The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

Other countries can sell us automobiles and bric-a-brac. They may even get over our tariff wall with hay and cotton and steel and lumber. But they have never dared to try to sell us farm machinery. Every harvester in the United States was made at home.

GATHERING IN A FINLAND HARVEST

Either one of the two immense harvester plants of Chicago is larger than the combined plants of England, Germany, and France. France, recently, made a brilliant dash toward success in the harvester business. M. Racquet, a journalist, built a great factory at Amiens. He bought the best American machinery. He allied himself with a savings bank and sold stock to the farmers. He was protected by a high tariff. But, alas for his eloquent prospectus! His selling force was too small. His American machinery made more reapers in a month than he could sell in a year. And in 1904 he fell into bankruptcy under a debt of ten million francs.

An American harvester is practically above competition in foreign countries, and commands an exceptional price. As for tariffs, there is a wide open door in Great Britain, Holland, Norway, Bulgaria, Brazil, Servia, and South Germany. But there is a toll-gate fee of $25 per harvester in Hungary, and $20 in France; and for lack of a commercial treaty, the tax has lately been increased in part of Germany, in Hungary, Switzerland, and Rumania. The harvester companies feel that they have a substantial grievance against a government that allows them to be not only hazed and harried at home by tariffs on raw material, but driven out of foreign markets as well. “The whole world is doing business on a single street to-day,” said one harvester maker; “but the trouble is that there are two hundred tariff toll-gates along that street.”

In self-defence, against these tariffs, the “International” has been forced to build two foreign factories, one in Canada and one in Sweden. The Swedish plant is a small affair as yet, making rakes and mowers only; but the Canadian enterprise supports one-tenth of the city of Hamilton, and holds about half the Canadian trade. Its worst vexation, so far as I can tell from a hasty visit, is a lack of Canadian raw materials. Its chains, bolts, nuts, and canvas aprons come from Chicago, its steel and coal from Pittsburg, and three-fourths of its lumber from the Southern states.

The country that perhaps most disturbs the dreams of our harvester companies, is as far as possible from being one of the great nations. It is scarcely a country at all—only a scrap of coral reef uprisen at the foot of Mexico—Yucatan. Yet this is the land on which the United States depends for binder twine. Manila fibre we can now get from our new co-Americans—the Filipinos; but there is never enough of it to supply the millions of self-binders. Only sisal-hemp yields abundantly enough. And Yucatan is the only spot in the world where sisal can be grown in commercial quantities.

Yucatan is smaller than South Carolina, with not quite the population of Milwaukee. It was once the poorest of the Central American states; but since the arrival of the twine-binder it has become the richest. It sells from fifteen to eighteen million dollars’ worth of sisal a year, and the United States buys it all. Three-fourths of this money is clear profit; and it is an almost incredible fact that the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan have a larger net income than the owners of the immense International Harvester Company.

Roughly speaking, the American farmer pays Yucatan $12,000,000 a year for string—mere string, which is used once and then flung away. It is an extortion and a waste, besides being the only un-American factor in the whole harvester business.

How can we save these twelve millions and completely Americanise the trade? This is a problem that William Deering toiled at for twenty years. The Harvester Company has a solution. I saw it at St. Paul—a new factory, which twists twine from flax. A farmer’s son named George H. Ellis has found a quick and cheap way to clean the flax fibre; and at the time I visited the factory there were more than three hundred workers at the spindles. Two million pound of the twine were sold in 1906, so that the enterprise is no longer an experiment. This means, probably, that the farmer of the future will grow his own twine. Instead of yielding tribute to the forty Sisal Kings of Yucatan, he will pay no more than the charges of the railroad and the factory. The flax will be his own.