Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

To see McCormick laugh was a spectacle. There was first a mellowing of his usual Jovian manner. His gray-brown eyes twinkled. The tense lines of his face relaxed. Then came a smile and soon a burst of laughter, shaking his powerful body and putting the whole company for the time into an uproar of merriment. It was the triumph of the genial and magnetic side of his nature—the side that was ordinarily repressed by the pressure of his big affairs.

McCormick had humor, but not wit. His jokes were simple and old-fashioned, such as Luther and Cromwell would have laughed at. There was no innuendo and no cynicism. On one occasion two small urchins knocked at the door and asked for food. McCormick heard their voices and had them brought into the sitting-room, where he happened to be in consultation with his lawyer. "Now," said he to the youngsters, "we are going to put both of you on trial. I will be the judge and this gentleman will be the prosecutor." Each boy in turn was placed on the witness-stand, and plied with questions. It was soon clear that neither of them was telling the truth, so "Judge" McCormick took them in hand and gave them a serious talk on the folly and wickedness of lying. Then he gave them twenty-five cents apiece, and sent them down to the kitchen to eat as much supper as they could hold.

HARVESTING NEAR SPOKANE, WASHINGTON

At another time a very dignified and self-centred military officer was taking supper with the McCormick family. The first course, as usual, was corn-meal mush and milk. This was served in Scotch fashion, with the hot mush in one bowl and the cold milk in another, and the practice was to so co-ordinate the eating of these that both were finished at the same time. The officer planned his spoonfuls badly, and was soon out of milk. "Have some more milk to finish your mush, Colonel," said McCormick. Several minutes later the Colonel's mush bowl was empty, at which McCormick said, "Have some more mush to finish your milk." And so it went, with milk for the mush and mush for the milk, until the unfortunate Colonel was hopelessly incapacitated for the four or five courses that came afterwards.

McCormick was not by any means a teller of stories, but he had a few simple and well-worn anecdotes that appealed so strongly to his sense of humor that he told and re-told them many times. There was the story of the man who stole the pound of butter and hid it in his hat, and how the grocer saw him and kept talking in the store, beside a hot stove, until the butter melted and exposed the man's thievery. Another favorite story was about the pig that found its way into a garden by walking through a hollow log, and how the gardener fooled the pig by placing the hollow log in such a way that both ends of it were on the outside of the garden.

Even McCormick's jokes had a certain moral tang—a flavor of the first Psalm and the eighth chapter of Romans. They were apt to deal with the troubles of the ungodly who had been caught in their wickedness. There were times, too, when his sense of humor and his sense of justice would co-operate in odd ways. Once, when a roast game bird, which had been sent to him as a gift from the hunter, was left over from supper, he ordered that his dainty be kept and served for the next day's luncheon. At luncheon the next day it did not appear. On asking for the game bird, a roast chicken was set before him, and he at once noticed that it was not the same bird which he had ordered to be kept. He questioned the butler, who protested that it was the same. After the meal McCormick ordered that the servants involved should be called into the dining-room. From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times, "A thief you can watch, but I detest a liar."

There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon the great inventor himself. His two youngest sons, Harold and Stanley, would hide in the hallway when they saw him approaching, and pounce out upon him with wild yells in small-boy fashion, but they were both privileged people.

McCormick was a most hearty and hospitable man. He was an ideal person for such a life-work—the abolition of famine. He was fond of food and plenty of it. He loved to see a big table heaped with food. The idea of hunger was intolerable to him. He might well have been posing for a statue of the deity of Plenty, as he squared himself around to the long, family dinner-table, with his napkin worn high and caught at his shoulders by a white silk band that went around his neck, and with a complacent, "Now, then," plunged the carving-fork into a crisp and fragrant fowl that lay on the platter in front of him.

The fact that McCormick seldom made a social call was not due to his own choosing, but because of the many worries and compulsions of his life. Once, when confiding in an intimate friend, he said, "It pains me very much to think how little I am known by my neighbors, but I seem to be always too busy to meet them." He was not at all, as many have thought because of his strenuous life, a man of harsh and rough exterior. There was nothing rough about him except his strength. He was irreproachable in dress and personal appearance. He did not drink, smoke, nor swear. And his manners and language, on formal occasions, were those of a dignified gentleman of the old school—a Calhoun, or a Van Buren.