The Romance of the Reaper Part 8

"What about the men? There are some of them that deserve a share in the new company, as much as we do."

So a list of the old employees was made, from Charlie Mulkey, the old watchman, to R. G. Brooks, the superintendent, and $1,500,000 was divided among them. Recently a complete profit-sharing plan, such as Perkins had worked out for the Steel Trust, was put in working order, and about $200,000 of extra money have been scattered through the pay-envelopes.

The two Deerings, who are now chairman and vice-president, were disciplined in the same stern, old-fashioned way as the McCormicks.

"Put this young man to work at the bottom rung of the ladder," said William Deering, when his younger son, James, was graduated from the university.

Being in many respects a chip of the old block, James Deering plunged into business with as much energy as though he had to toil for his millions as well as inherit them. He became a field expert, and followed the harvest from Texas to North Dakota. He asked for no favours, but sweltered along among the Western farmers for several summers. Then he went to the foot of the ladder in the factory and wrestled with big iron castings and steel frames. Step by step he worked up, until even his Spartan father was satisfied and made him the manager of the whole plant.

At present there is perhaps no man in the harvester industry who has so great a variety of attainments as James Deering. He is a shrewd commercialist, yet he has found time, no one knows how, to master several languages and to run the whole octave of self-culture.

Charles Deering, the older of the two brothers, had less farm experience, as he served for twelve years in Uncle Sam's navy. He was a lieutenant when he came ash.o.r.e to help his father make harvesters. At that time he did much to solve the binder-twine problem--how to get better twine and plenty of it. Then, when the drama of consolidation was staged by Morgan, he took a leading part. Personally, he is a bluff, forceful, but companionable man, such as one would expect to find on the deck of a war-ship rather than in the telephone-pestered office of a sky-sc.r.a.per.

The two other vice-presidents of the Harvester Company are battle-worn veterans of the compet.i.tive period--J. J. Glessner and William H. Jones.

Glessner, beginning as a bookkeeper in Ohio, has for many years been regarded as a sort of unofficial peacemaker and balance-wheel of the trade. Everybody confided in Glessner. He did as much as any one else to harmonise the warring Harvester Kings; but it is also true that it was the gentle Glessner who developed compet.i.tion to the explosive point by originating the system of canva.s.sing. He poured first oil and then water on the fire.

As for William H. Jones, he is a st.u.r.dy and genial Welshman, who was born and bred in a farmhouse. As a boy he reaped wheat with a sickle in the valleys of Wales. About forty years ago, when he had become an American, he bought a reaper and a tent, and set out to earn his fortune. By working twenty hours a day, he had earned enough money, by 1881, to begin making reapers of his own, at Plano; and he built up a large business.

The General Manager of this big anti-famine organisation is a young Illinoisan, named C. S. Funk. "He is the central man," says Perkins. No other Chicagoan of his age--he is only thirty-five--has pushed up so quickly to so high a place, with nothing to help him except his own grit and ability. To-day he manages a 65,000-man-power corporation; yet it is very little more than twenty years since he was trudging six miles on a hot July day, to ask for his first job in a hay-field. Young as he was, he was then the support of a widowed mother, and there were seven children younger than he.

His office, in which I was permitted to take notes for several days, is a nerve-centre of the world. Everything that happens to the human race is of interest to this alert young chancellor of the Harvester Company. A drought in Argentina, the green bug in Kansas, a tariff campaign in Australia, a shortage of farm labour in Egypt, a new railway in Southern Russia, such are the bulletins that guide him through his day's work.

His wide-flung army is officered mainly by farmers' sons who had a knack for business or for machinery. His a.s.sistant, Alex. Legge, is an ex-cowboy from Nebraska. Before the era of peace and unity began, Funk and Legge had fought each other in twenty states.

"Legge was one of the best fighters I ever knew," said Funk; "and I think you might put him down as the most popular man in the company."

Maurice Kane, the company's Chief Improver, and a fine type of the Irish-American, was born on a small farm near Limerick. He was a farm hand in Wisconsin when he first saw a harvester, and he has pulled himself up every inch of the way by his own abilities. A. E. Mayer, the first of an army of forty thousand salesmen, was born on a farm in New York. He is a sort of human Gatling gun, loaded with the experience of his trade. B. A.

Kennedy, the overlord of the thirteen factories, is a seasoned veteran who can remember when he stood by the forge of a country blacksmith shop and hammered out ploughs by hand. Only one of the company's generals, H. F.

Perkins, began life with such a luxury as a university education. He is in charge of the raw materials--the coal and iron and lumber and sisal and flax.

