A MODEL OF THE FIRST PRACTICAL REAPER
One morning, in the little town ofBrockport, New York, he found the first practical men who appreciated his invention—Dayton S. Morgan and William H. Seymour. Morgan was a handy young machinist who had formed a partnership with Seymour—a prosperous store-keeper. They listened to McCormick with great interest and agreed to make a hundred reapers. By this decision they both later became millionaires, and also entered history as the founders of the first reaper factory in the world.
Altogether, in the two years after he left Virginia, McCormick sold 240 reapers. This was Big Business; but it was only a morsel in proportion to his appetite. Neither was it satisfactory. He found himself tangled in a snarl of trouble because of bad iron, stupid workmen, and unreliable manufacturers. He cut the Gordian knot by building a factory of his own at Chicago.
This was one of the wisest decisions of his life, though at the time it appeared to be a disastrous mistake. Chicago, in 1847, showed no signs of its present greatness. As a city, it was a ten-year-old experiment, built in a swamp, without a railway or a canal. It was ugly and dirty, with a riverthat ran in the wrong direction; but it wasbusy. It was the link between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes—a central market where wheat was traded for lumber and furs for iron. It had no history—no ancient families clogging up the streets with their special privileges. And best of all, it was a place where a big new idea was actually preferred to a small old one.
Chicago did not look at McCormick with dead eyes and demand a certified cheque from his ancestors. It sized him up in a few swift glances and saw a thick-set, ruddy man, with the physique of a heavy-weight wrestler, dark hair that waved in glossy furrows, and strong eyes that struck you like a blow. It glanced at his reaper and saw a device to produce more wheat. More wheat meant more business, so Chicago said ——
“Glad to see you. You’re the right man and you’re in the right place. Come in and get busy.” William B. Ogden, the first Mayor of Chicago, listened to his story for two minutes, then asked him how much he wanted for a half interest. McCormick had little money and no prestige. Ogdenhad a surplus of both. So a partnership was arranged, and the new firm plunged toward prosperity by selling $50,000 worth of reapers for the next harvest.
At last there had come a break in the clouds, and McCormick found his path flooded with sunshine. He was no longer a wanderer in the night. He was the Reaper King—the founder of a new dynasty. As soon as possible he bought out Ogden, and thenceforth established a one-man business. By 1851 he was making a thousand reapers a year, and owned one-tenth of the million dollars he had dreamed of in the Virginian wilderness.
At this point his life changes. His pioneer troubles are over. There are no more thousand-mile rides on horseback—no more conflicts with jeering crowds—no more smashing of reapers by farm labourers. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England had opened up a new market for our wheat, and the discovery of gold in California was booming the reaper business by making money plentiful and labour scarce.
Suddenly, McCormick looked up from his work in the factory, and saw that he wasnot only rich, but famous. One of his reapers had taken the Grand Prize at a World’s Fair in England. Even the LondonTimes, which had first ridiculed his reaper as “a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow and a flying machine,” was obliged to admit, several days later, that “the McCormick reaper is worth the whole cost of the Exposition.”
Seventeen years later, on the imperial farm, near Paris, Napoleon III. descended from his carriage and fastened the Cross of the Legion of Honour upon McCormick’s coat. There was a picture that some American-souled artist, when we have one, will delight to put on canvas. How splendid was the contrast, and how significant of the New Age of Democracy, between the suave and feeble Emperor, enjoying the sunset rays of his inherited glory, and the strong-faced, rough-handed Virginian farmer, who had built up a new empire of commerce that will last as long as the human race eats bread!
From first to last, the stout-hearted old Reaper King received no favours from Congress or the Patent Office. He builtup his stupendous business without a land grant or a protective tariff. By the time that his Chicago factory was ten years old, he had sold 23,000 reapers, and cleared a profit of nearly$1,300,00. The dream of his youth had been realised, and more. All told, in 1859, there were 50,000 reapers in the United States, doing the work of 350,000 men, saving $4,000,000 in wages, and cramming the barns with 50,000,000 bushels of grain.
