  The first American reapers that went to Europe were given a royal welcome. There were two of them—one made by McCormick and one made by Hussey, and they were exhibited before Albert Edward, the Prince Consort of England, at a World’s Fair in London in 1851. There had been reapers invented in England before this date, but none of them would reap. All the inventors were mere theorists. They designed their reapers for ideal grain in ideal fields. One of them was a preacher, the Rev. Patrick Bell; another, Henry Ogle, was a school-teacher. James Dobbs, an actor, invented a machine that cut artificial grain on the stage. And a machinist named Gladstone made a reaper that also worked well until he tried it on real grain in a real field. But the exhibition of the American reaper In the years following 1851, the American reaper did, however, become popular among the very rich. It became the toy of kings and titled landowners. By 1864 Europe was buying our farm machinery to the extent of $600,000. This was less than she buys to-day in a week; but it was a beginning. Several foreign manufacturers began at this time to make reapers, notably in Toronto, Sheffield, Paris, and Hamburg. This competition spurred on the American reaper agents, who were already taking advantage of the interest shown by royalty in the American reaper. And from the close of the Civil War on, there was an exciting race, generally neck and neck, between Cyrus H. McCormick, Sr., and Walter A. Wood, to see who could vanquish the most of these foreign imitators, and bag the greatest number of kings and nobilities. Many and strange were the exploits of the American Reaper Kings at the courts and royal farms of the real kings. Unable to speak any language but their own, unused to pomp and pageantry, breezily independent in the American fashion, the Reaper Kings plunged from adventure to adventure, absolutely indifferent to everything but their reapers and success. “There is to be a trial of reapers at Rome next June,” wrote David M. Osborne, a New Yorker who began to export reapers to C. W. Marsh, inventor of the Marsh Harvester, made a sensational dÉbut in Hungary in 1870. Several grand dukes had arranged for a great contest of the various sorts of reapers on one of the royal farms in Hungary, so that the Minister of Agriculture might take notice. When the day arrived, there were nine reapers at the farm, mostly of European design. Marsh’s strange-looking machine seemed to be a combination of reaper and workbench. But ten minutes after the contest began, Marsh had the race won. His machine was a new type, the forerunner of the modern self-binder. It was so made that two men could stand upon it and bind the grain as fast as it was cut. But on this occasion Marsh could hire no farmer to help him and was obliged to do the work alone. The judges were stunned with amazement, therefore, when they found that he had bound “He is an athlete,” said one. “A wizard,” said another. Before they could recover from their astonishment, Marsh had stored his harvester, pocketed the prize of forty golden ducats, and hurried away to his hotel, eager for a bath and a chance to pick the thistles out of his hands. But the grand dukes and miscellaneous dignitaries were not to be escaped so easily. An officer in gorgeous uniform was sent to find Marsh and bring him forthwith to the main dining-hall of the city. Here a banquet was prepared, and a throng of high personages sat down, with Marsh at the head of the table, cursing his luck and nursing his sore fingers. At the close of the banquet, amid great applause, a medal was pinned upon his coat, and the whole assemblage hushed to hear his reply. Now Marsh, like two-thirds of the Reaper Kings, could no more make a speech than walk a rope. On only one “O Caledonia! Stern and wild, “That was the first and only speech of my life,” said Mr. Marsh, when I saw him in his home as DeKalb, where he has retired from business. “But it certainly established my reputation as an orator in that region of Hungary.” At one famous competition near Paris, in 1879, three reapers were set to work in fields of equal size. The French reaper led off and finished in seventy-two minutes. The English reaper followed and lumbered through Another of these tournaments, which also did much to advertise the United States as the only genuine and original reaper country, took place on an English estate in 1880. There was only one American reaper in the race, and in appearance it was the clown of the circus. The ship that carried it had been wrecked on the Irish coast, so that when it arrived the machine was rusted and dingy. Cyrus H. McCormick, Jr., had it in charge. He was then a youth of twenty-one, and equally ready for an adventure or a sale. There was no time to repaint and polish the machine, so he resolved to convert its forlorn appearance into an asset. “Oil her up so she’ll run like a watch,” he said to his experts. “But don’t improve her looks. If you find any paint, scrape it off. And go and hire the smallest, scrubbiest, toughest pair of horses you can find.” The next day five or six foreign reapers were on hand, each glittering with newness In Germany, as in England, the reaper was introduced into general use through royalty. This was in 1871, when a New York Reaper King named Byron E. Huntley gave the German emperor and empress their first view of harvesting on the American plan. The exhibition took place in a grain-field that lay near the royal residence at Potsdam. At first, the empress watched the machine from a window; but soon she became so keenly interested that she went into the field to study it at closer range. “I admire you Americans,” she said to the delighted Huntley. “You are so deft—so ingenious, to make a machine like this.” The present Emperor of Germany is not merely interested in American