30,000,000
farmers and her illimitable acres, if she had
to depend wholly upon the sickle and the
scythe.

But the story is by no means ended with
Europe. To-day the sun never sets and the
season never closes for American harvesters.
They are reaping the fields of Argentina in
January, Upper Egypt in February, East
India in March, Mexico in April, China in
May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada
in August, Sweden in September, Norway in
October, South Africa in November, and
Burma in December. It is always harvest
somewhere. The ripple of the ripened grain
goes round the world and the American
harvester follows it.

The American Harvester Abroad 145

Even from this incomplete list one may
begin to understand how tremendous is the
task that the International Harvester Com-
pany has assumed in undertakmg to cater to
the farmers of fifty countries — to adapt itself
to their various customs.

In Holland, for instance, where the grass
is short and thick, a mower must cut as close
as a barber's clippers; and in Denmark,
where moss grows under the grass, it must
cut so high as to leave the moss untouched.
The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a
light harvester, such as the "Milwaukee";
but in Argentina a light machine would be
racked into junk in a season. The Argen-
tinians, having raised cattle for generations,
rush to the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is
the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight
horses to a big "header," crack the long
whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough
ground.

There are small horses in Russia, big ones
in France, oxen in India, and camels in
Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted
to each. Certain backward countries demand
a reaper without a reel. Australia must have
a monster machine called a "stripper,"

146 The Romance of the Reaper

which combs off the heads of the grain.
California and Argentina, because of their
dry climate, can use "headers," a combina-
tion of reaper and thrashing-machine. And
so the American harvester has become a
citizen of the world, adopting the national
dress of each country.

The men who are dealing hand to hand
with these problems are no longer the Reaper
Kings, personally introducing their harvesters
through royalty and nobility. These have
been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred
American harvester experts. They are all
salaried, most of them by the "Interna-
tional"; and their work is to put the farmers
of the world to school. They are the
teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As
an example of the rapidity with which they
are sometimes able to teach, take the Philip-
pines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent
nothing whatever for farming machinery;
in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even
yet, however, they do not raise enough rice to
feed themselves; and although half of them
are farmers, only one-twentieth of their
land is cultivated.

"Many of our agents are now living in

The American Harvester Abroad 147

Siberia with their families," said C. S.
Funk, the General Pvlanager of the Inter-
national. "They are teaching the mujiks
to grow wheat and harvest it. We have
similar missionaries in South Africa and
South America and most of the countries
of the world. Some of them have gone as
far as water and rail would carry them,
and have then crossed the mountains with
their machinery on the backs of mules, so
that they might teach the natives how to
farm on the American plan. All told, we
have more than a thousand such missionaries
in foreign countries."

In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who
are in control of this army of teachers. One
was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named
Couchman, who handles several nations
from Hamburg; and the other was a cour-
teous commercial diplomat named La Porte,
who supervises France, Spain, Italy, and
Northern Africa from his office in Paris.
Each is in charge of several hundred Amer-
ican mechanics, who are exiled from home
for the sake of our harvester trade.

No renown comes to these men. No
medals are pinned upon their coats. They

148 The Romance of the Reaper

are only one regiment in the great pay-
envelope army of American mechanics. But
they are on the firing-line of the greatest
battle against ignorance and famine that
has ever been fought. They are the pioneers
of the new farmer. To show the world's
peasantry how to work with brains and
machinery, to bring them up to the American
farmer's level — that is their task. What
could be more essentially American, or more
profitable to the human race ?

Many European farmers, of course, are
easily up to the Kansas level; but the vast
majority have been mistaught that the path
of the farmer must forever be watered with
sweat. Many of them are so cramped by
the shackles of drudgery that they cannot
even conceive of the value of leisure.

"Why don't you use a scythe .? Then you
could cut twice as much," said Horace
Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm
machinery and agriculture, to a French
peasant. The peasant scratched his head.
This was a new idea.

"Because," he answered stodgily, "I
have n't got twice as much to cut."

The quick, handy ways of American

The American Harvester Abroad 149

farmers are seldom found in other countries.
A Swiss will put a big stone upon a land-
roller, to give it weight, and then walk
behind it. To ride on the roller himself
does not occur to him. A South German
will usually take the reel off his reaper, and
handle the grain by hand. Operating five
levers is too;great a tax upon his mind. An
Argentinian wastes his pesos by hiring
drivers — one on the seat and another
astride one of the horses.

"A Spanish farmer sent for me on one
occasion," an expert told me, "and I found
him in great trouble. He had bought a new
harvester, and put it together inside his barn,
which had only one narrow door. He had
to choose between taking the machine to
pieces and pulling his barn down."

