In his earlier journeys through the Middle West, McCormick was distressed at the rough immorality of the new settlements. "I see a great deal of profanity and infidelity in this country, enough to make the heart sick," he wrote in 1845. These towns and villages needed more preachers, and better preachers, he thought. Consequently, soon after he had acquired his first million dollars, he determined to establish the best possible college for the education of ministers. He almost stunned with joy the Western friends of higher education for ministers, by offering them $100,000 with which to establish a school of theology in Chicago. This offer was made in 1859—half a century ago, and resulted in the removal of a moneyless and decaying Seminary at New Albany, Indiana, to Chicago. Thus was founded the Northwestern Theological Seminary, afterwards named the McCormick Theological Seminary, which, in its fifty years of life, has given a Christian education to thousands of young men.
Thirteen years later he bought The Interior and made it what it has remained ever since—a religious weekly of the highest rank. These two—the college and the paper—were his pride and delight. He fathered them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its last sentence was typical of McCormick—full of hope and optimism: "I never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has hitherto shone upon us."
McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself, but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics, he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.
What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world. They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain him so far as he is right."
He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration.
He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war, and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he bought a daily paper—The Times—to explain to Chicago the standpoint of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he opposed it,—put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck.
He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union and the paths of law.
The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two conventions—one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband their armies and reëstablish peace.
After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of political partisanism into the religious life.
"When are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian fellowship," he asked, "so long as those who aspire to fill the high places of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now that the great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues settled, religion and patriotism alike require the exercise of mutual forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which tend to peace."
For the mere game of party politics Mr. McCormick cared little or nothing. It was all as irksome to him as the task of governing Geneva was to John Calvin; but he could not help himself. His political convictions were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They were racial traits which his forefathers and foremothers had spent at least three centuries in developing.
On one occasion Dr. John Hall of New York, seeing how Mr. McCormick was worried by political obligations, said to him:
"Why do you plague yourself with these uncongenial things? What glory can you hope to get from politics that will add to what you now possess as the inventor of the Reaper?"
"Dr. Hall," replied Mr. McCormick, "I am in politics because I cannot help it. There are certain principles that I have got to stand by, and I am obliged to go into politics to defend them."
The form of Mr. McCormick's religious faith had been forged by such preacher-patriots as John Knox and Andrew Melville; and he, like them, found it as imperative upon his conscience to fight for both civil and religious liberty. With his whole heart he believed in American institutions as they had been established by the nation-builders of 1776. He did not want the Constitution to be ignored by Federal reformers, nor the Union to be broken by secession. He was by temperament and tradition a conservative, and opposed especially to all extreme measures and sectional innovations. As he had adapted his Reaper so that it would cut grain in all States, he could never see why political policies, too, should not be lifted above the limitations of geography and made to conserve the welfare of the whole people. As he said on one strenuous occasion when laboring mightily to beat back the extremists in his own party: "Is not every government on the face of the earth established upon the principle of compromise?"
To special privileges of every sort he was unalterably opposed. He asked for none for himself—no favoring tariff or grant of public land or monopolistic franchise. "I have been throughout my life," he said, "opposed to all measures which tend to raise one class of the American people upon the ruin of others, or one section of our common country at the expense of another. The country is the common property of all parties, and all are interested in its prosperity."
All this shows the heroic side of McCormick; but he was not always heroic. He was a giant, but a most human and simple-natured giant. Strange as it may sound to those who knew him only with his armor on, it is true that he could be tender or humorous. There were tears and laughter in him. There was no cruelty in his strength and no revenge in his aggressiveness. He was a big, red-blooded, great-hearted man, who might to-day be threatening to cane a politician who had deceived him, and to-morrow be playing with his younger children and letting their two pet squirrels, Zip and Zoe, chase each other around his shoulders.
He was fond of power, not because of its privileges and exemptions, but because it furthered the work that he had in hand. He was often surrounded by sycophants—by men who said yes to his yes and no to his no; and while he accepted this homage with a certain degree of satisfaction, he was not deceived by it. On one occasion, when he was attending the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati—the convention that nominated Hancock as candidate for President,—he was beset by a court of flatterers and lip-servers. After it was over, he remarked simply to his valet, "Well, Charlie, there is a lot of farce and humbug about this."