harvesters; he is an enthusiast. On several occasions Dennis arranged a contest between his one machine and forty Polish women who cut the grain with old-fashioned sickles. As soon as the emperor and his retinue had arrived, all on horseback, a signal was given and the strange race began. On one side of the field were the forty women, bent and browned by many a day’s toil under the hot sun. On the other side was Sam Dennis, sitting on his showy harvester. “Get ap!” said Dennis to the big German horses, and the grain fell in a wide swath over the clicking knife, swept upward on the canvas elevator into the swift steel arms and fingers, and was flung to the ground in a fusillade of sheaves, each bound tightly with a knotted string. AMERICAN SELF-BINDERS ON THE ESTATE OF PRESIDENT FALLIERES, IN FRANCE The emperor was radiant with delight. Most wonderful of all, the one machine was soon seen to be doing more work than the whole mob of women drudges. The field had been evenly divided before the race began, and there was some wheat still uncut on the women’s side when Sam Dennis said “Whoa!” to his horses, and condescended to enter into a free and easy conversation with the distinguished onlookers. For the forty Polish women, the new harvester meant a better life finally, although at the time they hated the red monster of a machine that was about to take their jobs. In payment for the long, sweating work of Even Bismarck, the grim old unifier of Germany, yielded to general opinion a short time before his death, and bought an American self-binder. I was told of the incident by C. H. Haney, who made the sale, and who is to-day the head of the Foreign Department of the Harvester Company. “Bismarck sat in his carriage,” said Haney, “but he ordered his driver to follow the harvester as closely as possible. He looked very old and feeble. For quite a while he watched me operating the machine. Then he made a sign to me to stop.” “Let me see the thing that ties the knot,” he said. “I took off the knotter and brought it to his carriage. With a piece of string I showed him how the mechanism worked, and gave “‘No, your Excellency,’ I said. ‘They can be made only in America.’ “‘Well,’ said Bismarck, speaking very good English, ‘you Yankees are ingenious fellows. This is a wonderful machine.’” When Loubet was President of France, he and Seth Low, of New York, were walking together over the President’s estate. Loubet pointed to a reaper which was being driven through a yellow wheat-field. “Do you see that machine?” he remarked. “I bought it from an American company in 1870, and I have used it in every harvest since that time. I have four of those machines now, and I want to say to you that they are the most useful articles that come to us from the United States. I am stating no more than the simple truth when I tell you that without American harvesters, France would starve.” In still other countries the American reaper has been popular with kings and In Russia, the Czar and the grand dukes at first bought reapers partly as toys and partly as strike-breakers. If the labourers on their estates demanded more pay than fifty cents a week, the manager would drive them in a body to his barn, then throw open the doors and show them five or six red harvesters. “Do you see these American machines?” he would say. “Unless you go back to work at the same wages, I will reap the grain KING ALPHONSO OF SPAIN DRIVING AN AMERICAN SEEDER Many of the Russian nobility, too, have begun to learn a trifle about democracy from the American harvester agents. There is a certain young baron, for example, whose estate is not far from Riga. Last year, to be in fashion, he bought a Chicago self-binder. When it arrived, there came with it, as usual, an expert mechanic to set it up and start it in the field. In this case, the mechanic was a big German-American named Lutfring, born in Wisconsin, of “Forty Eighter” stock. The baron was evidently impressed by the manly and dignified bearing of Lutfring, who stood erect while the native workmen were bowing and cringing in obeisance. And when Lutfring said to him, “Now, Baron Hahn, we are all barons in my country, but you’ll pardon me if I do this work in my From such beginnings the harvester has advanced, to make in Russia the greatest conquests it has achieved anywhere. More business is now being done in the land of the Czar than was done with the whole world in 1885. One recent shipment, so large as to break all records, was carried from Chicago to New York on 3,000 freight-cars, and transferred to a chartered fleet of nine steam-ships, $5,000,000 worth of hunger-insurance. During the Russo-Japanese War a striking incident occurred that showed the respect of the government for American harvesters. Several troop-trains that were on their way to the front were suddenly side-tracked, to make way for a long freight train, loaded with heavy boxes. The war generals and As a result of this attitude, there are now some provinces in southern Russia where not even Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson would find much fault with the farming. I have secured the figures for the Province of Kuban, in the Caucasus. Here there are 3,500 thrashing-machines, 5,000 grain-drills, 37,000 harvesters, 50,000 harrows, 70,000 grain-cleaners, and 65,000 cultivators. This is a region where, one generation ago, were only the wooden plough, the sickle, and the flail. There is, to be sure, still a dense mass of Russians whose yearly habit it is to wait until their wheat is dead ripe, then in a few days of frantic labour to cut down half of it with sickles, leaving the rest to rot in the fields. And in one Caucasian province, “I have seen farmers ploughing in Russia with a piece of board,” said one agent. “And I have seen their thrashing done by the feet of oxen.” But the new idea