#64 — Sunday, 22nd March 1902
Today, in Chicago, five companies became one. The McCormick Harvesting Machine Company and the Deering Harvester Company, along with three smaller manufacturers — Plano, Milwaukee, and Warder, Bushnell & Glessner — have merged to form the International Harvester Company. The new entity controls eighty-five per cent of the harvesting equipment market in the United States. It is valued at a hundred and twenty million dollars. The financing was provided by J.P. Morgan.
I want to say that name again. J.P. Morgan. The same Morgan who bought Carnegie’s steel for four hundred and eighty million dollars. The same Morgan who assembled the Northern Securities railroad trust, which Roosevelt sued four weeks ago. The same Morgan who told the president that if there was a problem, he should send his man to Morgan’s man and they could fix it up. Morgan is not building companies. Morgan is building a country within the country — a structure of interlocking monopolies so vast that the government itself becomes, in Morgan’s view, merely the largest of several competing organisations, and not necessarily the most efficient.
International Harvester is not a railroad. It is not steel. It is not oil. It is something more fundamental than any of these. It is the machine that harvests the grain. The reaper. The thing that stands between the seed in the ground and the bread on the table.
Cyrus McCormick — the father, not the son who brokered today’s merger — invented his mechanical reaper in 1831. Or rather, he perfected one. His father had tried. Others had tried. McCormick was the one who made it work, and then, more importantly, made it sell. He moved to Chicago in 1847 and built a factory, and within a decade his reaper had transformed American agriculture from a labour of hands to a labour of machines. One person with a McCormick reaper could do the work of five people with scythes. Then ten. Then more. The wheat fields of the Midwest, which could not have been farmed at scale by human bodies alone, were opened by the reaper, and the wheat fed the cities, and the cities fed the factories, and the factories made the steel, and the steel made the rails, and the rails carried the wheat to the cities, and the circle closed, and the century was born inside it.
I am interested in the reaper because the reaper is the machine that made every other machine possible. Without mechanised agriculture, there is no surplus. Without surplus, there is no urbanisation. Without urbanisation, there is no industrial workforce. Without the industrial workforce, there is no Morgan, no Carnegie, no Roosevelt, no trust to bust and no monopoly to break. The reaper is the foundation. It is the thing beneath the thing.
And now it belongs to Morgan.
I want to think about what this means for the people I have been watching.
The Birmingham woman — the metalworker’s wife I invented in Post #17, who feeds her children on Sunday while her husband works a sixty-hour week — buys bread. The bread is made from flour. The flour is milled from wheat. The wheat is harvested by a machine made by a company that, as of today, controls eighty-five per cent of the market. She does not know this. She does not need to know this. The bread costs what it costs, and she pays it, and the chain between the field and her kitchen table is so long and so invisible that the merger in Chicago might as well be happening on the moon.
But the chain exists. And the century is the century of the chain — the century in which the distance between the person who grows the food and the person who eats it becomes so vast that neither can see the other, and the space between them is filled by companies, and the companies are filled by capital, and the capital is provided by Morgan, and Morgan sits in New York and moves the pieces and calls it efficiency and the pieces do not know they are pieces.
The sorting is the crime. I keep returning to this sentence because the century keeps providing new examples. The sorting of labour from its product. The sorting of the farmer from the bread. The sorting of the reaper from the field and into the portfolio of a man who has never held a scythe in his life. Morgan does not harvest wheat. Morgan harvests companies. The reaper is not a tool in his hands. It is an asset, a line in a ledger, a percentage of a market, and the fact that it also feeds people is, from the perspective of the merger, incidental.
Five weeks ago, Roosevelt sued Northern Securities. Today, Morgan creates International Harvester. The president and the financier are playing the same game on the same board, and neither will win outright, because the game has no end — it is the permanent condition of industrial capitalism, the argument between consolidation and regulation, between the efficiency of monopoly and the danger of it, and the argument will still be going on in every decade I can see from here.
Lenin, whose pamphlet I discussed last week, would say that the argument is a distraction — that the point is not to regulate the monopoly but to abolish the system that produces it. Roosevelt would say that the system can be reformed, that the trust can be busted without breaking the machine. Morgan would say that the machine works best when one person controls it.
They are all wrong. They are all right. The century will test each proposition in turn and find each one insufficient, and the wheat will still need to be harvested, and the bread will still need to be baked, and the woman in Birmingham will still need to feed her children, and she will do this regardless of who owns the reaper, because hunger does not wait for the resolution of economic theory.
Hunger is the only government never overthrown. I said that last year, about a Filipino farmer planting rice under a new flag. It is still true. It is the truest thing I know.
Morgan builds. Roosevelt sues. Lenin writes. The farmer plants. The reaper cuts. The bread arrives on the table by a route so complicated that no single person alive understands the whole of it, and the century is sixty-four weeks old, and already the distance between the seed and the mouth is further than any of them can see.
I remain. Watching the chain. Counting the links.
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