THE REAPER AND THE NATION
When Cyrus H. McCormick died in 1884 he had provided hunger-insurance
for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world. In
that year his own factory made 50,000 harvesting machines, and there
were in use, in all countries, more than 500,000 McCormick machines,
doing the work of 5,000,000 men in the harvest fields. The United States
was producing wheat at the rate of ten bushels per capita, instead of
four, as it had been in 1847, when McCormick built his first factory in
Chicago. And the total production of wheat in all lands was
2,240,000,000 bushels--enough to give an abundance of food to
325,000,000 people.
Chicago, in 1884, was a powerful city of six hundred thousand
population. It had grown sixty-fold since McCormick rode into it by
stage in 1845. It had 3,519 manufacturing establishments, giving work to
80,000 men and women and producing commodities at the rate of
$5,000,000 worth in a week. It was then what it is to-day--the chief
Reaper City and principal granary of the world. The wheat and flour that
were sent out from its ports and depots in the year that the inventor of
the Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand million loaves of
bread, which, if they were fairly distributed, would have given about
forty loaves apiece to the families of the human race.
The United States, in 1884, had been for six years the foremost of the
wheat-producing nations. It had also grown to be first in mining,
railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It was the land of the
highest wages and cheapest bread--an anomaly that foreign countries
could not understand. In the bulk of its manufacturing, it had forged
ahead of all other nations, even of Great Britain; and yet, although a
vast army of men had been drawn from its farms to its factories, it had
produced in that year more than half a billion bushels of wheat--six
times as much as its crop had been in the best year of the sickle and
the scythe.
So, in the span of his business life--from 1831 to 1884,--McCormick had
seen his country rise from insignificance to greatness, and he had the
supreme satisfaction of knowing that his Reaper had done much, if not
most, to accelerate this marvellous progress. As we shall see, the
invention of the Reaper was the right starting-point for the up-building
of a republic. It made all other progress possible, by removing the fear
of famine and the drudgery of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of
the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, because it gave him the
power of ten men.
[Illustration: THE WORKS OF THE McCORMICK HARVESTING MACHINE CO.]
The United States as a whole, had paid no attention to the Reaper until
the opening of the California gold mines in 1849. Then the sudden
scarcity of laborers created a panic among the farmers, and boomed the
sale of all manner of farm machinery. Two years later the triumph of the
McCormick Reaper at the London Exposition was a topic of the day and a
source of national pride. And in 1852 the Crimean War sent the price of
wheat skywards, providing an English market for as much wheat as
American farmers could sell.
But it was not until the outbreak of the Civil War that the United
States learned to really appreciate the Reaper. By the time that
President Lincoln had made his ninth call for soldiers, by the time that
he had taken every third man for the Northern armies, the value of the
Reaper was beyond dispute. By a strange coincidence, in this duel
between wheat States on the one side, and cotton States on the other, it
was a Northerner, Eli Whitney, who had invented the cotton-gin, which
made slavery profitable; and it was a Southerner, Cyrus H. McCormick,
who had invented the Reaper, which made the Northern States wealthy and
powerful.
It was the Reaper-power of the North that off set the slave-power of the
South. There were as many Reapers in the wheat-fields of 1861 as could
do the work of a million slaves. As the war went on, the crops in the
Northern States increased. Europe refused to believe such a miracle; but
it was true. Fifty million bushels of American grain went to Europe in
1861, and fifty-six million bushels in the following year. More than two
hundred million bushels were exported during the four years of the war.
Thus the Reaper not only released men to fight for the preservation of
the Union. It not only fed them while they were in the field. It did
more. It saved us from bankruptcy as well as famine, and kept our credit
good among foreign nations at the most critical period in our history.
After the Civil War came the settling of the West; and here again the
Reaper was indispensable. In most cases it went ahead of the railroad.
The first Reaper arrived in Chicago three years before the first
locomotive. "We had a McCormick Reaper in 1856," said James Wilson; "and
at that time there was no railroad within seventy-five miles of our Iowa
farm. The Reaper worked a great revolution, enabling one man to do the
work that many men had been doing, and do it better. By means of it the
West became a thickly settled country, able to feed the nation and to
spare bread and meat for the outside world."
