The Civil War in America did more than free the negro slave: it freed
the white man as well. In the Civil War agriculture, for the first time
in history, ceased to be exclusively a manual art. Up to that time the
typical agricultural laborer had been a bent figure, tending his fields
and garnering his crops with his own hands. Before the war had ended the
American farmer had assumed an erect position; the sickle and the scythe
had given way to a strange red chariot, which, with practically no
expenditure of human labor, easily did the work of a dozen men. Many
as have been America's contributions to civilization, hardly any have
exerted greater influence in promoting human welfare than her gift
of agricultural machinery. It seems astounding that, until McCormick
invented his reaper, in 1831, agricultural methods, in both the New and
the Old World, differed little from those that had prevailed in the days
of the Babylonians. The New England farmer sowed his fields and reaped
his crops with almost identically the same instruments as those which
had been used by the Roman farmer in the time of the Gracchi. Only a
comparatively few used the scythe; the great majority, with crooked
backs and bended knees, cut the grain with little hand sickles precisely
like those which are now dug up in Etruscan and Egyptian tombs.
Though McCormick had invented his reaper in 1831, and though many rival
machines had appeared in the twenty years preceding the Civil War, only
the farmers on the great western plains had used the new machinery to
any considerable extent. The agricultural papers and agricultural fairs
had not succeeded in popularizing these great laborsaving devices. Labor
was so abundant and so cheap that the farmer had no need of them. But
the Civil War took one man in three for the armies, and it was under
this pressure that the farmers really discovered the value of machinery.
A small boy or girl could mount a McCormick reaper and cut a dozen acres
of grain in a day. This circumstance made it possible to place millions
of soldiers in the field and to feed the armies from farms on which
mature men did very little work. But the reaper promoted the Northern
cause in other ways. Its use extended so in the early years of the war
that the products of the farms increased on an enormous scale, and the
surplus, exported to Europe, furnished the liquid capital that made
possible the financing of the war. Europe gazed in astonishment at a new
spectacle in history; that of a nation fighting the greatest war which
had been known up to that time, employing the greater part of her young
and vigorous men in the armies, and yet growing infinitely richer in the
process. The Civil War produced many new implements of warfare, such as
the machine gun and the revolving turret for battleships, but, so far as
determining the result was concerned, perhaps the most important was the
reaper.
Extensive as the use of agricultural machinery became in the Civil War,
that period only faintly foreshadowed the development that has taken
place since. The American farm is today like a huge factory; the use
of the hands has almost entirely disappeared; there are only a few
operations of husbandry that are not performed automatically. In Civil
War days the reaper merely cut the grain; now machinery rakes it up and
binds it into sheaves and threshes it. Similar mechanisms bind corn and
rice. Machinery is now used to plant potatoes; grain, cotton, and other
farm products are sown automatically. The husking bees that formed
one of our social diversions in Civil War days have disappeared, for
particular machines now rip the husks off the ears. Horse hay-forks and
horse hayrakes have supplanted manual labor. The mere names of scores
of modern instruments of farming, all unknown in Civil War days--hay
carriers, hay loaders, hay stackers, manure spreaders, horse corn
planters, corn drills, disk harrows, disk ploughs, steam ploughs,
tractors, and the like--give some suggestion of the extent to which
America has made mechanical the most ancient of occupations. In thus
transforming agriculture, we have developed not only our own Western
plains, but we have created new countries. Argentina could hardly exist
today except for American agricultural machinery. Ex-President Loubet
declared, a few years ago, that France would starve to death except
for the farming machines that were turned out in Chicago. There is
practically no part of the world where our self-binders are not used. In
many places America is not known as the land of freedom and opportunity,
but merely as "the place from which the reapers come." The traveler
suddenly comes upon these familiar agents in every European country,
in South America, in Egypt, China, Algiers, Siberia, India, Burma, and
Australia. For agricultural machinery remains today, what it has always
been, almost exclusively an American manufacture. It is practically the
only native American product that our European competitors have not
been able to imitate. Tariff walls, bounty systems, and all the other
artificial aids to manufacturing have not developed this industry in
foreign lands, and today the United States produces four-fifths of
all the agricultural machinery used in the world. The International
Harvester Company has its salesmen in more than fifty countries, and has
established large American factories in many nations of Europe.
