CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN
Cyrus H. McCormick was a great commercial Thor. He was six feet tall,
weighed two hundred pounds, and had the massive shoulders of a wrestler.
His body was well proportioned, with small hands and feet. His hair,
even in old age, was very dark and waving. His bearing was erect, his
manner often imperious, and his general appearance that of a man built
on large lines and for large affairs.
Men of lesser caliber regarded him with fear, not for any definite
reason, but because, as Seneca has said--"In him that has power, all men
consider not what he has done, but what he may do." He was so strong, so
dominating, so ready to crash through obstacles by sheer bulk of
will-power, that smaller men could never quite subdue a feeling of alarm
while they were in his presence. He was impatient of small talk and
small criticisms and small objections. He had no tact at retail, and he
saw no differences in little-minded people. All his life he had been
plagued and obstructed by the Liliputians of the world, and he had no
patience to listen to their chattering. He was often as rude as Carlyle
to those who tied their little threads of pessimism across his path.
At fashionable gatherings he would now and then be seen--a dignified
figure; but his mind was almost too ponderous an engine to do good
service in a light conversation. If a subject did not interest him, he
had nothing to say. What gave him, perhaps, the highest degree of social
pleasure, was the entertaining, at his house, of such men as Horace
Greeley, William H. Seward, Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, George
Peabody, Junius Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, or some old friend from
Virginia.
His long years of pioneering had made him a self-sufficient man, and a
man who lived from within. He did not pick up his opinions on the
streets. His mind was not open to any chance idea. He had certain clear,
definite convictions, logical and consistent. What he knew, he knew.
There were no hazy imaginings in his mind. The main secret of his power
lay in his ability to focus all his energies upon a few subjects. Once,
in 1848, he mentioned the French Revolution in one of his letters. "It
is a mighty affair," he wrote, "and will be likely to stand." But
usually he paid little attention to the world-dramas that were being
enacted. He was too busy--too devoted to affairs which, if he did not
attend to them, would not be attended to at all.
McCormick was a product of the Protestant Reformation, and of the
capitalistic development that came with it. The whole structure of his
character was based upon the two great dogmas of the Reformation--the
sovereignty of God and the direct responsibility of the individual.
Whoever would know the springs at which his life was fed must read the
story of Luther, Calvin, and Knox. They must call to mind the attitude
of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when he faced the men who had the power
to take his life and said, "Here I stand. I can do no other." They must
recollect how these three men, who were leaders of nations, not sects,
stood out alone against the kings and ecclesiasticisms of Europe,
without wealth, without armies, without anything except a higher Moral
Idea, and succeeded so mightily they actually changed the course of
empires and became the pathfinders of the human race.
McCormick was so essentially a result of this religio-economic movement
that it is impossible to separate his religion and his business life. He
was an individualist through and through--as well marked a type of the
Covenanter in commerce as the United States has ever produced. He
believed in presbyters in religion, private capitalists in business, and
elected representatives in government. He was opposed to feudalism and
bureaucracy in all their myriad forms. He held the middle ground, the
_via media_, between the over-organization of the fourteenth century,
when the rights of the individual were forgotten, and the lax liberalism
of to-day, when too much is left to individual whim and caprice, and
when duties and responsibilities are too apt to be ignored.
Above all constituted authorities stood a man's own conscience. This was
McCormick's faith, and it was this that made him the fighter that he
was. It gave him courage and the fortitude that is rarer than courage.
It compelled him to oppose his own political party at the Baltimore
Convention of 1861. It made him stand single-handed against his
fellow-manufacturers, in defence of his rights as an inventor. It
enabled him to beat down the Pennsylvania Railroad, after a twenty-three
year contest, and to prove that a great corporation cannot lawfully do
an injustice to an individual.