Next to Russia, in the list of countries that
this army of experts has won to the harvester,
comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers
into the Transvaal, and of the Japanese into
Korea, there has been a trek of three hundred
thousand American farmers into Western
Canada — into the new forty-bushel-to-the-
acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these
emigrants were Minnesotans and Dakotans;

150 The Romance of the Reaper

therefore they are not poor. They carried
two hundred milHons across the border. And
they are now uprearing a harvester-based
civihsation in a vast region that will probably
some day have a population of twenty-five
million people.

That billiard-table country — Argentina — ■
stands third among the foreign patrons of
our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation
it is little older than Alberta. It was only
about eighteen years ago, after three cen-
turies of revolution, that Argentina settled
down to raise wheat and be good.

To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat
than Germany, and their country has be-
come a land of milk and honey. It is a
South American Minnesota, but eleven times
larger, made fertile by the slow-moving
Platte River — a hundred miles wide when
it reaches the sea — which moves through
its plains like an irrigating canal.

The fourth in rank of our harvester
buyers is Australia, which is now sending a
yearly tribute of more than a million to
the International Company. This profitable
reciprocity between Chicago and the island
continent was greatly furthered when the

,'!fc>.^i«

The American Harvester Abroad 1 51

International bought the sixty- five-acre
Osborne plant, at Auburn, New York,
which had been remarkably successful in its
Australian, as well as its French, trade.

Ride along any of the historic roadways
of the world and you will see the painted
automata from Chicago. "On the road
to Mandalay," and along the Appian Way,
and the trail of death that marks the flight
of Napoleon from Moscow, you will find
these indispensable machines. They are
cutting grass and wheat on the battle-fields
of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo.

Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out
foreign machinery by law; but Roumania
has been using our reapers and mowers for
more than fifteen years. Once in a while a
reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback;
or into Central China via the wheelbarrow
express. And now that there are irrigation
pumps at the base of the Sphinx,^that ancient
female, who has been staring at sand-hills
for three thousand years may soon look
across yellow fields in which American
binders are clicking cheerfully. They are
for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome,
Jerusalem, Mecca, and Benares — almost

152 The Romance of the Reaper

everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of
Tibet. So far as I can learn, not one harvest-
ing machine of any kind has entered that
land of mystery and superstition. In a few
other countries harvesters are not numerous.
Very few have been sold or will be in Japan.
Here are the smallest farms in the world.
A fork and a pair of scissors would seem
much more appropriate implements for such
tiny plots. Take the whole arable area
of Japan, multiply it by three, and you will
have only the state of Illinois.

In India, where a family "lives" on fifty
cents a week, where one acre makes three
farms and an entire farm outfit means no
more than a ten-dollar bill, a harvester is
still almost as great a curiosity as an Indian
tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents
told me of a rich Hindoo who bought a
complete set of American farm machines,
and had them set in a row near his house,
apparently regarding them only as curios
from a foreign land. They have never
been used, and a mob of starving labourers
reap his grain by hand within sight of his
idle machines.

There are few harvesters in Asia Minor,

The American Harvester Abroad 153

where farmers live almost like groundhogs —
a whole family in one windowless hut of
burnt clay. And there are fewer still in
Africa, where five million idle acres of fertile
land will some day be made to v/ork for the
human race.

But since the formation of the big Chicago
company, every foreign nation is being
reached and taught to throw away its reap-
ing-hooks and to cut its grain in a civilised
way. There is now practically no great
city anywhere in which a farmer cannot
buy one of the handsome red harvesters
that have done so much to give a "full
dinner-pail" to the civilized nations.

"The world is mine oyster," says the
International Harvester Company. In the
first five years of its career, it has sent to
foreign countries 920,000 harvesters of all
sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000.
It has doubled its foreign sales and now
makes two-third of the harvesters of the
world.

What with the profits, and the big orders,
and the medals, and the appreciation of
monarchs, the Harvester men have found
their foreign trade from the first a business

154 The Romance of the Reaper

de luxe. In fact, one of the principal
reasons why they quit fighting was that they
might handle this world commerce in an
organised way.

To-day they are not battling with one
another on the royal farms of Europe, like
gladiators who make sport for emperors.
There is more business and less adventure.
They have a geography of their own, and
have divided the whole world into eight
provinces. The ** Domestic" Department
of the International comprises the United
States and Canada and is managed from
Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and
Siberia, has its headquarters at Hamburg;
Western Europe and Northern Africa are
handled from Paris; Great Britain is directed
from London; South America from Buenos
Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New
Zealand from Christchurch; and Mexico
from Mexico City. Such is the commercial
empire that has its seat at the foot of Lake
Michigan.