So, on his fiftieth birthday, the battle-scarred McCormick found himself a millionaire. He was also married, having fallen in love with Miss Nettie Fowler, of New York, a young lady of unusual beauty and ability. No history of the reaper can be complete without a reference to this remarkable woman, who has been for fifty years, and is to-day, one of the active factors in our industrial development. No important step has ever been taken either by her husband or her three sons, until it has received her approval. And Mrs. McCormick has been much more than a mere adviser. Her exact memory and keen grasp of the complex details of her husband’sbusiness made her practically an unofficial manager. She suggested economies at the factory, stopped the custom of closing the plant in midsummer, studied the abilities of the workmen, and on several occasions superintended the field-trials in Europe.
Chicago may not know it, but it is true, that its immense McCormick factory owes its existence to Mrs. McCormick. After the Big Fire of 1871, when his $2,000,000 plant was in ruins, McCormick concluded to retire. He still had a fortune of three or four millions and he was sixty-two years of age. His managers advised him not to rebuild, because of the excessive cost of new machinery.
As soon as the fiery cyclone had passed, he and his wife drove to the wrecked factory. Several hundred of the workmen gathered about the carriage, and the chief engineer, acting as spokesman, said: “Well, Mr. McCormick, shall we start the small engine and make repairs, or shall we start the big engine and make machines?”
Mr. McCormick turned to his wife and said, “Which shall it be?” It was a breathless moment for the workmen.
“Build again at once,” said Mrs. McCormick. “I do not want our boy to grow up in idleness; I want him to work, as a useful citizen, and a true American.”
“Start The Big Engine,” said McCormick. The men threw their hats in the air and cheered. They sprang at the smoking debris, and began to rebuild before the cinders were cold.
Such was the second birth of the vast factory which, in its sixty years, has created fully 5,000,000 harvesters, and which is now so magically automatic that, with 6,000 workmen, it can make one-third of all the grain-gathering machinery of the world.
Practically nothing has been written about McCormick from the human nature side. He was one of those Cromwellian men who can only be appreciated at a distance. He was too absorbed in his work to be congenial and too aggressive to be popular. He shouldered his way roughly against the slow-moving crowd; and the people whom he thrust out of his way naturally did not consider the importance of his life-task.
Most of the really great men of his day were his friends—Horace Greeley, forinstance, and Peter Cooper, Junius Morgan, Abram S. Hewitt, Cyrus W. Field, and Ferdinand De Lesseps. But among the men of his own trade he stood hostile and alone.
“McCormick wants to keep the whole reaper business to himself. He will not live and let live,” said his competitors. And they had reason to say so. He did want to dominate. He wanted to make all the harvesting machines that were made—not one less. He was not at all a modern “community-of-interest” financier. He was a man of an outgrown school—a consistent individualist, not only in business, but in politics and religion as well. There was no compartment in his brain for mergers and combines—for theories of government ownership—for Higher Criticism and the new theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin commercialist, a Thomas Jefferson Democrat, and a John Knox Presbyterian.
He had worked harder to establish the reaper business than any other man. He was making reapers when William Deering was five years old, and before Ralph Emerson and “Bill” Whiteley were born. Hehad graduated into success through a fifteen-year course in failure. The world into which he was born was as hostile to him as the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus. He was hard-fibred, because he had to be. He was the thin end of the wedge that split into fragments the agricultural obstacle to social progress.
One careless writer of biographies has said that McCormick began at the foot of the ladder. This is not correct. When he began, there was no ladder.He had to build it as he climbed.
The first man who gave battle to McCormick was an erratic genius named Obed Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a reaper patent in 1833. No two men were ever more unlike than Hussey and McCormick. Hussey was born in Nantucket; and he had roamed the frozen North as a whaling seaman. He was inventive, poetic, and as whimsical as the weather. His delight was in working out some mechanical problem. His first invention was a machine to make pins. Soon afterward, while he was living in Cincinnati,constructing a machine to mould candles, a friend said to him:
“Hussey, why don’t you invent a machine to reap grain?”
