Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 7

His plan of work, so far as he could be said to have a plan, was this--_One Thing at a Time, and the Hardest Thing First_. He followed the line of _most_ resistance. If the hardest thing can be done, he reasoned, all the rest will follow. And as for all work that was merely routine, he left as much as possible of it to others.

He was not an organizer so much as a creator and a pioneer. His problem was not like that which troubles the business men of to-day. He was not grappling with the evils of compet.i.tion, nor with the higher questions of efficiency and "community of interest." He was making a business that had not existed. He was clearing away obstacles that are now wholly forgotten. Consequently, as each new difficulty appeared, he had to consider it in all its details. He could not pa.s.s it over to Lieutenant Number One or Lieutenant Number Two.

McCormick was like a general who was leading an army into an unknown country rather than like the business man of the twentieth century, who can travel by time-table and schedule. When an obstacle blocked his path, it had to be removed; and until it was out of the way, nothing else mattered. Thus it was impossible for McCormick to have business hours. Once his mind had applied itself to a problem, he cared nothing for clocks and watches. Sometimes he would work on through the night, hour after hour, until the gray light of another day shone in the window. On all these arduous occasions, he had no idea of time, and he would allow no distractions nor interruptions. So rigid was this grasp of his mind that if his body rebelled and he fell asleep, he would invariably when he woke take up the matter in hand at the exact point at which it had been left. Not even sleep could detach his mind from a task that was unfinished.

When anything was going well, he let it alone. As soon as his factory was in good running order, he gave it little attention. It was managed first by his brothers, William and Leander, and afterwards by such thoroughly competent men as Charles Spring and E. K. Butler. The work that he chose to do himself was invariably new business. He cared little for the mere making of money. The success always pleased him much more than the profit. He was at heart a builder, and therefore when he had finished one structure, he moved off and began another.

It is a remarkable fact that as an investor, also, he had no interest in businesses that were already established. Stocks were offered to him, stocks that were safe and sure, but he bought none of them. The money that he invested outside of his own business was put into pioneering enterprises. He bought land in Chicago and Arizona. He opened up gold mines in South Carolina and Montana. He supplied the capital for a company which set out to bring mahogany from San Domingo. He invested $55,000 in the Tehuantepec Inter-Ocean Railroad, an ambitious attempt to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by rail, which was begun in 1879 and came to an inglorious end several years later. And he was one of that daring group of Americans who planned and financed the Union Pacific Railway--the first road that really joined sea to sea and reached to the farthest acre in the West.

[Ill.u.s.tration: McCORMICK REAPER CUTTING ON A SIDE HILL IN PENNSYLVANIA]

In all these undertakings he lost money, except in the instances of Chicago real estate and the Union Pacific. By 1883 he had several hundred thousand dollars invested in gold mines, and yet had not received one dollar of profit. It was the fascination of pioneering that had lured him. He saw no charm, as the gambler does, in the risk itself.

The Wall Street game he regarded as child's play. The thing that gripped him was the developing of new material resources--the colonization of new lands--the mastery of whatever is hostile to the welfare of the human race.

Another McCormick trait, which is not usually found in men who have the pioneering instinct, was _Thoroughness_. He never said, "This is good enough," or "Half a loaf is better than no bread." He wanted what was _right_ whether it came to him or went from him. He never believed in a ninety per cent success. He wanted par. Once his mind was fully aroused upon a subject, there was no detail too petty for him to consider. He labored hard to be correct in matters that appeared trifling to other men. Even in his letters to members of his family, the sentences were carefully formed, and there were no misspelled words. Once he gave advice to a younger brother on the importance of spelling words correctly. "You should carry a dictionary, as I do," he said.

All slovenliness, whether of mind or body, he abhorred. To take thought about a matter and to do it as it ought to be done, was to him a matter of character as well as of business. When a telegram was submitted to him for approval, it was his custom to draw a circle around the superfluous words. This was a little lesson to his managers on the importance of brevity and exactness. He insisted that clocks and watches should be correct, and in his later life carried a fine repeater which could strike the hour in the night and in which he took an almost boyish pride. Once, when he had been given the management of a political campaign in Chicago, he created consternation among the politicians by the rigid way in which he supervised the expense accounts. "This will never do," he said. "Things are at loose ends." If a bill was ten cents too much it went back. One bill for $15 was held up for a week because it was not properly drawn. The amazed politicians could not understand such a man,--who would readily sign a check for $10,000, and put it in the campaign treasury, and yet make trouble about the misplacing of a dime of other people's money.