has been planted and is growing. “Russia is the land of to-morrow,” said another expert. “We have been educating the farmers there for seventeen years, yet we have only scratched the surface. We who have lived among the Russian peasants expect great things from them.” They have succeeded, then, in their campaign for the supremacy of the American reaper—the Reaper Kings who enlisted the crowned heads and the nobility of Europe in their service. By 1899 Europe was a customer at our farm machinery factories to the extent of twelve millions a year. This figure was doubled in 1906, and is now increasing by leaps and bounds. All told, this one industry has brought us $150,000,000 of foreign money in less than fifty years. Europe has sent us emigrants—twenty-five If our foreign trade goes ahead at its present rate of speed, we shall soon have Europe hopelessly in our debt, in this exchange of men for machinery. In the past four years, for instance, Europe has sent us less than four million emigrants, but we have sent to Europe, in that time, enough agricultural automata to equal the labour of five million men. And this means much to Europe. What with her 4,500,000 soldiers and her 4,000,000 public officials, she has to serve more than twenty-five million meals a day to men who are non-producers. She has to clothe and house these governmental millions and their families. How could she do this if it were not for the eleven million man-power of her American harvesters, and the half billion bushels of reaper-wheat that she can buy from other countries? France must have our harvesters because But the story is by no means ended with Europe. To-day the sun never sets and the season never closes for American harvesters. They are reaping the fields of Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December. It is always harvest somewhere. The ripple of the ripened grain goes round the world and the American harvester follows it. In Holland, for instance, where the grass is short and thick, a mower must cut as close as a barber’s clippers; and in Denmark, where moss grows under the grass, it must cut so high as to leave the moss untouched. The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the “Milwaukee”; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight horses to a big “header,” crack the long whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough ground. There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. Australia must have a monster machine called a “stripper,” The men who are dealing hand to hand with these problems are no longer the Reaper Kings, personally introducing their harvesters through royalty and nobility. These have been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred American harvester experts. They are all salaried, most of them by the “International”; and their work is to put the farmers of the world to school. They are the teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As an example of the rapidity with which they are sometimes able to teach, take the Philippines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent nothing whatever for farming machinery; in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even yet, however, they do not raise enough rice to feed themselves; and although half of them are farmers, only one-twentieth of their land is cultivated. BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER “Many of our agents are now living in In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who are in control of this army of teachers. One was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named Couchman, who handles several nations from Hamburg; and the other was a courteous commercial diplomat named La Porte, who supervises France, Spain, Italy, and Northern Africa from his office in Paris. Each is in charge of several hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our harvester trade. No renown comes to these men. No medals are pinned upon their coats. They Many European farmers, of course, are easily up to the Kansas level; but the vast majority have been mistaught that the path of the farmer must forever be watered with sweat. Many of them are so cramped by the shackles of drudgery that they cannot even conceive of the value of leisure. “Why don’t you use a scythe? Then you could cut twice as much,” said Horace Greeley, who was deeply interested in farm machinery and agriculture, to a French peasant. The peasant scratched his head. This was a new idea. “Because,” he answered stodgily, “I haven’t got twice as much to cut.” The quick, handy ways of American “A Spanish farmer sent for me on one occasion,” an expert told me, “and I found him in great trouble. He had bought a new harvester, and put it together inside his barn, which had only one narrow door. He had to choose between taking the machine to pieces and pulling his barn down.” Next to Russia, in the list of countries that this army of experts has won to the harvester, comes Canada. Like the trek of the Boers into the Transvaal, and of the Japanese into Korea, there has been a trek of three hundred thousand American farmers into Western Canada—into the new forty-bushel-to-the-acre wheat-land of Alberta. Most of these emigrants were Minnesotans and Dakotans; That billiard-table country—Argentina—stands third among the foreign patrons of our Harvester Kings. As a wheat nation it is little older than Alberta. It was only about eighteen years ago, after three centuries of revolution, that Argentina settled down to raise wheat and be good. To-day the Argentinians raise more wheat than Germany, and their country has become a land of milk and honey. It is a South American Minnesota, but eleven times larger, made fertile by the slow-moving Platte River—a hundred miles wide when it reaches the sea—which moves through its plains like