Dr. Francis L. Patton, who was for years the president of Princeton University and also at one time editor of The Interior, was especially impressed with this direct naturalness of McCormick. "One meets with all sorts of men in the course of a lifetime," said Dr. Patton. "There are patronizing men, pompous men, men who habitually wear a mask of seriousness, men who clothe themselves with dignity as with a coat of mail lest you should presume too much or go too far, men whose position is never defined, and double-minded men with whom you never feel yourself safe. But Mr. McCormick was not like one of these. There is that in the possession of power which always tends to make men imperious. I do not mean to imply that he was altogether free from this tendency, for he was not. But he was approachable, companionable, and ready to hear what I had to say. He was not one of those men who are so uninterestingly self-controlled as to be always the same. There were times when his mirth was contagious and times when his wrath was kindled a little. We did not always agree, and sometimes we both grew hot in argument; but at the end his cheery laugh proclaimed the fact that our differences had only been the free and easy give-and-take of friendship."
To see McCormick laugh was a spectacle. There was first a mellowing of his usual Jovian manner. His gray-brown eyes twinkled. The tense lines of his face relaxed. Then came a smile and soon a burst of laughter, shaking his powerful body and putting the whole company for the time into an uproar of merriment. It was the triumph of the genial and magnetic side of his nature—the side that was ordinarily repressed by the pressure of his big affairs.
McCormick had humor, but not wit. His jokes were simple and old-fashioned, such as Luther and Cromwell would have laughed at. There was no innuendo and no cynicism. On one occasion two small urchins knocked at the door and asked for food. McCormick heard their voices and had them brought into the sitting-room, where he happened to be in consultation with his lawyer. "Now," said he to the youngsters, "we are going to put both of you on trial. I will be the judge and this gentleman will be the prosecutor." Each boy in turn was placed on the witness-stand, and plied with questions. It was soon clear that neither of them was telling the truth, so "Judge" McCormick took them in hand and gave them a serious talk on the folly and wickedness of lying. Then he gave them twenty-five cents apiece, and sent them down to the kitchen to eat as much supper as they could hold.
At another time a very dignified and self-centred military officer was taking supper with the McCormick family. The first course, as usual, was corn-meal mush and milk. This was served in Scotch fashion, with the hot mush in one bowl and the cold milk in another, and the practice was to so co-ordinate the eating of these that both were finished at the same time. The officer planned his spoonfuls badly, and was soon out of milk. "Have some more milk to finish your mush, Colonel," said McCormick. Several minutes later the Colonel's mush bowl was empty, at which McCormick said, "Have some more mush to finish your milk." And so it went, with milk for the mush and mush for the milk, until the unfortunate Colonel was hopelessly incapacitated for the four or five courses that came afterwards.
McCormick was not by any means a teller of stories, but he had a few simple and well-worn anecdotes that appealed so strongly to his sense of humor that he told and re-told them many times. There was the story of the man who stole the pound of butter and hid it in his hat, and how the grocer saw him and kept talking in the store, beside a hot stove, until the butter melted and exposed the man's thievery. Another favorite story was about the pig that found its way into a garden by walking through a hollow log, and how the gardener fooled the pig by placing the hollow log in such a way that both ends of it were on the outside of the garden.
Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral tang—a flavor of the first Psalm and the eighth chapter of Romans. They were apt to deal with the troubles of the ungodly who had been caught in their wickedness. There were times, too, when his sense of humor and his sense of justice would co-operate in odd ways. Once, when a roast game bird, which had been sent to him as a gift from the hunter, was left over from supper, he ordered that his dainty be kept and served for the next day's luncheon. At luncheon the next day it did not appear. On asking for the game bird, a roast chicken was set before him, and he at once noticed that it was not the same bird which he had ordered to be kept. He questioned the butler, who protested that it was the same. After the meal McCormick ordered that the servants involved should be called into the dining-room. From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times, "A thief you can watch, but I detest a liar."
There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon the great inventor himself. His two youngest sons, Harold and Stanley, would hide in the hallway when they saw him approaching, and pounce out upon him with wild yells in small-boy fashion, but they were both privileged people.