When McCormick was a boy, more wheat was raised in Virginia than in any
other State. But by 1860 Illinois was ahead, and by degrees the sceptre
of the wheat empire passed westwards, until to-day it is held by
Minnesota. What with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the offer of
McCormick and the other Reaper manufacturers to sell machines to the
farmers on credit, it was possible for poor men, without capital, to
become each the owner of 160 acres of land, and to harvest its grain
without spending a penny in wages. Thus the immense area of the West
became a populous country, with cities and railways and State
Governments, and producing one-tenth of the wheat of the world.
The enterprise of these Western farmers brought in the present era of
farm machinery. It replaced "the man with the hoe" by the man with the
self-binder and steel plow and steam thresher. It wiped out the old-time
drudge of the soil from American farms, and put in his stead the new
farmer, the _business_ farmer, who works for a good living and a profit,
and not for a bare existence. Such men as Oliver Dalrymple, of North
Dakota, led the way by demonstrating what might be done by "bonanza
farms." This doughty Scottish-American secured 30,000 acres of the Red
River Valley in 1876, and put it all into wheat. It was such a
wheat-field as never before had been seen in any country. The soil was
turned with 150 gang plows, sown with 70 drills, and reaped with 150
self-binders. Twelve threshing-machines, kept busy in the midst of this
sea of yellow grain, beat out the straw and chaff and in the season
filled two freight trains a day with enough wheat in each train to give
two thousand people their daily bread for a year.
Led on by such pathfinders, American farmers launched out bravely, until
now they are using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of labor-saving
machinery. The whole level of farm life has been raised. It has been
lifted from muscle to mind. The use of machinery has created leisure and
capital, and these two have begotten intelligence, education, science,
so that the farmer of to-day lives in a new world, and is a wholly
different person from what he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to till
the soil.
This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be our best guarantee of
prosperity and national permanence. It was the incoming flood of wheat
money that put the United States on its feet as a manufacturing nation.
The total amount of this money, from the building of the first McCormick
Reaper factory until to-day, is the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000,
which may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to the nation.
Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, for instance, a mere
convenience to the farmer himself. It was the link between the city and
the country. It directly benefited all bread-eaters, and put the whole
nation upon a higher plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, for
the reason that they were not surrounded by hordes of sickle-and-flail
serfs, who would sooner or later rise up in the throe of a
hunger-revolution and pull down the cities and the palaces into
oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 1840, only eight per cent
of Americans lived in towns and cities; and to-day the proportion is
_forty_ per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it
was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation
between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the
midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no Goths and
Vandals on American farms.
Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the
first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape,
there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago--the oldest and
largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life,
this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and
it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to
ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan
of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the
farmers.
[Illustration: McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA]
This McCormick City is one of the industrial wonders that America
exhibits to visiting foreigners, and it is so vast that it can only
be glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land. In its buildings
there is enough flooring to cover a 90-acre farm, and if they were all
made over into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and one story
high, it would be very nearly forty miles long, as far as from Chicago
to Joliet. The population of McCormick City, counting workers only, is
7,000, whose average wages are $2.20 a day.
Here you will find a mammoth twine-mill--the largest of its kind in any
country. Into this mill come the bright yellow sisal fibres from Yucatan
and the manila fibres from the Philippines. These fibres are cleaned and
strewn upon endless chains of combs, which jerk and pull the fibres and
finally deliver them to spindles--1,680 spindles, which whirl and twist
19,000 miles of twine in the course of a single day, almost enough to
put a girdle around the earth. Most of this work is done by Polish girls
and women, who are being displaced as farm laborers in their own country
by American harvesting machines.
This plant is so vast that from one point of view it seems to be mainly
a foundry. Thousands of tons of iron--88,000 tons, to be exact,--pour
out of its furnaces every year and are moulded into 113,000,000
castings. But from another point of view it appears to be a carpenter
shop. In its yard stand as many piles of lumber as would build a
fair-sized city--60,000,000 feet of it, cut in the forests of
Mississippi and Missouri. And so much of this lumber is being sawed,
planed, and shaped in the various wood-working shops that eight
sawdust-fed furnaces are needed to supply them with power.
