Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

AS A MAN

was by no means an exaggeration. His business was his life. It was not a definite, walled-off fraction of his life, as with most men. It was the whole

nd commerce and the reciprocities of trade. He was never dazzled nor deflected for a moment by the pomps and pageantries of the world, and for the glory that springs from war he had very little respect. In 1847, when offering a place in his factory to his brother Leander, he writes, "This w

ers and described a hunting trip in which he shot three prairie chickens near Beloit. But during the rest of his life, he was too busy for sport. His energy was the wonder of his friends an

ay. With regard to every important piece of work, it was his instinct to "do it now." He abhorred delay and dawdling. Even as a boy, when sent on an errand,

Thing First. He followed the line of most resistance. If the hardest thing can be done, he reasoned, all th

tition, 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 wholl

ssible 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,

r, 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

es. 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 an

UTTING ON A SIDE H

et 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 regarde

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

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

ne 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 complet

st. He was not one of those wh

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

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 t

power of concentration, nor his spirit of pioneering, nor his thoroughnes

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 tre

rrible," said one of his lawyers. "If any other man on this e

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

blows of c

e skirts of

e with his

petition, 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 o

WN BY OXEN

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 hi

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 cashier 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, McCo

merchant, who had lost his store, borrowed $100,000 from McCormick and started again. And so McCormick became not only one of the main buil

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 i