McCormick was a most hearty and hospitable man. He was an ideal person for such a life-work—the abolition of famine. He was fond of food and plenty of it. He loved to see a big table heaped with food. The idea of hunger was intolerable to him. He might well have been posing for a statue of the deity of Plenty, as he squared himself around to the long, family dinner-table, with his napkin worn high and caught at his shoulders by a white silk band that went around his neck, and with a complacent, "Now, then," plunged the carving-fork into a crisp and fragrant fowl that lay on the platter in front of him.
The fact that McCormick seldom made a social call was not due to his own choosing, but because of the many worries and compulsions of his life. Once, when confiding in an intimate friend, he said, "It pains me very much to think how little I am known by my neighbors, but I seem to be always too busy to meet them." He was not at all, as many have thought because of his strenuous life, a man of harsh and rough exterior. There was nothing rough about him except his strength. He was irreproachable in dress and personal appearance. He did not drink, smoke, nor swear. And his manners and language, on formal occasions, were those of a dignified gentleman of the old school—a Calhoun, or a Van Buren.
He was not a hard-natured man, except when he was battling for his rights and his principles. He would often turn from an overwhelming mass of business to play with one of his children. He was as ready to forgive as he was to fight. He never cherished resentments or personal grudges. He knew that life was a conflict of interests and policies; and when he forgave, his forgiveness was free and full, and not a formal ceremony. It was as honest and as spontaneous as his wrath. He was one of the few men who could freely pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
His fame and honors and intimacies with people of rank never made him less democratic in his sympathies. He always had a profound respect for the man or woman who did useful work, if the work was done well. Once, when a poor woman went to him for advice about some trifling thing that she had invented, he turned from his work and explained to her, with the utmost patience and courtesy, the things that she wished to know. With his trusted employees, too, he was usually kindly and sometimes jovial. "I had only one brush with him in thirty-five years," said one of his cashiers. "The last time that I saw him, he met me on the street and said, 'Hello, Sellick, have you got lots of money? Can you give me a hundred thousand dollars to-day?' 'Yes, sir,' I answered. 'Well, I'm glad I don't need it,' he said with a laugh."
The loyalty of his workmen and his agents was always a source of pride to McCormick. It was one of the favorite topics of his conversation. He would mention his men by name and tell of their exploits with the deepest satisfaction. On one occasion, when a body of agents made a united demand for higher salaries, there was one agent in Minnesota who refused to take part in the movement. "I don't want to force Mr. McCormick," he said. "I have worked for him for nearly thirty years, and I know that he is a just man, and that he will do what is right." Not long afterwards, McCormick was told of this man's action, and he immediately showed his appreciation by making the agent a present of a carriage and fine team of horses.
There was one man who was wholly in McCormick's power—a negro named Joe, who, by the custom that prevailed in the South before the Civil War, was a slave and the property of McCormick. They were of the same age, and had played together as boys. Joe grew up to be a tall, straight, intelligent negro, and his master was very fond of him. He is mentioned frequently in McCormick's letters, usually in a considerate way. Years before the Civil War McCormick gave Joe his freedom, and some land and a good cabin. Now and then, even in the stress and strain of his business-building, he would stop to write Joe a short letter of good wishes and advice. There was no other one thing, perhaps, which proved so convincingly the essential kindliness of his nature as his treatment of Joe.
In his family relations, too, McCormick was a man of tenderness and devotion. When his father died, in 1846, he was struck down by sorrow. "Many a sore cry have I had as I have gone around this place and found no father," he wrote to his brother William. And as soon as he was solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly believe her eyes. "I feel like the Queen of Sheba," she said to her neighbors when she returned to Virginia; "the half was never told."
McCormick helped his younger brothers—William and Leander, by making them his partners. William died in 1865—a great and irreparable loss. He was a man of careful mind and rare excellence of character, especially able in matters of detail—a point in which Cyrus McCormick was not proficient. The two men were well suited as partners. Cyrus planned the work in large outlines, and broke down the obstacles that stood in the way; while William added the details and supervised the carrying out of the plan. Leander, who also held a high place in the business in its earlier days, withdrew from it later, and died in 1900.