“Are there no such machines?” he asked in surprise.
“No,” said his friend, “and whoever can invent one will make a fortune.”
Hussey forsook his candle machine, set to work upon a reaper, and within a year had one in the fields. Then came a twenty-five-year war with McCormick, which was waged furiously in the Patent Office, the courts, and a hundred wheat-fields. Hussey won the opening battle by arriving first at the Patent Office, although his machine, as claimed by McCormick, was two years younger. By 1841 Hussey had sold reapers in five states, and ten years later he shared the honours with McCormick at the London World’s Fair.
Both machines were very crude and unsatisfactory. Hussey’s had a better cutting apparatus and McCormicks was more complete. In the long run, each adopted the devices of the other, and a better reaper was evolved. Before many years, it becameapparent that Hussey was outclassed. By 1858 he was left so far behind that he lost his interest in reapers and invented a steam-plough.
His first machine was “really a mower,” says Merritt Finley Miller, one of the two professors who have written on harvesting machinery. It lacked the master-wheel, the reel and the divider, without which the grain cannot be rightly handled. When Hussey gave up the contest, his invention was bought for $200,000 by William F. Ketchum and others, who adapted it into a mowing-machine.
“Hussey was a very peculiar man,” said Ralph Emerson. “His machine was fairly good, but it was a failure in the market, because he would not put on a reel. He refused to do this, saying he did not invent a reel, and it would be a falsehood if he put one on. He said that it was contrary to his principles to sell anything that he had not invented.
“On one occasion I went to buy a shop licence from him. ‘Have you a thousand dollars in your pocket?’ he asked. ‘No,’ said I. ‘Can you get me three thousanddollars by daylight to-morrow morning?’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but I can get it by noon.’ ‘Well,’ said Hussey, ‘I want to be very reasonable with you. If you’ll pay me one thousand dollars before you leave the house, or twenty-five hundred dollars before daybreak to-morrow, I’ll sell you a licence. Otherwise, it will cost you twelve thousand dollars.’
“Several days later I paid him twelve thousand dollars, and as he handed me the licence, he said—‘Now, don’t say that I never offered you this for a thousand dollars.’”
Hussey’s adventurous life was snapped short by a tragic death. While he was on a train at Baltimore, a little girl was crying for a drink of water. The kind-hearted old sailor-mechanic got off the train, brought her a glass of water, and on his way to return the glass, he slipped and fell between the moving wheels.
Of all the men who fought McCormick in the earlier days, I found only two now alive—Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, and William N. Whiteley, of Springfield, Ohio. Both of these men to-day generously give the old warrior his due.
“McCormick was the first man to make the reaper a success in the field,” said Whiteley, the battle-worn giant of Ohio, where I found him still at work. “McCormick was a fighter—a bulldog, we called him; but those were rough days. The man who couldn’t fight was wiped out.”
Ralph Emerson, now one of the most venerable figures in Illinois, rose from a sick-bed against his doctors orders, so that he might be magnanimous to his former antagonist.
“McCormick’s first reapers were a failure,” said he, speaking slowly and with great difficulty; “and he owed his preëminence mainly to his great business ability. His enemies have said that he was not an inventor, but I say that he was an inventor of eminence.”
So, as the gray haze of years enables us to trace the larger outlines of his work, we can see that McCormick was especially fitted for a task which, up to his day, had never been done, and which will never need to be repeated during the lifetime of our earth. He was absolutely mastered by one idea, as wholly as Copernicus or Columbus.His business was his life. It was not accidental, as with Rockefeller, nor incidental, as with Carnegie. On one occasion when a friend was joking him about his poor judgment in outside affairs, he whirled around in his chair and said emphatically: “I have one purpose in life, and only one—the success and widespread use of my machines. All other matters are to me too insignificant to be considered.”
