Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work quotes

From this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor.

But he was as necessary as bread.

He fed his country as truly as Washington created it and Lincoln preserved it. He abolished our agricultural peasantry so effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries ever since.

From this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor. But he was as necessary as bread.

He fed his country as truly as Washington created it and Lincoln preserved it.

He abolished our agricultural peasantry so effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries ever since.

It had cut down three of Mrs. McCormick's family,—her father, mother, and brother,—and had swung its fatal scythe toward the boy Cyrus, who was then five years of age. When the doctor was called, he insisted that the child should be bled.

"But you bled all the others, and they died," said Robert McCormick quietly; "I'll have no more bleedings."

No remedy for yellow fever, except bleeding, was known to the doctors of a century ago, so Robert McCormick at once invented a remedy. He devised a treatment of hot baths, hot teas, and bitter herbs;

Such was the making of the first practical Reaper in the history of the world.

It was as clumsy as a Red River ox-cart; but it reaped.

It was made on right lines. The "new principle" that the youth McCormick laboriously conceived in the little log workshop became the basic type of a wholly new machine. It has never been displaced.

and one day in July, with no spectators except his parents and his excited brothers and sisters, Cyrus put a horse between the shafts of his Reaper, and drove against the yellow grain. The reel revolved and swept the gentle wheat downwards upon the knife.

Click! Click! Click! The white steel blade shot back and forth.

The grain was cut. It fell upon the platform in a shimmering golden swath. From here it was raked off by a young laborer named John Cash. It was a roughly done specimen of reaping, no doubt. The reel and the divider worked poorly.

This praise, from "a scholar and a gentleman," as McCormick afterwards called him, was very encouraging. And still more so was the quiet word of praise from Robert McCormick, who said,

"It makes me feel proud to have a son do what I could not do."

Of all who were present on that memorable summer day, not one is now alive. Neither in Lexington nor in Staunton—the towns that lay on either side of the McCormick farm—can we find any one who saw the Reapers of 1831 and 1832.

Their farm tools, for the most part, were so simple as to be made either by themselves or by the village blacksmith. That the Reaper did the work of ten men, they could not deny. But it was driven by an expert.

"It's all very wonderful, but I'm running a farm, not a circus," thought the average spectator at these exhibitions.

Also, there was in all Eastern States at that time a surplus of labor and a scarcity of money, both of which tended to retard the adoption of the Reaper.

More than this, he freely gave them credit, without being safeguarded by any Dun or Bradstreet. He allowed them to pay with the money that was saved during the harvest.

"It is better that I should wait for the money," he said, "than that you should wait for the machine that you need."

So he borrowed money in Chicago to build the Reapers, borrowed more money to pay the freight, and then sold them on time to the farmers.

McCormick did not for a moment regard this case as trivial. It involved a principle. Once when a friend bantered him for fighting so hard over a small matter, he replied,

"My conscience, sir! I don't know what would become of the American people if there were not some one to stand up for fair dealing."

His victory did much to teach the railroads better manners and a finer consideration of the travelling public. Soon after the conclusion of the case, a trunk belonging to a relative of the McCormicks was destroyed on the New York Central.

His father had grappled with the problem of the Reaper before most of them were born. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should have been an unspanable gap between the two points of view.

McCormick stood alone because he was alone.

He and the Reaper had grown up together in long hazardous years of pioneering, through ridicule and poverty and failure. It was his dream come true.

In seventy seconds McCormick had become famous. He was the lion of the hour; and had he brought five hundred Reapers with him, he could have sold them all."

Suddenly the "Ugly Duckling" had become a swan.

The glory of the Reaper began to rival that of the Koh-i-noor. McCormick was given not only a First Prize but a Council Medal, such as was usually awarded only to Kings and Governments.

In 1847, when offering a place in his factory to his brother Leander, he writes, "This will be as honorable an enterprise as to go to Mexico to be shot at." And in later life, in a conversation with General Lilley, of Virginia, he said,

"I expect to die in the harness, because this is not the world for rest. This is the world for work. In the next world we will have the rest."

In the vast mass of letters, papers, etc., left by Mr. McCormick, there is one mention, and only one, of recreation.

