There were four of them—Cyrus H. McCormick, Charles Deering, J. J. Glessner, and W. H. Jones—and all of them added to the strong preference for competition a definite opposition to trusts, monopolies, and stock speculation. They were not the Wall Street type of millionaire. In that time of booming optimism, they might have made more money in one year by selling stock than they had made in thirty years by selling harvesters. But no one of them had tried it. The fact is that they cared more for the good-will of the farmers and the prestige of their machines than they did for larger profits. The thing that troubled them most in the proposed consolidation of properties, one of the Morgan partners told me, was the fear that prices would in any case have to be raised, because of the increasing cost of labour and raw materials.
| HAROLD McCORMICK Photo by Matzene, Chicago, 1905 | J. J. GLESSNER |
| W. H. JONES Photo by Smith, Evanston, Ill. | JAMES DEERING Photo by Dyer, Chicago |
No wonder that the financiers who undertook to organise them were driven almost to distraction by their obstinate independence. They had as many contradictory opinions as a Russian Duma; and it was soon clear that the only possible way to proceed was to keep them apart until all possible preliminaries were arranged.
So the four Harvester Men went back home until the details of the new combination should be worked out. Then they were summoned again to New York. As was their custom, they went to different hotels, and each man was handled separately until he was in an organisable frame of mind. This master-stroke of diplomacy was accomplished by George W. Perkins—Morgan’s most versatile partner; and it gave Perkins a day and a night that he will never forget. From morning until midnight—from midnight until the first ray of dawn slanted down Broadway, Perkins dashed from hotel to hotel like a human shuttle. Deering conceded one point if McCormick would concede another. Glessner yielded one of his claims, and Jones withdrew something else. Inch by inch these stubborn men were pushed within tying distance of each other; and the fifty-year harvester war was about to come to an end.
The next day Perkins renewed the struggle, but he was too tired to continue the cab driving between hotels. He telephoned the four Harvester Men to meet him at Morgan’s office. As each man climbed up the rusty iron steps of the Morgan Building he was switched by the big Irish doorkeeper into one of those large inner rooms at the rear, on the ground floor, where many a broken business has been mended. Four men in four rooms, with Perkins flying in and out—such was the way that the great harvester company was finished. It was a unique situation, as much like an incident in comic opera as an affair of business. But the Morgan experts knew that if the four men were allowed to meet, the old hurtful rivalries would break out afresh and the project might snap off like a broken dream.
To strengthen the new company with a big surplus of ready money, a one-sixth interest was sold for twenty millions to Morgan and several other New York financiers of the “old reliable” sort. Also, a fifth harvester company, in Milwaukee, was bought from Stephen Bull for about five millions. And when the last rivet had been clinched and the last nail driven home, the four Westerners suddenly found themselves sitting around the same table, in the new International Harvester Company, of Chicago.
There were several harvester companies that remained independent, but probably not from choice. I do not know of one that has not, at some stage of its career, tried to get into a trust. Fifteen companies were merged by Colonel Conger in 1892, but they were poorly fastened together and soon fell apart. It is also a fact, though one not before made public, that the Mutual Life Insurance Company tried to form a second Harvester Combine in 1903, with four large manufacturing companies in the merger, and under the presidency of E. D. Metcalf, of Auburn, New York. When this project failed, three independent companies—two in New York and one in Canada, offered themselves for sale to the Harvester Company. It bought one—the Osborne—for six millions, and refused the others.
“We are big enough now,” said Cyrus H. McCormick. “It is not safe for one company to have a monopoly. What we want to do is to regulate competition, not to destroy it.”
Besides the big Osborne Company, which is now the third largest in the combine, the Harvester Company has bought five smaller concerns, and built two new plants—one in Canada and one in Sweden. It is like the original United States—a union of thirteen industrial colonies. Its output has risen to 700,000 harvesting machines a year, including all varieties; and its annual revenue is more than seventy-three million dollars.
With its 25,000 employees and 42,000 agents, this one company is supporting as many families as there are in Utah or Montana. A square mile of land would be too small to contain its factories. At its hundred warehouses there is trackage for 12,000 cars. Around its workshops are six busy railways of its own, whose engines last year pulled out 65,000 freight-cars, jammed full of machinery for the farmers of the world.