His Last Portrait
Until 1858 McCormick had thought himself too busy to be married. But in that year he met Miss Nettie Fowler, of New York, and changed his mind. It was soon apparent that his marriage was not to be in any sense a hindrance to his success, but rather the wisest act of his life. Mrs. McCormick was a woman of rare charm, and with a comprehension of business affairs that was of the greatest possible value to her husband. She was at all times in the closest touch with his purposes. By her advice he introduced many economies at the factory, and rebuilt the works after the Great Fire of 1871. The precision of her memory, and the grasp of her mind upon the multifarious details of human nature and manufacturing, made her an ideal wife for such a man as Cyrus H. McCormick. As he grew older, he depended upon her judgment more and more; and as Mrs. McCormick is still in the possession of health and strength, it may truly be said that for more than half a century she has been a most influential factor in the industrial and philanthropic development of the United States.
Four sons were born, and two daughters—Cyrus Hall, who is now President of the International Harvester Company; Robert, who died in infancy; Harold, Treasurer of the International Harvester Company; Stanley, Comptroller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita, now known as Mrs. Emmons Blame.
Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate husband and father. He took the utmost delight in his home and its hospitalities; and invariably brought his whole household with him whenever the growth of his business obliged him to visit foreign countries. In the last few years of his life it gave him the most profound satisfaction to know that his oldest son would pick up the McCormick burden and carry it forward. "Cyrus is a great comfort to me," he said to an intimate friend. "He has excellent judgment in business matters, and I find myself leaning on him more and more."
The truth is that there was a tender side to McCormick's strong nature, which was not seen by those who met him only upon ordinary occasions. He was in reality a great dynamo of sentiment. He was deeply moved by music, especially by the playing of Ole Bull and the singing of Jenny Lind, who were his favorites. He was as fond of flowers as a child. "I love best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "because they grew in my mother's garden in Virginia." Often the tears would come to his eyes at the sight of mountains, for they reminded him of his Virginian home. "Oh, Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat crippled in a wheel-chair in a Southern hotel, "how I wish I could get on a horse and ride on through those mountains once again!"
McCormick was not in any sense a Gradgrind of commercialism—a man who enriched his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul. He made money—ten millions or more; but he did so incidentally, just as a man makes muscle by doing hard work. Several of his fellow Chicagoans had swept past him in the million-making race. No matter how much money came to him, he was the same man, with the same friendships and the same purposes. And it is inconceivable that, for any amount of wealth, he would have changed the ground-plan of his life.
It is strictly true to say that he was a practical idealist. He idealized the American Constitution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the Democratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church. He was an Oliver Cromwell of industry. All his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple principles and fitted together like a picture puzzle. There was religion in his business and business in his religion. He was made such as he was by the Religious Reformation of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of the United States. He was all of one piece—sincere and self-consistent—a type of the nineteenth-century American at his best. He was not sordid. He was not cynical. He was not scientific. He was a man of faith and works—one of the old-fashioned kind who laid the foundations and built the walls of this republic.
He felt that he was born into the world with certain things to do. Some of these things were profitable and some of them were not, but he gave as much energy and attention to the one as to the other. In 1859, for instance, he had a factory that was profitable, and a daily paper and a college that were expensive. He was struggling to extend his trade at home and in Europe, to protect his patents, to prevent the war between the North and South, and to maintain the simplicity of the Presbyterian faith. To contend for these interests and principles was his life. He could not have done anything else. It was as natural for him to do so as for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. Once, towards the end of his life, when he was sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said to his wife, "Nettie, life is a battle." He made this announcement as though it were the discovery of a new fact. All his life he had been much less conscious of the battle itself than of the cause for which he fought.
In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the year when wheat is being sown in Spain and reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the strong personality before whom obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as grain before the knife of his machines," was ended. His last words, spoken in a moment's awakening from the death-stupor, were—"Work, work!" Not even the dissolution of his body could relax the fixity of his will. And when he lay in state, in his Chicago home, there was a Reaper, modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon his breast a sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat, surmounted by a crown of lilies. These were the emblems of the work that had been given him to do, and the evidence of its completion.
WHEN Cyrus H. McCormick died in 1884 he had provided hunger-insurance for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world. In that year his own factory made 50,000 harvesting machines, and there were in use, in all countries, more than 500,000 McCormick machines, doing the work of 5,000,000 men in the harvest fields. The United States was producing wheat at the rate of ten bushels per capita, instead of four, as it had been in 1847, when McCormick built his first factory in Chicago. And the total production of wheat in all lands was 2,240,000,000 bushels—enough to give an abundance of food to 325,000,000 people.