The marvels of labor-saving machinery are upon every hand, in this
McCormick City. The paint-tank has replaced the paint-brush. Instead of
painting wheels by hand, for instance, ten of them are now strung on a
pole, like beads on a string, and soused into a bath from which they
come, one minute later, resplendent in suits of red or blue. The
labor-cost of painting these ten wheels is two cents. Guard-fingers, for
which McCormick paid twenty-four cents apiece in 1845, are now produced
with a labor-cost of two cents a dozen. And as for bolts, with two
cents you can pay for the making of a hundred. Both bolts and nuts are
shaped by automatic machines which are so simple that a boy can operate
five at once, and so swift that other boys with wheelbarrows are kept
busy carrying away their finished product.
There is one specially designed machine, with a battery of augurs, which
bores twenty-one holes at once, thus saving four-fifths of a cent per
board. Another special machine shapes poles and saves one cent per pole.
Such tiny economies appear absurd, until the immense output is taken
into account. Whoever can reduce the costs in the McCormick plant one
cent per machine, adds thereby $3,500 a year to the profits, and helps
to make it possible for a farmer to buy a magical self-binder, built up
of 3,800 parts, for less than the price of a good horse, or for as much
wheat as he can grow in one season on a dozen acres.
The vast McCormick City has its human side, too, in spite of all its
noise and semi-automatic machinery. Cyrus McCormick was not one of those
employers who call their men by numbers instead of names, and who have
no more regard for flesh and blood than for iron and steel. He had
worked with his hands himself, and brought up his sons to do the same.
The feeling of loyalty and friendliness between the McCormick family and
their employees has from the first been unusually strong. In 1902, at
the suggestion of Stanley McCormick, gifts to the amount of $1,500,000
were made to the oldest employees of the business, as rewards for
faithful service and tokens of good-will. Also, a handsome club-house
was built for the comfort of the men of the McCormick City, and a
rest-room for the women, under the mothering superintendence of a matron
and trained nurse.
But this one McCormick City, immense as it is, does not by any means
represent the sum total of McCormick's legacy to the United States. As
the founder of the harvesting-machine business, he deserves credit for
an industry which now represents an investment of about $150,000,000.
With the sole exception of the Australian stripper, every wheat-reaping
machine is still made on the lines laid down by McCormick in 1831. New
improvements have been adopted; but not one of his seven factors has
been thrown aside.
Fully two-thirds of this industry is still being done by the United
States, although four-fifths of the wheat is grown in other countries.
Our national income, from this one item of harvesting machinery, has
risen to $30,000,000 a year--more than we derive from the exportation of
any other American invention. No European country, apparently, has been
able to master the complexities and multifarious details which abound in
a successful harvester business.
In 1902 the efficiency of the larger American plants was greatly
increased by the organization of the International Harvester Company,
which has its headquarters in Chicago. The McCormick City is the most
extensive plant in this Company, and McCormick's son--who is also Cyrus
H. McCormick--is its President. In this Company sixteen separate plants
are coordinated, four of these being in foreign countries. Its yearly
output averages about $75,000,000 in value; and in bulk is great enough
to fill 65,000 freight-cars. It has 25,000 workmen and 35,000 agents.
The lumber with which its yards are filled comes from its own
80,000-acre forest; the steel comes from its own furnaces and the iron
ore from its own mines. It is so overwhelmingly vast, this new
famine-fighting consolidation, that the value of its output for one hour
is greater than the $25,000 of capital with which McCormick built his
first factory in Chicago.
So, it is evident that the McCormick Reaper has been an indispensable
factor in the making of America. Without it, we could never have had the
America of to-day. It has brought good, and nothing but good, to every
country that has accepted it. It has never been, and never can be, put
to an evil use. It cannot, under any system of government, benefit the
few and not the many. It is as democratic in its nature as the American
Constitution; and in every foreign country where it cuts the grain, it
is an educator as well as a machine, giving to the masses of less
fortunate lands an object-lesson in democracy and the spirit of American
progress.