McCormick was nourished on this virile Calvinistic faith from the time
when he first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the
Bible. It had been the faith of his fathers for generations, and it was
bred into him from boyhood. Nevertheless, according to the practice of
the Presbyterians, there had to come a time when he himself openly made
his choice. This occasion came in 1834, when McCormick was twenty-five
years of age. A four-day meeting was being held in the little stone
church on his grandfather's farm. Three ministers were in charge. As was
the custom, there was constant preaching from morning until sundown,
with an hour's respite for dinner. At the close of the fourth day, all
who wished to become avowed Christians were requested to stand up. Cyrus
McCormick was there, and he was not a member of the church; yet he did
not stand up. That night his father went to his bedside and gently
reproached him. "My son," he said, "don't you know that your silence is
a public rejection of your Saviour?" Cyrus was conscience-stricken. He
leapt from his bed and began to dress himself. "I'll go and see old
Billy McClung," he said. Half an hour later, old Billy McClung, who was
a universally respected religious leader in the community, was amazed to
be called out of his sleep by a greatly troubled young man, who wanted
to know by what means he might make his peace with his Maker. The next
Sunday this young man stood up in the church, and became in name what
he already was by nature and inheritance--a Christian of the
Presbyterian faith.
After he left home his letters to the members of his family are strewn
with scraps of religious reflection. In 1845, for instance, he writes,
"Business is not inconsistent with Christianity; but the latter ought to
be a help to the former, giving a confidence and resignation, after
using all proper means; and yet I have sometimes felt that I came so far
short of the right _feeling_, so worldly-minded, that I could wish
myself out of the world." On another occasion, when he was struggling
with manufacturers who had broken their contracts, he wrote, "If it were
not for the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in our
business, it has at times seemed that I would almost sink under the
weight of responsibility hanging upon me; but I believe the Lord will
help us out." And after his first visit to New York City, he summed up
his impressions of the metropolis in the following sentence, "It is a
desirable place and people, with regular and good Presbyterian
preaching."
McCormick enjoyed with all his heart the logical, doctrinal sermon. His
favorite Bible passage was the eighth chapter of Romans, that
indomitable victorious chapter that ends like the blast of a trumpet:
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
As it is written, 'for Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are
accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Nay, in all these things we are
more than conquerors through Him that loved us; for I am persuaded that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in
Christ Jesus, our Lord."
His favorite hymn, which he sang often and with the deepest fervor, was
that melodious prayer that begins--
"O Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight,
On whom in affliction I call,
My comfort by day, and my song in the night,
My hope, my salvation, my all."
In his earlier journeys through the Middle West, McCormick was
distressed at the rough immorality of the new settlements. "I see a
great deal of profanity and infidelity in this country, enough to make
the heart sick," he wrote in 1845. These towns and villages needed more
preachers, and better preachers, he thought. Consequently, soon after he
had acquired his first million dollars, he determined to establish the
best possible college for the education of ministers. He almost stunned
with joy the Western friends of higher education for ministers, by
offering them $100,000 with which to establish a school of theology in
Chicago. This offer was made in 1859--half a century ago, and resulted
in the removal of a moneyless and decaying Seminary at New Albany,
Indiana, to Chicago. Thus was founded the Northwestern Theological
Seminary, afterwards named the McCormick Theological Seminary, which, in
its fifty years of life, has given a Christian education to thousands of
young men.
Thirteen years later he bought _The Interior_ and made it what it has
remained ever since--a religious weekly of the highest rank. These
two--the college and the paper--were his pride and delight. He fathered
them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be
impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his
editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from
his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His
last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he
was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the
corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its
last sentence was typical of McCormick--full of hope and optimism: "I
never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he
said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has
given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has hitherto
shone upon us."
McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon
with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of
the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the
Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself,
but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He
believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and
competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little
ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was
almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in
matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics,
he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your
own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.
What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic
failure of his life. He ran for office on several occasions, but he was
never elected. He was not the sort of man who gets elected. He stood for
his whole party at a time when the average politician was standing only
for himself. He talked of "fundamental principles" while the other
leaders, for the most part, were thinking of salaries. He gave up his
time and his money as freely for politics as he did for religion; but
he was out of his element. He was too sincere, too simple, too intent
upon a larger view of public questions. He could never talk the flexible
language of diplomacy nor suit his theme to the prejudice of his
listeners. Usually, to the political managers and delegates with whom he
felt it his duty to co-operate, he was like a man from another world.
They could never understand him, and tolerated his leadership mainly
because of his generous contributions. Again and again he astonished
them by developing a party speech into a sermon on national
righteousness, or by speaking nobly of a political opponent. On one
memorable occasion, for instance, in the white-hot passion of the
Hayes-Tilden controversy, and after he had lavished time and money in
support of Tilden, he sprang to his feet in a Democratic convention and
amazed the delegates by saying: "Mr. Hayes is not a Democrat, but he is
too patriotic and honest to suit his party managers and we must sustain
him so far as he is right."
