A SELF-BINDER IN SCOTLAND, WITH THE WALLACE MONUMENT IN THE BACKGROUND

“On returning to Fort Wayne we found the E—— people, whose headquarters were separated by a partition wall from ours, had coaxed one of our customers to cancel his order, and substitute their machine. For this act, we retaliated and replaced three of their orders the following week, and while loading these into the farmers’ wagons a fight took place between the opposing factions. I looked as though I had encountered a flax-hackle. The next day hostilities opened early with three on our side to six of the E—— host, requiring a riot alarm and a wagon-load of police to restore order.

“We had swept the enemy before us, using neck-yokes, pitman rods and even six shooters in the grand finale. Our expense account for that week included fifty dollars for lawyers’ fees, which was promptly O. K.’d by the manager. After all, I had only obeyed instructions, which were to get the business and hold up prices, ‘peaceably if you can, but forcibly if you must.’”An interesting relic of these fierce days of cut-throat competition was given to me by Mr. John F. Steward. It reads as follows:—

The king of the field test was William N. Whiteley. No other reaper king, in any country, received as much renown from his personal exploits. He was the Charlemagne of the harvest-field. He was as tall as a sapling and as strong as a tree. As a professor in the great field school of agriculture, he has never been surpassed. He could out-talk, outwork, and generally outwit the men who were sent against him. He was a whole exhibition in himself. “I’ve seen Bill Whiteley racin’ his horses through the grain and leanin’ over with his long arms to pick the mice’s nests from just in front of the knife,” said an old Ohio settler.

The feat that first made Whiteley famous was performed at Jamestown, Ohio, in 1867. His competitor was doing as good work as he was; whereupon he sprang from his seat, unhitched one horse, and finished his course with a single, surprised steed pulling the heavy machine. His competitor followed suit, and succeeded fully as well. This enraged Whiteley, who at that time was as powerful as a young Hercules.

“I can pull my reaper myself,” he shouted, turning his second horse loose, and yoking his big shoulders into its harness. Such a thing had never been done before, and has never been done since; but it is true that, in the passion of the moment, Whiteley was filled with such strength that he ran the reaper from one side of the field to the other, cutting a full swath—a deed that, had he done it in ancient Greece, would have placed him among the immortals. It was witnessed by five hundred farmers, and fully reported in the press. One of the reporters, as it happened, representing the Cincinnati Commercial, was a young Ohioan named Whitelaw Reid, now the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

That ten minutes in a horse collar made $2,000,000 for Whiteley. His antagonist, Benjamin H. Warder, was filled with admiration for Whiteley’s prowess, and at once proposed that they should quit fighting and work in harmony.

“Give me the right to make your reaper and I’ll pay you $5 apiece for all I can sell,” said Warder. “It’s a bargain,” responded Whiteley. And so there arose the first consolidation in the harvester business.

Whiteley and Warder did not merge their companies; but they divided the United States into three parts—one for Whiteley, one for his brother Amos, who also made reapers in Springfield, and one for Warder. They united in building a malleable iron foundry and a knife works, so that they could use better materials at a lower cost. They made the first handsome and shapely machines.

For twelve years this triple alliance led the way, and all others, even the mighty McCormick and the sagacious Deering, had to follow. The “Champion” reaper became the leading machine of the United States, and the little town of Springfield, Ohio, was known as the “Reaper City.” As many as 160,000 reapers and mowers were sent out as a year’s work. In all, 2,000,000 of Whiteley’s “Champion” machines have been made in Springfield, and have sold at a gain of $18,000,000.

As the millions came pouring in so fast, Whiteley’s head was turned and he began to run amuck. He cut loose from Warder and from his own partners, Fassler and Kelly, opened war on the Knights of Labour, built the biggest reaper factory in the world, became a railroad president, helped to corner the Chicago wheat market, backed the “Strasburg Clock”—an absurd self-binder that was as big as a pipe-organ—and came crashing down in a failure that jarred the farming world from end to end.

Whiteley lost millions in this crash—and with comparative indifference. It was never the profits that he fought for. At heart he was a sportsman rather than a money-maker. He craved the excitement of the race itself more than the prizes. To win—that was the ambition of his life. And he did not shrink from spectacular methods to accomplish his ambition.