Other countries can sell us automobiles
and bric-a-brac. They may even get over
our tariff wall with hay and cotton and
steel and lumber. But they have never

iP*

p^^^lS^k ' ~^'' Bflp-

mil 'V-

^^^^^^^^^m

>|^^^^^^^B

The American Harvester Abroad 155

dared to try to sell us farm machinery.
Every harvester in the United States was
made at home.

Either one of the two immense harvester
plants of Chicago is larger than the combined
plants of England, Germany, and France.
France, recently, made a brilliant dash
toward success in the harvester business. M.
Racquet, a journalist, built a great factory at
Amiens. He bought the best American
machinery. He allied himself with a sav-
ings bank and sold stock to the farmers.
He was protected by a high tariff. But,
alas for his eloquent prospectus! His selling
force was too small. His American ma-
chinery made more reapers in a month than
he could sell in a year. And in 1904 he fell
into bankruptcy under a debt of ten million
francs.

An American harvester is practically above
competition in foreign countries, and com-
mands an exceptional price. As for tariffs,
there is a wide open door in Great Britain,
Holland, Norway, Bulgaria, Brazil, Servia,
and South Germany. But there is a toll-
gate fee of $25 per harvester in Hungary,
and $20 in France; and for lack of a com-

156 The Romance of the Reaper

mercial treaty, the tax has lately been in-
creased in part of Germany, in Hungary,
Switzerland, and Rumania. The harvester
companies feel that they have a substantial
grievance against a government that allows
them to be not only hazed and harried at
home by tariffs on raw material, but driven
out of foreign markets as well. "The whole
world is doing business on a single street
to-day," said one harvester maker; "but
the trouble is that there are two hundred
tariff toll-gates along that street."

In self-defence, against these tariffs, the
"International" has been forced to build
two foreign factories, one in Canada and one
in Sweden. The Swedish plant is a small
affair as yet, making rakes and mowers only;
but the Canadian enterprise supports one-
tenth of the city of Hamilton, and holds about
half the Canadian trade. Its worst vexation,
so far as I can tell from a hasty visit, is a
lack of Canadian raw materials. Its chains,
bolts, nuts, and canvas aprons corne from
Chicago, its steel and coal from Pittsburg,
and three-fourths of its lumber from the
Southern states.

The country that perhaps most disturbs

The American Harvester Abroad 157

the dreams of our harvester companies, is
as far as possible from being one of the great
nations. It is scarcely a country at all —
only a scrap of coral reef uprisen at the foot
of Mexico — Yucatan. Yet this is the land
on which the United States depends for
binder twine. Manila fibre we can now
get from our new co-Americans — the Fili-
pinos; but there is never enough of it to
supply the millions of self-binders. Only
sisal-hemp yields abundantly enough. And
Yucatan is the only spot in the world where
sisal can be grown in commercial quantities.

Yucatan is smaller than South Carolina,
with not quite the population of Milwaukee.
It was once the poorest of the Central Ameri-
can states; but since the arrival of the twine-
binder it has become the richest. It sells
from fifteen to eighteen million dollars' wonh
of sisal a year, and the United States buys it
all. Three-fourths of this money is clear
profit; 2.nd it is an almost incredible fact that
the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan have a larger
net income than the owners of the immense
International Harvester Company.

Roughly speaking, the American farmer
pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year for string

158 The Romance of the Reaper

— mere string, which is used once and then
flung away. It is an extortion and a waste,
besides being the only un-American factor
in the whole harvester business.

How can we save these twelve millions
and completely Americanise the trade ?
This is a problem that William Deering toiled
at for twenty years. The Harvester Com-
pany has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul

— a new factory, which twists twine from
flax. A farmer's son named George H.
Ellis has found a quick and cheap way to
clean the flax fibre; and at the time I visited
the factory there were more than three
hundred workers at the spindles. Two
million pound of the twine were sold in 1906,
so that the enterprise is no longer an experi-
ment. This means, probably, that the far-
mer of the future vs^ill grow his own twine.
Instead of yielding tribute to the forty Sisal
Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than
the charges of the railroad and the factory.
The flax will be his own.

Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country
that has been enriched by the harvester.
Elsewhere it is the rule that the common
people of the nation must reach a certain

^ p

The American Harvester Abroad 159

high level before the harvester trade can
begin. Where human labour has little value,
it is plainly not worth saving.

For this reason, the harvester is the
best barometer of civilisation. It cannot
go where slavery and barbarism exist. It
will not enter a land where the luxury of
the city is built on the plunder of the men
and women who work in the fields. Who-
ever operates a harvester must not only be
intelligent: he must be free.

To hundreds of millions of foreigners,
the United States is known as "the country
where the reapers come from." They realise,
too, that farm machinery represents our
type of genius, that it springs out of our
national life, and comes from us as inevi-
tably as song comes from Italy or silk from
France.