A drizzle of little annoyances and little matters always irritated him, but he could stand up alone against a sea of adversity without a whimper. In fact, he would sooner be asked for a thousand dollars than for fifty cents.

He would storm over the loss of a carpet slipper and smile blandly at the loss of a lawsuit.

"He made more fuss over a pin-prick," said one of his valets, "than he did over a surgical operation." He disliked the petty odds and ends of life. His mind was too massive to adapt itself readily to small matters.

He was so confident of his own strength, and of the justice of his cause, that it was almost a joy to him to—

A defeat never meant anything more to McCormick than a delay.

Often, the harder he was thrown down the higher he would rebound. Again and again he was thwarted and blocked.

Most of his lawsuits were decided against him. But no one ever saw him crushed or really disheartened. In 1877, after he had made a long hard struggle to become a United States Senator, the news came to him that he was defeated.

"Well," he said, "that's over. What next?"

Usually, McCormick was at his best when the situation was at its worst. His Titanic work immediately after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 is the most striking evidence of this.

On one occasion, when he was attending the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati—the convention that nominated Hancock as candidate for President,—he was beset by a court of flatterers and lip-servers. After it was over, he remarked simply to his valet,

"Well, Charlie, there is a lot of farce and humbug about this."

Dr. Francis L. Patton, who was for years the president of Princeton University and also at one time editor of The Interior, was especially impressed with this direct naturalness of McCormick.

From them, by a series of questions, he soon obtained the truth and proved the butler to be the culprit. The one thing that he would tolerate least was a lie. As he would say at times,

"A thief you can watch, but I detest a liar."

There were very few who had the temerity to play a practical joke upon the great inventor himself.

In his family relations, too, McCormick was a man of tenderness and devotion. When his father died, in 1846, he was struck down by sorrow.

"Many a sore cry have I had as I have gone around this place and found no father,"

he wrote to his brother William. And as soon as he was solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly believe her eyes.

And as soon as he was solidly established in Chicago, his first act was to send for his mother, and to give her such a royal welcome that she could hardly believe her eyes.

"I feel like the Queen of Sheba," she said to her neighbors when she returned to Virginia; "the half was never told."

McCormick helped his younger brothers—William and Leander, by making them his partners. William died in 1865—a great and irreparable loss.

"I love best the old-fashioned pinks," he said, "because they grew in my mother's garden in Virginia." Often the tears would come to his eyes at the sight of mountains, for they reminded him of his Virginian home.

"Oh, Charlie," he said once to his valet, as he sat crippled in a wheel-chair in a Southern hotel, "how I wish I could get on a horse and ride on through those mountains once again!"

McCormick was not in any sense a Gradgrind of commercialism—a man who enriched his coffers by the impoverishment of his soul. He made money—ten millions or more; but he did so incidentally, just as a man makes muscle by doing hard work.

He idealized the American Constitution, the Patent Office, the Courts, the Democratic Party, and the Presbyterian Church. He was an Oliver Cromwell of industry. All his beliefs and acts sprang from a few simple principles and fitted together like a picture puzzle.

There was religion in his business and business in his religion.

He was made such as he was by the Religious Reformation of Europe and the Industrial Revolution of the United States. He was all of one piece—sincere and self-consistent—a type of the nineteenth-century American at his best. He was not sordid. He was not cynical.

It was as natural for him to do so as for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. Once, towards the end of his life, when he was sitting in his great arm-chair, reflecting, he said to his wife,

"Nettie, life is a battle."

He made this announcement as though it were the discovery of a new fact. All his life he had been much less conscious of the battle itself than of the cause for which he fought.

Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields.

There are no Goths and Vandals on American farms.

Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape, there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago—the oldest and largest harvester plant in the world.

And as Sir James Crichton-Browne, in a recent book on "Parcimony in Nutrition," maintains, the lack of food is a prolific cause of war, disease, and social misery in its various forms.

"Nothing is more demoralizing," he says, "than chronic hunger."

"For lack of bread the French Revolution failed," said Prince Krapotkin. For lack of bread the opium traffic flourishes in India and China; the secret of the prevalence of opium is that the natives use it to prevent hunger-pangs in time of famine.

Flesh becomes too expensive once the wild game of the forests is destroyed; and it is not suitable for food in tropical countries. Rice, on the other hand, is not a flesh-forming food, and so is not suited for food in cold countries.