One day, a few years before his death, Prince Bismarck was driving on
his estate, closely following a self-binder that had recently been put
to work. The venerable statesman, bent and feeble, seemed to find a deep
melancholy interest in the operation.
"Show me the thing that ties the knot," he said. It was taken to pieces
and explained to him in detail. "Can these machines be made in Germany?"
he asked.
"No, your Excellency," came the reply. "They can be made only in
America."
The old man gave a sigh. "Those Yankees are ingenious fellows," he said.
"This is a wonderful machine."
In this story of American success, four names stand out preeminently.
The men who made the greatest contributions were Cyrus H. McCormick,
C. W. Marsh, Charles B. Withington, and John F. Appleby. The name that
stands foremost, of course, is that of McCormick, but each of the others
made additions to his invention that have produced the present finished
machine. It seems like the stroke of an ironical fate which decreed
that since it was the invention of a Northerner, Eli Whitney, that made
inevitable the Civil War, so it was the invention of a Southerner, Cyrus
McCormick, that made inevitable the ending of that war in favor of the
North. McCormick was born in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on a farm
about eighteen miles from Staunton. He was a child of that pioneering
Scotch-Irish race which contributed so greatly to the settlement of this
region and which afterward made such inestimable additions to American
citizenship. The country in which he grew up was rough and, so far as
the conventionalities go, uncivilized; the family homestead was little
more than a log cabin; and existence meant a continual struggle with
a not particularly fruitful soil. The most remarkable figure in the
McCormick home circle, and the one whose every-day life exerted the
greatest influence on the boy, was his father. The older McCormick
had one obsessing idea that made him the favorite butt of the local
humorists. He believed that the labor spent in reaping grain was a
useless expenditure of human effort and that machinery might be made
to do the work. Other men, in this country and in Europe, had nourished
similar notions. Several Englishmen had invented reaping machines, all
of which had had only a single defect--they would not reap. An ingenious
English actor had developed a contrivance which would cut imitation
wheat on the stage, but no one had developed a machine that would work
satisfactorily in real life. Robert McCormick spent the larger part
of his days and nights tinkering at a practical machine. He finally
produced a horrific contrivance, made up of whirling sickles, knives,
and revolving rods, pushed from behind by two horses; when he tried this
upon a grain-field, however, it made a humiliating failure.
Evidently Robert McCormick had ambitions far beyond his powers; yet
without his absurd experiments the development of American agriculture
might have waited many years. They became the favorite topics of
conversation in the evening gatherings that took place about the family
log fire. Robert McCormick had several sons, and one manifested a
particular interest in his repeated failures. From the time he was seven
years old Cyrus Hall McCormick became his father's closest companion.
Others might ridicule and revile, but this chubby, bright-eyed,
intelligent little boy was always the keenest listener, the one comfort
which the father had against his jeering neighbors. He also became his
father's constant associate in his rough workshop. Soon, however, the
older man noticed a change in their relations. The boy was becoming
the teacher, and the father was taught. By the time Cyrus was eighteen,
indeed, he had advanced so far beyond his father that the latter had
become merely a proud observer. Young McCormick threw into the discard
all his father's ideas and struck out on entirely new lines. By the time
he had reached his twenty-second birthday he had constructed a machine
which, in all its essential details, is the one which we have today. He
had introduced seven principles, all of which are an indispensable part
of every reaper constructed now. One afternoon he drove his unlovely
contraption upon his father's farm, with no witnesses except his own
family. This group now witnessed the first successful attempt ever made
to reap with machinery. A few days later young McCormick gave a
public exhibition at Steele's Tavern, cutting six acres of oats in
an afternoon. The popular ridicule soon changed into acclaim; the new
invention was exhibited in a public square and Cyrus McCormick became a
local celebrity. Perhaps the words that pleased him most, however, were
those spoken by his father. "I am proud," said the old man, "to have a
son who can do what I failed to do."
