This plant is so vast that from one point of view it seems to be mainly a foundry. Thousands of tons of iron—88,000 tons, to be exact,—pour out of its furnaces every year and are moulded into 113,000,000 castings. But from another point of view it appears to be a carpenter shop. In its yard stand as many piles of lumber as would build a fair-sized city—60,000,000 feet of it, cut in the forests of Mississippi and Missouri. And so much of this lumber is being sawed, planed, and shaped in the various wood-working shops that eight sawdust-fed furnaces are needed to supply them with power.
The marvels of labor-saving machinery are upon every hand, in this McCormick City. The paint-tank has replaced the paint-brush. Instead of painting wheels by hand, for instance, ten of them are now strung on a pole, like beads on a string, and soused into a bath from which they come, one minute later, resplendent in suits of red or blue. The labor-cost of painting these ten wheels is two cents. Guard-fingers, for which McCormick paid twenty-four cents apiece in 1845, are now produced with a labor-cost of two cents a dozen. And as for bolts, with two cents you can pay for the making of a hundred. Both bolts and nuts are shaped by automatic machines which are so simple that a boy can operate five at once, and so swift that other boys with wheelbarrows are kept busy carrying away their finished product.
There is one specially designed machine, with a battery of augurs, which bores twenty-one holes at once, thus saving four-fifths of a cent per board. Another special machine shapes poles and saves one cent per pole. Such tiny economies appear absurd, until the immense output is taken into account. Whoever can reduce the costs in the McCormick plant one cent per machine, adds thereby $3,500 a year to the profits, and helps to make it possible for a farmer to buy a magical self-binder, built up of 3,800 parts, for less than the price of a good horse, or for as much wheat as he can grow in one season on a dozen acres.
The vast McCormick City has its human side, too, in spite of all its noise and semi-automatic machinery. Cyrus McCormick was not one of those employers who call their men by numbers instead of names, and who have no more regard for flesh and blood than for iron and steel. He had worked with his hands himself, and brought up his sons to do the same. The feeling of loyalty and friendliness between the McCormick family and their employees has from the first been unusually strong. In 1902, at the suggestion of Stanley McCormick, gifts to the amount of $1,500,000 were made to the oldest employees of the business, as rewards for faithful service and tokens of good-will. Also, a handsome club-house was built for the comfort of the men of the McCormick City, and a rest-room for the women, under the mothering superintendence of a matron and trained nurse.
But this one McCormick City, immense as it is, does not by any means represent the sum total of McCormick's legacy to the United States. As the founder of the harvesting-machine business, he deserves credit for an industry which now represents an investment of about $150,000,000. With the sole exception of the Australian stripper, every wheat-reaping machine is still made on the lines laid down by McCormick in 1831. New improvements have been adopted; but not one of his seven factors has been thrown aside.
Fully two-thirds of this industry is still being done by the United States, although four-fifths of the wheat is grown in other countries. Our national income, from this one item of harvesting machinery, has risen to $30,000,000 a year—more than we derive from the exportation of any other American invention. No European country, apparently, has been able to master the complexities and multifarious details which abound in a successful harvester business.
In 1902 the efficiency of the larger American plants was greatly increased by the organization of the International Harvester Company, which has its headquarters in Chicago. The McCormick City is the most extensive plant in this Company, and McCormick's son—who is also Cyrus H. McCormick—is its President. In this Company sixteen separate plants are coordinated, four of these being in foreign countries. Its yearly output averages about $75,000,000 in value; and in bulk is great enough to fill 65,000 freight-cars. 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. Without it, we could never have had the America of to-day. It has brought good, and nothing but good, to every country that has accepted it. It has never been, and never can be, put to an evil use. It cannot, under any system of government, benefit the few and not the many. It is as democratic in its nature as the American Constitution; and in every foreign country where it cuts the grain, it is an educator as well as a machine, giving to the masses of less fortunate lands an object-lesson in democracy and the spirit of American progress.