He was one of the first Americans who rose above sectional interests
and party loyalties, and surveyed his country as a whole. No other man
of his day, either in or out of public office, was so free from local
prejudices and so intensely national in his beliefs and sympathies. He
refused to stamp himself with the label of the North or of the South. He
had been reared in the one and matured in the other. And in the ominous
days before the Civil War he strove like a beneficent giant to make the
wrangling partisans listen to the voice of reason and arbitration.
[Illustration: THE REAPER IN HEAVY GRAIN]
He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war,
and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he
bought a daily paper--_The Times_--to explain to Chicago the standpoint
of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the
newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits
that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor
than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of
public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he
opposed it,--put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there
until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck.
He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that
when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and
labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually
believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace
Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the
closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union
and the paths of law.
The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two
conventions--one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other
the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a
board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war
and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband
their armies and reëstablish peace.
After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its
dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of
church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been
preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an
article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of
political partisanism into the religious life.
"When are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian
fellowship," he asked, "so long as those who aspire to fill the high
places of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now that the
great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues settled,
religion and patriotism alike require the exercise of mutual
forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which tend to peace."
For the mere game of party politics Mr. McCormick cared little or
nothing. It was all as irksome to him as the task of governing Geneva
was to John Calvin; but he could not help himself. His political
convictions were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They were
racial traits which his forefathers and foremothers had spent at least
three centuries in developing.
On one occasion Dr. John Hall of New York, seeing how Mr. McCormick was
worried by political obligations, said to him:
"Why do you plague yourself with these uncongenial things? What glory
can you hope to get from politics that will add to what you now possess
as the inventor of the Reaper?"
"Dr. Hall," replied Mr. McCormick, "I am in politics because I cannot
help it. There are certain principles that I have got to stand by, and I
am obliged to go into politics to defend them."
The form of Mr. McCormick's religious faith had been forged by such
preacher-patriots as John Knox and Andrew Melville; and he, like them,
found it as imperative upon his conscience to fight for both civil and
religious liberty. With his whole heart he believed in American
institutions as they had been established by the nation-builders of
1776. He did not want the Constitution to be ignored by Federal
reformers, nor the Union to be broken by secession. He was by
temperament and tradition a conservative, and opposed especially to all
extreme measures and sectional innovations. As he had adapted his Reaper
so that it would cut grain in all States, he could never see why
political policies, too, should not be lifted above the limitations of
geography and made to conserve the welfare of the whole people. As he
said on one strenuous occasion when laboring mightily to beat back the
extremists in his own party: "Is not every government on the face of the
earth established upon the principle of compromise?"
To special privileges of every sort he was unalterably opposed. He asked
for none for himself--no favoring tariff or grant of public land or
monopolistic franchise. "I have been throughout my life," he said,
"opposed to all measures which tend to raise one class of the American
people upon the ruin of others, or one section of our common country at
the expense of another. The country is the common property of all
parties, and all are interested in its prosperity."
All this shows the heroic side of McCormick; but he was not always
heroic. He was a giant, but a most human and simple-natured giant.
Strange as it may sound to those who knew him only with his armor on, it
is true that he could be tender or humorous. There were tears and
laughter in him. There was no cruelty in his strength and no revenge in
his aggressiveness. He was a big, red-blooded, great-hearted man, who
might to-day be threatening to cane a politician who had deceived him,
and to-morrow be playing with his younger children and letting their two
pet squirrels, Zip and Zoe, chase each other around his shoulders.
He was fond of power, not because of its privileges and exemptions, but
because it furthered the work that he had in hand. He was often
surrounded by sycophants--by men who said yes to his yes and no to his
no; and while he accepted this homage with a certain degree of
satisfaction, he was not deceived by it. On one occasion, when he was
attending the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati--the convention that
nominated Hancock as candidate for President,--he was beset by a court
of flatterers and lip-servers. After it was over, he remarked simply to
his valet, "Well, Charlie, there is a lot of farce and humbug about
this."
