So a list of the old employees was made, from Charlie Mulkey, the old watchman, to R. G. Brooks, the superintendent, and $1,500,000 was divided among them. Recently a complete profit-sharing plan, such as Perkins had worked out for the Steel Trust, was put in working order, and about $200,000 of extra money have been scattered through the pay-envelopes.
The two Deerings, who are now chairman and vice-president, were disciplined in the same stern, old-fashioned way as the McCormicks.
“Put this young man to work at the bottom rung of the ladder,” said William Deering, when his younger son, James, was graduated from the university.
Being in many respects a chip of the old block, James Deering plunged into business with as much energy as though he had to toil for his millions as well as inherit them. He became a field expert, and followed the harvest from Texas to North Dakota. He asked for no favours, but sweltered along among the Western farmers for several summers. Then he went to the foot of the ladder in the factory and wrestled with big iron castings and steel frames. Step by step he worked up, until even his Spartan father was satisfied and made him the manager of the whole plant.
At present there is perhaps no man in the harvester industry who has so great a variety of attainments as James Deering. He is a shrewd commercialist, yet he has found time, no one knows how, to master several languages and to run the whole octave of self-culture.
Charles Deering, the older of the two brothers, had less farm experience, as he served for twelve years in Uncle Sam’s navy. He was a lieutenant when he came ashore to help his father make harvesters. At that time he did much to solve the binder-twine problem—how to get better twine and plenty of it. Then, when the drama of consolidation was staged by Morgan, he took a leading part. Personally, he is a bluff, forceful, but companionable man, such as one would expect to find on the deck of a war-ship rather than in the telephone-pestered office of a sky-scraper.
The two other vice-presidents of the Harvester Company are battle-worn veterans of the competitive period—J. J. Glessner and William H. Jones. Glessner, beginning as a bookkeeper in Ohio, has for many years been regarded as a sort of unofficial peacemaker and balance-wheel of the trade. Everybody confided in Glessner. He did as much as any one else to harmonise the warring Harvester Kings; but it is also true that it was the gentle Glessner who developed competition to the explosive point by originating the system of canvassing. He poured first oil and then water on the fire.
As for William H. Jones, he is a sturdy and genial Welshman, who was born and bred in a farmhouse. As a boy he reaped wheat with a sickle in the valleys of Wales. About forty years ago, when he had become an American, he bought a reaper and a tent, and set out to earn his fortune. By working twenty hours a day, he had earned enough money, by 1881, to begin making reapers of his own, at Plano; and he built up a large business.
The General Manager of this big anti-famine organisation is a young Illinoisan, named C. S. Funk. “He is the central man,” says Perkins. No other Chicagoan of his age—he is only thirty-five—has pushed up so quickly to so high a place, with nothing to help him except his own grit and ability. To-day he manages a 65,000-man-power corporation; yet it is very little more than twenty years since he was trudging six miles on a hot July day, to ask for his first job in a hay-field. Young as he was, he was then the support of a widowed mother, and there were seven children younger than he.
His office, in which I was permitted to take notes for several days, is a nerve-centre of the world. Everything that happens to the human race is of interest to this alert young chancellor of the Harvester Company. A drought in Argentina, the green bug in Kansas, a tariff campaign in Australia, a shortage of farm labour in Egypt, a new railway in Southern Russia, such are the bulletins that guide him through his day’s work.