Herbert Newton Casson

“ It cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be intelligent: he must be free.
To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as “the country where the reapers come from.” They realise, too, that farm machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or silk from France. ”

“ CHAPTER I The Story of McCormick This Romance of the Reaper is a true fairy tale of American life—the story of the magicians who have taught the civilised world to gather in its harvests by machinery.
On the old European plan—snip—snip—snipping with a tiny hand-sickle, every bushel of wheat required three hours of a man’s lifetime. To-day, on the new American plan—riding on the painted chariot of a self-binding harvester, the price of wheat has been cut down to ten minutes a bushel. ”

“ He knows that there are more living things in one pinch of rich soil than there are people on the whole globe. He knows that he can take half a dozen handfuls of earth from different parts of his farm, mix them together, send one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out exactly the kind of crop that will give him the best harvest. And more, now that science has given him a peep into Nature’s factory, he can even feel a sense of kinship between himself and his acres, because he knows that the same elements that redden his blood are painting the green hues on his fields and forests. ”

“ But McCormick soon discovered that it was not enough to invent a reaper. What the world needed was a man who was strong and dominating enough to force his reaper upon the unwilling labourers of the harvest fields.
Tenacity! Absolute indifference to defeat! The lust for victory that makes a man unconscious of the blows he gives or takes! This was what was needed, and what Cyrus McCormick possessed, to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other man in American history. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The reaper was America’s answer to the world’s demand for democracy. Instead of bread riots and red flags and theories of an earthly paradise in which nobody worked but the Government, the United States invented a machine that gave democracy a chance. ”

“ But he was not so tremendously superior to the farm labourer who takes a can of gasolene and cuts fifty cords of wood in a day, or to the man who milks a herd of sixty cows in two hours, by machinery.
To-day farming is not a drudgery. Rather it is a race—an exciting rivalry between the different States. For years Illinois and Iowa have run neck and neck in the raising of corn and oats. Minnesota carries the blue ribbon for wheat, with Kansas breathless in second place. ”

“ The real business that is now swinging the whole nation ahead is not the ping-pong traffic of the Stock Exchanges, but the steady output of twenty millions a day from the fields and barn-yards. If this farm output were to be cut off, the towering skyscrapers would fall and the gay palace-hotels would be as desolate as the temple of Thebes.
The brain-working farmer is the man behind prosperity. That is the Big Fact of recent American history. It is he who pays the bills and holds up the national structure in the whirlwind hour of panic. ”

“ Cut the Kings and their retinues out of history and it is no exaggeration to say that the human race was hungry for ten thousand years. Even of the Black Bread—burnt and dirty and coarse, there was not enough; and the few who were well fed took the food from the mouths of slaves. Even the nations that grew Galileo and Laplace and Newton were haunted by the ghosts of Hunger. ”

“ Without the magical grain machinery that gives us cheap bread, the whole new structure of our civilisation, with all its dazzling luxuries and refinements, would be withered by the blight of Famine. This may sound strange and sensational to those who have been bred in the cities, but it is true.
The reaper has done more to chase the [Pg viii] wolf from the door—to abolish poverty and drudgery and hand-labour, than any other invention of our day. It has done good without any backwash of evil. It has not developed any new species of social parasite, as so many modern improvements have done. ”

“ His hermit days are over; he is a man among men. The railway, the trolley, the automobile and the top buggy have transformed him into a suburbanite. In fact, his business has become so complex and many-sided, that he touches civilisation at more points and lives a larger life than if he were one of the atoms of a crowded city.
All American farmers, of course, are not of the New variety. The country, like the city, has its slums. But after having made allowance for exceptions, it is still true that the United States is the native land of the New Farmer. ”

“ Flour mills were closed for lack of wheat. Starving men fell in the streets of Boston and Philadelphia. Mobs of labourers, maddened by the fear of famine, broke into warehouses and carried away sacks of food as though they were human wolves. Even in the Middle West—the prairie paradise of farmers—many a family fought against Death with the serf’s weapon of Black Bread.
Enterprise was not then an American virtue. The few men who dared to suggest improvements were persecuted as enemies of society. The first iron ploughs were said to poison the soil. The first railroad was torn up. ”

“ Each step ahead meant a struggle for patents. Whoever built a reaper had to defend himself in the courts as well as approve himself in the harvest-fields. Cyrus H. McCormick, especially, as William Deering soon learned, wielded the Big Stick against every man who dared to make reapers. He was the old veteran of the trade, and he gave battle to his competitors as though they were a horde of trespassers. He was their common enemy, and the reaper money that was squandered on lawsuits brought a golden era of prosperity to the lawyers. ”

“ The reaper is our best guarantee of prosperity. In spite of our periodical panics, which prove, by the way, that the men who provide us with banks are not as efficient as the men who provide us with bread, we are certain to rebound into prosperity and social progress as long as we continue to make three hundred harvesting machines every working day—one every two minutes. The rising flood of wheat is bound to submerge the schemers and the pessimists alike. ”

“ It is at once a factory, a bank and a university.
Thus, of necessity, the Harvester Company represents in the highest degree the new [Pg 102] American 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. ”

“ Unable to speak any language but their own, unused to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent in the American fashion, the Reaper Kings plunged from adventure to adventure, absolutely indifferent to everything but their reapers and success. ”

“ There are no more thousand-mile rides on horseback—no more conflicts with jeering crowds—no more smashing of reapers by farm labourers. The repeal of the Corn Laws in England had opened up a new market for our wheat, and the discovery of gold in California was booming the reaper business by making money plentiful and labour scarce. ”

“ Iowans pay the total self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the summer’s hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about farmers.
Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. ”

“ Here there are twenty thousand women and three hundred thousand men who have made farming a profession. They are producing wealth at the rate of five hundred millions a year, nearly sixteen hundred dollars apiece. How? By throwing the burden of drudgery upon machines.
Iowa is not so old; she will be sixty-two, this year. She is not so large; little England is larger. Yet, with her hog-money she could pay the salaries of all the monarchs of Europe; and with one year’s corn crop she could buy out the “Harvester Trust,” or build three New York Subways. ”

“ 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.”
[Pg 74] 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 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. ”

“ The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the “Milwaukee”; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight horses to a big “header,” crack the long whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough ground.
There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. ”

“ This magical machinery of the wheat-field solves the mystery of prosperity. It explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture. It accounts for the growth of great cities with their steel mills and factories. And it makes clear how we in the United States have become the best fed nation in the world.
Hard as it may be for this twentieth century generation to believe, it is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine. ”

“ Each is in charge of several hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our harvester trade.
No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. They [Pg 148] are only one regiment in the great pay-envelope army of American mechanics. But they are on the firing-line of the greatest battle against ignorance and famine that has ever been fought. They are the pioneers of the new farmer. To show the world’s peasantry how to work with brains and machinery, to bring them up to the American farmer’s level—that is their task. ”

“ 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. ”