Chicago, in 1884, was a powerful city of six hundred thousand population. It had grown sixty-fold since McCormick rode into it by stage in 1845. It had 3,519 manufacturing establishments, giving work to 80,000 men and women and producing commodities at the rate of $5,000,000 worth in a week. It was then what it is to-day—the chief Reaper City and principal granary of the world. The wheat and flour that were sent out from its ports and depots in the year that the inventor of the Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand million loaves of bread, which, if they were fairly distributed, would have given about forty loaves apiece to the families of the human race.
The United States, in 1884, had been for six years the foremost of the wheat-producing nations. It had also grown to be first in mining, railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It was the land of the highest wages and cheapest bread—an anomaly that foreign countries could not understand. In the bulk of its manufacturing, it had forged ahead of all other nations, even of Great Britain; and yet, although a vast army of men had been drawn from its farms to its factories, it had produced in that year more than half a billion bushels of wheat—six times as much as its crop had been in the best year of the sickle and the scythe.
So, in the span of his business life—from 1831 to 1884,—McCormick had seen his country rise from insignificance to greatness, and he had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that his Reaper had done much, if not most, to accelerate this marvellous progress. As we shall see, the invention of the Reaper was the right starting-point for the up-building of a republic. It made all other progress possible, by removing the fear of famine and the drudgery of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, because it gave him the power of ten men.
The United States as a whole, had paid no attention to the Reaper until the opening of the California gold mines in 1849. Then the sudden scarcity of laborers created a panic among the farmers, and boomed the sale of all manner of farm machinery. Two years later the triumph of the McCormick Reaper at the London Exposition was a topic of the day and a source of national pride. And in 1852 the Crimean War sent the price of wheat skywards, providing an English market for as much wheat as American farmers could sell.
But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil War that the United States learned to really appreciate the Reaper. By the time that President Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers, by the time that he had taken every third man for the Northern armies, the value of the Reaper was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence, in this duel between wheat States on the one side, and cotton States on the other, it was a Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton-gin, which made slavery profitable; and it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick, who had invented the Reaper, which made the Northern States wealthy and powerful.
It was the Reaper-power of the North that off set the slave-power of the South. There were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861 as could do the work of a million slaves. As the war went on, the crops in the Northern States increased. Europe refused to believe such a miracle; but it was true. Fifty million bushels of American grain went to Europe in 1861, and fifty-six million bushels in the following year. More than two hundred million bushels were exported during the four years of the war. Thus the Reaper not only released men to fight for the preservation of the Union. It not only fed them while they were in the field. It did more. It saved us from bankruptcy as well as famine, and kept our credit good among foreign nations at the most critical period in our history.
After the Civil War came the settling of the West; and here again the Reaper was indispensable. In most cases it went ahead of the railroad. The first Reaper arrived in Chicago three years before the first locomotive. "We had a McCormick Reaper in 1856," said James Wilson; "and at that time there was no railroad within seventy-five miles of our Iowa farm. The Reaper worked a great revolution, enabling one man to do the work that many men had been doing, and do it better. By means of it the West became a thickly settled country, able to feed the nation and to spare bread and meat for the outside world."
When McCormick was a boy, more wheat was raised in Virginia than in any other State. But by 1860 Illinois was ahead, and by degrees the sceptre of the wheat empire passed westwards, until to-day it is held by Minnesota. What with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the offer of McCormick and the other Reaper manufacturers to sell machines to the farmers on credit, it was possible for poor men, without capital, to become each the owner of 160 acres of land, and to harvest its grain without spending a penny in wages. Thus the immense area of the West became a populous country, with cities and railways and State Governments, and producing one-tenth of the wheat of the world.
The enterprise of these Western farmers brought in the present era of farm machinery. It replaced "the man with the hoe" by the man with the self-binder and steel plow and steam thresher. It wiped out the old-time drudge of the soil from American farms, and put in his stead the new farmer, the business farmer, who works for a good living and a profit, and not for a bare existence. Such men as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota, led the way by demonstrating what might be done by "bonanza farms." This doughty Scottish-American secured 30,000 acres of the Red River Valley in 1876, and put it all into wheat. It was such a wheat-field as never before had been seen in any country. The soil was turned with 150 gang plows, sown with 70 drills, and reaped with 150 self-binders. Twelve threshing-machines, kept busy in the midst of this sea of yellow grain, beat out the straw and chaff and in the season filled two freight trains a day with enough wheat in each train to give two thousand people their daily bread for a year.