an irrigating canal. The fourth in rank of our harvester buyers is Australia, which is now sending a yearly tribute of more than a million to the International Company. This profitable reciprocity between Chicago and the island continent was greatly furthered when the AN AMERICAN HARVESTER AT WORK IN ARGENTINA Ride along any of the historic roadways of the world and you will see the painted automata from Chicago. “On the road to Mandalay,” and along the Appian Way, and the trail of death that marks the flight of Napoleon from Moscow, you will find these indispensable machines. They are cutting grass and wheat on the battle-fields of Austerlitz and Sedan and Waterloo. Scutari, near the Adriatic Sea, bars out foreign machinery by law; but Roumania has been using our reapers and mowers for more than fifteen years. Once in a while a reaper is sent over the Andes on muleback; or into Central China via the wheelbarrow express. And now that there are irrigation pumps at the base of the Sphinx, that ancient female, who has been staring at sand-hills for three thousand years may soon look across yellow fields in which American binders are clicking cheerfully. They are for sale, too, in the holy cities of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, and Benares—almost In India, where a family “lives” on fifty cents a week, where one acre makes three farms and an entire farm outfit means no more than a ten-dollar bill, a harvester is still almost as great a curiosity as an Indian tiger is to us. One of the harvester agents told me of a rich Hindoo who bought a complete set of American farm machines, and had them set in a row near his house, apparently regarding them only as curios from a foreign land. They have never been used, and a mob of starving labourers reap his grain by hand within sight of his idle machines. There are few harvesters in Asia Minor, But since the formation of the big Chicago company, every foreign nation is being reached and taught to throw away its reaping-hooks and to cut its grain in a civilised way. There is now practically no great city anywhere in which a farmer cannot buy one of the handsome red harvesters that have done so much to give a “full dinner-pail” to the civilized nations. “The world is mine oyster,” says the International Harvester Company. In the first five years of its career, it has sent to foreign countries 920,000 harvesters of all sorts, for which it has been paid $70,000,000. It has doubled its foreign sales and now makes two-third of the harvesters of the world. What with the profits, and the big orders, and the medals, and the appreciation of monarchs, the Harvester men have found their foreign trade from the first a business To-day they are not battling with one another on the royal farms of Europe, like gladiators who make sport for emperors. There is more business and less adventure. They have a geography of their own, and have divided the whole world into eight provinces. The “Domestic” Department of the International comprises the United States and Canada and is managed from Chicago. Central Europe, with Russia and Siberia, has its headquarters at Hamburg; Western Europe and Northern Africa are handled from Paris; Great Britain is directed from London; South America from Buenos Ayres; Australia from Melbourne; New Zealand from Christchurch; and Mexico from Mexico City. Such is the commercial empire that has its seat at the foot of Lake Michigan. 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 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 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 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 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. Yucatan is the only cheap-labour country that has been enriched by the harvester. Elsewhere it is the rule that the common people of the nation must reach a certain IN THE ANCIENT FIELDS OF ALGIERS For this reason, the harvester is the best barometer of civilisation. It cannot go where slavery and barbarism exist. It will not enter a land where the luxury of the city is built on the plunder of the men and women who work in the fields. Whoever operates a harvester must not only be intelligent: he must be free. To hundreds of millions of foreigners, the United States is known as “the country where the reapers come from.” They realise, too, that farm machinery represents our type of genius, that it springs out of our national life, and comes from us as inevitably as song comes from Italy or silk from France. Why? Read the history of the United States. This was the first country, so far as we can know, where men of high intelligence went to work en masse upon the soil, and under such conditions as compelled them to develop a high degree of mechanical skill. The pioneer American farmer had to be his own carpenter and blacksmith. He had to In the Old World every occupation stood alone and aloof. The mechanics knew nothing of the farm and the farmer knew nothing of the workshop. “Every man to his trade,” said Europe, Asia, and Africa. But in the New World, where trades and classes and nationalities were flung together in a heterogenous jumble, there sprang up a race of handy, inventive farmers, set free from the habits and prejudices of their fathers. They were the first body of men who were competent to solve the problem of farm machinery. And so, the American harvester is much more than a handy device for cutting grain. It is the machine that makes democracy possible. It reaches the average man, and more—it pushes the ladder of prosperity down so far that even the farm labourer can grasp the lowest rung and climb. It has become one of our national emblems. It is as truly and as exclusively American as the Stars and Stripes or the Declaration of Independence. |
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