For instance, nothing less would satisfy him, when he exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial, than a quarter-sized reaper, made daintily of rosewood and gold. This brought him so sudden a rush of orders from the East that in one day of the following year he sent seventy loaded cars to Baltimore. With flags flying and brass bands playing, these cars rolled off, with orders to travel only by daylight. When they arrived in Harrisburg, running in three sections, they caught the eye of a railroad superintendent named McCrea—who is now, by the way, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. McCrea saw a chance to advertise his railway as well as Whiteley’s reapers, so he linked the seventy cars together into one three-quarter-mile train, put his biggest engine at the front, and sent the gaudy caravan on its way.

Whiteley never knew how to be commonplace, even in the smallest matters. Wherever he went, his trail was marked by stories of his exploits and his oddities. How he organised the famous “White Plug Hat Brigade” in the Blaine campaign—how he made a twelve-hour speech to help “Mother” Stewart close up the saloons of Springfield—how he found a Springfield farmer using a McCormick reaper, gave him a Whiteley reaper in its place, and flung the rival machine upon the junk-pile, as a sign that he was the monarch of Ohio—how he gathered up a peck of pies after a field test dinner, put them in a sack, and ate nothing but pies for half a week—such is the sort of anecdotes that his life has added to the folklore of the Western farmers.

Many a time his vaudeville tactics disgusted and enraged his fellow manufacturers; but he was too big a factor to be ignored. Once, when a number of reaper kings had met together to see if they could rescue their business from its riot of rivalry, the chairman opened the discussion with the question—“What ought we to do to improve the conditions of our trade?” For a moment there was silence, and then John P. Adriance—as mild-natured a man as ever lived—said blandly, “Kill Whiteley.”

With daring originality Whiteley combined a tremendous physical vitality and a brain that fairly effervesced with inventiveness. He probably holds the record among the reaper-men for inventions, with 125 patents in his name. And he would work twenty-four hours at a stretch, without a yawn. One evening he asked a young machinist to remain in the factory and help him fix a refractory reaper. After working till midnight Whiteley said: “Well, Jim, I suppose you think you are tired. Go home and have a good night’s sleep, and come back here in three hours.”

He dashed with fanatical energy into any undertaking that appealed to his imagination. Once, when he had too much money, he bought control of a new railway that ran through Ohio from Springfield to Jackson,—160 miles. He wanted to know its real value, so, instead of asking the directors a few questions, as other men would have done, Whiteley travelled over the entire length of the railroad, on foot.

When I saw Whiteley, last June, he was time-worn and whitened. Since the great failure, he has been in the harvester business only intermittently. He has long outlived his Golden Age, but he is as busy as ever, with a new scheme and a new factory. And he still wears the Scotch cap and long boots that have been familiar at field tests for more than half a century.

Of the other Springfield men, Warder was unquestionably the ablest. “He was the main wheel,” said Whiteley. As a young man of twenty-seven he was running a sawmill in Springfield when he first heard of the reaper. He was so impressed with its possibilities that he offered the inventor $30,000 for a share in it.

“Young Warder is crazy,” said Springfield people, for at that time $30,000 was a fortune and a reaper was a fad. But thirty-five years later, when Warder had removed to Washington and become noted among its social entertainers, his investment had multiplied itself very nearly two hundredfold.

Warder had associated with him two partners, Asa S. Bushnell and J. J. Glessner. Bushnell began earning his living in boyhood as a clerk at $5 a month, and stumbled into a business career as a druggist. Then he became Warder’s understudy, and piled up twice as many millions as he could count on his fingers. As a climax he rose higher in public life than any other reaper king, by serving twice as the Governor of Ohio. As for J. J. Glessner, he is still active, and one of the dozen solid pillars upon which the International Harvester Company is built.

Such were the strong men whom William Deering faced when he came, without a shred of experience, into the harvester world. He had no ancient patent-rights, like McCormick. He could not outrace thirty competitors in a wheat-field, like Whiteley and Jones and Adriance and Osborne. One way was left open to him.

“I’ll beat them,” he said, “by making a better machine.”He set out upon such a search for improvements that, during the rest of his life, inventors fluttered around him like moths around a candle. Until 1879, the best harvester was a self-binder that tied the sheaves with wire. It was the invention of Sylvanus D. Locke, and had been developed to its highest point of perfection by a farm-bred inventor named C. B. Withington, who is still living in Wisconsin. The Withington machine was pushed by McCormick with great energy, and fifty thousand were sold between 1877 and 1885. It was a marvelously simple mechanism, consisting mainly of two steel fingers that moved back and forth, and twisted a wire band around each sheaf of grain. As a machine it was a complete success; but the farmers disliked it.

