The Romance of the Reaper Part 1

The Romance of the Reaper.

by Herbert Newton Ca.s.son.

PREFACE

This is the story of our most useful business. It is a medley of mechanics, millionaires, kings, inventors and farmers; and it is intended for the average man and woman, boy and girl. Although I have taken great pains to make this book accurate, I have written it in the fashion of romance, because it tells a story that every American ought to know.

The fact is that the United States owes much more to the Reaper than it owes to the factory or the railroad or the Wall Street Stock Exchange.

Without the magical grain machinery that gives us cheap bread, the whole new structure of our civilisation, with all its dazzling luxuries and refinements, would be withered by the blight of Famine. This may sound strange and sensational to those who have been bred in the cities, but it is true.

The reaper has done more to chase the wolf from the door--to abolish poverty and drudgery and hand-labour, than any other invention of our day.

It has done good without any backwash of evil. It has not developed any new species of social parasite, as so many modern improvements have done.

It has not added one dollar to the unclean h.o.a.rd of a stock-gambler, nor turned loose upon the public a single idle millionaire.

The reaper is our best guarantee of prosperity. In spite of our periodical panics, which prove, by the way, that the men who provide us with banks are not as efficient as the men who provide us with bread, we are certain to rebound into prosperity and social progress as long as we continue to make three hundred harvesting machines every working day--one every two minutes. The rising flood of wheat is bound to submerge the schemers and the pessimists alike.

And it is the reaper, too, which has done most to make possible a n.o.bler human race, by lessening the power of that ancient motive--the Search for Food. Every harvester that clicks its way through the yellow grain means more than bread. It means more comfort, more travel, more art and music, more books and education. In this large fact lies the real Romance of the Reaper.

In gathering the material for this book I have been greatly a.s.sisted by Messrs. E. J. Baker, of the _Farm Implement News_; B. B. Clarke, of the _American Thresherman_; Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, Ill; C. W. Marsh, of De Kalb, Ill.; Edwin D. Metcalf and T. M. Osborne, of Auburn, N. Y., Henry Wallace, of _Wallace's Farmer_, William N. Whiteley, of Springfield, Ohio; and the officials of the International Harvester Company, who made it possible for me to have free access to all of its works and to familiarise myself with its manner of doing business in this country and abroad.

Also, I take pleasure in reproducing the following editorial note from _Everybody's Magazine_, in which four chapters of this book were first printed:

"President Roosevelt in his message of December 3rd said: 'Modern industrial conditions are such that combination is not only necessary, but inevitable.... Corporation and labour union alike have come to stay. Each, if properly managed, is a source of good, and not evil.' If capital combinations can be good, there must be some that are good. Would it not be a proper service to the American people to tell them of a trust that, while it had reaped the economical advantages of combination, had yet played fair with the public and with its compet.i.tors? Hence this story of the great Harvester combine. Before we began to publish Mr. Ca.s.son's articles, we followed up his investigations with a thorough inquiry of our own, and we are bound to say that the business methods of this inst.i.tution seem to conform to the highest standards of fair play and square dealing. The International Harvester combine is not a tariff trust.

Its members surrendered dominance in their own business only when the trend of 'modern industrial conditions' and overstrenuous compet.i.tion made combination 'not only necessary, but inevitable.' The inside history of the 'Morganising' of this group of fighters, as narrated here, is as humorous as it is fascinating."

The Romance of the Reaper

CHAPTER I

THE STORY OF MCCORMICK

This Romance of the Reaper is a true fairy tale of American life--the story of the magicians who have taught the civilised world to gather in its harvests by machinery.

On the old European plan--snip--snip--snipping with a tiny hand-sickle, every bushel of wheat required three hours of a man's lifetime. To-day, on the new American plan--riding on the painted chariot of a self-binding harvester, the price of wheat has been cut down to _ten minutes a bushel_.

"When I first went into the harvest field," so an Illinois farmer told me, "it took ten men to cut and bind my grain. Now our hired girl gets on the seat of a self-binder and does the whole business."

This magical machinery of the wheat-field solves the mystery of prosperity. It explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture. It accounts for the growth of great cities with their steel mills and factories. And it makes clear how we in the United States have become the best fed nation in the world.

Hard as it may be for this twentieth century generation to believe, it is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread.

Life was a Search for Food--a desperate postponement of famine.

Cut the Kings and their retinues out of history and it is no exaggeration to say that the human race was hungry for ten thousand years. Even of the Black Bread--burnt and dirty and coa.r.s.e, there was not enough; and the few who were well fed took the food from the mouths of slaves. Even the nations that grew Galileo and Laplace and Newton were haunted by the ghosts of Hunger. Merrie England was famine-swept in 1315, 1321, 1369, 1438, 1482, 1527, 1630, 1661, and 1709. To have enough to eat, was to the ma.s.ses of all nations a dream--a Millennium of Prosperity.

This long Age of Hunger outlived the great nations of antiquity. Why?

Because they went at the problem of progress in the wrong way.

If Marcus Aurelius had invented the reaper, or if the Gracchi had been inventors instead of politicians, the story of Rome would have had a happier ending. But Rome said: The first thing is empire. Egypt said: The first thing is fame. Greece said: The first thing is genius. Not one of them said: The first thing is _Bread_.

In the Egyptian quarter of the British Museum, standing humbly in a gla.s.s case between two mummied Pharaohs, is a little group of farm utensils. A fractured wooden plough, a rusted sickle, two sticks tied together with a leathern thong, and several ta.s.sels that had hung on the horns of the oxen. A rummaging professor found these in the tomb of Seti I., who had his will on the banks of the Nile three thousand years ago. Egypt had a most elaborate government at that time. She had an army and navy, an art and literature. Yet her bread-tools were no better than those of the barbarians whom she despised.

