The Romance of the Reaper Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MODEL OF THE FIRST PRACTICAL REAPER]

One morning, in the little town of Brockport, 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 partners.h.i.+p 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 appet.i.te. 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 ca.n.a.l. It was ugly and dirty, with a river that ran in the wrong direction; but it was _busy_. 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. Ogden had a surplus of both. So a partners.h.i.+p 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 was not only rich, but famous. One of his reapers had taken the Grand Prize at a World's Fair in England. Even the London _Times_, 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 built up 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's business 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 pa.s.sed, 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, for instance, 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 compet.i.tors. 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 owners.h.i.+p--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. He had 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 became apparent that Hussey was outcla.s.sed. 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 thousand dollars 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 gla.s.s of water, and on his way to return the gla.s.s, 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 preeminence 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 a.s.sist 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-G.o.d-and-keep-your-powder-dry"

species. A little farther down, in this same letter, he writes--"Meet Hussey in Maryland and _put 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.