These are a few of the men who manage this international empire of bread-machinery. They are all practical men, hard workers, close to the farm and the farmer. They are not fashionable idlers, nor promoters, nor Wall Street speculators. And they have no more use for tickers than for telescopes--a fact which is vitally important, now that they are making more than half the harvesters of the world.

Such is the International Harvester Company from the inside. But an outside view is equally necessary. It is of tremendous interest to 10,000,000 American farmers to know the habits and the disposition of this powerful organisation. As Theodore Roosevelt has said, there are good combinations and bad ones. Which is the International Harvester Company?

In order to get the facts about it at first hand, I interviewed the four chief compet.i.tors of the Harvester Company, three Attorneys-General, seven editors of farm papers, four professors of agricultural colleges, seven or eight implement agents, thirty farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, two state governors, and the Federal Bureau of Corporations. Before I had gone far, I learned that the big Harvester Company has been beset by a host of new troubles.

It is an evidence of the eternal futility of human ambition, that when a group of warring Harvester Kings had made peace with one another, when they had healed their wounded and buried their dead, and sat down to enjoy a future of prosperous tranquillity, up sprang a host of new enemies, armed and double-armed with weapons from which there seemed to be no sort of defence. Their outposts were shattered by legislative dynamite. Tariff walls were built across their paths. And half a dozen giant ogres, otherwise known as Attorneys-General, crashed into their peaceful business with destructive clubs of law.

The bigger the organisation the more trouble to protect and preserve it.

This is what Abraham Lincoln learned--what the whole United States learned, half a century ago; and it is the lesson that the harvester-makers are studying to-day. It is a new phase of an old fact; it is the Tragedy of the Trust.

Some foreign nations, too, have taken their cue from American Legislatures, and have become almost as hostile to the Chicago company as though it were exporting roulette wheels and burglars' jimmies. France taxed half a million from it last year by a penalising tariff. Australia has made it a political issue. Germany takes a toll of $11 on every self-binder, and Austria takes $25. Roumania raised the duty on harvesters several months ago; and there is a general feeling that the time has come to check the supremacy that the United States has always had in this line.

Yet the fact that the Harvester Company has been fined in two states does not mean that it has taken advantage of its size to become a lawbreaker.

The "crime" of which it was declared guilty, was the maintenance of the old practice of "exclusive contracts," which has been the almost universal custom for fifty years. Each agent was pledged not to sell any other company's goods. _The International abolished this requirement two years ago, and several of the independent companies still retain it._ Until the merger was organised it was regarded as fair enough. It is one of the most usual habits of agency business. But the American people are now demanding that a big company shall be much more "square" and moral than a small capitalist who is fighting for his life.

Many of the old methods of the rough-and-tumble days have survived. It is not possible to say "Presto, change!" to 40,000 battling agents, so that they shall at once begin to play fair and cooperate. But the general opinion is that the Combine has raised the harvester business to a higher level. At one of its branch offices I came accidentally upon a letter written by Cyrus H. McCormick, in which he forbade the taking of rebates from railways.

"You must clearly understand," he wrote, "that this company will maintain a policy of absolute obedience to the law."

Among the farmers of Iowa and Kansas I found no definite charges against the harvester combine--nothing but that vague dread of bigness which seems natural to the average mind, and which even the great-brained Webster had when he opposed the annexation of Texas and California. Of four farm editors, one was against all "trusts" on general principles; and the other three believed that the evils of harvester compet.i.tion were much greater than those of consolidation. The bare fact that this one corporation has $120,000,000 of capital alarms the old-timers. Others have become more accustomed to the Big Facts of American business.

"Why," said one implement dealer, "after all, $120,000,000 is less than the American farmers earn in a week."

He might also have said that it was less than the value of one corn crop in Iowa, or half as much as the Iowa farmers have now on deposit in their savings banks. It is very little more than Russell Sage raked in through the wickets of his little money-lending office, or than Marshall Field acc.u.mulated from a single store. In fact, if bread were raised one cent a loaf for one year in the United States alone, the extra pennies would buy out the whole "Harvester Trust," bag and baggage.

The bulk of the farmers, so far as I could harmonise their opinions, are now too well accustomed to big enterprises among themselves to be scared by the Chicago merger. They have at the present time more than five thousand cooperative companies of their own. And some of these are of national importance; as, for instance, the powerful Cotton Growers' Trust, and the Farmers' Business Congress, which owns 800 elevators for the storage of grain.