Why ? Read the history of the United
States. This was the first country, so far
as we can know, where men of high intelli-
gence went to work en masse upon the soil,
and under such conditions as compelled them
to develop a high degree of mechanical skill.
The pioneer American farmer had to be his
own carpenter and blacksmith. He had to

l6o The Romance of the Reaper

build his own house and make his own har-
ness. Consequently, before this Farmers'
Republic was two generations old, the reaper
was born in the little workshop behind the barn.

In the Old World every occupation stood
alone and aloof. The mechanics knew
nothing of the farm and the farmer knew
nothing of the workshop. "Every man to
his trade," said Europe, Asia, and Africa.
But in the New World, where trades and
classes and nationalities were flung together
in a heterogenous jum.ble, there sprang up
a race of handy, inventive farmers, set free
from the habits and prejudices of their
fathers. They were the first body of men
who were competent to solve the problem
of farm machinery.

And so, the American harvester is much
more than a handy device for cutting grain.
It is the machine that makes democracy pos-
sible. It reaches the average man, and more
— it pushes the ladder of prosperity down so
far that even the farm labourer can grasp
the lowest rung and climb. It has become
one of our national emblems. It is as truly
and as exclusively American as the Stars and
Stripes or the Declaration of Independence.

CHAPTER V

The Harvester and the American
Farmer

IF THE American Farmer went out of
business this year he could clean up
thirty thousand million dollars. And he
would have to sell his farm on credit; for
there is not enough money in the whole
world to pay him half his price.

Talk of the money-mad Trusts! They
might have reason to be mad if they owned
the farms, instead of their watered stock.
When we remember that the American
Farmer earns enough in seventeen days
to buy out Standard Oil, and enough in
fifty days to wipe Carnegie and the Steel
Trust off the industrial map, the story of
the trusts seems like "the short and simple
annals of the poor."

One American harvest would buy the
kingdom of Belgium, king and all. Two
would buy Italy. Three would buy Austria-
i6i

1 62 The Romance of the Reaper

Hungary. And five, at a spot cash price,
would take Russia from the Czar.

Talk of swollen fortunes ! \Vith the setting
of every sun, the money-box of the American
Farmer bulges with the weight of twenty-
four new millions. Only the most athletic
imagination can conceive of such a torrent
of wealth.

Place your finger on the pulse of your
wrist and count the heart-beats; one — two —
three — four. With every four of those
quick throbs, day and night, a thousand
dollars clatters into the gold-bin of the
American Farmer.

How incomprehensible it would seem
to Pericles, who saw Greece in her Golden
Age, if he could know that the yearly revenue
of his country is now no more than one day's
pay for the men who till the soil of this
infant Republic!

Or, how it would amaze a resurrected
Christopher Columbus, if he were told that
the revenues of Spain and Portugal are not
nearly as much as the earnings of the Ameri-
can Farmer's Hen!

Merely the crumbs that drop from the
Farmer's table (otherwise known as agri-

The Harvester and American Farmer 163

cultural exports), have brought him in
enough oi^ foreign money since 1892, so that
he could, if he wished, settle the railway
problem once for all, by buying every foot
of railroad in the United States.

Such is our New Farmer — a man for
whom there is no name in any language.
He is as far above the farmer of the story-
books, as a 1908 touring-car is above a
jinrikisha. Instead of being an ignorant
hoe-man in a barn-yard world, he gets the
news by daily paper, daily mail, and tele-
phone; and incidentally publishes seven
hundred trade journals of his own. Instead
of being a moneyless peasant, he pays the
interest on the mortgage with the earnings
of four days, and his taxes with the earnings
of a week. Even this is less of an expense
than it seems, for he borrows the money
from himself, out of his own banks, and
spends the bulk of the tax money around his
own properties.

Farming for a business, not for a living —
this is the ??iotif of the New Farmer. He is
a commercialist — a man of the twentieth
century. He works as hard as the Old
Farmer did, but in a higher way. He

164 The Romance of the Reaper

uses the four M's — Mind, Money, Ma-
chinery and Muscle; but as Httle of the latter
as possible.

Neither is he a Robinson Crusoe of the
soil, as the Old Farmer was. His hermit
days are over; he is a man among men.
The railway, the trolley, the automobile
and the top buggy have transformed him
into a suburbanite. In fact, his business
has become so complex and many-sided,
that he touches civilisation at more points
and lives a larger life than if he were one of
the atoms of a crowded city.

All American farmers, of course, are not
of the New variety. The country, like the
city, has its slums. But after having made
allowance for exceptions, it is still true that
the United States is the native land of the
New Farmer. He is the most typical human
product that this country has produced,
and the most important; for, in spite of its
egotistical cities, the United States is still a
farm-based nation.

