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
heartbreak. 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 success, took Governor Merriam and
James J. 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 surrendered; 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 wasteful 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 combination and ruin.
Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were
individualists through and through. The spirit of competition had been
bred in the bone. So, when 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.
One by one these battle-worn Westerners came to New York, "on an exploring
expedition," 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 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.
[Illustration: HAROLD McCORMICK Photo by Matzene, Chicago, 1905
J. J. GLESSNER
W. H. JONES Photo by Smith, Evanston, Ill.
JAMES DEERING Photo by Dyer, Chicago]
No wonder that the financiers who undertook 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 accomplished by George W. Perkins--Morgan's
most versatile partner; and it gave 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
something 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 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 financiers 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 themselves 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 Combine in
1903, with four large manufacturing 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 Harvester Company. 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 Montana. 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--$120,000,000--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 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 warehouses thirty-seven different species of machines,
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 for 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 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 gasolene 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.
A harvester company must follow 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 Plano 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 equipment, it has been forced
by the pressure of 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 essentially 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 American way of manufacturing: everything on a large scale,
elaborate machinery, unskilled 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 McCormick 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 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. McCormick 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. Nearby 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
McCormick 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. "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 monstrous 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 frame 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 haste, knowing that 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 expenses:
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 department costs this imperial company
$7,000 a week. Here are more than two hundred 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 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 pneumatic machine. Every link, even, is
branded with a private mark--[triangle]. 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 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 community of interest.
In all things he is a simple and serious man. I have seen him work from
noon until midnight; but in my opinion, if he really had his choice, he
would prefer a quiet homestead, in the little town of Princeton, where he
could pursue a life devoted to the interests of Princeton 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-hearted man of thirty-five. He has a quick-action brain; but his
strong point is his personal magnetism and likableness. 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 illustrate 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 $18 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," said the berated mechanic, "I
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
superintendent of the whole plant. For years he rose at five o'clock every
work-day morning, and walked into the factory at six.
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. Recently 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 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 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 peacemaker 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
originating the system of canvassing. He poured first oil and then water
on the fire.
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 1881, to begin making
reapers of his own, at Plano; 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 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 Improver, 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 thousand 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 generals, 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 Company 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 powerful organisation. As Theodore Roosevelt 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 Corporations. 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 ogres,
otherwise known as Attorneys-General, crashed into their peaceful business
with destructive clubs of law.
The bigger the organisation the more trouble 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 roulette 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 $11 on every
self-binder, and Austria takes $25. 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 become a lawbreaker.
The "crime" of which it was declared guilty, was the maintenance 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 requirement two 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 company 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 possible 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.
"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 harvester 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 competition were much greater
than those of consolidation. The bare fact that this one corporation 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 week."
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 through
the wickets of his little money-lending office, or than Marshall Field
accumulated 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 themselves 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 Growers' Trust,
and the Farmers' Business Congress, 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 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 unskilled eye, more than $30 worse.
No one accuses the "Trust" of having unreasonably raised prices. On the
contrary, 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-machines 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 International for $125, 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. Powerful 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 another 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 companies, 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 yet, to being a merger. They
look back with open regret to the wasteful but adventurous days of
competition. Of the combination 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 sent a message that amazed the Bureau of
Corporations--"Please come and investigate 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 investigate 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 business, once alive, grows on
through the short centuries, from generation to generation.
And what does it all mean--this federation of thirteen factory
cities--this coordination 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?
_It means bread. It means hunger-insurance for the whole human race. As we
shall see in the next chapter, it means that the famine problem has been
solved, not only for the United States, but for all the civilised nations
of the world._