“Start The Big Engine,” said McCormick. The men threw their hats in the air and cheered. They sprang at the smoking debris, and began to rebuild before the cinders were cold.
Such was the second birth of the vast factory which, in its sixty years, has created fully 5,000,000 harvesters, and which is now so magically automatic that, with 6,000 workmen, it can make one-third of all the grain-gathering machinery of the world.
Practically nothing has been written about McCormick from the human nature side. He was one of those Cromwellian men who can only be appreciated at a distance. He was too absorbed in his work to be congenial and too aggressive to be popular. He shouldered his way roughly against the slow-moving crowd; and the people whom he thrust out of his way naturally did not consider the importance of his life-task.
Most of the really great men of his day were his friends—Horace Greeley, for instance, and Peter Cooper, Junius Morgan, Abram S. Hewitt, Cyrus W. Field, and Ferdinand De Lesseps. But among the men of his own trade he stood hostile and alone.
“McCormick wants to keep the whole reaper business to himself. He will not live and let live,” said his competitors. And they had reason to say so. He did want to dominate. He wanted to make all the harvesting machines that were made—not one less. He was not at all a modern “community-of-interest” financier. He was a man of an outgrown school—a consistent individualist, not only in business, but in politics and religion as well. There was no compartment in his brain for mergers and combines—for theories of government ownership—for Higher Criticism and the new theology. He was a Benjamin Franklin commercialist, a Thomas Jefferson Democrat, and a John Knox Presbyterian.
He had worked harder to establish the reaper business than any other man. He was making reapers when William Deering was five years old, and before Ralph Emerson and “Bill” Whiteley were born. He had graduated into success through a fifteen-year course in failure. The world into which he was born was as hostile to him as the Kentucky wilderness was to Daniel Boone or the Atlantic Ocean to Columbus. He was hard-fibred, because he had to be. He was the thin end of the wedge that split into fragments the agricultural obstacle to social progress.
One careless writer of biographies has said that McCormick began at the foot of the ladder. This is not correct. When he began, there was no ladder. He had to build it as he climbed.
The first man who gave battle to McCormick was an erratic genius named Obed Hussey, who, as we have seen, secured a reaper patent in 1833. No two men were ever more unlike than Hussey and McCormick. Hussey was born in Nantucket; and he had roamed the frozen North as a whaling seaman. He was inventive, poetic, and as whimsical as the weather. His delight was in working out some mechanical problem. His first invention was a machine to make pins. Soon afterward, while he was living in Cincinnati, constructing a machine to mould candles, a friend said to him:
“Hussey, why don’t you invent a machine to reap grain?”
“Are there no such machines?” he asked in surprise.