He made money—ten millions or more. But a hundred millions would not have bribed him to forsake his reaper. It was as much a part of him as his right hand. In several of his business letters he writes as though he had been a Hebrew prophet, charged with a world-message of salvation.
“But for the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in all our business,” he writes on one critical occasion, “it has at times seemed that I would almost sink under the weight of responsibility hanging upon me. I believe the Lord will help us out.”
Not that he left any detail to Providence to which he could personally attend. He was a Puritan of the “trust-in-God-and-keep-your-powder-dry” species. A little fartherdown, in this same letter, he writes—“Meet Hussey in Maryland andput him down.”
The fountain-springs of his life were wholly within. He acted from a few basic, unchangeable convictions. If public opinion was with him, he was gratified; if it was against him he thought no more of it than of the rustling of the trees when the wind blew.
“When anyone opposed his plans and showed that they were impossible,” said one of his superintendents, “I noticed that he never argued; he just went on working.”
His brain had certain subjects distinctly mapped out. What he knew—he knew. He had no hazy imaginings. He lived in a black and white world and abhorred all half-tints. He was right—always right, and the men who opposed him were Philistines and false prophets, who deserved to be consumed by sudden fire from Heaven.
It was this inward spiritual force that made him irresistible. Small men shrivelled up when he spoke to them.
“The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,” said one of his attorneys. “If any other man on this earthever had such a will, certainly I have not heard of it.”
Small and easy undertakings had no interest for him whatever. It was the impossibility that enraged and inspired him. At the sight of an obstacle in his path, he rushed forward like a charge of cavalry. When the Civil War was at its height, he and Horace Greeley, who was very similar to him in this respect, actually believed that they could stop it. They had several long conferences in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, and McCormick went so far in 1864 as to prepare a statement of principles which he fully believed would restore peace and harmony between the North and the South.
Such was this massive, unbendable American. As we shall see, he was far from being the only strong, picturesque figure in the industry. But it would make many a book to tell in detail the effect of his life work upon the progress of the United States. It was a New World, truly, that had been created, alike for the people of the farms and of the cities, in the year that the victorious old Reaper King was carried to his grave, with a sheaf of wheat on his breast.
What if there had been no reapers, and no hunger-insurance, and no cheap bread! What sort of an American nation would we have, if we were still using such food-implements as the sickle and the flail?
Could we have swung through four years of Civil War, as we did, without famine or national insolvency?
Could the West have risen toward its present greatness if its billion acres had to be harvested by hand?
Could the railways alone, which produce nothing, have given us more food for less work—the first necessity of a civilised democracy?
Would our manufacturers be creating new wealth at the rate of sixteen billions a year, if the reaper had not enriched the farmers and sent half the farm-hands into the factories?
And our towering cities—two of them more populous than the thirteen colonies were, how large would they be and how prosperous if bread were twenty cents a pound?
As Seward once said, it was the reaper that “pushed the American frontierwestward at the rate of thirty miles a year.” Most of the western railways were built to the wheat; and it was wheat money that paid for them. The reaper clicked ahead of the railroad, and civilisation followed the wheat, from Chicago to Puget Sound, just as the self-binder is leading the railroad to-day—three hundred miles in front in Western Canada, and eight hundred miles in Siberia. Even so unyielding a partisan of the railroads as Marvin Hughitt admitted to me that “the reaper has not yet received proper recognition for its development of the West.”
During the Civil War the reaper was doing the work of a million men in the grain-fields of the North. It enabled a widow, with five sons, to send them all to the front, and yet gather every sheaf into the barn. It kept the wolf from the door, and more—it paid our European debts in wheat. It wiped out all necessity for Negro labour in the wheat States, just as a cotton-picker will, some day, in the South.
“The reaper is to the North what the slave is to the South,” said Edwin M. Stanton in 1861. “It releases our youngmen to do battle for the Union, and at the same time keeps up the supply of the nation’s bread.”