It is one of the most baffling mysteries of history, that agriculture--the first industry to be learned, was the last one to be developed. For thousands of years the wise men of the world absolutely ignored the problems of the farm. A farmer remained either a serf or a tenant. He was a stolid drudge--"brother to the ox." Even the masterful old Pilgrim Fathers had no ploughs at all--nothing but hoes and sharp sticks, for the first twelve years of their pioneering.

Fifty-five years of American Independence went by before the first reaper clicked its way clumsily into fame, on a backwoods farm in Virginia. At that time, 1831, the American people were free, but they held in their hands the land-tools of slaves. They had to labour and sweat in the fields, with the crude implements that had been produced by ages of slavery. For two generations they tried to build up a prosperous Republic with sickles, flails, and wooden ploughs, and they failed.

There are men and women now alive who can remember the hunger year of 1837, when there were wheat bounties in Maine and bread riots in New York City. Flour mills were closed for lack of wheat. Starving men fell in the streets of Boston and Philadelphia. Mobs of labourers, maddened by the fear of famine, broke into warehouses and carried away sacks of food as though they were human wolves. Even in the Middle West--the prairie paradise of farmers--many a family fought against Death with the serf's weapon of Black Bread.

Enterprise was not then an American virtue. The few men who dared to suggest improvements were persecuted as enemies of society. The first iron ploughs were said to poison the soil. The first railroad was torn up. The first telegraph wires were cut. The first sewing-machine was smashed. And the first man who sold coal in Philadelphia was chased from the State as a swindler.

Even the railway was a dangerous toy. The telegraph was still a dream in the brain of Morse. John Deere had not invented his steel plough, nor Howe his sewing-machine, nor Hoe his printing-press. There were no stoves nor matches nor oil-lamps. Petroleum was peddled as a medicine at a dollar a bottle. Iron was $75 a ton. Money was about as reliable as mining stocks are to-day; and all the savings in all the banks would not now buy the chickens in Iowa.

Our total exports were not more than we paid last year for diamonds and champagne. Chicago was a twelve-family village. There was no West nor Middle West. Not one grain of wheat had been grown in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma or Texas.

The whole structure of civilisation, as we know it, was unbuilt; and most of its architects and builders were unborn or in the cradle. Spencer was eleven years of age; Virchow was ten; Pasteur nine; Huxley six; Berthelot four; and as for Haeckel, Carnegie, Morgan, Edison and their generation, they had not yet appeared in the land of the living.

Then came the Reaper.

This unappreciated machine, about which so little has been written, changed the face of the world. It moved the civilised nations up out of the bread line. It made prosperity possible; and elevated the whole struggle for existence to a higher plane.

Life is still a race--always will be; but not for bread. The lowest prizes now are gold watches and steam yachts and automobiles. Even the hobo at the back door scorns bread, unless we apologise for it with meat and jam.

It is so plentiful--this clean, white bread, that it is scarcely an article of commerce any longer. In our hotels it is thrown in free of charge, as though it were a pinch of salt or a gla.s.s of water. There is no "penn'orth of bread" in the bill, as there was in Falstaff's day.

Seven bushels of wheat apiece! That is what we eighty-five million people ate in 1906--twelve thousand million loaves of bread. Such a year of feasting was new in the history of the world. And yet we sent a thousand million dollars' worth of food to other nations.

Suppose that bread were money, just for one day! What a lesson it would be on the social value of the reaper! Thirty loaves would be the day's pay of a labourer--as much as he could carry on his back. Two loaves for a cigar--three for a shave--five for a bunch of violets--forty for a theatre ticket--a hundred for a bottle of champagne! Is there anything cheaper than bread?

The reaper was America's answer to Malthus--who scared England into abolishing the Corn Laws by his proclamation that "the ultimate check to population is the lack of food." What would that well-meaning pessimist think were he now alive, if he were told that the human race is growing wheat at the rate of ten bushels a year per family? Or that Minnesota and the Dakotas (names that the world of his day had never heard) produce enough wheat to feed all the people of England?

The reaper was America's answer to the world's demand for democracy.

Instead of bread riots and red flags and theories of an earthly paradise in which n.o.body worked but the Government, the United States invented a machine that gave democracy a chance. Instead of a guillotine to cut off the heads of the privileged people who ate too much, it produced a reaper that gave everybody enough. This was not a complete answer, nor will there ever be one, to the riddle of liberty, equality and fraternity. But it was so much better than theories and riots that it helped to persuade twenty-five million immigrants to cross the ocean and become shareholders in the American Republic.

If it were possible to trace back a strand in the twisted thread of cause and effect, we would find that many a factory and steel-mill owes its origin to the flood of wheat-money that came to us from Europe in 1880 and 1881--every dollar of it made by the humble harvester.

Without this obedient slave of wood and steel, all our railroads and skysc.r.a.pers and automobiles could not save us from famine. If we had to reap our grain in the same way as the Romans did, it would take half the men in the United States to feed us on bread alone, to say nothing of the rest of the menu.

Like most great things, the reaper was born among humble people and in a humble way. It was crude at first and dogged by failure. No one man made it. It was the product of a hundred brains.

The exact truth about its origin is not known and never will be. What few facts there were have been torn and twisted by the bitter feuds of the Patent Office. Every letter and doc.u.ment that exists is controversial. So I cannot say that the story, as I give it, is entirely true, but only that it is as near as I can get to the truth after six months of investigation.

There is evidence to show that Cyrus Hall McCormick completed a practical reaper in 1831, although the first reaper patent was taken out in 1833 by an inventive seaman named Obed Hussey, of Baltimore. The young McCormick did not secure his patent until 1834; but he had given a public exhibition in Virginia three years before.