McCormick demanded absolute honesty from his employees. One young man lost his chance of promotion because he was seen to place a two-cent stamp, belonging to the firm, on one of his personal letters. But once he had tested a man, and found him to be pure gold, he trusted him completely. A new employee would be pelted with questions and complete answers insisted upon. This was often a harsh ordeal. It was irritating to a man of independent spirit, until he realized that it was a sort of discipline and examination.

McCormick was always an optimist. He was not one of those who said, "Let well enough alone."

He never endured unsatisfactory business conditions. When he found that the freight charges on Reapers from Virginia to Cincinnati were too high, he arranged to have Reapers built in Cincinnati. When he found that other manufacturers were apt to be careless as to the quality of their materials, he built a factory of his own. Again and again in the course of his life, came the temptation to be satisfied with what he had already achieved. But he could not endure the thought of being beaten.

Instead of being content and complacent, he was far more likely to be planning a wholly new policy, on larger lines.

A daring proposition from a competent man always caught his attention.

Once, when he was sitting in his office, he heard E. K. Butler, who was at that time the head of his sales department, protest that the factory was not making as many machines as it should. "It is sheer nonsense,"

said Butler, "to say that the factory is producing as much as it can. If I were at the head of it, I could double the output with very little extra expense." Most employers would have regarded this sort of talk as mere boastfulness, but not so McCormick. He knew that Butler was a most adaptable and competent man, so he called him into the office and straightway appointed him to be the superintendent of the factory.

Butler was thus put upon his mettle. He went out to the factory resolved that McCormick's confidence in him should not be overthrown. He routed the wastes and inefficiencies, and keyed the whole plant up to such a pitch that, in a remarkably short period, he had made good his boast and doubled the output without hiring an extra man.

But the preeminent quality in the character of Cyrus McCormick was not his power of concentration, nor his spirit of pioneering, nor his thoroughness. It was his strength of will--his _Tenacity_. This was the motif of his life.

He was not at all a shrewd acc.u.mulator of millions, as many have imagined him. He had not an iota of craft and cunning. Neither was he a financier, in the modern sense. It would be nearer the truth to say that he was a farmer-manufacturer, of simple nature but tremendous resolution, whose one overmastering life-purpose was to teach the wheat nations of the world to use his harvesting machinery.

"The exhibition of his powerful will was at times actually terrible,"

said one of his lawyers. "If any other man on this earth ever had such a will, certainly I have not heard of it."

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-p.r.i.c.k," 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 ma.s.sive to adapt itself readily to small matters. But when a great difficulty came in view, he rose and went at it with a sort of stern satisfaction and religious zeal. He was so confident of his own strength, and of the justice of his cause, that it was almost a joy to him to--

"Breast the blows of circ.u.mstance, And grasp the skirts of happy chance, And grapple with his evil star."

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. In the race of compet.i.tion, there was a time when he was beaten by Whiteley, and there was a time when he was beaten by Deering. 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?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: REAPER DRAWN BY OXEN IN ALGERIA]

Usually, McCormick was at his best when the situation was at its worst.

His t.i.tanic work immediately after the great Chicago Fire of 1871 is the most striking evidence of this. He had been living at the corner of Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue, in New York City, for four years before the Fire; but he was in Chicago during the greatest of all Illinois disasters. In one day of fire and terror he saw his city reduced to a waste of ashes. It was no longer a city. It was two thousand acres of desolation. He was himself in the midst of the fire-fighting. When his wife, in response to his telegraphic message, came to him in Chicago two days later, he met her wearing a half-burned hat and a half-burned overcoat. His big factory, which was at that time making about 10,000 harvesters a year, was wholly destroyed. In a flash he found himself without a city and without a business.

But McCormick never flinched. The arrival of a great difficulty was always his cue. First he ascertained his wife's wishes. Did she wish the factory to be rebuilt, or did she want him to retire from active business life? She, thinking of her son, said--"Rebuild." At once McCormick became the most buoyant and confident citizen in the ruined city. His great spirit was aroused. He called up one of his attorneys and sent him in haste to the docks to buy lumber. He telegraphed to his agents to rush in as much money as they could collect. Every bank in the city had been burned, so for a time this money was kept by the cas.h.i.+er in a market basket, and carried at night to a private house. There was one day as much as $24,000 in the basket. Before the cinders were cool, McCormick had given orders to build a new factory, larger than the one that had been burned down. More than this, he had also given orders that his house in New York should be sold, and that a home should be established in Chicago. Chicago was his city. He had seen it grow from 10,000 to 325,000. And in this hour of its distress he tossed aside all other plans and gave Chicago all he had.

