His wide-flung army is officered mainly by farmers’ sons who had a knack for business or for machinery. His assistant, Alex. Legge, is an ex-cowboy from Nebraska. Before the era of peace and unity began, Funk and Legge had fought each other in twenty states.
“Legge was one of the best fighters I ever knew,” said Funk; “and I think you might put him down as the most popular man in the company.”
Maurice Kane, the company’s Chief Improver, and a fine type of the Irish-American, was born on a small farm near Limerick. He was a farm hand in Wisconsin when he first saw a harvester, and he has pulled himself up every inch of the way by his own abilities. A. E. Mayer, the first of an army of forty thousand salesmen, was born on a farm in New York. He is a sort of human Gatling gun, loaded with the experience of his trade. B. A. Kennedy, the overlord of the thirteen factories, is a seasoned veteran who can remember when he stood by the forge of a country blacksmith shop and hammered out ploughs by hand. Only one of the company’s generals, H. F. Perkins, began life with such a luxury as a university education. He is in charge of the raw materials—the coal and iron and lumber and sisal and flax.
These are a few of the men who manage this international empire of bread-machinery. They are all practical men, hard workers, close to the farm and the farmer. They are not fashionable idlers, nor promoters, nor Wall Street speculators. And they have no more use for tickers than for telescopes—a fact which is vitally important, now that they are making more than half the harvesters of the world.
Such is the International Harvester Company from the inside. But an outside view is equally necessary. It is of tremendous interest to 10,000,000 American farmers to know the habits and the disposition of this powerful organisation. As Theodore Roosevelt has said, there are good combinations and bad ones. Which is the International Harvester Company?
In order to get the facts about it at first hand, I interviewed the four chief competitors of the Harvester Company, three Attorneys-General, seven editors of farm papers, four professors of agricultural colleges, seven or eight implement agents, thirty farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, two state governors, and the Federal Bureau of Corporations. Before I had gone far, I learned that the big Harvester Company has been beset by a host of new troubles.
It is an evidence of the eternal futility of human ambition, that when a group of warring Harvester Kings had made peace with one another, when they had healed their wounded and buried their dead, and sat down to enjoy a future of prosperous tranquillity, up sprang a host of new enemies, armed and double-armed with weapons from which there seemed to be no sort of defence. Their outposts were shattered by legislative dynamite. Tariff walls were built across their paths. And half a dozen giant ogres, otherwise known as Attorneys-General, crashed into their peaceful business with destructive clubs of law.
The bigger the organisation the more trouble to protect and preserve it. This is what Abraham Lincoln learned—what the whole United States learned, half a century ago; and it is the lesson that the harvester-makers are studying to-day. It is a new phase of an old fact; it is the Tragedy of the Trust.
Some foreign nations, too, have taken their cue from American Legislatures, and have become almost as hostile to the Chicago company as though it were exporting roulette wheels and burglars’ jimmies. France taxed half a million from it last year by a penalising tariff. Australia has made it a political issue. Germany takes a toll of $11 on every self-binder, and Austria takes $25. Roumania raised the duty on harvesters several months ago; and there is a general feeling that the time has come to check the supremacy that the United States has always had in this line.
Yet the fact that the Harvester Company has been fined in two states does not mean that it has taken advantage of its size to become a lawbreaker. The “crime” of which it was declared guilty, was the maintenance of the old practice of “exclusive contracts,” which has been the almost universal custom for fifty years. Each agent was pledged not to sell any other company’s goods. The International abolished this requirement two years ago, and several of the independent companies still retain it. Until the merger was organised it was regarded as fair enough. It is one of the most usual habits of agency business. But the American people are now demanding that a big company shall be much more “square” and moral than a small capitalist who is fighting for his life.