The four independent companies that make binders seem to have no fear of the “Trust.” “We have no fault to find with it,” said President Atwater, of the Johnson Company. “We don’t want it smashed. Why? Because our business has doubled since it was organised; and because we would sooner compete with one company than with a dozen.”
“The ‘Trust’ was the only thing that saved the whole harvester business from annihilation,” said the ex-president of another independent company, when I pressed him for his personal opinion, and promised not to use his name. “The cold fact is really this,” he added, “that the International Harvester Company has bettered conditions for the farmer, for the independent companies, and for everybody but itself.”
“The big combine has never misused its power,” said a third of the International’s competitors. “Now and then its agents make trouble, just as ours do, no doubt. But the men at the top have always given us a square deal.”
So it is my duty to state that on the whole the Harvester Combine is a good combination and not a bad one. I have found it radically different from the get-rich-quick trusts that have been described in recent books and magazine articles. It is not a monopoly. It is an advocate of free trade. Its stock is not watered, nor for sale in Wall Street. And the men at the top are very evidently plain, hard-working, simple-living American citizens, who are quite content to do business in a live-and-let-live way.
They are not thoroughly reconciled, even yet, to being a merger. They look back with open regret to the wasteful but adventurous days of competition. Of the combination the elder Mrs. Cyrus McCormick finely said:
“It was a hurt of the heart. Each of our companies was like a family. Each had a body of loyal agents, who had been comrades through many struggles. But the terrible increase in expenses compelled us to subdue our feelings and to coöperate with one another.”
“I am not a merger man myself,” said William Deering, “although I believe that the International Harvester Company has been a benefit to the farmers.”
Cyrus H. McCormick goes still further. He is a “trust-buster” himself, so far as the over-capitalised and oppressive leviathans of business are concerned. He said to me frankly: “Some of the hostility to our company is inspired by worthy motives, growing out of the general opposition to the so-called trusts.” And when a North Dakota congressman proposed in 1904 that the International Harvester Company should be investigated, Cyrus McCormick at once sent a message that amazed the Bureau of Corporations—“Please come and investigate us,” he said. “If we’re not right, we want to get right.”
“Yes,” said one of the highest officials of the Roosevelt administration, when I asked him to corroborate this very remarkable story. “It is true that from 1904 it has been the continued desire of the International Harvester Company that we should investigate them. In fact, during the last year (1907) they have urged us with considerable earnestness to make this investigation.”
So, this big business has evolved from simple to complex in accordance with the same laws that rule plants and empires. It has probably not yet reached its full maturity, for it is greater than any man or any form of organisation, and the tiny ephemeral atoms who control it to-day are no more than its most obedient retinue. They come and go—quarrel and make friends—live and die. What matter? The big business, once alive, grows on through the short centuries, from generation to generation.