“The wire will mix with the straw,” they said, “and our horses and cattle will be killed.”

So, when Deering met John F. Appleby, a stocky mechanic who claimed to have invented a twine self-binder, he at once set him to work upon fifty of the new machines.

When Deering saw his first Appleby binder at work in a field of wheat, he was enthralled. Here, at last, was the perfect harvester. Its strong steel arms could flash a cord around a bundle of grain, tie a knot, cut the cord, and fling off the sheaf, too quickly for the eye to follow. It seemed magical.

“What am I to do?” asked the farmer who bought the first of these machines, as he climbed upon the seat and prepared to cut his grain.

“Do!” exclaimed John Webster, the Deering mechanic. “Do nothing! Drive the Horses.”

The amazed farmer started the horses, drove around the field, and came back swinging his hat and shouting like a lunatic—as well he might. For in the trail of his harvester the sheaves lay bound, as though there were some kindly genie hidden among its wheels.

Deering owned, at that time, not much more than a million dollars—the gleanings of thirty-five industrious years. But he resolved to stake it all upon this amazing machine. If he lost—he would be a poor man at fifty-three. If he won—he would be the harvester king of the world.“I’ll move the factory to Chicago and make 3,000 of these Appleby twine-binders at once,” he said.

His partner, E. H. Gammon, held back, so the inflexible Deering bought him out, and from that day he, like his greatest competitor, McCormick, ran a one-man business.

“Did you hear the news about Deering?” gossiped his fellow manufacturers. “Clean crazy on a twine-binder!”

And, far more discouraging, the magical self-binder itself suddenly became ill-humored and refused to form its sheaves properly. It was no easy exploit, as any one may see, to make the first 3,000 of such complex machines. No other artificial mechanism must so combine strength and delicacy. No piano nor Hoe press, for instance, is expected to operate while it is being jerked over a rough field or along the steep slant of a hill.

One day in the early spring of 1880, Deering and his chief lieutenants—Steward and Dixon—were in a field of rye near Alton, trying to coax the new harvester to do its work. All day long it was obstinate and perverse, and the men were at their wits’ end.“Well, boys,” said Deering, “if we can’t do better than this, I’ll lose $1,000,000.”

“Try one more day,” said Steward. They went to their hotel, and as it happened to be crowded, the three were placed in a large double room.

“Steward and Dixon were mad at me the next morning,” said Deering, when he told me of that critical occasion. “They had nothing at stake, yet they had lain awake all night; while I was apparently about to lose my only million, and had slept like a log.”

That day a slight change was made, and the harvester became good-natured and obedient. The whole 3,000 machines were sold, and created as much excitement as 3,000 miracles. They swept away competitors like chaff. Of a hundred manufacturers seventy-eight were winnowed out. Instead of losing his fortune, Deering cleared at once about four hundred thousand dollars, for profits were large in those experimental days. Better still, he became an acknowledged leader of his class. He had taken the right line of development, as McCormick had in 1831, and all others who could, choked down their rage and followed—quick march!

The man who had found the right path was John F. Appleby. He was the scout—the Kit Carson of the harvester business. It was he—the inspired farm labourer of Wisconsin—who had hurled another great impossibility out of the way of the world’s farmers.

He did not of course originate the whole self-binder. But he put the parts together in the right way and pushed ahead to success through a wilderness of failure. There was a notable group of inventors in Rockford who did much to put him on the right track. One of these, Marquis L. Gorham, was the originator of the self-sizing device that regulates the size of the bound sheaf. Another, named Jacob Behel, invented a knotter, whittling it out of a branch of a cherry tree.

Appleby has been, and is yet, a knight-errant of industry. He takes his pay in adventure. He dislikes to travel with the crowd. When I saw him first, in his Chicago workshop, his thoughts were far from twine-binders. He was engaged on the task of perfecting a cotton-picker, which he hopes will do as much for the South as his self-binder did for the West. And it was with some difficulty that I could persuade him to disentangle the story of the twine-binder from the various other romances of his life.

In 1855 Appleby was a rugged youngster doing chores on a farm for one dollar a week. Even this rate of pay was too high to the mind of the farmer who employed him; for he was always whittling and making toy machinery, instead of minding his work.

One day, when Appleby was seventeen, he was binding grain after a reaper. “How do you like the work, Jack?” asked the farmer.

“I don’t like it,” said Jack, “and what’s more, I believe I can invent a machine to tie these bundles.”