Dr. Francis L. Patton, who was for years the president of Princeton
University and also at one time editor of _The Interior_, was especially
impressed with this direct naturalness of McCormick. "One meets with all
sorts of men in the course of a lifetime," said Dr. Patton. "There are
patronizing men, pompous men, men who habitually wear a mask of
seriousness, men who clothe themselves with dignity as with a coat of
mail lest you should presume too much or go too far, men whose position
is never defined, and double-minded men with whom you never feel
yourself safe. But Mr. McCormick was not like one of these. There is
that in the possession of power which always tends to make men
imperious. I do not mean to imply that he was altogether free from this
tendency, for he was not. But he was approachable, companionable, and
ready to hear what I had to say. He was not one of those men who are so
uninterestingly self-controlled as to be always the same. There were
times when his mirth was contagious and times when his wrath was kindled
a little. We did not always agree, and sometimes we both grew hot in
argument; but at the end his cheery laugh proclaimed the fact that our
differences had only been the free and easy give-and-take of
friendship."
To see McCormick laugh was a spectacle. There was first a mellowing of
his usual Jovian manner. His gray-brown eyes twinkled. The tense lines
of his face relaxed. Then came a smile and soon a burst of laughter,
shaking his powerful body and putting the whole company for the time
into an uproar of merriment. It was the triumph of the genial and
magnetic side of his nature--the side that was ordinarily repressed by
the pressure of his big affairs.
McCormick had humor, but not wit. His jokes were simple and
old-fashioned, such as Luther and Cromwell would have laughed at. There
was no innuendo and no cynicism. On one occasion two small urchins
knocked at the door and asked for food. McCormick heard their voices
and had them brought into the sitting-room, where he happened to be in
consultation with his lawyer. "Now," said he to the youngsters, "we are
going to put both of you on trial. I will be the judge and this
gentleman will be the prosecutor." Each boy in turn was placed on the
witness-stand, and plied with questions. It was soon clear that neither
of them was telling the truth, so "Judge" McCormick took them in hand
and gave them a serious talk on the folly and wickedness of lying. Then
he gave them twenty-five cents apiece, and sent them down to the kitchen
to eat as much supper as they could hold.
[Illustration: HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON]
At another time a very dignified and self-centred military officer was
taking supper with the McCormick family. The first course, as usual, was
corn-meal mush and milk. This was served in Scotch fashion, with the hot
mush in one bowl and the cold milk in another, and the practice was to
so co-ordinate the eating of these that both were finished at the same
time. The officer planned his spoonfuls badly, and was soon out of
milk. "Have some more milk to finish your mush, Colonel," said
McCormick. Several minutes later the Colonel's mush bowl was empty, at
which McCormick said, "Have some more mush to finish your milk." And so
it went, with milk for the mush and mush for the milk, until the
unfortunate Colonel was hopelessly incapacitated for the four or five
courses that came afterwards.
McCormick was not by any means a teller of stories, but he had a few
simple and well-worn anecdotes that appealed so strongly to his sense of
humor that he told and re-told them many times. There was the story of
the man who stole the pound of butter and hid it in his hat, and how the
grocer saw him and kept talking in the store, beside a hot stove, until
the butter melted and exposed the man's thievery. Another favorite story
was about the pig that found its way into a garden by walking through a
hollow log, and how the gardener fooled the pig by placing the hollow
log in such a way that both ends of it were on the outside of the
garden.
Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral tang--a flavor of the first
Psalm and the eighth chapter of Romans. They were apt to deal with the
troubles of the ungodly who had been caught in their wickedness. There
were times, too, when his sense of humor and his sense of justice would
co-operate in odd ways. Once, when a roast game bird, which had been
sent to him as a gift from the hunter, was left over from supper, he
ordered that his dainty be kept and served for the next day's luncheon.
At luncheon the next day it did not appear. On asking for the game bird,
a roast chicken was set before him, and he at once noticed that it was
not the same bird which he had ordered to be kept. He questioned the
butler, who protested that it was the same. After the meal McCormick
ordered that the servants involved should be called into the
dining-room. From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the
truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he
would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times, "A thief you
can watch, but I detest a liar."
There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon
the great inventor himself. His two youngest sons, Harold and Stanley,
would hide in the hallway when they saw him approaching, and pounce out
upon him with wild yells in small-boy fashion, but they were both
privileged people.