Led on by such pathfinders, American farmers launched out bravely, until now they are using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of labor-saving machinery. The whole level of farm life has been raised. It has been lifted from muscle to mind. The use of machinery has created leisure and capital, and these two have begotten intelligence, education, science, so that the farmer of to-day lives in a new world, and is a wholly different person from what he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to till the soil.
This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be our best guarantee of prosperity and national permanence. It was the incoming flood of wheat money that put the United States on its feet as a manufacturing nation. The total amount of this money, from the building of the first McCormick Reaper factory until to-day, is the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000, which may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to the nation.
Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, for instance, a mere convenience to the farmer himself. It was the link between the city and the country. It directly benefited all bread-eaters, and put the whole nation upon a higher plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, for the reason that they were not surrounded by hordes of sickle-and-flail serfs, who would sooner or later rise up in the throe of a hunger-revolution and pull down the cities and the palaces into oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 1840, only eight per cent of Americans lived in towns and cities; and to-day the proportion is forty per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no Goths and Vandals on American farms.
Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape, there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago—the oldest and largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life, this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the farmers.
This McCormick City is one of the industrial wonders that America exhibits to visiting foreigners, and it is so vast that it can only be glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land. In its buildings there is enough flooring to cover a 90-acre farm, and if they were all made over into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and one story high, it would be very nearly forty miles long, as far as from Chicago to Joliet. The population of McCormick City, counting workers only, is 7,000, whose average wages are $2.20 a day.
Here you will find a mammoth twine-mill—the largest of its kind in any country. Into this mill come the bright yellow sisal fibres from Yucatan and the manila fibres from the Philippines. These fibres are cleaned and strewn upon endless chains of combs, which jerk and pull the fibres and finally deliver them to spindles—1,680 spindles, which whirl and twist 19,000 miles of twine in the course of a single day, almost enough to put a girdle around the earth. Most of this work is done by Polish girls and women, who are being displaced as farm laborers in their own country by American harvesting machines.
This plant is so vast that from one point of view it seems to be mainly a foundry. Thousands of tons of iron—88,000 tons, to be exact,—pour out of its furnaces every year and are moulded into 113,000,000 castings. But from another point of view it appears to be a carpenter shop. In its yard stand as many piles of lumber as would build a fair-sized city—60,000,000 feet of it, cut in the forests of Mississippi and Missouri. And so much of this lumber is being sawed, planed, and shaped in the various wood-working shops that eight sawdust-fed furnaces are needed to supply them with power.
The marvels of labor-saving machinery are upon every hand, in this McCormick City. The paint-tank has replaced the paint-brush. Instead of painting wheels by hand, for instance, ten of them are now strung on a pole, like beads on a string, and soused into a bath from which they come, one minute later, resplendent in suits of red or blue. The labor-cost of painting these ten wheels is two cents. Guard-fingers, for which McCormick paid twenty-four cents apiece in 1845, are now produced with a labor-cost of two cents a dozen. And as for bolts, with two cents you can pay for the making of a hundred. Both bolts and nuts are shaped by automatic machines which are so simple that a boy can operate five at once, and so swift that other boys with wheelbarrows are kept busy carrying away their finished product.
There is one specially designed machine, with a battery of augurs, which bores twenty-one holes at once, thus saving four-fifths of a cent per board. Another special machine shapes poles and saves one cent per pole. Such tiny economies appear absurd, until the immense output is taken into account. Whoever can reduce the costs in the McCormick plant one cent per machine, adds thereby $3,500 a year to the profits, and helps to make it possible for a farmer to buy a magical self-binder, built up of 3,800 parts, for less than the price of a good horse, or for as much wheat as he can grow in one season on a dozen acres.