There could be no cloth-mills without
the wool and cotton of the farm; no sugar
factories without beets; no flour-mills with-
out wheat; no beef-packing industry without

The Harvester and American Farmer 165

cattle. The real business that is now swing-
ing the whole nation ahead is not the ping-
pong traffic of the Stock Exchanges, but the
steady output of twenty millions a day
from the fields and barn-yards. If this
farm output were to be cut off, the towering
skyscrapers would fall and the gay palace-
hotels would be as desolate as the temple
of Thebes.

The brain-working farmer is the man
behind prosperity. That is the Big Fact
of recent American history. It is he who
pays the bills and holds up the national
structure in the whirlwind hour of panic.
Last year, for instance, while banks were
tumbling, the non-hysterical farmer was
quietly gathering in a crop that was worth
three times all the bank capital in the United
States; and since 1902 he and his soil have
produced as much new wealth as would
support Uncle Sam, at his present rate of
living, for fifty years.

What was called "McKinley Prosperity"
was really created by the agricultural boom
of 1897. There had been a general crop
failure in Europe, and the price of wheat
had soared above a dollar a bushel. Other

l66 The Romance of the Reaper

nations paid us twelve hundred millions
for farm products; and this unparalleled
inpouring of foreign money made us the
richest and busiest nation in the world.

The supreme fact about the American
Farmer is that he has always been just as
intelligent and important as anyone else in
the Republic. He put fourteen of his sons
in the White fiouse; and he did his full share
of the working and fighting and thinking
and inventing, all the way down from George
Washington to James Wilson.

He climbed up by self-help. He got no
rebates, nor franchises, nor subsidies. The
free land that was given him was worthless
until he took it; and he has all along been
more hindered than helped by the meddling
of public officials.

His best friend has been the maker of
farm-machinery. But this is a family matter.
Four-fifths of the Harvester Kings were
farmers' sons; and the biggest harvester
factory is only a development of the small
workshop that always stood beside the
barn. There are no two men who are more
closely linked together by the ties of blood
and business than the farmer and the man

The Harvester and American Farmer 167

who makes his labour-saving machines.
Neither one can hurt the other without
doing injury to himself

The inventor of the modern plough, Jethro
Wood, was a wealthy Quaker farmer of
New York — a man of such masterful
intelligence as to count Clay and Webster
among his friends. The late James Oliver,
and David Bradley, one of his greatest com-
petitors, were born and bred near the fur-
rowed soil.

McCormick built his first reaper in a
blacksmith shop on a farm. So did John F.
Sieberling, William N. Whiteley, Lewis Miller
and C. W. Marsh. And the man who owned
the first of the reaper factories, Dayton S.
Morgan, grew up amid the stumps of a
New York farm.

The American Farmer'^has always grown
ideas, as well as corn and potatoes. That
is the secret of his prosperity. It was out
in the wheat-fields where the idea of a self-
binder flashed upon the brain of John F.
Appleby; where Jacob Miller learned to
improve the thresher and George Esterley
to build the header and Joseph F. Glidden
to invent barb-wire.

l68 The Romance of the Reaper

Before 1850 there was some progress
among farmers, but it was as slow as mo-
lasses in Alaska. They were free and inde-
pendent, and little else. They had poor
homes, poor farms, poor implements.

Then came the gold-rush to California.
What this event did for farmers and the world
can scarcely be exaggerated. It opened up
the prairies, fed the hungry banks with
money, lured the farm labourers westward,
and compelled the farmers to use machinery.

Three years later the Crimean War sent
the price of wheat soaring, and the farmers
had a jubilee of prosperity. Away went
the log-cabin, the ox-cart, the grain-cradle,
and the flail. In came the frame house,
the spring buggy, the reaper, and the thresher.
The farmers began to buy labour-saving
devices. Better still, they began to invent
them.

There is one farm-bred man, named R. C.
Haskins, in the Harvester Building in Chicago,
who, in his thirty years of salesmanship,
has supervised the selling of ^275,000,000
worth of harvesters to American farmers.
And as for the amount of money represented
by our farm machinery of all kinds, now in

The Harvester and American Farmer 169

use, it is very nearly a billion dollars — a
total that no other nation can touch.

To measure American Farmers by the
census is novv^ an outgrown method, for the
reason that each farmer works with the
power of five men. The farm has become
a factory. Four-fifths of its work is done
by machinery, which explains how we can
produce one-fifth of the wheat of the world,
half of the cotton, and three-fourths of the
corn, although we are only six per cent,
of the human race.