McCormick was a most hearty and hospitable man. He was an ideal person
for such a life-work--the abolition of famine. He was fond of food and
plenty of it. He loved to see a big table heaped with food. The idea of
hunger was intolerable to him. He might well have been posing for a
statue of the deity of Plenty, as he squared himself around to the long,
family dinner-table, with his napkin worn high and caught at his
shoulders by a white silk band that went around his neck, and with a
complacent, "Now, then," plunged the carving-fork into a crisp and
fragrant fowl that lay on the platter in front of him.
The fact that McCormick seldom made a social call was not due to his own
choosing, but because of the many worries and compulsions of his life.
Once, when confiding in an intimate friend, he said, "It pains me very
much to think how little I am known by my neighbors, but I seem to be
always too busy to meet them." He was not at all, as many have thought
because of his strenuous life, a man of harsh and rough exterior. There
was nothing rough about him except his strength. He was irreproachable
in dress and personal appearance. He did not drink, smoke, nor swear.
And his manners and language, on formal occasions, were those of a
dignified gentleman of the old school--a Calhoun, or a Van Buren.
He was not a hard-natured man, except when he was battling for his
rights and his principles. He would often turn from an overwhelming mass
of business to play with one of his children. He was as ready to forgive
as he was to fight. He never cherished resentments or personal grudges.
He knew that life was a conflict of interests and policies; and when he
forgave, his forgiveness was free and full, and not a formal ceremony.
It was as honest and as spontaneous as his wrath. He was one of the few
men who could freely pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
those who trespass against us."
His fame and honors and intimacies with people of rank never made him
less democratic in his sympathies. He always had a profound respect for
the man or woman who did useful work, if the work was done well. Once,
when a poor woman went to him for advice about some trifling thing that
she had invented, he turned from his work and explained to her, with the
utmost patience and courtesy, the things that she wished to know. With
his trusted employees, too, he was usually kindly and sometimes jovial.
"I had only one brush with him in thirty-five years," said one of his
cashiers. "The last time that I saw him, he met me on the street and
said, 'Hello, Sellick, have you got lots of money? Can you give me a
hundred thousand dollars to-day?' 'Yes, sir,' I answered. 'Well, I'm
glad I don't need it,' he said with a laugh."
The loyalty of his workmen and his agents was always a source of pride
to McCormick. It was one of the favorite topics of his conversation. He
would mention his men by name and tell of their exploits with the
deepest satisfaction. On one occasion, when a body of agents made a
united demand for higher salaries, there was one agent in Minnesota who
refused to take part in the movement. "I don't want to force Mr.
McCormick," he said. "I have worked for him for nearly thirty years, and
I know that he is a just man, and that he will do what is right." Not
long afterwards, McCormick was told of this man's action, and he
immediately showed his appreciation by making the agent a present of a
carriage and fine team of horses.
There was one man who was wholly in McCormick's power--a negro named
Joe, who, by the custom that prevailed in the South before the Civil
War, was a slave and the property of McCormick. They were of the same
age, and had played together as boys. Joe grew up to be a tall,
straight, intelligent negro, and his master was very fond of him. He is
mentioned frequently in McCormick's letters, usually in a considerate
way. Years before the Civil War McCormick gave Joe his freedom, and some
land and a good cabin. Now and then, even in the stress and strain of
his business-building, he would stop to write Joe a short letter of good
wishes and advice. There was no other one thing, perhaps, which proved
so convincingly the essential kindliness of his nature as his treatment
of Joe.
In his family relations, too, McCormick was a man of tenderness and
devotion. When his father died, in 1846, he was struck down by sorrow.
"Many a sore cry have I had as I have gone around this place and found
no father," he wrote to his brother William. And as soon as he was
solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his
mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly
believe her eyes. "I feel like the Queen of Sheba," she said to her
neighbors when she returned to Virginia; "the half was never told."
McCormick helped his younger brothers--William and Leander, by making
them his partners. William died in 1865--a great and irreparable loss.
He was a man of careful mind and rare excellence of character,
especially able in matters of detail--a point in which Cyrus McCormick
was not proficient. The two men were well suited as partners. Cyrus
planned the work in large outlines, and broke down the obstacles that
stood in the way; while William added the details and supervised the
carrying out of the plan. Leander, who also held a high place in the
business in its earlier days, withdrew from it later, and died in 1900.