His unconquerableness gave heart to others. Several of the wealthiest citizens, who had lost courage, rallied to the help of the city. One merchant, who had lost his store, borrowed $100,000 from McCormick and started again. And so McCormick became not only one of the main builders of the first Chicago, but also of the second Chicago, which in less than three years had become larger and finer than the city that was.

It was this steel-fibred tenacity that was the main factor in the success of McCormick, whether we consider him as a manufacturer or as a great American. It enabled him to establish the perilous industry of making harvesting machines--a business so complex and many-sided that out of every twenty manufacturers who set out to emulate McCormick, only one survives to-day. It enabled McCormick to hold his own in spite of adverse litigation, the hostility of Congress, the rivalry of other inventors, and the calamity of the Great Fire. It was so remarkable, and so productive of good to his country and to himself, that he will always remain one of the creative and heroic figures in the early industrial history of the United States.

CHAPTER X

CYRUS H. McCORMICK AS A MAN

Cyrus H. McCormick was a great commercial Thor. He was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and had the ma.s.sive shoulders of a wrestler.

His body was well proportioned, with small hands and feet. His hair, even in old age, was very dark and waving. His bearing was erect, his manner often imperious, and his general appearance that of a man built on large lines and for large affairs.

Men of lesser caliber regarded him with fear, not for any definite reason, but because, as Seneca has said--"In him that has power, all men consider not what he has done, but what he may do." He was so strong, so dominating, so ready to crash through obstacles by sheer bulk of will-power, that smaller men could never quite subdue a feeling of alarm while they were in his presence. He was impatient of small talk and small criticisms and small objections. He had no tact at retail, and he saw no differences in little-minded people. All his life he had been plagued and obstructed by the Liliputians of the world, and he had no patience to listen to their chattering. He was often as rude as Carlyle to those who tied their little threads of pessimism across his path.

At fas.h.i.+onable gatherings he would now and then be seen--a dignified figure; but his mind was almost too ponderous an engine to do good service in a light conversation. If a subject did not interest him, he had nothing to say. What gave him, perhaps, the highest degree of social pleasure, was the entertaining, at his house, of such men as Horace Greeley, William H. Seward, Peter Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, George Peabody, Junius Morgan, Cyrus W. Field, or some old friend from Virginia.

His long years of pioneering had made him a self-sufficient man, and a man who lived from within. He did not pick up his opinions on the streets. His mind was not open to any chance idea. He had certain clear, definite convictions, logical and consistent. What he knew, he knew.

There were no hazy imaginings in his mind. The main secret of his power lay in his ability to focus all his energies upon a few subjects. Once, in 1848, he mentioned the French Revolution in one of his letters. "It is a mighty affair," he wrote, "and will be likely to stand." But usually he paid little attention to the world-dramas that were being enacted. He was too busy--too devoted to affairs which, if he did not attend to them, would not be attended to at all.

McCormick was a product of the Protestant Reformation, and of the capitalistic development that came with it. The whole structure of his character was based upon the two great dogmas of the Reformation--the sovereignty of G.o.d and the direct responsibility of the individual.

Whoever would know the springs at which his life was fed must read the story of Luther, Calvin, and Knox. They must call to mind the att.i.tude of Luther at the Diet of Worms, when he faced the men who had the power to take his life and said, "Here I stand. I can do no other." They must recollect how these three men, who were leaders of nations, not sects, stood out alone against the kings and ecclesiasticisms of Europe, without wealth, without armies, without anything except a higher Moral Idea, and succeeded so mightily they actually changed the course of empires and became the pathfinders of the human race.

McCormick was so essentially a result of this religio-economic movement that it is impossible to separate his religion and his business life. He was an individualist through and through--as well marked a type of the Covenanter in commerce as the United States has ever produced. He believed in presbyters in religion, private capitalists in business, and elected representatives in government. He was opposed to feudalism and bureaucracy in all their myriad forms. He held the middle ground, the _via media_, between the over-organization of the fourteenth century, when the rights of the individual were forgotten, and the lax liberalism of to-day, when too much is left to individual whim and caprice, and when duties and responsibilities are too apt to be ignored.

Above all const.i.tuted authorities stood a man's own conscience. This was McCormick's faith, and it was this that made him the fighter that he was. It gave him courage and the fort.i.tude that is rarer than courage.

It compelled him to oppose his own political party at the Baltimore Convention of 1861. It made him stand single-handed against his fellow-manufacturers, in defence of his rights as an inventor. It enabled him to beat down the Pennsylvania Railroad, after a twenty-three year contest, and to prove that a great corporation cannot lawfully do an injustice to an individual.