This McCormick reaper dates from 1831; but it represented merely the
beginnings of the modern machine. It performed only a single function;
it simply cut the crop. When its sliding blade had performed this task,
the grain fell back upon a platform, and a farm hand, walking alongside,
raked this off upon the ground. A number of human harvesters followed,
picked up the bundles, and tied a few strips of grain around them,
making the sheaf. The work was exceedingly wearying and particularly
hard upon the women who were frequently impressed into service as
farm-hands. About 1858 two farmers named Marsh, who lived near De Kalb,
Illinois, solved this problem. They attached to their McCormick reaper a
moving platform upon which the cut grain was deposited. A footboard was
fixed to the machine upon which two men stood. As the grain came upon
this moving platform these men seized it, bound it into sheaves, and
threw it upon the field. Simple as this procedure seemed it really
worked a revolution in agriculture; for the first time since the
pronouncement of the primal curse, the farmer abandoned his hunchback
attitude and did his work standing erect. Yet this device also had
its disqualifications, the chief one being that it converted the human
sheaf-binder into a sweat-shop worker. It was necessary to bind the
grain as rapidly as the platform brought it up; the worker was
therefore kept in constant motion; and the consequences were frequently
distressing and nerve racking. Yet this "Marsh Harvester" remained the
great favorite with farmers from about 1860 to 1874.
All this time, however, there was a growing feeling that even the Marsh
harvester did not represent the final solution of the problem; the air
was full of talk and prophecies about self-binders, something that would
take the loose wheat from the platform and transform it into sheaves.
Hundreds of attempts failed until, in 1874, Charles B. Withington of
Janesville, Wisconsin, brought to McCormick a mechanism composed of two
steel arms which seized the grain, twisted a wire around it, cut the
wire, and tossed the completed sheaf to the earth. In actual practice
this contrivance worked with the utmost precision. Finally American
farmers had a machine that cut the grain, raked it up, and bound it
into sheaves ready for the mill. Human labor had apparently lost its
usefulness; a solitary man or woman, perched upon a seat and driving a
pair of horses, now performed all these operations of husbandry.
By this time, scores of manufacturers had entered the field in
opposition to McCormick, but his acquisition of Withington's invention
had apparently made his position secure. Indeed, for the next ten years
he had everything his own way. Then suddenly an ex-keeper of a drygoods
store in Maine crossed his path. This was William Deering, a character
quite as energetic, forceful, and pugnacious as was McCormick himself.
Though McCormick had made and sold thousands of his selfbinders, farmers
were already showing signs of discontent. The wire proved a continual
annoyance. It mingled with the straw and killed the cattle--at least so
the farmers complained; it cut their hands and even found its way, with
disastrous results, into the flour mills. Deering now appeared as the
owner of a startling invention by John F. Appleby. This did all that
the Withington machine did and did it better and quicker; and it had
the great advantage that it bound with twine instead of wire. The new
machine immediately swept aside all competitors; McCormick, to save his
reaper from disaster, presently perfected a twine binder of his own. The
appearance of Appleby's improvement in 1884 completes the cycle of the
McCormick reaper on its mechanical side The harvesting machine of fifty
nations today is the one to which Appleby put the final touches in 1884.
Since then nothing of any great importance has been added.
This outline of invention, however, comprises only part of the story.
The development of the reaper business presents a narrative quite as
adventurous as that of the reaper itself. Cyrus McCormick was not only
a great inventor; he was also a great businessman. So great was his
ability in this direction, indeed, that there has been a tendency to
discredit his achievements as a creative genius and to attribute his
success to his talents as an organizer and driver of industry. "I may
make a million dollars from this reaper," said McCormick, in the full
tide of enthusiasm over his invention; and these words indicate an
indispensable part of his program. He had no miserly instinct but he
had one overpowering ambition. It was McCormick's conviction, almost
religious in its fervor, that the harvester business of the world
belonged to him. As already indicated, plenty of other hardy spirits,
many of them almost as commanding personalities as himself, disputed the
empire. Not far from 12,000 patents on harvesting machines were granted
in this country in the fifty years following McCormick's invention, and
more than two hundred companies were formed to compete for the market.