Lincoln called out every third man, yet the crops increased. Europeans could not believe it. They heard in 1861 that we were sending three times as much wheat to England as we had ever done before. They shook their heads and said—“Another American story!” when they were told that we were supporting two vast armies and yet selling other nations enough grain to feed thirty-five million people. Naturally, no country that clung to the sickle and flail could be convinced of such a preposterous miracle.
After the war, the mighty river of wheat that flowed from the West became so wide and so deep that it poured a yellow stream into every American home. It began to turn the wheels of fourteen thousand flour-mills. Rich cities sprang up, like Aladdin palaces, beside its banks—Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Paul, Omaha, Des Moines. All of these, and a hundred lesser ones, were nourished into prosperity by the risingcurrent of reaper-wheat, as it moved from the Mississippi to the sea.
By 1876 we had become the champion food-producers of the world. A Kansas farmer was raising six bushels of wheat with as little labour as an Italian spent to produce one. And there was one doughty Scot—Dalrymple of Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by hand.
Inevitably, the American Farmer became a financier. In 1876 he earned twenty-four per cent. He had twenty-seven hundred millions to spend. By 1880 he had begun to buy so much store goods that the United States was able to write a Declaration of Industrial Independence. Steadily he has grown richer and wiser, until now he is the owner of a billion-acre farm, worth thirty dollars an acre, operated with farm machinery that cost him $900,000,000 and producing, in a single year, seven thousand times the value of a millionaire.
Such, in one country, is the amazing result which the Reaper has helped to create.And this is not all. It is now more necessary to the human race than the railway. It is fighting back famine in fifty countries. Its click has become the music of an International Anthem. The nations are feeding each other, in spite of their tariffs and armies. The whole world takes dinner at the one long table; and the fear of hunger is dying out of the hearts of men; and the prayer of the Christian centuries is answered—“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Fiftyyears ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent—too American—to be fond of work for work’s sake. And of all their drudgery, the everlasting stooping over bundles to bind them into sheaves galled them most. Such back-breaking toil, they thought, might be well enough for kangaroos, but it certainly was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.
“If I didn’t have to walk from bundle to bundle, and hump myself like a horseshoe, I could do twice as much work,” said one of the brothers.
“Well,” said the other, “why can’t we fix a platform on the reaper, and have the grain carried up to us?”
It was a brilliant idea and a new one. Neither of the young fellows had ever seen a reaper factory; but they were handy andself-reliant. By the next autumn they were in the field with their new machine, and as they had expected, they bound the grain twice as quickly as they had the year before.
So was born the famous Marsh harvester, which proved to be the half-way mark in the evolution of the grain-reaping machine. It was the child of the reaper and the parent of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of binding grain. But it did more than this—it gave the farmer his first chance to stand erect, and forced him to be quick, for the two men who stood on the harvester were compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was cut. Thus it introduced the factory system, one might say, into the harvest-field. For the first time the Big Minute made its appearance on the farm.
The Marsh boys, never dreaming that they had helped to change the destinies of nations, took out a flimsy patent on their invention, and went on with their farm work. Two summers later, as they were at work with it, their home-made harvester broke down. A farmer from Plano, near DeKalb, named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He stopped, and, being a man of unusual abilitiesand discernment, he at once saw the value of the Marsh machine, even in its disabled state.
“Boys, you’re on the right track,” he said. “If you can run your machine ten rods, it can be made to run ten miles. It is superior to anything now in use.”
Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went to Plano, arranged a partnership with a clever mechanic named John F. Hollister, and began to make harvesters for sale. To their surprise the new machine was not welcomed. It was received with an almost unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a “man-killer,” said the farmers. Now, the Marsh brothers were quick, nervous men, and they had built a machine to suit themselves. But it was undeniably too fast and nerve-racking for most farmers. The labourers refused to work with it.
The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a very ingenious way. They putgirlson their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordinary girls, to be sure, but vigorous German maidens, who were swift and skilful binders. Also, they had well-trained men, disguised as hoboes, who mingled in the crowd aroundthe harvester at times of demonstration, and volunteered to get aboard of it. To see a girl or a “Weary Willie” binding grain on the new machine shamed the labourers into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen of the Marsh harvesters were sold.
