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 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.
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 McCormick 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,
absolutely 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 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 machinery."
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 Agriculture 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
workbench. 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 on 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 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 banquet 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 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
banqueters as follows:
"O Caledonia! Stern and wild,
Meet 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 in
sixty-six minutes. Then came the American machine, and when it swept down
its stretch of grain in twenty-two minutes, the judges were inclined 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'll 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, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find."
The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering
with newness and drawn by a stately team of big Norman horses. The shabby
American reaper arrived 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 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 grain 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.
[Illustration: AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES,
IN FRANCE]
The emperor was radiant with delight. Being somewhat of an expert
himself, he rode here and there and showed, with many gestures, the
differences between the old way and the new. Some of the grain had been
blown down. Nothing but a sickle could cut it, in the belief, at that
time, of the average German farmer. On the contrary, as the emperor
pointed out to his ministers, the harvester was raising the fallen grain
and cutting it without the waste of a handful while the women were
trampling much of it under their bare feet, as they jostled one another in
the stubbled field.
Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work
than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided
before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women's
side when Sam Dennis said "Whoa!" to his horses, and condescended to enter
into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers.
For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally,
although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was
about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of the
harvest-field they received only twenty-five cents a day. Probably what
some of those women did, when they saw themselves displaced, was to buy a
steerage ticket to the country where the red harvester was made; at any
rate I found two thousand women in the harvester factories of Chicago,
earning $9 a week, and most of them, as it happened, were Polish.
Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion
a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was
told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day
the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company.
"Bismarck sat in his carriage," said Haney, "but he ordered his driver to
follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and
feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he
made a sign to me to stop."
"Let me see the thing that ties the knot," he said.
"I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of
string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave 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
walking 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 machines 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 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 workmen 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 these American machines?" he would say. "Unless you go back to
work at the same wages, I will reap the grain 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 A B C
lesson in American doctrines.
[Illustration: KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER]
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'll pardon me if I do this work in
my shirt-sleeves," the baron was so taken by surprise that he offered to
hold Lutfring's coat. Half an hour later he was at work 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 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. _It means bread._"
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, 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 customer 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-five million in the past
seventy-five years. But we have more than replaced them with 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 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.
Even from this incomplete list one may begin to understand how tremendous
is the task that the International Harvester Company has assumed in
undertaking 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 Argentinians, 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," which combs off the heads of the
grain. California and Argentina, because of their dry climate, can use
"headers," a combination 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
"International"; 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
Philippines. 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.
[Illustration: BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER]
"Many of our agents are now living in Siberia with their families," said
C. S. Funk, the General Manager of the International. "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 courteous
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 American 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
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 haven't got twice as much to cut."
The quick, handy ways of American 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; therefore they are not poor. They carried
two hundred millions across the border. And they are now uprearing a
harvester-based civilisation 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 centuries 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 become 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 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.
[Illustration: AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA]
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 everywhere but Lhasa, the sacred capital of Tibet. So far
as I can learn, not one harvesting 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, 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 work 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 reaping-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 _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 dared to try to sell us farm machinery. Every harvester in
the United States was made at home.
[Illustration: GATHERING IN A FINLAND HARVEST]
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 savings 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
machinery 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 commands 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 commercial
treaty, the tax has lately been increased 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 come 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 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 Filipinos; 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 American states; but
since the arrival of the twine-binder it has become the richest. It sells
from fifteen to eighteen million dollars' worth of sisal a year, and the
United States buys it all. _Three-fourths of this money is clear profit;
and 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--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 Company 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 experiment. This means, probably, that the
farmer of the future will 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 high level before the harvester trade can begin.
Where human labour has little value, it is plainly not worth saving.
[Illustration: IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS]
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. Whoever 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 inevitably 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 intelligence 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 build his own house and make his
own harness. 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 jumble, 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 possible. 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._