The Romance of the Reaper Part 6

"Take this," he said, "and make me a partner. Your invention will be a world's wonder some day."

All told, Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on Appleby's genius, for which, twelve years later, he drew out $80,000. This was the first of the many incidental fortunes scattered right and left in the path of the self-binder, which began in 1880, to sweep forward as gloriously as the triumphal car of a Roman emperor.

As for William Deering--the modest manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879 joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had he sold the 3,000 self-binders than he found himself floundering neck deep in an unexpected sea of troubles. There was not a flaw in the binders. They were cutting and tying the grain with the skill of 60,000 men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand farmers swore that it was too high.

Twine was an item that they had never in their lives bought in large quant.i.ties. To pay fifty dollars--the price of a horse--for mere string that was used once and then flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like buying daily papers by the thousand, or shoe-laces by the ton. And so it came about that though Deering had reduced the cost of wheat ten per cent., he got little thanks for his superb machines--nothing but a loud and angry roar for better and cheaper twine.

Deering moved against this new array of difficulties with quiet and inexorable persistence. There were only three binder-twine makers in the United States, and all warned him that he was pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp.

But Deering pushed on until he met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of Philadelphia. From the una.s.suming way in which Deering stated his needs, Fitler concluded that the order would be a small one.

"What you want," he said, "is a single strand twine, which cannot be made without a new line of machinery. I regret to say that I cannot afford to do this for one customer."

"Well," said Deering, "I think I may need a good deal in the long run, though I wish to begin with not more than ten car-loads."

Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was dazed, but only for a moment. It was his chance and he knew it. Years afterward, he was fond of telling how he "made a million-dollar deal with William Deering in two minutes."

Thus, whatever Deering touched, he improved. He became the servant of the harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as sporting millionaires spent fortunes on their horses. It was his one extravagance. In his later endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on gra.s.s twine, $35,000 on paper, $43,000 on straw, and failed. Then he spent $165,000 on flax and succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort of paymaster to a small mob of inventors who had new ideas or who thought they had. There was one very able inventor--John Stone--who actually drew his salary and expenses every week for twenty years, until he had perfected a corn-picking machine. From first to last, Deering spent "perhaps more than two millions of dollars" on improvements, according to one of his closest friends.

The fact is that the Appleby binder had transformed Deering from a man in business simply to make money, into an enthusiast. While he remained as careful of the business as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself more than the profit. He would still fuss if he saw half a dozen nails in the sweepings, or any other waste of pennies. But he poured the golden flood of profits back into his factory with a recklessness that amazed his friends. He pampered his beloved machines with roller bearings and bodies of steel. He sent them to Europe and showed them to kings. Then, as his enthusiasm grew, he looked ahead to the time when even the farm-horse shall be set free from drudgery; and he began to build automobile mowers and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened, as he worked, into a seer who saw far past the gain or loss of the present into the splendour of the future.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CYRUS HALL McCORMICK, JR.

CHARLES DEERING Photo by Matzene, Chicago]

Sagacity--that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William Deering's success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his compet.i.tors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There seemed to be a business compa.s.s in his brain.

He was never a master of men, like McCormick, nor a good mixer among men, like Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was easily superior to them both. He knew how to pit his managers one against another, as Carnegie did; and how to develop a factory into a swift and automatic machine. He was a statesman of commercialism. He piled up a big fortune, and earned it.

It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley, Lewis Miller, Morgan, Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard stood a farmer's son--John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the loyalty of Steward that he became Deering's Grand Vizier. He was inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen patents to his credit.

So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling out in every workday minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine.

Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his conversation.

"A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter," he said; "and perhaps he was right. I wasn't an inventor, that's true. All I did was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I suppose I was just a promoter."

The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty.

Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said:

"Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?"

"Yes," replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.

"Well," said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, "I want to say that you're a mighty smart man."

Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone, he leaned over to Webster and said:

"Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for making them. I never felt so foolish in my life."

He is now eighty-one--older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times in wealth.

He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world.

More--they said, "Presto, change!" and the drudges of the harvest-fields stood up and became men. They have made life easier and n.o.bler for untold myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.

Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads.

And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.

The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester business once--and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the famous "Binder-Twine Trust" set out with the black flag flying. It was a skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was the first and only "easy money" that was ever made in the harvester world.

Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.

No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine crawled out whipped or terrified.

And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of compet.i.tion. _Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and warfare continued, their business would be destroyed._

CHAPTER III

THE INTERNATIONAL HARVESTER COMPANY

For fifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field of compet.i.tion. Their armies of agents, drilled in the arts of rivalry, waged a war in which quarter was neither given nor sought. It was a fight almost of extermination. Out of two hundred companies that went to battle with flags waving and drums beating, less than a dozen came home.

David M. Osborne backed a new self-binder, lost a million, and died of heartbreak. J. S. Morgan, who had a small factory at Brockport, saw the immense McCormick and Deering plants and quit. Even the great Whiteley fell, and Lewis Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the founder of Chautauqua, went down "like a great tree upon the hills."

Walter A. Wood, after forty years of success, took Governor Merriam and James J. Hill as partners, and set out to win the West for the Wood Company. Their factory was the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the best, and their fame was over all the prairies. Yet after five years of battling they surrendered; and not one harvester is made to-day west of Illinois.

It is a common opinion among harvester men that from first to last there has been more money put into the business than has ever been taken out--so enormously wasteful were these years of compet.i.tion. By 1902 the harvester business was merely a terrific and destructive war. The agents were tearing the whole industry to shreds and tatters. So far as the Harvester Men could see, they must choose between combination and ruin.

Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were individualists through and through. The spirit of compet.i.tion had been bred in the bone. So, when several of them came together to check this warfare, it was not of their own free will. It was because they could do nothing else. They were hurled together by social forces over which they had no control.

One by one these battle-worn Westerners came to New York, "on an exploring expedition," as one of them said. Here they met Judge Elbert H. Gary, whom they had known intimately in Chicago. Gary had been William Deering's attorney for twenty-five years. He was a farmer's son, and had risen to be the official head of the Steel Trust; so that he was the one man who had an expert knowledge at once of farms, harvesters, and mergers. And naturally, when the Chicagoans ran to Gary with their tales of woe, he brought them across Broadway into the office of J. P. Morgan, which had become in 1902 a sort of Tribunal of Industrial Peace.

There were four of them--Cyrus H. McCormick, Charles Deering, J. J.

Glessner, and W. H. Jones--and all of them added to the strong preference for compet.i.tion a definite opposition to trusts, monopolies, and stock speculation. They were not the Wall Street type of millionaire. In that time of booming optimism, they might have made more money in one year by selling stock than they had made in thirty years by selling harvesters.

But no one of them had tried it. The fact is that they cared more for the good-will of the farmers and the prestige of their machines than they did for larger profits. The thing that troubled them most in the proposed consolidation of properties, one of the Morgan partners told me, was the fear that prices would in any case have to be raised, because of the increasing cost of labour and raw materials.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HAROLD McCORMICK Photo by Matzene, Chicago, 1905

J. J. GLESSNER

W. H. JONES Photo by Smith, Evanston, Ill.

JAMES DEERING Photo by Dyer, Chicago]