The genie who built Aladdin's palace in
a night was the champion hustler of the
fairy tale countries. But he was not so
tremendously superior to the farm labourer
who takes a can of gasolene and cuts fifty
cords of wood in a day, or to the man who
milks a herd of sixty cows in two hours, by
machinery.

To-day farming is not a drudgery. Rather
it is a race — an exciting rivalry between
the different States. For years Illinois and
Iowa have run neck and neck in the raising
of corn and oats. Minnesota carries the
blue ribbon for wheat, with Kansas breath-
less in second place. California has shot

I/O The Romance of the Reaper

to the front in the barley race. Texas and
Louisiana are tied in the production of
rice. Kentucky is the tobacco champion;
and New York holds the record for hay
and potatoes.

To see the New Farmer at his best, I
went to Iowa. No other State has invested
so much money — sixty millions — in labour-
saving machinery, so it can fairly claim to be
the zenith of the farming world.

Here there are tv/enty thousand women
and three hundred thousand men who have
made farming a profession. They are pro-
ducing wealth at the rate of five hundred
millions a year, nearly sixteen hundred
dollars apiece. How ^ By throwing the
burden of drudgery upon machines.

Iowa is not so old; she will be sixty-two,
this year. She is not so large; little England
is larger. Yet, with her hog-money she
could pay the salaries of all the monarchs
of Europe; and with one year's corn crop
she could buy out the "Harvester Trust,"
or build three New York Subways.

When the Indians sold Iowa to Uncle Sam
they got about eight cents an acre. To
give the price exactly, to a cent, it was

The Harvester and American Farmer ijl

1^2,877,547.87. When this money was paid,
there were statesmen who protested that it
was too much. Yet this amount was less
than the lowans got for last year's colts;
it was less than one quarter of the value of
the eggs in last year's nests. Every three
months, the Iowa hen pays for Iowa.

Through the courtesy of Mr. Harlan, of
the Des Moines Historical Society, I ob-
tained the addresses of nine old settlers,
who went into Iowa with ox-carts, before
1850, and who are still living. I found
that every one of them had remained on the
land and was prosperous. The poorest
owned ^7,000, the richest $96,000; and their
average wealth was $36,000.

These fortunes are not made, as in France,
by sacrificial economies. The lowan is
noted as a high liver and a good spender.
Here, for instance, is the menu of a chance
supper I enjoyed at the home of an Iowa
farmer, nine miles from Des Moines:
Mashed potatoes, poached eggs, hot biscuits,
white bread, fresh butter, honey, jelly,
peaches and cream, gooseberry pie, and
good coffee — all served on china, with
fine linen tablecloth and napkins. The

172 The Romance of the Reaper

man of the house was the son of a rack-
rented Irish immigrant, who had been
reared "on potatoes and salt, mostly."

I found one young county, born since the
Civil War, in which five thousand farmers
now own property worth seventy-five mil-
lions. They have fourteen thousand horses,
seventeen thousand sheep, sixty thousand
rattle, and ninety thousand hogs. In the
furnishing of the homes in this county, so
its Auditor informs me, more than twenty-
five thousand dollars have been spent on
the one item of pianos.

In a small, out-of-the-way town, called
Ames, I came upon a farmers' college — a
veritable Harvard of the soil. Here, on a
thousand acres which fed the wild deer and
buffalo in the days of Andrew Jackson, is
a college that equals Princeton and Vassar
combined, in the number of its pupils. Its
farm machinery building is the largest of
its kind. Five professors are in charge,
and it is a curious fact, showing how new
the New Farmer is, that these professors
are obliged to teach without a text-book.
As yet, there is no such thing in the world
as a text-book on farm machinery.

The Harvester and American Farmer 173

The lowans pay half a milhon dollars a
year to sustain this college. They pay it
cheerfully. They pay it with a hurrah.
Why ? Because it is the biggest money-
maker in the State. One little professor,
named Holden — the smallest of the whole
hundred and forty, is revered by the lowans
as a Kino- Midas of the cornfield. He has
shown them how to grow ten bushels more
per acre, by using a better quality of seed.
This one ideay in a State where every
fourth dollar is a corn dollar, meant an
extra twenty millions last year.

First in corn, first in farm machinery,
and first in the number of her banks! That
is Iowa. There are a few of her villages
that have no banks, but they are conscious
of their disgrace. They feel naked and
ashamed. In all, there are as many banks
as post-offices, very nearly; and they are
crammed with enough wealth to build
three Panama Canals.