McCormick always regarded these competitors as highwaymen who had
invaded a field which had been almost divinely set apart for himself. A
man of covenanting antecedents, heroic in his physical proportions, with
a massive, Jove-like head and beard, tirelessly devoted to his work,
watching every detail with a microscopic eye, marshaling a huge force
of workers who were as possessed by this one overruling idea as was
McCormick himself, he certainly presented an almost unassailable
battlefront to his antagonists. The competition that raged between
McCormick and the makers of rival machines was probably the fiercest
that has prevailed in any American industry. For marketing his machine
McCormick developed a system almost as ingenious as the machine itself.
The popularization of so ungainly and expensive a contrivance as the
harvester proved a slow and difficult task. McCormick at first attempted
to build his product on his Virginia farm and for many years it was
known as the Virginia Reaper. Nearly ten years passed, however,
before he sold his first machine. The farmer first refused to take it
seriously. "It's a great invention," he would say, "but I'm running
a farm, not a circus." About 1847 McCormick decided that the Western
prairies offered the finest field for its activities, and established
his factory at Chicago, then an ugly little town on the borders of a
swamp. This selection proved to be a stroke of genius, for it placed the
harvesting factory right at the door of its largest market.
The price of the harvester, however, seemed an insurmountable obstacle
to its extensive use. The early settlers of the Western plains had
little more than their brawny hands as capital, and the homestead
law furnished them their land practically free. In the eyes of a
large-seeing pioneer like McCormick this was capital enough. He
determined that his reaper should develop this extensive domain,
and that the crops themselves should pay the cost. Selling expensive
articles on the installment plan now seems a commonplace of business,
but in those days it was practically unknown. McCormick was the first
to see its possibilities. He established an agent, usually the general
storekeeper, in every agricultural center. Any farmer who had a modicum
of cash and who bore a reputation for thrift and honesty could purchase
a reaper. In payment he gave a series of notes, so timed that they fell
due at the end of harvesting seasons. Thus, as the money came in from
successive harvests, the pioneer paid off the notes, taking two, three,
or four years in the process. In the sixties and seventies immigrants
from the Eastern States and from Europe poured into the Mississippi
Valley by the hundreds of thousands. Almost the first person who greeted
the astonished Dane, German, or Swede was an agent of the harvester
company, offering to let him have one of these strange machines on
these terms. Thus the harvester, under McCormick's comprehensive selling
plans, did as much as the homestead act in opening up this great farming
region.
McCormick covered the whole agricultural United States with these
agents. In this his numerous competitors followed suit, and the
liveliest times ensued. From that day to this the agents of harvesting
implements have lent much animation and color to rural life in this
country. Half a dozen men were usually tugging away at one farmer at the
same time. The mere fact that the farmer had closed a contract did not
end his troubles, for "busting up competitors' sales" was part of the
agent's business. The situation frequently reached a point where there
was only one way to settle rival claims and that was by a field contest.
At a stated time two or three or four rival harvesters would suddenly
appear on the farmer's soil, each prepared to show, by actual test, its
superiority over the enemy. Farmers and idlers for miles around would
gather to witness the Homeric struggle. At a given signal the small
army of machines would spring savagely at a field of wheat. The one that
could cut the allotted area in the shortest time was regarded as the
winner. The harvester would rush on all kinds of fields, flat and hilly,
dry and wet, and would cut all kinds of crops, and even stubble. All
manner of tests were devised to prove one machine stronger than its
rival; a favorite idea was to chain two back to back, and have them
pulled apart by frantic careering horses; the one that suffered the
fewest breakdowns would be generally acclaimed from town to town.
Sometimes these field tests were the most exciting and spectacular
events at country fairs.
