The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

Its properties are so widespread that no member of the company has seen them all. To run around their circle would be a trip of 15,000 miles. It owns 20,000 acres of coal lands in Kentucky, 100,000 acres of trees in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Missouri, and 40,000,000 tons of ore in the Wisconsin and Mesaba Ranges. It has staked its money—$120,000,000—upon the belief that for fifty years longer, at least, the scientists will find no substitute for bread.

The fact that Elbert H. Gary, the official head of the Steel Trust, is one of its directors, has not prevented this self-sufficient company from owning a complete steel plant, where 2,000 Hungarians make iron from ore, and steel from iron. It saws its trees into lumber in Missouri, and roasts its coal into coke in Kentucky. Its domains are so extensive, in fact, that if they were contiguous, they would make a Harvester City as spacious as Greater Chicago.

But the most surprising feature of this unique corporation, to one who sees it for the first time, is the distracting variety of things that pour out of its factories. Its business is by no means to make harvesters and nothing else. Its true character seems to be that of a manufacturing department store for farmers. As a matter of actual count, I found in its factories and warehouses thirty-seven different species of machines, besides all manner of variations of each sort.

Here you will see, not only a mower to cut the grass, but a tedder (a kind of steel mule, with an incurably bad temper) to kick and scatter the new-mown hay, so that it will dry in the sun; a rake to gather it together; a loader to swing it on the wagon; and a baler to compress it into bundles.

Here are the self-binders, not for the grain only, but for corn and rice as well. For the especial benefit of King Corn, whose tribute to this Republic has lately swollen to twelve hundred millions a year, the company is making machines that pluck the corn from the stalk with iron hands, and others that wrench off the husks, shell the corn, and grind it into several varieties of breakfast food for the four-footed boarders of the farm.

Here is a new machine, much less elegant than useful, for flinging manure over a field. Barefooted women did this work in the old brutal days of hand labour. But now, thanks to the brain of a canny Canadian farmer, Joseph S. Kemp, one worker can feed the hungry fields without so much as soiling the tips of the fingers.

The farmer’s wife—and there are 10,000,000 of her in the United States, has been the last one to be considered, in this outpouring of machinery. But I found at Milwaukee a rebuilt factory belonging to the International, where 2,500 men are making fifty cream separators and 100 gasolene engines a day, both designed to make life easier for Mrs. Farmer, as well as for her husband. Also, it will please her to know that she may soon be honking her way to town in an automobile buggy, which the big corporation is making for farmers in a new factory in Akron.

A harvester company must follow the whims of its customers, almost as much as though it had newspapers for sale. It must give 10,000,000 farmers what they want. At the Plano factory I saw 470 different varieties of wheels; and sixty-one kinds of wooden tongues at McCormick’s.

“Nothing could be simpler than a tongue,” said Maurice Kane, the chief mechanical expert of the International. “It is a mere pole. If we suited ourselves, we should only make two kinds—one for horses and one for oxen. But the farmers of the world have sixty-one different ideas as to how a tongue ought to be made, and we must give them what they ask for.”

The last Minnesota Legislature, in the simplicity of its heart, proposed to establish a complete harvester plant for $200,000. It may surprise the members of that Legislature to know that the International has lately spent twice as much merely to improve one twine factory in St. Paul, and four times as much to build one warehouse in Chicago. Though it began its career with sixty million dollars’ worth of equipment, it has been forced by the pressure of its trade to spend sixteen millions more on its factories. And for lack of a weather prophet, it is obliged to carry over from five to six million dollars worth of machines each year, which remain unsold in different countries.