WILLIAM DEERING
In this year one of the Marshes performed a feat that seemed more appropriate for a circus than for a grain-field. Riding alone on a harvester, he bound a whole acre of wheat in fifty-five minutes. Little was heard of this amazing achievement at the time, as the national mind was distraught over the death grapple of Grant and Lee in Virginia.
But there was one quick-eyed man in Chicago named Gammon who heard of the event, and acted upon it so promptly that the goddess of prosperity picked him out as one of her favourites. Several years before, Gammon had been a Methodist preacher in Maine. A weak throat had brought his sermons to an end, and he became a reaper salesman in Chicago. He was shrewd and honest, and in 1864 his profits were very nearly forty thousand dollars.
When he heard that W. W. Marsh had bound an acre of grain in fifty-five minutes,on a new-fangled reaper, he caught the next train for DeKalb, and bought a licence to manufacture Marsh harvesters. He took in a partner—J. D. Easter—and the business inched ahead slowly, until in 1870 the sales rose to a thousand. Easter and Gammon were driving their small factory ahead at full speed. If they only could secure enough capital, they would surprise the world.
One evening, while Gammon was worrying over this lack, he heard a gentle knock at the door. He opened it to one of his old acquaintances from Maine.
“Mr. Gammon,” said the visitor, “I have about forty thousand dollars of spare money that I would like to invest in Chicago real estate, and I want your advice as to the best place to buy.”
“What!” said Gammon, springing to his feet in delight. “Have you money to invest? Give it to me and I’ll pay you ten per cent. or make you a partner in the best business in Illinois.”
The visitor, whose name was William Deering, knew nothing whatever about reapers nor wheat-fields. He had gained afair-sized fortune in the wholesale dry-goods business. But he was a Methodist and had confidence in the ex-reverend E. H. Gammon; so he passed his $40,000 across the table and the next day went home to Maine.
Two years later Deering came down to see how Gammon and the $40,000 were faring. The books showed a profit of $80,000. So Deering requested that he be made a partner. A year afterward Gammon fell sick and begged Deering to come to Illinois and manage the business. Deering consented to be manager for one year only; but Gammon’s sickness continued.
“So,” said William Deering, who told me this story, “in that way I got into the harvester business and had to stay in. But I did not even know, at that time, the appearance of our own machine.”
Deering’s competitors at first called him a greenhorn. But they forgot that he was the only one among them who had been trained in the art of business. He was already a veteran—a prize winner—in the game of finance. For thirty years, ever since he began to earn $18 a month in his father’s woolen mills, he had been a man of affairs. He had,in fact, established the wholesale dry-goods house of Deering, Milliken & Co., which still stands as one of the largest of its kind. This training was all the more valuable an asset because of the conditions that prevailed when Deering entered the harvester trade. For he arrived in that worst of all years in the last century—1873. The Jay Cooke panic was at its height. The proudest corporations were falling like grass before a mower. It was a year of dread and paralysis. But Deering faced these disadvantages with ability, with sheer, dogged persistence, and with business training. In seven years he had become one of the greatest of the harvester kings, and was leading them all up to a higher level.
We shall understand more clearly what this means if we consider the state of the trade at the time of his entrance. A man of peaceable and kindly inclinations, Deering was dragged into a business that was as turbulent as a bull-fight. For as the reaper had evolved, it had become a bone of contention, and it remained so from the first patent to the last. The opening battle was fought by McCormick and Hussey, each claiming tohave been the Christopher Columbus of the business. After the gold-rush of 1849 new types of reapers sprang up on all sides. The crude machines that merely cut the grain were driven out by others that automatically raked the cut grain into bundles. These were soon followed by a combined reaper and mower, which held the field until the Marsh harvester was invented, as we have seen, at the close of the Civil War.