Thus the harvesting machine "pushed the frontier westward at the rate of
thirty miles a year," according to William H. Seward. It made American
and Canadian agriculture the most efficient in the world. The German
brags that his agriculture is superior to American, quoting as proof
the more bushels of wheat or potatoes he grows to an acre. But the
comparison is fallacious. The real test of efficiency is, not the crops
that are grown per acre, but the crops that are grown per man
employed. German efficiency gets its results by impressing women as
cultivators--depressing bent figures that are in themselves a sufficient
criticism upon any civilization. America gets its results by using a
minimum of human labor and letting machinery do the work. Thus America's
methods are superior not only from the standpoint of economics but of
social progress. All nations, including Germany, use our machinery, but
none to the extent that prevails on the North American Continent.
Perhaps McCormick's greatest achievement is that his machine has
banished famine wherever it is extensively used, at least in peace
times. Before the reaper appeared existence, even in the United States,
was primarily a primitive struggle for bread. The greatest service of
the harvester has been that it has freed the world--unless it is a world
distracted by disintegrating war--from a constant anxiety concerning its
food supply. The hundreds of thousands of binders, active in the fields
of every country, have made it certain that humankind shall not want for
its daily bread. When McCormick exhibited his harvester at the London
Exposition of 1851, the London Times ridiculed it as "a cross between
an Astley chariot, a wheel barrow, and a flying machine." Yet this same
grotesque object, widely used in Canada, Argentina, Australia, South
Africa, and India, becomes an engine that really holds the British
Empire together.
For the forty years succeeding the Civil War the manufacture of
harvesting machinery was a business in which many engaged, but in which
few survived. The wildest competition ruthlessly destroyed all but
half a dozen powerful firms. Cyrus McCormick died in 1884, but his sons
proved worthy successors; the McCormick factory still headed the list,
manufacturing, in 1900, one-third of all the self-binders used in the
world. The William Deering Company came next and then D. M. Osborne, J.
J. Glessner, and W. H. Jones, established factories that made existence
exceedingly uncomfortable for the pioneers. Whatever one may think of
the motives which caused so many combinations in the early years of
the twentieth century, there is no question that irresistible economic
forces compelled these great harvester companies to get together.
Quick profits in the shape of watered stock had nothing to do with
the formation of the International Harvester Company. All the men
who controlled these enterprises were individualists, with a natural
loathing for trusts, combinations, and pools. They wished for nothing
better than to continue fighting the Spartan battle that had made
existence such an exciting pastime for more than half a century. But the
simple fact was that these several concerns were destroying one another;
it was a question of joining hands, ending the competition that was
eating so deeply into their financial resources, or reducing the whole
business to chaos. When Mr. George W. Perkins, of J. P. Morgan
and Company, first attempted to combine these great companies, the
antagonisms which had been accumulated in many years of warfare
constantly threatened to defeat his end. He early discovered that the
only way to bring these men together was to keep them apart. The usual
way of creating such combinations is to collect the representative
leaders, place them around a table, and persuade them to talk the thing
over. Such an amicable situation, however, was impossible in the present
instance. Even when the four big men--McCormick, Deering, Glessner,
and Jones--were finally brought for the final treaty of peace to J. P.
Morgan's office, Mr. Perkins had to station them in four separate rooms
and flit from one to another arranging terms. Had these four men been
brought face to face, the Harvester Company would probably never have
been formed.
Having once signed their names, however, these once antagonistic
interests had little difficulty in forming a strong combination. The
company thus brought together manufactured 85 per cent of all the farm
machinery used in this country. It owned its own coal-fields and iron
mines and its own forests, and it produces most of the implements used
by 10,000,000 farmers. In 1847 Cyrus McCormick made 100 reapers and
sold them for $10,000; by 1902 the annual production of the corporation
amounted to hundreds of thousands of harvesters--besides an almost
endless assortment of other agricultural tools, ploughs, drills,
rakes, gasoline engines, tractors, threshers, cream separators, and the
like--and the sales had grown to about $75,000,000. This is merely the
financial measure of progress; the genuine achievements of McCormick's
invention are millions of acres of productive land and a farming
population which is without parallel elsewhere for its prosperity,
intelligence, manfulness, and general contentment.