"Money is a trifle tight just now," said an
Iowa banker. This was last September.
"You see, at this time of year, the farm
labourers cause a drain on the currency by
keeping their wages in their pockets." This

174 The Romance of the Reaper

surprising fact did not seem surprising
to the banker. He was himself bred on
the soil — the son of a farm-hand who had
become a rich farmer. But to the finan-
ciers of Europe, what an incredible thing
is this — that the wages of the farm-labourers
should sway the money market up and down.
The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city
of farm-bred people. It is so young that
some of its old men remember when wolf-
hunting was good where its one skyscraper
stands to-day. It has no ancient history
and no souvenirs. A little while ago a lot
of industrious people came here poor, and
now they are prosperous and still busy — •
that is the story of Des Moines in a sentence.

In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol
at Des Moines is a life-sized painting of a
prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such
a rude conveyance as this most of the early
settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two
miles an hour. But there are no prairie
wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles
of railway criss-cross the State, and make
more profit in three months than all the
railways of ancient India made last year.

Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these

The Harvester and American Farmer 175

lowans pay the total self-governing cost of
their Commonwealth by handing over the
price of the summer's hay. Instead of being
the prey of money-lenders, they have made
Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in
vv^hich forty-two insurance companies carry
a risk of half a billion. And so, in each
one of its details, the story of these Corn
Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller,
especially to anyone who has cold storage
ideas about farmers.

Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are
grown in Iowa. Here is a sample group —
half educators and half statesmen — John B.
Grinnell, Henry Smith Williams, Albert
Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder,
Emerson Hough, Hamlin Garland, Senators
Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John

A. Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert

B. Cummins and our Official Farmer —
James Wilson. There are now fifteen hun-
dred newspaper men in Iowa. (One of
them ships seven carloads of magazines a
month.) There are three hundred and
fifty architects, two thousand engineers,
five thousand doctors, three thousand bankers
and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers.

176 The Romance of the Reaper

These amazing changes have taken place
within the memory of men and women who
are now alive.

"I can remember when the first mowing-
machine was made in our county," said
Governor Cummins, who is still far from
being a man of years.

"I walked eight miles through the forest
and sold eggs for three cents a dozen and
butter for four cents a pound," said John
Cownie — a well-known figure at the Des
Moines Capitol.

One short half-century, and here is the
v/hole paraphernalia of a high civilisation —
a fruitage which has usually required the
long cultivation of a thousand years.

And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller
hears the same story — from ox-cart to
automobile, in almost every region of the
prairie West. The various States are only
patches of one vast grassy plain where

" painted harvesters, fleet after fleet,
Like yachts, career through seas of Vv^aving wheat."

"My first experience with the 'New
Farmer,' as you call him, was in Texas,"
said a Kansas City business man. "I had
taken an agency for harvesters in a section

The Harvester and American Farmer 1 77

of Texas that was bigger than several dozen
Vermonts, and I made my headquarters
in a town called Amarillo. The first morning
I went into the bank to get acquainted.
While I was there in came a big, roughly
dressed man. "'Come here, Bill,' said the
banker. 'Maybe you want some farm ma-
chinery.'

"'Maybe I do,' said the big fellow; so I
gave him a catalogue and went on talking
with the banker.

"Ten minutes later the big fellow looked
up from the catalogue and asked — 'How
much do you want for ten of these binders ?*
I nearly had a spell of heart failure, but I
gasped the price. He said — 'all right;
send 'em along.'

"'Don't you worry about Bill's credit,*
said the banker, seeing I looked dazed.
'He has more than $100,000 in this bank
right now.'

"This was my cue to get busy with the
big farmer, and before he left the bank he
had bought a thresher, four traction engines
and half a dozen ploughs."

Harvesting by machinery has actually
become cheaper than the ancient method

IjS The Romance of the Reaper

of harvesting by slaves. This surprising
fact was first brought to the notice of Euro-
peans during the Chicago World's Fair,
when forty-seven foreign Commissioners were
taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in
North Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-
field very nearly a hundred square miles in
extent, with three hundred self-binders click-
ing out the music of the harvest. There
were no serfs — no drudges — no barefooted
women. And yet they were told that the
labour-cost of reaping the wheat was less

THAN A CENT A BUSHEL.

It has now become impossible to reap the
world's wheat by hand. As well might we
try to carry coal from mines to factories
in baskets. Merely to have gathered in our
own cereal and hay of last year's growing,
would have been a ten days' job for every
man and woman in the United States,
between the ages of twenty and twenty-six.
But even if it had been possible to return
to hand-labour, in the production of the
world's wheat, the extra cost would have
swollen, last year, to a total of ^330,000,000
— so I am told by a Wisconsin professor
who has made a careful study of the costs

The Harvester and American Farmer 1/9

of harvesting. This amount is more than
equal to the entire revenue of the International
Harvester Company, in the five years of its
existence.

