The Romance of the Reaper Part 7

No wonder that the financiers who undertook to organise them were driven almost to distraction by their obstinate independence. They had as many contradictory opinions as a Russian Duma; and it was soon clear that the only possible way to proceed was to keep them apart until all possible preliminaries were arranged.

So the four Harvester Men went back home until the details of the new combination should be worked out. Then they were summoned again to New York. As was their custom, they went to different hotels, and each man was handled separately until he was in an organisable frame of mind. This master-stroke of diplomacy was accomplished by George W. Perkins--Morgan's most versatile partner; and it gave Perkins a day and a night that he will never forget. From morning until midnight--from midnight until the first ray of dawn slanted down Broadway, Perkins dashed from hotel to hotel like a human shuttle. Deering conceded one point if McCormick would concede another. Glessner yielded one of his claims, and Jones withdrew something else. Inch by inch these stubborn men were pushed within tying distance of each other; and the fifty-year harvester war was about to come to an end.

The next day Perkins renewed the struggle, but he was too tired to continue the cab driving between hotels. He telephoned the four Harvester Men to meet him at Morgan's office. As each man climbed up the rusty iron steps of the Morgan Building he was switched by the big Irish doorkeeper into one of those large inner rooms at the rear, on the ground floor, where many a broken business has been mended. Four men in four rooms, with Perkins flying in and out--such was the way that the great harvester company was finished. It was a unique situation, as much like an incident in comic opera as an affair of business. But the Morgan experts knew that if the four men were allowed to meet, the old hurtful rivalries would break out afresh and the project might snap off like a broken dream.

To strengthen the new company with a big surplus of ready money, a one-sixth interest was sold for twenty millions to Morgan and several other New York financiers of the "old reliable" sort. Also, a fifth harvester company, in Milwaukee, was bought from Stephen Bull for about five millions. And when the last rivet had been clinched and the last nail driven home, the four Westerners suddenly found themselves sitting around the same table, in the new International Harvester Company, of Chicago.

There were several harvester companies that remained independent, but probably not from choice. I do not know of one that has not, at some stage of its career, tried to get into a trust. Fifteen companies were merged by Colonel Conger in 1892, but they were poorly fastened together and soon fell apart. It is also a fact, though one not before made public, that the Mutual Life Insurance Company tried to form a second Harvester Combine in 1903, with four large manufacturing companies in the merger, and under the presidency of E. D. Metcalf, of Auburn, New York. When this project failed, three independent companies--two in New York and one in Canada, offered themselves for sale to the Harvester Company. It bought one--the Osborne--for six millions, and refused the others.

"We are big enough now," said Cyrus H. McCormick. "It is not safe for one company to have a monopoly. What we want to do is to regulate compet.i.tion, not to destroy it."

Besides the big Osborne Company, which is now the third largest in the combine, the Harvester Company has bought five smaller concerns, and built two new plants--one in Canada and one in Sweden. It is like the original United States--a union of thirteen industrial colonies. Its output has risen to 700,000 harvesting machines a year, including all varieties; and its annual revenue is more than seventy-three million dollars.

With its 25,000 employees and 42,000 agents, this one company is supporting as many families as there are in Utah or Montana. A square mile of land would be too small to contain its factories. At its hundred warehouses there is trackage for 12,000 cars. Around its workshops are six busy railways of its own, whose engines last year pulled out 65,000 freight-cars, jammed full of machinery for the farmers of the world.

Its properties are so widespread that no member of the company has seen them all. To run around their circle would be a trip of 15,000 miles. It owns 20,000 acres of coal lands in Kentucky, 100,000 acres of trees in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, and 40,000,000 tons of ore in the Wisconsin and Mesaba Ranges. It has staked its money--$120,000,000--upon the belief that for fifty years longer, at least, the scientists will find no subst.i.tute for bread.

The fact that Elbert H. Gary, the official head of the Steel Trust, is one of its directors, has not prevented this self-sufficient company from owning a complete steel plant, where 2,000 Hungarians make iron from ore, and steel from iron. It saws its trees into lumber in Missouri, and roasts its coal into c.o.ke in Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in fact, that if they were contiguous, they would make a Harvester City as s.p.a.cious as Greater Chicago.

But the most surprising feature of this unique corporation, to one who sees it for the first time, is the distracting variety of things that pour out of its factories. Its business is by no means to make harvesters and nothing else. Its true character seems to be that of a manufacturing department store for farmers. As a matter of actual count, I found in its factories and warehouses thirty-seven different species of machines, besides all manner of variations of each sort.

Here you will see, not only a mower to cut the gra.s.s, but a tedder (a kind of steel mule, with an incurably bad temper) to kick and scatter the new-mown hay, so that it will dry in the sun; a rake to gather it together; a loader to swing it on the wagon; and a baler to compress it into bundles.

