Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Cyrus Hall McCormick, by Herbert Newton Casson
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CYRUS HALL McCORMICK
HIS LIFE AND WORK
HERBERT N. CASSON
Author of The Romance of Steel, The Romance of the Reaper, etc.
ILLUSTRATED
CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1909
The Lakeside Press R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO

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. To know McCormick is to know what type of man it was who created the United States of the nineteenth century. And now that a new century has arrived, with a new type of business development, it may be especially instructive to review a life that was so structural and so fundamental.
As Professor Simon Newcomb has observed, It is impressive to think how few men we should have had to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization. From this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor. But he was as necessary as bread. He fed his country as truly as Washington created it and Lincoln preserved it. He abolished our agricultural peasantry so effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries ever since. And he added an immense province to the new empire of mind over matter, the expansion of which has been and is now the highest and most important of all human endeavors.