Four sons were born, and two daughters—Cyrus Hall, who is now President of the International Harvester Company; Robert, who died in infancy; Harold, Treasurer of the International Harvester Company; Stanley, Comptroller of the Company; Virginia; and Anita, now known as Mrs. Emmons Blame.
Mr. McCormick was a most affectionate husband and father. He took the utmost delight in his home and its hospitalities; and invariably brought his whole household with him whenever the growth of his business obliged him to visit foreign countries. In the last few years of his life it gave him the most profound satisfaction to know that his oldest son would pick up the McCormick burden and carry it forward. "Cyrus is a great comfort to me," he said to an intimate friend. "He has excellent judgment in business matters, and I find myself leaning on him more and more."
The truth is that there was a tender side to McCormick's strong nature, which was not seen by those who met him only upon ordinary occasions. He was in reality a great dynamo of sentiment. He was deeply moved by music, especially by the playing of Ole Bull and the singing of Jenny Lind, who were his favorites. He was as fond of flowers as a child. "I love best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "because they grew in my mother's garden in Virginia." Often the tears would come to his eyes at the sight of mountains, for they reminded him of his Virginian home. "Oh, Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat crippled in a wheel-chair in a Southern hotel, "how I wish I could get on a horse and ride on through those mountains once again!"
McCormick was not in any sense a Gradgrind of commercialism—a man who enriched his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul. He made money—ten millions or more; but he did so incidentally, just as a man makes muscle by doing hard work. Several of his fellow Chicagoans had swept past him in the million-making race. No matter how much money came to him, he was the same man, with the same friendships and the same purposes. And it is inconceivable that, for any amount of wealth, he would have changed the ground-plan of his life.
It is strictly true to say that he was a practical idealist. He idealized the American Constitution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the Democratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church. He was an Oliver Cromwell of industry. All his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple principles and fitted together like a picture puzzle. There was religion in his business and business in his religion. He was made such as he was by the Religious Reformation of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of the United States. He was all of one piece—sincere and self-consistent—a type of the nineteenth-century American at his best. He was not sordid. He was not cynical. He was not scientific. He was a man of faith and works—one of the old-fashioned kind who laid the foundations and built the walls of this republic.
He felt that he was born into the world with certain things to do. Some of these things were profitable and some of them were not, but he gave as much energy and attention to the one as to the other. In 1859, for instance, he had a factory that was profitable, and a daily paper and a college that were expensive. He was struggling to extend his trade at home and in Europe, to protect his patents, to prevent the war between the North and South, and to maintain the simplicity of the Presbyterian faith. To contend for these interests and principles was his life. He could not have done anything else. It was as natural for him to do so as for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. Once, towards the end of his life, when he was sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said to his wife, "Nettie, life is a battle." He made this announcement as though it were the discovery of a new fact. All his life he had been much less conscious of the battle itself than of the cause for which he fought.
In 1884 McCormick died, at that time of the year when wheat is being sown in Spain and reaped in Mexico. The earth-life of "the strong personality before whom obstacles went down as swiftly and inevitably as grain before the knife of his machines," was ended. His last words, spoken in a moment's awakening from the death-stupor, were—"Work, work!" Not even the dissolution of his body could relax the fixity of his will. And when he lay in state, in his Chicago home, there was a Reaper, modelled in white flowers, at his feet; and upon his breast a sheaf of the ripe, yellow wheat, surmounted by a crown of lilies. These were the emblems of the work that had been given him to do, and the evidence of its completion.