Herbert Newton Casson

“ The children born and bred in this Red River Valley have never seen, except in pictures, a sickle or a flail. Their only conception of a harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders, with reels whirling and knives clacking, shall charge upon the wheat as though each acre were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make war until the land is strewn with heaps of fallen sheaves. ”

“ And when, at the call of the sun and the rain, the black field becomes green and ripens from green to gold, its yellow fruitage is swept down and into barns, not by a horde of stooping laborers, but by the Grand March of the Harvesters, the drivers of painted chariots, who ride against the grain and leave it behind them in bound sheaves.
Henceforth civilization may be based upon higher motives than the Search for Food. The struggle for existence may become the struggle of the nobler nature for its full development. The gentle need not be eliminated by the strong. ”

“ To-day there is no longer in most countries any tragic note in the Epic of the Wheat. There is no sweating peasant with a hoe. The plowman may even sit, if he wishes, upon the sliding steel knife that slices the soil into furrows, or upon the steel harrow that combs the clods into [245] soft, loose earth. The sower is no heavy-footed serf, scattering his grain in handfuls upon the surface of the soil, where the birds of the air may devour it. He, too, rides upon a machine with steel fingers that plant the living seed securely in the living earth. ”

“ Thousands of men who had been sailors turned their backs on the sea and learned to till the soil. Town laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day, tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon scraps of land that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the utmost energy and perseverance,—but with what tools? With the wooden plow, the sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the same rude hand-labor tools that the nations of antiquity had tried to farm with,—the tools of failure and slavery and famine. ”

“ It is a Field of the Cloth of Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of the common people. Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a golden fringe. ”

“ The selection of wheat as the first world-food,—its abundance made possible by the Reaper—its transportation by railroads and steamships—its storage in elevators—the production of flour—the growth of wheat-banks, wheat-ports, and exchanges—the new wheat empires—the international mechanism of marketing—the conquest of famine and the stupendous possibilities of the future! These are the subjects that group themselves under the general title—The Reaper and the World.
To find a world-food,—that was the beginning of the problem. All human beings wake up hungry every morning of their lives ”

“ Famine, to these children of the wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling of the sun. Even the one young State of North Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food for herself, and for twelve million people besides.
So, the urgent world-problem is to teach other nations the lesson of the Red River Valley. There is not yet enough bread so that we may put a loaf at every plate. To feed the whole race according to the present American standard of living would require ten thousand million bushels—three times as much as we are raising now; and the demand is fast outgrowing the supply. ”

“ A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than a meeting-place for brokers. It is a mechanism. It is a news bureau—a parliament—a part of the whispering-gallery of the world. It not only provides a market where wheat can at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for both buyer and seller all the news from everywhere about the wheat, so that no bargain may be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were organized there were times when a farmer would drive twenty miles to the nearest town with a load of wheat, and find no one to buy it. ”

“ With a sickle, the time-cost of a bushel of wheat was three [210] hours; with a self-binder, it is now ten minutes. And so, because of these amazing results, the rattle of the harvester has become an indispensable part of the music of our industrial orchestra, harmonious with the click of the telegraph key, the ring of the telephone bell, the hum of the sewing-machine, the roar of the Bessemer converter, the gong of the trolley, the whistle of the steamboat, and the puff of the locomotive. ”

“ As the master builder of the modern business of manufacturing farm machinery, McCormick set in motion so many forces of human betterment that the fruitfulness of his life can never be fully told. There are to-day in all countries more than one hundred thousand patents for inventions that were meant to lighten the labor of the farmer. And the cereal crop of the [vii] world has risen with incredible gains, until this year its value will be not far from ten thousand millions of dollars,—very nearly the equivalent of all the gold in coin and jewelry and bullion. ”

“ He believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics, he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.
What McCormick tried to do as a citizen and a patriot was the one heroic failure of his life. ”

“ London has no elevators, and never has had, although it buys more wheat than any other city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that the grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To give bread to London would take the entire crop of Indiana or Siberia. ”

“ So, in the span of his business life—from 1831 to 1884,—McCormick had seen his country rise from insignificance to greatness, and he had the supreme satisfaction of knowing that his Reaper had done much, if not most, to accelerate this marvellous progress. As we shall see, the invention of the Reaper was the right starting-point for the up-building of a republic. It made all other progress possible, by removing the fear of famine and the drudgery of farm labor. It enabled even the laborer of the harvest-field to be free and intelligent, because it gave him the power of ten men. ”

“ In any case, whatever its earlier history may have been, wheat is to-day the chief food of the civilized races of mankind. It is the main support of 600,000,000 people. It has overcome its natural enemies—weeds, fungus diseases, insects, and drought,—and attained a crop total of 3,500,000,000 bushels a year. To the intelligent, purposeful nations that have become the masters of the human race, wheat is now the staff of life, the milk of Mother Earth, the essence of soil and air and rain and sunshine. ”