"My only objection to the International Harvester Company," said a business man in St. Paul, "is that it sells its machinery cheaper in Europe than it does in the United States." I investigated this charge, and found it wholly incorrect. The greater expense and risk of foreign trade compels the manufacturers to ask almost as high prices as American farmers had to pay twenty years ago. But there is a quite credible reason for this rumour. It is simply this--that for some less progressive countries a crude, old-fashioned reaper is being made, to sell for $45. The modern, self-rake reaper is too complex for the simple mind of many a Russian farmer, so he is supplied with a clumsy machine which is $15 cheaper, but which looked, to my unskilled eye, more than $30 worse.

No one accuses the "Trust" of having unreasonably raised prices. On the contrary, it is generally given full credit for holding prices down, in spite of the fact that it is paying from twenty to eighty per cent. more for its labour and raw materials than was paid in 1902. Generally speaking, all farm implements except thrashing-machines are cheaper now than they were in 1880, when the compet.i.tion was most strenuous. Binders have dropped from $325 to $125; hay-rakes from $25 to $16; and mowers from $80 to $45.

"I paid $200 for a self-binding harvester twenty-five years ago," said a Kansas farmer. "Ten years later I bought another for $140 and in 1907 I bought one from the International for $125, which is in my judgment the best of the three machines."

The International has compet.i.tors, too--very active and able ones. Binders are made by 4 large independent companies, mowers by 17, corn-shredders by 18, twine by 26, wagons by 116, and gasolene engines by 124. Of the thirty-seven different machines made by the International there are only three--hemp-reapers, corn-shockers, and rice-binders--that are made by no other company, and even these machines are not protected by any basic patents. Powerful as the International is, it is still far from the place where business is one long sweet dream of monopoly.

The four independent companies that make binders seem to have no fear of the "Trust." "We have no fault to find with it," said President At.w.a.ter, of the Johnson Company. "We don't want it smashed. Why? Because our business has doubled since it was organised; and because we would sooner compete with one company than with a dozen."

"The 'Trust' was the only thing that saved the whole harvester business from annihilation," said the ex-president of another independent company, when I pressed him for his personal opinion, and promised not to use his name. "The cold fact is really this," he added, "that the International Harvester Company has bettered conditions for the farmer, for the independent companies, and for everybody but itself."

"The big combine has never misused its power," said a third of the International's compet.i.tors. "Now and then its agents make trouble, just as ours do, no doubt. But the men at the top have always given us a square deal."

So it is my duty to state that on the whole the Harvester Combine is a good combination and not a bad one. I have found it radically different from the get-rich-quick trusts that have been described in recent books and magazine articles. It is not a monopoly. It is an advocate of free trade. Its stock is not watered, nor for sale in Wall Street. And the men at the top are very evidently plain, hard-working, simple-living American citizens, who are quite content to do business in a live-and-let-live way.

They are not thoroughly reconciled, even yet, to being a merger. They look back with open regret to the wasteful but adventurous days of compet.i.tion. Of the combination the elder Mrs. Cyrus McCormick finely said:

"It was a hurt of the heart. Each of our companies was like a family. Each had a body of loyal agents, who had been comrades through many struggles.

But the terrible increase in expenses compelled us to subdue our feelings and to cooperate with one another."

"I am not a merger man myself," said William Deering, "although I believe that the International Harvester Company has been a benefit to the farmers."

Cyrus H. McCormick goes still further. He is a "trust-buster" himself, so far as the over-capitalised and oppressive leviathans of business are concerned. He said to me frankly: "Some of the hostility to our company is inspired by worthy motives, growing out of the general opposition to the so-called trusts." And when a North Dakota congressman proposed in 1904 that the International Harvester Company should be investigated, Cyrus McCormick at once sent a message that amazed the Bureau of Corporations--"Please come and investigate us," he said. "If we're not right, we want to get right."

"Yes," said one of the highest officials of the Roosevelt administration, when I asked him to corroborate this very remarkable story. "It is true that from 1904 it has been the continued desire of the International Harvester Company that we should investigate them. In fact, during the last year (1907) they have urged us with considerable earnestness to make this investigation."

So, this big business has evolved from simple to complex in accordance with the same laws that rule plants and empires. It has probably not yet reached its full maturity, for it is greater than any man or any form of organisation, and the tiny ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no more than its most obedient retinue. They come and go--quarrel and make friends--live and die. What matter? The big business, once alive, grows on through the short centuries, from generation to generation.

And what does it all mean--this federation of thirteen factory cities--this coordination of muscle and mind and millions--this arduous development of a new art, whereby a group of mechanics can take a wagon-load of iron ore and a tree, and fashion them into a shapely automaton that has the power of a dozen farmers?

_It means bread. It means hunger-insurance for the whole human race. As we shall see in the next chapter, it means that the famine problem has been solved, not only for the United States, but for all the civilised nations of the world._

CHAPTER IV

THE AMERICAN HARVESTER ABROAD