Among these different types of reapers, and the numerous variations of each type, the bitterest rivalries prevailed. There was no pool, no “gentlemen’s agreement,” no “community of interest.” Indeed, the “harvester business” was not business. It was a riotous game of “Farmer, farmer, who gets the farmer?” The excited players cared less for the profits than for the victories. As fast as they made money, they threw it back into the game. Mechanics became millionaires, and millionaires became mechanics. The whole trade was tense with risk and rivalry and excitement, as though it were a search for gold along the high plateaus of the Rand. And this in spite of the fact that, with the exception of McCormick,Osborne, and Whiteley, the men who came to be known as reaper kings were not naturally fighters. No business men were ever gentler than Deering, Glessner, Warder, Adriance, and Huntley. But the making of reapers was a new trade. It was like a vast, unfenced prairie, where every settler owned as much ground as he could defend.
Each step ahead meant a struggle for patents. Whoever built a reaper had to defend himself in the courts as well as approve himself in the harvest-fields. Cyrus H. McCormick, especially, as William Deering soon learned, wielded the Big Stick against every man who dared to make reapers. He was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave battle to his competitors as though they were a horde of trespassers. He was their common enemy, and the reaper money that was squandered on lawsuits brought a golden era of prosperity to the lawyers.
Some of these patent wars shook the country with the crash of hostile forces. The tide of battle rolled up to the Supreme Court and even into the halls of Congress. Once, in 1855 when McCormick charged full tilt upon John H. Manny, who was makingreapers at Rockford, Illinois, a three-year struggle began that was the most noted legal duel of the day.
McCormick, to make sure of his victory, went into the fight with a battery of lawyers whom he thought invincible—William H. Seward, E. M. Dickerson, and Senator Reverdy Johnson. Manny made a giant effort at self-defence by hiring Abraham Lincoln, Edwin M. Stanton, Stephen A. Douglas, Peter H. Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.
From first to last it was a lawyers’ battle, and McCormick was finally defeated by Stanton, who made an unanswerably eloquent speech. For this speech Stanton received $10,000, and Lincoln, who had made no speech at all, was given $1,000. Yet, in the long run, the man who profited by this lawsuit was Lincoln; for it was this money that enabled him to carry on his famous debate with Douglas, and thus made him the inevitable candidate of the Republican Party.
McCormick’s most disastrous lawsuit was with D. M. Osborne and the Gordon brothers, of Rochester. In 1875 the Gordons hadinvented an attachment for a wire self-binder, and in a careless moment McCormick had signed a contract promising to make these self-binders and to pay $10 royalty on every machine. Then a man named Withington appeared with a much better self-binder. McCormick at once began to make the Withington machine and was sued by the Gordons.
At this time McCormick was over seventy years of age, and crippled with rheumatism; but he believed that the Gordons had deceived him and he fought them sternly as long as he lived. After his death, his eldest son, Cyrus, consented to a compromise, whereby Osborne, who was owner of a share in the Gordon concern, and the Gordons were to be paid $225,000. But in order to impress upon them the enormity of this amount, he prepared the money for them in small bills. When they called at the McCormick office in Chicago, they were taken to a small room on the top floor and shown a great pyramid of green currency.
“There is your money,” said McCormick’s lawyer. “Kindly count it and see if it is not a quarter of a million dollars.”
The three men gasped with mingled ecstasy and consternation. “B—b—but,” stammered one of them, “how can we take it away? Can’t you give us a cheque?”
“That is the right amount, in legal money, gentlemen,” replied the lawyer. “All I will say is that there are a couple of old valises in the closet—and I wish you good afternoon.”
For several hours Osborne and the Gordons literally waded in affluence, counting the money and packing it in the valises. By the time they had finished, it was eight o’clock. The building was dark. The elevator was not running. They were hungry and terrified. Step by step they groped their trembling way downstairs, and staggered with their treasure through the perilous streets to the Grand Pacific Hotel. None of them ever forgot the terror of that night.
Another warlike Reaper King was “Bill” Whiteley, of Ohio. Whiteley had invented a combined mower and reaper in 1858, which he named the “Champion”; and he pushed this machine with an irresistible enthusiasm.
His mode of attack was not the patent suit, but the field test. This was the white-hotclimax of the rivalry among the reaper kings; and it was great sport for the farmers. It was a reaper circus—a fierce chariot-race in a wheat-field; and its influence upon the industry was remarkable. It weeded out the low-grade machines. It spurred on the manufacturers to a campaign of improvement. It developed American harvesters to the highest point of perfection. It swung the farmers into the new path of scientific agriculture. And it piled expenses so high that few of the reaper kings escaped disaster.
A field test was conducted in this fashion: A committee of judges was appointed, and several acres of ripe grain were selected as the battle-field. After the field was marked off into equal sections, each reaper took its place. There were sometimes two reapers and sometimes forty. The signal was given. “Crack”—the horses leaped; the drivers shouted; and hundreds of farmers surged up and down in excited crowds.
“All’s fair in a field test,” said the reaper agents who superintended these contests; though each man said it to himself. They were a hardy and reckless body of men, halfcowboy, half mechanic, and no trick was too dangerous or too desperate for them. Often the feud was so bitter that bodyguards of big-fisted “bulldozers” were on the spot to protect the warrior of their tribe who was in danger. “I had four men with me once who together weighed 1,000 pounds,” said A. E. Mayer, who is now the general of an army of 40,000 salesmen. In most tests the machines were shamefully abused. Self-binders were made to cut and bind stubble as though it were grain. Mowers were driven full tilt against stumps and hop-poles. Rival reapers were chained back to back and yanked apart by plunging horses. The warrior agents exposed the weak points in each other’s machines. They photographed each other’s breakdowns, and bragged to the limit of their vocabularies. They raised prices in one town and cut them in the next; for when their fighting blood was aroused—and that was often—they cared no more for profits than a small boy cares for his clothes.
To give only one instance out of hundreds, here is a picture of a field test that I found in the diary of B. B. Clarke, of Madison, whois now the editor of theAmerican Thresherman, but who was in the eighties a harvester fighter in Indiana.
“We drove fourteen miles to the wheat-field, which was also the battle-field,” he wrote, “and found a heavy crop of rank grain, wild pea vines, morning glories and other vegetation, which tested both machines to the limit. The bundles were twisted together by the vines into almost a continuous rope. After adjusting the machine, we had to ‘open the field.’ This is considered the most severe test, as the machine, the horses and all are in the grain.
“A—— drove the team, a magnificent pair of big grays. McK—— watched the binder, while Y—— and I created sympathy for our cause among the farmers who had come to see the fight. With a crack of his whip and a shout to his team, A—— opened the ball. The machine was so crowded with grain and weeds that the sickle could not be heard fifty feet away. He cleared the first round without a stop. Then the other machine followed, but the driver, failing to recognise the necessity of fast driving, allowed his machine to clog, andlost the day. We received two hundred dollars in gold on the spot for our victorious binder.
A SELF-BINDER IN SCOTLAND, WITH THE WALLACE MONUMENT IN THE BACKGROUND
“On returning to Fort Wayne we found the E—— people, whose headquarters were separated by a partition wall from ours, had coaxed one of our customers to cancel his order, and substitute their machine. For this act, we retaliated and replaced three of their orders the following week, and while loading these into the farmers’ wagons a fight took place between the opposing factions. I looked as though I had encountered a flax-hackle. The next day hostilities opened early with three on our side to six of the E—— host, requiring a riot alarm and a wagon-load of police to restore order.
“We had swept the enemy before us, using neck-yokes, pitman rods and even six shooters in the grand finale. Our expense account for that week included fifty dollars for lawyers’ fees, which was promptly O. K.’d by the manager. After all, I had only obeyed instructions, which were to get the business and hold up prices, ‘peaceably if you can, but forcibly if you must.’”
An interesting relic of these fierce days of cut-throat competition was given to me by Mr. John F. Steward. It reads as follows:—