“ CHICAGO
[v]
INTRODUCTION WHOEVER wishes to understand the making of the United States must read the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one man so truly represented the dawn of the industrial era,—the grapple of the pioneer with the crudities of a new country, the replacing of muscle with machinery, and the establishment of better ways and better times in farm and city alike. Beginning exactly one hundred years ago, the life of McCormick spanned the heroic period of our industrial advancement, when great things were done by great individuals. ”

“ From one point of view, the speculator is the driving-wheel of the whole wheat trade. By his energy and his impetus he steadies and equalizes the conflicting forces, and gives the entire mechanism a continuous movement. From another point of view, he is a gambler, reckless and parasitical, who interferes with the natural laws of supply and demand, and snatches an unearned toll from the wheat bins of the world. ”

“ The wheat and flour that were sent out from its ports and depots in the year that the inventor of the Reaper died were enough to make ten thousand million loaves of bread, which, if they were fairly distributed, would have given about forty loaves apiece to the families of the human race.
The United States, in 1884, had been for six years the foremost of the wheat-producing nations. It had also grown to be first in mining, railroads, telegraphs, steel, and agriculture. It was the land of the highest wages and cheapest bread—an anomaly that foreign countries could not understand. ”

“ It has 25,000 workmen and 35,000 agents. The lumber with which its yards are filled comes from its own 80,000-acre forest; the steel comes from its own furnaces and the iron ore from its own mines. It is so overwhelmingly vast, this new famine-fighting consolidation, that the value of its output for one hour is greater than the $25,000 of capital with which McCormick built his first factory in Chicago.
So, it is evident that the McCormick Reaper has been an indispensable factor in the making of America. ”

“ He acquired a reputation as "a man who would law you to death." He brought down upon himself to a remarkable degree the hostility of his competitors, and prevented himself from receiving the full credit and prestige that he deserved. Instead of being revered as the father of the Reaper business, he was feared as an industrial Bismarck—a man of unyielding will and indomitable purpose, who regarded his competitors as a pack of trespassers in an empire that belonged by right to him. ”

“ There were two Chicago events in this year which must have deeply impressed Cyrus McCormick. The first was the arrival of a horde of hunger-driven immigrants from Ireland. The famine of 1846, which had caused 210,000 deaths in that unfortunate island, was driving the survivors to America; and the people of Chicago showed the warmest sympathy towards these gaunt, sad-faced newcomers. Even in the depth of her own depression, Chicago called a special meeting to consider what could be done to alleviate the suffering of the Irish, and gave several thousand dollars for their relief. ”

“ In Russia and Siberia a vast tract of twenty-five million acres has been rescued from idleness in the last fifteen years. And even in the valley of the Euphrates, where wheat, so it is believed, was born, a new railway is now being constructed which, when it is finished, will carry oil and wheat.
By thus opening up new regions to settlement, the wheat-farmer not only thwarts the monopolist and makes the world a larger place to live in, he does more: he compels the gold to come out of its vaults in the great cities and to flow to the outermost parts of the earth. ”

“ Twelve threshing-machines, kept busy in the midst of this sea of yellow grain, beat out the straw and chaff and in the season filled two freight trains a day with enough wheat in each train to give two thousand people their daily bread for a year.
Led on by such pathfinders, American farmers launched out bravely, until now they are using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of labor-saving machinery. The whole level of farm life has been raised. ”

“ But, although wheat was known to be the best food for fifty centuries, it did not until very recently, until thirty or forty years ago, become a world-food. Every community ate up its own wheat. It had little or none to sell, because, no matter how much grain the farmers planted, they could not in the eight or ten days of harvest gather more than a certain limited quantity into their barns. All that one man could do, with his wife to help him, was to snatch in enough [208] wheat to feed ten people for a year. Each family could do no more than feed one other family and itself. ”

“ And even China, which is not as a whole on the wheat-map of the world, has recently begun to grow wheat in Manchuria and to build flour-mills at Hong-Kong.
So, the human race will soon be able to feed itself. It has learned how and needs only to use to the full the agencies that are already invented and established. Beginning with the McCormick Reaper in 1831, there has been constructed a world mechanism of the bread, which promises to wholly abolish Famine and its brood of evils. ”

“ At about this time he undertook to do a man's work in the reaping of the wheat, and here he discovered that to swing a cradle against a field of grain under a hot summer sun was of all farming drudgeries the severest. Both his back and his brain rebelled against it. One thing at least he could do,—he could make a smaller cradle, that would be easier to swing; and he did this, whittling away in the evening in the little log workshop.
"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius," said an old laborer who had worked on the McCormick farm. "He was always trying to invent something." ”

“ For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent hunger-pangs in time of famine. Once let those countries have cheap bread, and there may be no more opium sold there than there is to-day in Kansas. For lack of bread came the war between Russia and Japan; what the one nation wanted was a seaport for the grain of Siberia, and what the other wanted was more land for the support of her swarming population. ”

“ Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape, there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago—the oldest and largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life, this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the farmers. ”