The vast McCormick City has its human side, too, in spite of all its noise and semi-automatic machinery. Cyrus McCormick was not one of those employers who call their men by numbers instead of names, and who have no more regard for flesh and blood than for iron and steel. He had worked with his hands himself, and brought up his sons to do the same. The feeling of loyalty and friendliness between the McCormick family and their employees has from the first been unusually strong. In 1902, at the suggestion of Stanley McCormick, gifts to the amount of $1,500,000 were made to the oldest employees of the business, as rewards for faithful service and tokens of good-will. Also, a handsome club-house was built for the comfort of the men of the McCormick City, and a rest-room for the women, under the mothering superintendence of a matron and trained nurse.
But this one McCormick City, immense as it is, does not by any means represent the sum total of McCormick's legacy to the United States. As the founder of the harvesting-machine business, he deserves credit for an industry which now represents an investment of about $150,000,000. With the sole exception of the Australian stripper, every wheat-reaping machine is still made on the lines laid down by McCormick in 1831. New improvements have been adopted; but not one of his seven factors has been thrown aside.
Fully two-thirds of this industry is still being done by the United States, although four-fifths of the wheat is grown in other countries. Our national income, from this one item of harvesting machinery, has risen to $30,000,000 a year—more than we derive from the exportation of any other American invention. No European country, apparently, has been able to master the complexities and multifarious details which abound in a successful harvester business.
In 1902 the efficiency of the larger American plants was greatly increased by the organization of the International Harvester Company, which has its headquarters in Chicago. The McCormick City is the most extensive plant in this Company, and McCormick's son—who is also Cyrus H. McCormick—is its President. In this Company sixteen separate plants are coordinated, four of these being in foreign countries. Its yearly output averages about $75,000,000 in value; and in bulk is great enough to fill 65,000 freight-cars. It has 25,000 workmen and 35,000 agents. The lumber with which its yards are filled comes from its own 80,000-acre forest; the steel comes from its own furnaces and the iron ore from its own mines. It is so overwhelmingly vast, this new famine-fighting consolidation, that the value of its output for one hour is greater than the $25,000 of capital with which McCormick built his first factory in Chicago.
So, it is evident that the McCormick Reaper has been an indispensable factor in the making of America. Without it, we could never have had the America of to-day. It has brought good, and nothing but good, to every country that has accepted it. It has never been, and never can be, put to an evil use. It cannot, under any system of government, benefit the few and not the many. It is as democratic in its nature as the American Constitution; and in every foreign country where it cuts the grain, it is an educator as well as a machine, giving to the masses of less fortunate lands an object-lesson in democracy and the spirit of American progress.
WE shall now see what the invention of the Reaper means to the human race as a whole. We shall leave behind McCormick and the United States, and survey the field from a higher standpoint. The selection of wheat as the first world-food,—its abundance made possible by the Reaper—its transportation by railroads and steamships—its storage in elevators—the production of flour—the growth of wheat-banks, wheat-ports, and exchanges—the new wheat empires—the international mechanism of marketing—the conquest of famine and the stupendous possibilities of the future! These are the subjects that group themselves under the general title—The Reaper and the World.
To find a world-food,—that was the beginning of the problem. All human beings wake up hungry every morning of their lives; and consequently the first necessity of the day is food. The search for food is the oldest of instincts. It is the master-motive of evolution. It has reared empires up and thrown them down. As Buckle has shown, where the national food is cheap and plentiful, population increases more rapidly. And as Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition," maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and social misery in its various forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he says, "than chronic hunger."
"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin. For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent hunger-pangs in time of famine. Once let those countries have cheap bread, and there may be no more opium sold there than there is to-day in Kansas. For lack of bread came the war between Russia and Japan; what the one nation wanted was a seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what the other wanted was more land for the support of her swarming population. For lack of bread have come most of the crimes of greed and violence,—most of the social systems based on sordid self-interest, most of the ill-humor that has postponed the coming of an era of peace on earth and good-will among men.
Now, of the three main foods of the human race, flesh, rice, and wheat, wheat is the best suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too expensive once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries. Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in just about the right proportion.
Wheat, to the botanist, is a grass—"a degraded lily," to quote from Grant Allen. It was originally a flower that was tamed by man and trained from beauty to usefulness. We do not know when or where the prehistoric Burbank lived who undertook this education of the wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has been a food for at least five thousand years. We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and pictured on the stones of the Pyramids. We know that Solomon sent wheat as a present to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have reason to believe that its first appearance was in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near where the ancient city of Babylon rose to greatness.