Roughly speaking, the time needed to
handle an acre of wheat has been reduced
from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of
machinery. Hay now requires four hours,
instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours,
instead of sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-
eight hours, instead of one hundred and nine.

It is machinery that has so vastly increased
the size of the average American farm.
In India, where a farmer's whole outfit
can be bought for ten dollars, the average
farm is half an acre or less. In France and
Germany it is five acres. In England it
is nine. But in the United States — the
home of farm machinery, it is one hundred
and fifty acres.

Very little has been written about this
stupendous prosperity of American farmers.
Why ? Because it is so recent. The Era
of Big Profits began barely ten years ago.
There was a time when the blue-ribbon
New Farmer was the man who grew wheat
in the Red River Valley. He was the

l8o The Romance of the Reaper

aristocrat of the West. His year's work was
no more than a few weeks of ploughing and
sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even
this was done easily, sitting on the seat of a
machine and driving a team of splendid
horses. After harvest, he cashed in, carried
a big cheque to the bank, and settled down
for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead
in the East.

But it was the bad year of 1893 that first
put the farmers, the country over, on the
road to affluence. Up to that time it was
their usual policy to depend upon a single
crop. One farmer planted nothing but
wheat; another planted nothing but corn;
a third nothing but cotton; and so on. But
in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton
fell so low that the farmers' profits were
wiped out. This disaster set the farmers
thinking; and in four years they had changed
over to the new policy o^ Diversified Farming.

Instead of putting all their vv^ork upon one
crop, they planted from three to a dozen
different crops each year. They manu-
factured their corn into cattle. They gave
the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisa-
tion. They learned to plant better seed

The Harvester and American Farmer l8l

and to pay attention to the Weather Bureau.
They studied the market reports. And,
best of all, they swung over from muscle to
machinery, until to-day the value of the
machinery on American farms is fully a
thousand millions.

All this amazing progress that I have been
describing is by no means the best that the
New Farmer will do. It is merely what
he has done by the aid of machinery. What
he w^ill do by the aid of Science remains
to be seen.

Scientific agriculture is young. It has
had to wait until machinery prepared the
way, by giving the farmers time to thmk,
and money to spend. The first scientist
who took notice of farming was the French-
man, Lavoisier. He found out the composi-
tion of water in 1783, and was in the midst
of many discoveries, when a Paris mob
hustled him to the guillotine. The famous
Liebig next appeared and founded the first
agricultural experiment station. Then came
Berthelot — the father of synthetic chemis-
try, with his sensational announcement — ■
"The soil is alive."

To-day the New Farmer finds himself

l82 The Romance of the Reaper

touched by Science on all sides. He knows
that there are more living things in one pinch
of rich soil than there are people on the
whole globe. He knows that he can take
half a dozen handfuls of earth from different
parts of his farm, mix them together, send
one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out
exactly the kind of crop that will give him
the best harvest. And more, now that
science has given him a peep into Nature's
factory, he can even feel a sense of kinship
between himself and his acres, because he
knows that the same e^lements that redden
his blood are painting the green hues on
his fields and forests.

There are now fifteen thousand New
Farmers who have graduated from agri-
cultural colleges; and since the late Professor
W. C. Atwater opened the first American
experiment station in 1875, fifty others have
sprung into vigorous life. There is also
at Washington an Agricultural Department
which has become the greatest aggregation
of farm-scientists in the world. To main-
tain this Department Uncle Sam pays
grudgingly eleven millions a year. He pays
much more than this to give food and

The Harvester and American Farmer 183

blankets to a horde of lazy Indians, or for
the building of two or three warships.
But it is at least more than is being spent
on the New Farmer in any other country.

Step by step farming is becoming a sure
and scientific profession. The risks and
uncertainties that formerly tossed the farmer
back and forth, between hope and despair,
are being mastered. The Weather Bureau,
which sent lialf a million warnings last
year to the farmers, has already become so
skilful that six-sevenths of its predictions
come true. In Kansas, wheat-growing has
become so sure that there has been no failure
for thirteen years. And in the vast South-
West, the trick of irrigation is chano-ing the

' o too

man-killing desert mto a Farmers' paradise,
where there is nothing so punctual as the
crops.

Already gasolene engines are in use
among the New Farmers. The International
Harvester Company made twenty-five thou-
sand of them last year at Milwaukee, without
supplying the demand. These engines, in
the near future, will be operated with
alcohol, which the farmers can distil from
potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon.

184 The Romance of the Reaper

This is no dream, as there are now six
thousand alcohol engines in use on the farms
of Germany alone.

When this Age of Alcohol arrives, the
making of the New Farmer will be very
nearly complete. He will then grow his
own power, and know how to harness for
his own use the omnipotence of the soil.

u --.

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