“Ho! ho!” laughed the farmer. “You little fool, you can’t invent anything.”

Twenty-five years later, when Appleby had made half a million by his invention, and was manager of a factory at Minneapolis, he noticed an old man pushing a wheelbarrow in the factory yard.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” replied the old man. “I was the farmer who gave you your first job.”“Well,” said Appleby, “you see I wasn’t a little fool after all.”

Appleby actually had set to work to invent a knotting-machine when he was a farm-boy of seventeen, and had made his first model at that age—in 1858. A young school-teacher named Chester W. Houghton was the first man who put money back of the boy’s invention. He stood behind it to the extent of fifty dollars, and then became alarmed at such a reckless speculation, and quit. Had he been just a little more adventurous, and a little more patient, every dollar of his investment would have fruited into a thousand.

When the school-teacher deserted him, and wanted the fifty dollars back, Appleby was discouraged. The models that had been made at a gun shop in Palmyra, Wisconsin, drifted about. They were sold at auction on one occasion for seventeen cents; and the buyer thought they were not worth even that, for he made a present of them to Appleby. Then came the crash of the Civil War. Appleby enlisted, and for four years forgot knotters and thought only of guns.

Yet while he lay in the trenches at Vicksburg, he whittled out a new device for rifles. After the war, a capitalist saw this device, gave him $500 for it, and then, before Appleby’s eyes, sold a half interest in it for $7,000. This awakened Appleby to the value of inventions and made him an inventor for life.

Once more he set to work on his long-neglected grain-binder, and in 1867 he drove his first completed machine into a field near Mazomanie, Wisconsin. The horses were fractious, and after being jerked along for several rods, the machine broke down, to the great delight of the spectators, most of whom knew Appleby and regarded him as a crank. But the machine had bound a couple of sheaves before it broke. Appleby displayed these, and one man—Dr. E. D. Bishop—pulled a roll of money from his pocket and handed it to the inventor.

“Take this,” he said, “and make me a partner. Your invention will be a world’s wonder some day.”

All told, Dr. Bishop staked $1,500 on Appleby’s genius, for which, twelve years later, he drew out $80,000. This was the first of the many incidental fortunes scattered right and left in the path of the self-binder, which began in 1880, to sweep forward as gloriously as the triumphal car of a Roman emperor.

As for William Deering—the modest manufacturer from Maine, who in 1879 joined forces with Appleby, no sooner had he sold the 3,000 self-binders than he found himself floundering neck deep in an unexpected sea of troubles. There was not a flaw in the binders. They were cutting and tying the grain with the skill of 60,000 men. But the twine-bill! Three thousand farmers swore that it was too high.

Twine was an item that they had never in their lives bought in large quantities. To pay fifty dollars—the price of a horse—for mere string that was used once and then flung away, seemed outrageous. It was like buying daily papers by the thousand, or shoe-laces by the ton. And so it came about that though Deering had reduced the cost of wheat ten per cent., he got little thanks for his superb machines—nothing but a loud and angry roar for better and cheaper twine.

Deering moved against this new array of difficulties with quiet and inexorable persistence. There were only three binder-twine makers in the United States, and all warned him that he was pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp. But Deering pushed on until he met Edwin H. Fitler, afterward a mayor of Philadelphia. From the unassuming way in which Deering stated his needs, Fitler concluded that the order would be a small one.

“What you want,” he said, “is a single strand twine, which cannot be made without a new line of machinery. I regret to say that I cannot afford to do this for one customer.”

“Well,” said Deering, “I think I may need a good deal in the long run, though I wish to begin with not more than ten car-loads.”

Ten car-loads! For a moment Fitler was dazed, but only for a moment. It was his chance and he knew it. Years afterward, he was fond of telling how he “made a million-dollar deal with William Deering in two minutes.”

Thus, whatever Deering touched, he improved. He became the servant of the harvester. He lavished fortunes upon it as sporting millionaires spent fortunes on their horses. It was his one extravagance. In his later endeavours to make the twine cheaper, he spent $15,000 on grass twine, $35,000 on paper, $43,000 on straw, and failed. Then he spent $165,000 on flax and succeeded. He was for thirty years a sort of paymaster to a small mob of inventors who had new ideas or who thought they had. There was one very able inventor—John Stone—who actually drew his salary and expenses every week for twenty years, until he had perfected a corn-picking machine. From first to last, Deering spent “perhaps more than two millions of dollars” on improvements, according to one of his closest friends.