Here are the self-binders, not for the grain only, but for corn and rice as well. For the especial benefit of King Corn, whose tribute to this Republic has lately swollen to twelve hundred millions a year, the company is making machines that pluck the corn from the stalk with iron hands, and others that wrench off the husks, sh.e.l.l the corn, and grind it into several varieties of breakfast food for the four-footed boarders of the farm.

Here is a new machine, much less elegant than useful, for flinging manure over a field. Barefooted women did this work in the old brutal days of hand labour. But now, thanks to the brain of a canny Canadian farmer, Joseph S. Kemp, one worker can feed the hungry fields without so much as soiling the tips of the fingers.

The farmer's wife--and there are 10,000,000 of her in the United States, has been the last one to be considered, in this outpouring of machinery.

But I found at Milwaukee a rebuilt factory belonging to the International, where 2,500 men are making fifty cream separators and 100 gasolene engines a day, both designed to make life easier for Mrs. Farmer, as well as for her husband. Also, it will please her to know that she may soon be honking her way to town in an automobile buggy, which the big corporation is making for farmers in a new factory in Akron.

A harvester company must follow the whims of its customers, almost as much as though it had newspapers for sale. It must give 10,000,000 farmers what they want. At the Plano factory I saw 470 different varieties of wheels; and sixty-one kinds of wooden tongues at McCormick's.

"Nothing could be simpler than a tongue," said Maurice Kane, the chief mechanical expert of the International. "It is a mere pole. If we suited ourselves, we should only make two kinds--one for horses and one for oxen.

But the farmers of the world have sixty-one different ideas as to how a tongue ought to be made, and we must give them what they ask for."

The last Minnesota Legislature, in the simplicity of its heart, proposed to establish a complete harvester plant for $200,000. It may surprise the members of that Legislature to know that the International has lately spent twice as much merely to improve one twine factory in St. Paul, and four times as much to build one warehouse in Chicago. Though it began its career with sixty million dollars' worth of equipment, it has been forced by the pressure of its trade to spend sixteen millions more on its factories. And for lack of a weather prophet, it is obliged to carry over from five to six million dollars worth of machines each year, which remain unsold in different countries.

By its very nature, this industry cannot be carried on in a small way. It is as essentially mutual and cooperative as life insurance or banking. If a malicious "green bug" devours the wheat in Kansas, the loss must be made up by larger sales somewhere else. This, no doubt, is the main reason why every plant that was ever built to supply a local trade has failed.

No other manufacturing business carries so many risks or includes so many factors. It is the most comprehensive industry in the world. It is the link between the city and the farm. It is both wholesale and retail, ready-made and made to order, local and international. It must make what the farmer demands, and yet teach him better methods. It is at once a factory, a bank and a university.

Thus, of necessity, the Harvester Company represents in the highest degree the new American way of manufacturing: everything on a large scale, elaborate machinery, unskilled workmen, and a vast surplus to drive it past failures and misfortunes. From its ore mines in the Mesaba Range, where I saw a steam-shovel heap a fifty ton railroad car in ten swings, to the lumber yard of the McCormick Works, where 26,000,000 feet of hardwood are seasoning in the sooty rays of the Chicago sun, it was a panorama of big production.

"How many castings did your men make last year?" I asked of the hustling Irish-American who rules over one of the McCormick foundries.

"Very nearly 44,000,000, sir," he replied. "And the gray iron foundry over there uses three times as much iron as we do, and it made more than 12,000,000."

Fifty-six million castings! Merely to count these would take the whole Minnesota Legislature sixteen days, even though every member worked eight hours a day and counted sixty castings a minute. Far, far behind are the simple, old-fashioned days, when a reaping tool was made of two pieces--the handle and the blade. There are now 300 parts in a horse-rake, 600 in a mower, 3,800 in a binder.

When McCormick built his first hundred reapers in 1845, he paid four and a half cents for bolts. That was in the mythical age of hand labour. To-day fifty bolts are made for a cent. So with guard-fingers. McCormick paid twenty-four cents each when James K. Polk was in the White House. Now there is a ferocious machine, which, with the least possible a.s.sistance from one man, cuts out 1,300 guard-fingers in ten hours, at a labour-cost of six for a cent.

Also, while exploring one of the Chicago factories, I came upon a herd of cud-chewing machines that were crunching out chain-links at the rate of 56,000,000 a year. Nearby were four smaller and more irritable automata, which were biting off pieces of wire and chewing them into linchpins at a speed of 400,000 bites a day.

"Take out your watch and time this man," said Superintendent Brooks of the McCormick plant. "See how long he is in boring five holes in that great casting."

"Exactly six minutes," I answered.

"Well, that's progress," observed Brooks. "Before we bought that machine, it was a matter of four hours to bore those holes."