[Illustration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, 1883
His Last Portrait]
Until 1858 McCormick had thought himself too busy to be married. But in
that year he met Miss Nettie Fowler, of New York, and changed his mind.
It was soon apparent that his marriage was not to be in any sense a
hindrance to his success, but rather the wisest act of his life. Mrs.
McCormick was a woman of rare charm, and with a comprehension of
business affairs that was of the greatest possible value to her husband.
She was at all times in the closest touch with his purposes. By her
advice he introduced many economies at the factory, and rebuilt the
works after the Great Fire of 1871. The precision of her memory, and the
grasp of her mind upon the multifarious details of human nature and
manufacturing, made her an ideal wife for such a man as Cyrus H.
McCormick. As he grew older, he depended upon her judgment more and
more; and as Mrs. McCormick is still in the possession of health and
strength, it may truly be said that for more than half a century she has
been a most influential factor in the industrial and philanthropic
development of the United States.
Four sons were born, and two daughters--Cyrus Hall, who is now President
of the International Harvester Company; Robert, who died in infancy;
Harold, Treasurer of the International Harvester Company; Stanley,
Comptroller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita, now known as Mrs.
Emmons Blame.
Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate husband and father. He took the
utmost delight in his home and its hospitalities; and invariably brought
his whole household with him whenever the growth of his business obliged
him to visit foreign countries. In the last few years of his life it
gave him the most profound satisfaction to know that his oldest son
would pick up the McCormick burden and carry it forward. "Cyrus is a
great comfort to me," he said to an intimate friend. "He has excellent
judgment in business matters, and I find myself leaning on him more and
more."
The truth is that there was a tender side to McCormick's strong nature,
which was not seen by those who met him only upon ordinary occasions. He
was in reality a great dynamo of sentiment. He was deeply moved by
music, especially by the playing of Ole Bull and the singing of Jenny
Lind, who were his favorites. He was as fond of flowers as a child. "I
love best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "because they grew in my
mother's garden in Virginia." Often the tears would come to his eyes at
the sight of mountains, for they reminded him of his Virginian home.
"Oh, Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat crippled in a
wheel-chair in a Southern hotel, "how I wish I could get on a horse and
ride on through those mountains once again!"
McCormick was not in any sense a Gradgrind of commercialism--a man who
enriched his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul. He made
money--ten millions or more; but he did so incidentally, just as a man
makes muscle by doing hard work. Several of his fellow Chicagoans had
swept past him in the million-making race. No matter how much money came
to him, he was the same man, with the same friendships and the same
purposes. And it is inconceivable that, for any amount of wealth, he
would have changed the ground-plan of his life.
It is strictly true to say that he was a practical idealist. He
idealized the American Constitution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the
Democratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church. He was an Oliver Cromwell
of industry. All his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple
principles and fitted together like a picture puzzle. There was religion
in his business and business in his religion. He was made such as he was
by the Religious Reformation of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of
the United States. He was all of one piece--sincere and
self-consistent--a type of the nineteenth-century American at his best.
He was not sordid. He was not cynical. He was not scientific. He was a
man of faith and works--one of the old-fashioned kind who laid the
foundations and built the walls of this republic.
He felt that he was born into the world with certain things to do. Some
of these things were profitable and some of them were not, but he gave
as much energy and attention to the one as to the other. In 1859, for
instance, he had a factory that was profitable, and a daily paper and a
college that were expensive. He was struggling to extend his trade at
home and in Europe, to protect his patents, to prevent the war between
the North and South, and to maintain the simplicity of the Presbyterian
faith. To contend for these interests and principles was his life. He
could not have done anything else. It was as natural for him to do so as
for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. Once, towards the end of his life,
when he was sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said to his
wife, "Nettie, life _is_ a battle." He made this announcement as though
it were the discovery of a new fact. All his life he had been much less
conscious of the battle itself than of the _cause_ for which he fought.
In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the year when wheat is being
sown in Spain and reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the strong
personality before whom obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as
grain before the knife of his machines," was ended. His last words,
spoken in a moment's awakening from the death-stupor, were--"Work,
work!" Not even the dissolution of his body could relax the fixity of
his will. And when he lay in state, in his Chicago home, there was a
Reaper, modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon his breast a
sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat, surmounted by a crown of lilies. These
were the emblems of the work that had been given him to do, and the
evidence of its completion.