CHAPTER III
The International Harvester Company
For fifty years the Harvester Kings fought one another in the open field of competition. Their armies of agents, drilled in the arts of rivalry, waged a war in which quarter was neither given nor sought. It was a fight almost of extermination. Out of two hundred companies that went to battle with flags waving and drums beating, less than a dozen came home.
David M. Osborne backed a new self-binder, lost a million, and died of heartbreak. J. S. Morgan, who had a small factory at Brockport, saw the immense McCormick and Deering plants and quit. Even the great Whiteley fell, and Lewis Miller, the father-in-law of Edison and the founder of Chautauqua, went down “like a great tree upon the hills.”
Walter A. Wood, after forty years of success, took Governor Merriam and James J. Hill as partners, and set out to win the West for the Wood Company. Their factory was the pride of St. Paul. Their credit was the best, and their fame was over all the prairies. Yet after five years of battling they surrendered; and not one harvester is made to-day west of Illinois.
It is a common opinion among harvester men that from first to last there has been more money put into the business than has ever been taken out—so enormously wasteful were these years of competition. By 1902 the harvester business was merely a terrific and destructive war. The agents were tearing the whole industry to shreds and tatters. So far as the Harvester Men could see, they must choose between combination and ruin.
Not one of them was personally in favour of combination. They were individualists through and through. The spirit of competition had been bred in the bone. So, when several of them came together to check this warfare, it was not of their own free will. It was because they could do nothing else. They were hurled together by social forces over which they had no control.
One by one these battle-worn Westerners came to New York, “on an exploring expedition,” as one of them said. Here they met Judge Elbert H. Gary, whom they had known intimately in Chicago. Gary had been William Deering’s attorney for twenty-five years. He was a farmer’s son, and had risen to be the official head of the Steel Trust; so that he was the one man who had an expert knowledge at once of farms, harvesters, and mergers. And naturally, when the Chicagoans ran to Gary with their tales of woe, he brought them across Broadway into the office of J. P. Morgan, which had become in 1902 a sort of Tribunal of Industrial Peace.