Wheat is the one food that is universal, as good for the Esquimaux as for the South Sea Islander.

It is not easily spoiled, as milk and fruits are; and it contains all the elements that are needed by the body and in just about the right proportion.

This Baltic market is so practically international, in fact, that it is never closed. Whoever wishes to buy or sell wheat may do so here at any hour of the day or night.

There are no days in this building and no seasons, for the reason that it is always noonday and harvest-time in some part of the world.

In this Baltic Exchange, too, there is now a nucleus for a Wheat Parliament, organized under the name of the Corn Trade Association.

He insures the wheat in the elevators, on the cars, or in the steamships. He may even insure it against hail and tornadoes while it is growing.

It is so precious, this brown seed, that we watch over every step of its progress.

It is the bankers' busy season, too, when the wheat begins to move. The marketing of the grain ties up more money than any other yearly event.

The last wheat corner that did not fail was in 1867. Since then every would-be cornerer has been caught in his own trap. The wheat-machinery of the world has now become so vast that no individual can master it.

Whoever has tried it has found that he was being cornered by the wheat; for as soon as he had raised the price to an artificial level, the grain has flowed in upon him and covered him up.

The price of wheat to-day may be temporarily deflected by schemes and conspiracies, but not for long. Ultimately it is decided by the state of the crop and the state of public opinion in the thirty-six countries that grow wheat and eat bread.

As one of McCormick's competitors, J. D. Easter of Evanston, once declared,

"It seems as though the McCormick Reaper started the ball of prosperity rolling, and it has been rolling ever since."

If we wish to know what the Reaper will eventually do for these new wheat countries, we have but to glance back over the short history of our ten prairie States.

Here, in the yellow days of August, a man may travel for days and see no limit to the ocean of waving, shimmering wheat, that ripples around him in a vast sky-bounded circle.

Wheat—wheat—wheat! Nothing but wheat! It is a Field of the Cloth of Gold, that adds nothing to the glory of kings, but much to the glory of the common people.

Drop the German Empire down upon this valley and its expanse of dizzying, swirling wheat, and the wheat would not be wholly eclipsed. There would still be enough grain around the edges to make a golden fringe.

… of a harvest time is that a battery of red self-binders, with reels whirling and knives clacking, shall charge upon the wheat as though each acre were a battalion of hostile infantry, and make war until the land is strewn with heaps of fallen sheaves.

Famine, to these children of the wheat, seems as remote a danger as the cooling of the sun.

Even the one young State of North Dakota, not yet of age, is now growing food for herself, and for twelve million people besides.

… swiftest mill in Athens, in the age of Pericles, produced no more than two barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible size in Minneapolis that fills seventeen thousand barrels in a twenty-four hours' run—enough to give bread to New York State and California.

What the Greeks did in a day the Minnesotans do in ten seconds.

Five million barrels of this Minneapolis flour is each year scattered among foreign nations, a fact which informs us that flour is now not a local product, but part of the real currency of nations.

Three-sevenths of the people of the world are now on a wheat basis. They are the lesser fraction in point of numbers, but the larger in point of prosperity and progress.

A wheat map of the globe would be very nearly a map of modern civilization.

As yet, there are many peasants who grow wheat and cannot afford to eat it. But the number of bread-eaters is steadily increasing, probably at the rate of four or five million a year.

That young Virginian farmer who awoke from his dream and made his dream come true, made it possible for a few in each country to provide enough food for all.

He found a cure for Hunger, which had always persisted like a chronic disease.

He heaped the plates on the tables of thirty-six nations. He took a drudgery and transformed it into a profession. He instructed the wheat-eating races how to increase the "seven small loaves" so that the multitudes should be fed.

He found a cure for Hunger, which had always persisted like a chronic disease. He heaped the plates on the tables of thirty-six nations.

He took a drudgery and transformed it into a profession.

He instructed the wheat-eating races how to increase the "seven small loaves" so that the multitudes should be fed.

Henceforth civilization may be based upon higher motives than the Search for Food. The struggle for existence may become the struggle of the nobler nature for its full development.

The gentle need not be eliminated by the strong.

Instead of contending with one another in an unbrotherly competition, men may move upward to the higher activities of social self-preservation and organized self-help.