The fact is that the Appleby binder had transformed Deering from a man in business simply to make money, into an enthusiast. While he remained as careful of the business as ever, he began to enjoy the work itself more than the profit. He would still fuss if he saw half a dozen nails in the sweepings, or any other waste of pennies. But he poured the golden flood of profits back into his factory with a recklessness that amazed his friends. He pampered his beloved machines with roller bearings and bodies of steel. He sent them to Europe and showed them to kings. Then, as his enthusiasm grew, he looked ahead to the time when even the farm-horse shall be set free from drudgery; and he began to build automobile mowers and gasolene engines. In fact, he ripened, as he worked, into a seer who saw far past the gain or loss of the present into the splendour of the future.

Sagacity—that is, perhaps, the one word that best explains William Deering’s success. He had an almost supernatural instinct, so his competitors believed, which kept him in the right line of progress. There seemed to be a business compass in his brain.

He was never a master of men, like McCormick, nor a good mixer among men, like Whiteley; but as an organiser of men he was easily superior to them both. He knew how to pit his managers one against another, as Carnegie did; and how to develop a factory into a swift and automatic machine. He was a statesman of commercialism. He piled up a big fortune, and earned it.

It was his misfortune not to have been schooled on a farm, as were most of the great reaper kings. McCormick, Whiteley, Lewis Miller, Morgan, Johnson, Osborne, Sieberling, Jones, Esterley, and the Marshes were all farm-bred. But Deering was shrewd enough to gather around him a corps of men who had the experience that he lacked. At the head of this bodyguard stood a farmer’s son—John F. Steward. Such were the versatility and the loyalty of Steward that he became Deering’s Grand Vizier. He was inventive, combative, literary, mechanical, litigious. It is now forty-two years since Steward began to build harvesters; and he has ten dozen patents to his credit.

So, what with the mature business experience of Deering himself, and the skill and faithfulness of his captains, the little factory that he had begun to manage in 1872 expanded in thirty years into one of the two greatest harvester plants in the world, rolling out in every workday minute two complete machines and thirty miles of twine.

Largely because of his enterprise the spectres of Famine are now beaten back in fifty countries, yet there is not a word of self-praise in his conversation.

“A man told me once that I was nothing more than a promoter,” he said; “and perhaps he was right. I wasn’t an inventor, that’s true. All I did was to get the right men and tell them what I wanted them to do; so I suppose I was just a promoter.”

The few anecdotes that are told of him relate chiefly to his overmodesty. Once, when he was travelling through Kansas with John Webster, one of his trusty men, a big Westerner loomed up in front of him and said:

“Are you the Deering that makes the self-binders?”

“Yes,” replied Deering, blushing as red as one of his own mowers.

“Well,” said the Westerner, shaking him by the hand, “I want to say that you’re a mighty smart man.”

Deering looked thoroughly uncomfortable, and when the stranger had gone, he leaned over to Webster and said:

“Think of him saying that I made the binders when I pay you fellows for making them. I never felt so foolish in my life.”

He is now eighty-one—older than our oldest railroad. In his lifetime he has seen his country grow seven times in population and twenty-four times in wealth.He and his fellows have undeniably doubled the food supply of the world. More—they said, “Presto, change!” and the drudges of the harvest-fields stood up and became men. They have made life easier and nobler for untold myriads of people, and have led the way to the brightest era of peace and plenty that the hunger-bitten human race has ever known.

Yet less than thirty of the reaper kings became millionaires. Not one can stand beside the great financiers of steel and real estate and railroads. And not one, in his whole lifetime, piled up as much profit as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller has made in a single year.

The get-rich-quick brigands of Wall Street meddled with the harvester business once—and never again. That was twenty-one years ago, when the famous “Binder-Twine Trust” set out with the black flag flying. It was a skyrocket enterprise. James R. Keene bulled the stock up to 136. This was the first and only “easy money” that was ever made in the harvester world. Then the farmers and the reaper kings rose up together and smote the Trust in twenty legislatures. Its stock became waste paper; and in the financial hurricane of 1893, it was the first victim.

No other business shows so tragic a death roll. For fifty years its trail was marked by wreckage and disaster. Most of the few who succeeded at first, failed later. Out of every ten who plunged into the scrimmage, nine crawled out whipped or terrified.

And so the Romance of the Reaper was for fifty years a tragedy of competition. Out of more than two hundred harvester companies, only fourteen survived in 1902; and these realised that if such waste and warfare continued, their business would be destroyed.