McCormick was nourished on this virile Calvinistic faith from the time when he first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the Bible. It had been the faith of his fathers for generations, and it was bred into him from boyhood. Nevertheless, according to the practice of the Presbyterians, there had to come a time when he himself openly made his choice. This occasion came in 1834, when McCormick was twenty-five years of age. A four-day meeting was being held in the little stone church on his grandfather's farm. Three ministers were in charge. As was the custom, there was constant preaching from morning until sundown, with an hour's respite for dinner. At the close of the fourth day, all who wished to become avowed Christians were requested to stand up. Cyrus McCormick was there, and he was not a member of the church; yet he did not stand up. That night his father went to his bedside and gently reproached him. "My son," he said, "don't you know that your silence is a public rejection of your Saviour?" Cyrus was conscience-stricken. He leapt from his bed and began to dress himself. "I'll go and see old Billy McClung," he said. Half an hour later, old Billy McClung, who was a universally respected religious leader in the community, was amazed to be called out of his sleep by a greatly troubled young man, who wanted to know by what means he might make his peace with his Maker. The next Sunday this young man stood up in the church, and became in name what he already was by nature and inheritance--a Christian of the Presbyterian faith.

After he left home his letters to the members of his family are strewn with sc.r.a.ps of religious reflection. In 1845, for instance, he writes, "Business is not inconsistent with Christianity; but the latter ought to be a help to the former, giving a confidence and resignation, after using all proper means; and yet I have sometimes felt that I came so far short of the right _feeling_, so worldly-minded, that I could wish myself out of the world." On another occasion, when he was struggling with manufacturers who had broken their contracts, he wrote, "If it were not for the fact that Providence has seemed to a.s.sist me in our business, it has at times seemed that I would almost sink under the weight of responsibility hanging upon me; but I believe the Lord will help us out." And after his first visit to New York City, he summed up his impressions of the metropolis in the following sentence, "It is a desirable place and people, with regular and good Presbyterian preaching."

McCormick enjoyed with all his heart the logical, doctrinal sermon. His favorite Bible pa.s.sage was the eighth chapter of Romans, that indomitable victorious chapter that ends like the blast of a trumpet:

"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

As it is written, 'for Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.' Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us; for I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princ.i.p.alities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of G.o.d, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord."

His favorite hymn, which he sang often and with the deepest fervor, was that melodious prayer that begins--

"O Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight, On whom in affliction I call, My comfort by day, and my song in the night, My hope, my salvation, my all."

In his earlier journeys through the Middle West, McCormick was distressed at the rough immorality of the new settlements. "I see a great deal of profanity and infidelity in this country, enough to make the heart sick," he wrote in 1845. These towns and villages needed more preachers, and better preachers, he thought. Consequently, soon after he had acquired his first million dollars, he determined to establish the best possible college for the education of ministers. He almost stunned with joy the Western friends of higher education for ministers, by offering them $100,000 with which to establish a school of theology in Chicago. This offer was made in 1859--half a century ago, and resulted in the removal of a moneyless and decaying Seminary at New Albany, Indiana, to Chicago. Thus was founded the Northwestern Theological Seminary, afterwards named the McCormick Theological Seminary, which, in its fifty years of life, has given a Christian education to thousands of young men.

Thirteen years later he bought _The Interior_ and made it what it has remained ever since--a religious weekly of the highest rank. These two--the college and the paper--were his pride and delight. He fathered them in the most affectionate way. No matter what crisis might be impending in the war of business, he always had time to talk to his editors and his professors. So, though McCormick had received much from his religious inheritance, it is also true that he gave back much. His last public speech, which was read for him by his son Cyrus because he was too weak to deliver it himself, was given at the laying of the corner-stone of a new building which he had given to the college. Its last sentence was typical of McCormick--full of hope and optimism: "I never doubted that success would ultimately reward our efforts," he said; "and now, on this occasion, we may fairly say that the night has given place to the dawn of a brighter day than any which has. .h.i.therto shone upon us."

McCormick went into politics, too, with the same conscientious abandon with which he plunged into business and religion. He was a Democrat of the Jeffersonian type. One of his keenest pleasures was to go to the Senate and listen to its debates. He was not a fluent speaker himself, but he delighted in the orations of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster. He believed in politics. He thought it a public danger that the strong and competent men of the republic should willingly permit men of little ability and low character to manage public affairs. In fact, he was almost as much a pathfinder and pioneer in this matter as he had been in matters of business, but without the same measure of success. Politics, he found, was not like business. Its successes depended not upon your own efforts, but upon the votes of the majority.