In the immense carpenter shop he pointed to another machine. "There is one of the reasons," he said, "why the small factories have been wiped out.

That machine cost us $2,500. Its work is to shape poles, and it saves us a penny a pole; that is profitable to us because we use 300,000 poles a year."

In one of its five twine mills--a monstrous Bedlam of noise and fuzz, which is by far the largest of its sort in the world--there is enough twine twisted in a single day to make a girdle around the earth.

In the paint shop the man with the brush has been superseded--a case of downright trade suicide. In his place is an unskilled Hungarian with a big tank of paint. Souse! Into the tank goes the whole frame of a binder, and the swarthy descendant of Attilla thinks himself slow if he dips less than four hundred of these in a day. The labour-cost of painting wheels is now one-fifth of a cent each. Ten at once, on a wooden axle, are swung into the paint bath without the touch of a finger. And the few belated brush-men who are left work with frantic haste, knowing that they, too, are being pursued by a machine that will overtake them some day.

In the central bookkeeping office of the Harvester Company I found some almost incredible statistics. Here, for instance, are a few of the items in last year's bill of expenses:

Two hundred and thirty-five miles of leather belting, 940 miles of cotton duck, 2,000 grindstones, 3,000 shovels, 10,000 brooms, 1,670,000 buckles, 1,185,000 pounds paint, 4,000,000 pounds wire, 15,000,000 pounds nails.

Merely to maintain its experimental department costs this imperial company $7,000 a week. Here are more than two hundred inventors and designers, well housed and well salaried, and not tramping from shop to shop, as inventors did in the good old days. They are paid to think; and the company is mightily proud of them. But the truth is that all large corporations which employ an army of unskilled workmen are being compelled to offset so much mere muscle by a special department of brains.

There is, besides, a most elaborate system of inspection. In the Deering factory I saw a squad of ten men who were testing the newly made binders with straw. "About three out of a hundred need fixing," said the foreman.

The chains are tested by a violent pneumatic machine. Every link, even, is branded with a private mark--[triangle]. And in the Hamilton plant a new scheme is being tried--the whole packing gang has become a staff of inspection. Whenever a man finds a hundred defective pieces, he gets an extra dollar. One sharp-eyed Scot in the packing-room confided to me that he had made "as high as two shillin's a week."

Such is the scope of the International Harvester Company, created in 1902.

As to the men who control it, I have had the greatest difficulty in penetrating back of the business to their personal characteristics. For they dislike the fierce light that beats upon a rich American.

Of its president, Cyrus H. McCormick the Second, the first word to be said is that he is not built on the same lines as his belligerent father. He would fare badly, very likely, if he were in charge of a catch-as-catch-can business, such as the reaper trade was thirty years ago. The making of harvesters is, to him, half a duty--to his father, his workmen, and the machine itself--and half a profession--not a battle nor a game, as it was with the first Reaper Kings. He has no desire to play a lone hand in the business world. And his painstaking purpose, as a man of affairs, is to secure less speculation and more stability, less waste and more organisation, less friction and more community of interest.

In all things he is a simple and serious man. I have seen him work from noon until midnight; but in my opinion, if he really had his choice, he would prefer a quiet homestead, in the little town of Princeton, where he could pursue a life devoted to the interests of Princeton University and the Civic Federation. Even now, whenever he can get free from the treadmill of his office, his greatest delight is to escape to a camp in the wild lands of northern Michigan, where he can dress like a fisherman and forget that he is the servitor of a hundred and twenty millions.

Harold McCormick, his brother, and a vice-president of the big company, is a boy-hearted man of thirty-five. He has a quick-action brain; but his strong point is his personal magnetism and likableness. He knows the harvester business throughout, having been a shirt-sleeve workman in the factory, an agent at Council Bluffs, and a field expert in several states.

Most of the stories told about him ill.u.s.trate his nave boyishness. For instance, when he had become an expert in handling the harvester, an agent-in-chief near Chicago telegraphed for a dozen men. Only eleven experts were available, so Harold volunteered to be the twelfth. He had his working-card made out in the usual form, ent.i.tling him to $18 a week.

On Sat.u.r.day night, when the twelve men went to the agent-in-chief for their wages, he said, "I want all of you to come in and have a conference with me to-morrow morning at ten o'clock."

"Sorry to say, Mr. Blank," said young McCormick, "that I can't be here until Monday."

The agent stormed. How could anything be more important to a three-dollar-a-day man than his job?

"Well, if you really must know the reason," said the berated mechanic, "I have an appointment to go to church to-morrow morning with the Rockefeller family."

The third brother--Stanley McCormick, worked his way up from labourer to superintendent of the whole plant. For years he rose at five o'clock every work-day morning, and walked into the factory at six.

All three of the McCormicks show a remarkable sense of obligation, almost of grat.i.tude, to their employees. At the time the International was organised, Stanley said to the others: