To Agents for the Sale of Harvesting Machinery:The undersigned, manufacturers of harvesting machinery, call the attention of their travelling experts and local agents to a practice which has grown among them for a few years past, and which has become so disreputable and is carried to such an extent that we feel it necessary to bring it to your special notice.It is the habit of trying to break up sales made by other agents when you have not been successful in securing the sale.It has become a very common practice, as soon as a sale is made by one agent, for the agents of all other machines to try to break up that sale, by misrepresentations or by lowering the price, or by trying to convince the purchaser that the machine which he has bargained for is not as good as the one which the other agent sells. This practice is disreputable, and should not be tolerated by any manufacturer. We wish it now thoroughly understood that we will not tolerate this practice in any agent, and we will be glad to have reports from you of the agents of any machines who have tried to break up your sales of our machines in this way. There is nothing that tends more to demoralise business than this practice, and we wish it stopped.Machines should be sold upon their merits, and not by disparaging or running down other machines. You will find that your customers will place more reliance upon what you say if you leave all other machines alone, and show the good features of your own and demonstrate them in actual work. An agent never makes any progress by running down or trying to show the defects of others, and you will be better able to sustain your prices and the reputation of your machines by following the course indicated above. Therefore, it is our wish that you should hold to your prices firmly, present your machines in the very best possible light, and use all honourable means for making a fair and honest sale; but if you are unfortunate enough to lose your sale, and some competitor gains it, don’t be persuaded to put yours in the field by the side of your competitor, or try in any way to break up the sale; and do not, until the purchaser has discarded another machine, offer to put one of ours in its place.Of course we do not mean by this that you shall stand quietly by and see other agents break up your sales, or if others habitually do this that you shall not retaliate, but you must not be the first to inaugurate this practice. We are always ready to meet fair and honest competition.We want our business conducted in a fair and honourable way, and not descend to ways that are discreditable to us and to you. No one agent can expect to sell all the machines that are wanted in his district, for the poorest machine will have some friends, and, though he may have the very best one, we do not expect he will make every one see it. Let the purchaser take the risk. If he buys an inferior machine he should take the consequences, as if he was deceived or mistaken in his judgment in buying a horse. In such a case you would not think of putting your horse in work the purchaser was doing, to show him yours was the best, with the expectation that he would return the one he had bought because it did not prove quite equal to yours in drawing a load or in driving. If you would not in the case of a horse, why should you, in the case of a mower, reaper, or self-binding harvester? Our advice to you is:1st. Hold firmly to your prices.2d. Sell your own machine. Convince your purchaser that you have the best machine made.3d. Settle for the machine at time of delivery. A machine works much better after being settled for.4th. If you lose the sale do not try to break up the sale of your competitor. It won’t pay.Larger Image
To Agents for the Sale of Harvesting Machinery:
The undersigned, manufacturers of harvesting machinery, call the attention of their travelling experts and local agents to a practice which has grown among them for a few years past, and which has become so disreputable and is carried to such an extent that we feel it necessary to bring it to your special notice.It is the habit of trying to break up sales made by other agents when you have not been successful in securing the sale.It has become a very common practice, as soon as a sale is made by one agent, for the agents of all other machines to try to break up that sale, by misrepresentations or by lowering the price, or by trying to convince the purchaser that the machine which he has bargained for is not as good as the one which the other agent sells. This practice is disreputable, and should not be tolerated by any manufacturer. We wish it now thoroughly understood that we will not tolerate this practice in any agent, and we will be glad to have reports from you of the agents of any machines who have tried to break up your sales of our machines in this way. There is nothing that tends more to demoralise business than this practice, and we wish it stopped.
Machines should be sold upon their merits, and not by disparaging or running down other machines. You will find that your customers will place more reliance upon what you say if you leave all other machines alone, and show the good features of your own and demonstrate them in actual work. An agent never makes any progress by running down or trying to show the defects of others, and you will be better able to sustain your prices and the reputation of your machines by following the course indicated above. Therefore, it is our wish that you should hold to your prices firmly, present your machines in the very best possible light, and use all honourable means for making a fair and honest sale; but if you are unfortunate enough to lose your sale, and some competitor gains it, don’t be persuaded to put yours in the field by the side of your competitor, or try in any way to break up the sale; and do not, until the purchaser has discarded another machine, offer to put one of ours in its place.
Of course we do not mean by this that you shall stand quietly by and see other agents break up your sales, or if others habitually do this that you shall not retaliate, but you must not be the first to inaugurate this practice. We are always ready to meet fair and honest competition.
We want our business conducted in a fair and honourable way, and not descend to ways that are discreditable to us and to you. No one agent can expect to sell all the machines that are wanted in his district, for the poorest machine will have some friends, and, though he may have the very best one, we do not expect he will make every one see it. Let the purchaser take the risk. If he buys an inferior machine he should take the consequences, as if he was deceived or mistaken in his judgment in buying a horse. In such a case you would not think of putting your horse in work the purchaser was doing, to show him yours was the best, with the expectation that he would return the one he had bought because it did not prove quite equal to yours in drawing a load or in driving. If you would not in the case of a horse, why should you, in the case of a mower, reaper, or self-binding harvester? Our advice to you is:
1st. Hold firmly to your prices.
2d. Sell your own machine. Convince your purchaser that you have the best machine made.
3d. Settle for the machine at time of delivery. A machine works much better after being settled for.
4th. If you lose the sale do not try to break up the sale of your competitor. It won’t pay.
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The king of the field test was William N. Whiteley. No other reaper king, in any country, received as much renown from his personal exploits. He was the Charlemagne of the harvest-field. He was as tall as a sapling and as strong as a tree. As a professor in the great field school of agriculture, he has never been surpassed. He could out-talk, outwork, and generally outwit the men who were sent against him. He was a whole exhibition in himself. “I’ve seen Bill Whiteley racin’ his horses through the grain and leanin’ over with his long arms to pick the mice’s nests from just in front of the knife,” said an old Ohio settler.
The feat that first made Whiteley famous was performed at Jamestown, Ohio, in 1867. His competitor was doing as good work as he was; whereupon he sprang from his seat, unhitched one horse, and finished his course with a single, surprised steed pulling the heavy machine. His competitor followed suit, and succeeded fully as well. This enraged Whiteley, who at that time was as powerful as a young Hercules.
“I can pull my reaper myself,” he shouted, turning his second horse loose, and yokinghis big shoulders into its harness. Such a thing had never been done before, and has never been done since; but it is true that, in the passion of the moment, Whiteley was filled with such strength that he ran the reaper from one side of the field to the other, cutting a full swath—a deed that, had he done it in ancient Greece, would have placed him among the immortals. It was witnessed by five hundred farmers, and fully reported in the press. One of the reporters, as it happened, representing theCincinnati Commercial, was a young Ohioan named Whitelaw Reid, now the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James.
That ten minutes in a horse collar made $2,000,000 for Whiteley. His antagonist,BenjaminH. Warder, was filled with admiration for Whiteley’s prowess, and at once proposed that they should quit fighting and work in harmony.
“Give me the right to make your reaper and I’ll pay you $5 apiece for all I can sell,” said Warder. “It’s a bargain,” responded Whiteley. And so there arose the first consolidation in the harvester business.
Whiteley and Warder did not merge theircompanies; but they divided the United States into three parts—one for Whiteley, one for his brother Amos, who also made reapers in Springfield, and one for Warder. They united in building a malleable iron foundry and a knife works, so that they could use better materials at a lower cost. They made the first handsome and shapely machines.
For twelve years this triple alliance led the way, and all others, even the mighty McCormick and the sagacious Deering, had to follow. The “Champion” reaper became the leading machine of the United States, and the little town of Springfield, Ohio, was known as the “Reaper City.” As many as 160,000 reapers and mowers were sent out as a year’s work. In all, 2,000,000 of Whiteley’s “Champion” machines have been made in Springfield, and have sold at a gain of $18,000,000.
As the millions came pouring in so fast, Whiteley’s head was turned and he began to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder and from his own partners, Fassler and Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour, built the biggest reaper factory in the world,became a railroad president, helped to corner the Chicago wheat market, backed the “Strasburg Clock”—an absurd self-binder that was as big as a pipe-organ—and came crashing down in a failure that jarred the farming world from end to end.
Whiteley lost millions in this crash—and with comparative indifference. It was never the profits that he fought for. At heart he was a sportsman rather than a money-maker. He craved the excitement of the race itself more than the prizes. To win—that was the ambition of his life. And he did not shrink from spectacular methods to accomplish his ambition.
For instance, nothing less would satisfy him, when he exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made daintily of rosewood and gold. This brought him so sudden a rush of orders from the East that in one day of the following year he sent seventy loaded cars to Baltimore. With flags flying and brass bands playing, these cars rolled off, with orders to travel only by daylight. When they arrived in Harrisburg, running in three sections, they caught the eye of a railroad superintendent namedMcCrea—who is now, by the way, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw a chance to advertise his railway as well as Whiteley’s reapers, so he linked the seventy cars together into one three-quarter-mile train, put his biggest engine at the front, and sent the gaudy caravan on its way.
Whiteley never knew how to be commonplace, even in the smallest matters. Wherever he went, his trail was marked by stories of his exploits and his oddities. How he organised the famous “White Plug Hat Brigade” in the Blaine campaign—how he made a twelve-hour speech to help “Mother” Stewart close up the saloons of Springfield—how he found a Springfield farmer using a McCormick reaper, gave him a Whiteley reaper in its place, and flung the rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign that he was the monarch of Ohio—how he gathered up a peck of pies after a field test dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing but pies for half a week—such is the sort of anecdotes that his life has added to the folklore of the Western farmers.
Many a time his vaudeville tactics disgusted and enraged his fellow manufacturers;but he was too big a factor to be ignored. Once, when a number of reaper kings had met together to see if they could rescue their business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman opened the discussion with the question—“What ought we to do to improve the conditions of our trade?” For a moment there was silence, and then John P. Adriance—as mild-natured a man as ever lived—said blandly, “Kill Whiteley.”
With daring originality Whiteley combined a tremendous physical vitality and a brain that fairly effervesced with inventiveness. He probably holds the record among the reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents in his name. And he would work twenty-four hours at a stretch, without a yawn. One evening he asked a young machinist to remain in the factory and help him fix a refractory reaper. After working till midnight Whiteley said: “Well, Jim, I suppose you think you are tired. Go home and have a good night’s sleep, and come back here in three hours.”
He dashed with fanatical energy into any undertaking that appealed to his imagination. Once, when he had too much money, hebought control of a new railway that ran through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,—160 miles. He wanted to know its real value, so, instead of asking the directors a few questions, as other men would have done, Whiteley travelled over the entire length of the railroad,on foot.
When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was time-worn and whitened. Since the great failure, he has been in the harvester business only intermittently. He has long outlived his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever, with a new scheme and a new factory. And he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots that have been familiar at field tests for more than half a century.
Of the other Springfield men, Warder was unquestionably the ablest. “He was the main wheel,” said Whiteley. As a young man of twenty-seven he was running a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard of the reaper. He was so impressed with its possibilities that he offered the inventor $30,000 for a share in it.
“Young Warder is crazy,” said Springfield people, for at that time $30,000 was a fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-fiveyears later, when Warder had removed to Washington and become noted among its social entertainers, his investment had multiplied itself very nearly two hundredfold.
Warder had associated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J. Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became Warder’s understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J. Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon which the International Harvester Company is built.
Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty competitors in a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way was left open to him.
“I’ll beat them,” he said, “by making a better machine.”
He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until 1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with wire. It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke, and had been developed to its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B. Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism,consistingmainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success; but the farmers disliked it.
“The wire will mix with the straw,” they said, “and our horses and cattle will be killed.”
So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty of the new machines.
When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he wasenthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It seemed magical.
“What am I to do?” asked the farmer who bought the first of these machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.
“Do!” exclaimed John Webster, the Deering mechanic. “Do nothing!Drive the Horses.”
The amazed farmer started the horses, drove around the field, and came back swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic—as well he might. For in the trail of his harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though there were some kindly genie hidden among its wheels.
Deering owned, at that time, not much more than a million dollars—the gleanings of thirty-five industrious years. But he resolved to stake it all upon this amazing machine. If he lost—he would be a poor man at fifty-three. If he won—he would be the harvester king of the world.
“I’ll move the factory to Chicago and make 3,000 of these Appleby twine-binders at once,” he said.
His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so the inflexible Deering bought him out, and from that day he, like his greatest competitor, McCormick, ran a one-man business.
“Did you hear the news about Deering?” gossiped his fellow manufacturers. “Clean crazy on a twine-binder!”
And, far more discouraging, the magical self-binder itself suddenly became ill-humored and refused to form its sheaves properly. It was no easy exploit, as any one may see, to make the first 3,000 of such complex machines. No other artificial mechanism must so combine strength and delicacy. No piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected to operate while it is being jerked over a rough field or along the steep slant of a hill.
One day in the early spring of 1880, Deering and his chief lieutenants—Steward and Dixon—were in a field of rye near Alton, trying to coax the new harvester to do its work. All day long it was obstinate and perverse, and the men were at their wits’ end.
“Well, boys,” said Deering, “if we can’t do better than this, I’ll lose $1,000,000.”
“Try one more day,” said Steward. They went to their hotel, and as it happened to be crowded, the three were placed in a large double room.
“Steward and Dixon were mad at me the next morning,” said Deering, when he told me of that critical occasion. “They had nothing at stake, yet they had lain awake all night; while I was apparently about to lose my only million, and had slept like a log.”
That day a slight change was made, and the harvester became good-natured and obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were sold, and created as much excitement as 3,000 miracles. They swept away competitors like chaff. Of a hundred manufacturers seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead of losing his fortune, Deering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars, for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became an acknowledged leader of his class. He had taken the right line of development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could,choked down their rage and followed—quick march!
The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the scout—the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he—the inspired farm labourer of Wisconsin—who had hurled another great impossibility out of the way of the world’s farmers.
He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it out of a branch of a cherry tree.
Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders. He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes will do as much for the South as hisself-binder did for the West. And it was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.
In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy machinery, instead of minding his work.
One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper. “How do you like the work, Jack?” asked the farmer.
“I don’t like it,” said Jack, “and what’s more, I believe I can invent a machine to tie these bundles.”
“Ho! ho!” laughed the farmer. “You little fool, you can’t invent anything.”
Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” replied the old man. “I was the farmer who gave you your first job.”
“Well,” said Appleby, “you see I wasn’t a little fool after all.”
Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age—in 1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man who put money back of the boy’s invention. He stood behind it to the extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited into a thousand.
When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back, Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and thought only of guns.
Yet while he lay in the trenches atVicksburg, he whittled out a new device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him $500 for it, and then, before Appleby’s eyes, sold a half interest in it for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him an inventor for life.
Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867 he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie, Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed these, and one man—Dr. E. D. Bishop—pulled a roll of money from his pocket and handed it to the inventor.
“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 scatteredright 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 quantities. 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 ofdifficulties 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 unassuming 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. Inhis later endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass 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. Hesent 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.
Sagacity—that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William Deering’s success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his competitors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There seemed to be a business compass 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; “andperhaps 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 nobler 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 twentylegislatures. 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 competition.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.
Forfifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field of competition. 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 competition. 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 competition 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 competition 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 hadtried 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.
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 gavePerkins 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 theMorgan 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 HarvesterCombine 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 competition, 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 orMontana. 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 substitute 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 coke in Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in fact, that if they were contiguous, they wouldmake a Harvester City as spacious 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 grass, 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 fromthe stalk with iron hands, and others that wrench off the husks, shell 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 ofits 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 coöperative 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 newAmerican 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 theMcCormickfoundries.
“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 arenow 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 assistance 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 frantichaste, 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 systemof 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—Δ. 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-canbusiness, 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 aboy-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 illustrate his naïve 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, entitling him to $18 a week. On Saturday 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 gratitude, to their employees. At the time the International was organised, Stanley said to the others:
“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 inthe 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 twobrothers, had less farm experience, as he served for twelve years in Uncle Sam’s navy. He was a lieutenant when he came ashore 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-scraper.
The two other vice-presidents of the Harvester Company are battle-worn veterans of the competitive 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 competition to the explosive point by originating the system of canvassing. He poured first oil and then water on the fire.
As for William H. Jones, he is a sturdy 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 ofthe 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 assistant, 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 thousandsalesmen, 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 thispowerful 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 competitors 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 giantogres, 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 tobecome 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 coöperate. 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 competition 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 inthrough the wickets of his little money-lending office, or than Marshall Field accumulated 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 coöperative 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 paytwenty 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 competition 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 theInternational for $125, which is in my judgment the best of the three machines.”
The International has competitors, 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 Atwater, 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 ofanother 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 competitors. “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.