Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 9

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.

CHAPTER XI

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 princ.i.p.al 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 pa.s.sed 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Const.i.tution; and in every foreign country where it cuts the grain, it is an educator as well as a machine, giving to the ma.s.ses of less fortunate lands an object-lesson in democracy and the spirit of American progress.

CHAPTER XII

THE REAPER AND THE WORLD

We shall now see what the invention of the Reaper means to the human race as a whole. We shall leave behind McCormick and the United States, and survey the field from a higher standpoint. The selection of wheat as the first world-food,--its abundance made possible by the Reaper--its transportation by railroads and steamships--its storage in elevators--the production of flour--the growth of wheat-banks, wheat-ports, and exchanges--the new wheat empires--the international mechanism of marketing--the conquest of famine and the stupendous possibilities of the future! These are the subjects that group themselves under the general t.i.tle--_The Reaper and the World_.

To find a world-food,--that was the beginning of the problem. All human beings wake up hungry every morning of their lives; and consequently the first necessity of the day is food. The search for food is the oldest of instincts. It is the master-motive of evolution. It has reared empires up and thrown them down. As Buckle has shown, where the national food is cheap and plentiful, population increases more rapidly. And as Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition,"

maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and social misery in its various forms. "Nothing is more demoralizing," he says, "than chronic hunger."

"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin.

For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent hunger-pangs in time of famine. Once let those countries have cheap bread, and there may be no more opium sold there than there is to-day in Kansas. For lack of bread came the war between Russia and j.a.pan; what the one nation wanted was a seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what the other wanted was more land for the support of her swarming population. For lack of bread have come most of the crimes of greed and violence,--most of the social systems based on sordid self-interest, most of the ill-humor that has postponed the coming of an era of peace on earth and good-will among men.

Now, of the three main foods of the human race, flesh, rice, and wheat, wheat is the best suited to be a world-food. Flesh becomes too expensive once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries.

Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as for the South Sea Islander. It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in just about the right proportion.

Wheat, to the botanist, is a gra.s.s--"a degraded lily," to quote from Grant Allen. It was originally a flower that was tamed by man and trained from beauty to usefulness. We do not know when or where the prehistoric Burbank lived who undertook this education of the wheat-lily. But we do know that wheat has been a food for at least five thousand years. We find it in the oldest tombs of Egypt and pictured on the stones of the Pyramids. We know that Solomon sent wheat as a present to his friend, the King of Tyre; and we have reason to believe that its first appearance was in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates, near where the ancient city of Babylon rose to greatness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chart Showing Relative Distribution of Values by Producing Countries in 1908 of World's Production of Five Princ.i.p.al Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Chart Showing Relative Values in 1908 of World's Production of the Five Princ.i.p.al Grains. Approximate Value, $9,280,000,000]

Wheat is not a wild weed. It is a tame and transient plant--a plant of civilization. It could not continue to exist without man, and man, perhaps, could not exist except in the tropical countries without wheat.

Each needs the other. If the human race were to perish from the face of the earth, wheat might survive for three years, but no longer. So close has this co-operation been between wheat and civilized man, that an eminent German writer, Dr. Gerland, maintains with a wealth of evidence that wheat was the original cause of civilization, partly because it was the first good and plentiful food, and partly because it was wheat that persuaded primitive man to forsake his wars and his wanderings and to learn the peaceful habits of agriculture.

In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies--weeds, fungus diseases, insects, and drought,--and attained a crop total of 3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain and sunshine.