While yesterday’s stamp, which celebrated the Future Farmers of America, presented a bucolic picture of agricultural life, today’s honors a man who played a key role in the mechanization of agricultural, a shift that in many respects fostered the decline of family farms and the industrialization of America.

The honoree, who is pictured on a 3-cent stamp issued on October 14, 1940, is a Cyrus Hall McCormick, a 19th century inventor and businessman who in the mid-1800s founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902. The stamp was part of the series honoring 35 Famous Americans including McCormick and four other inventors (Eli Whitney, Samuel Morse, Elias Howe, and Alexander Graham Bell).

McCormick was born on a 532-acre farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the early 1800s. At that time, grain was harvested by the same manual process that had been used for hundreds, possible thousands of years. Reapers mowed down the standing grain with hand-swung scythes. Behind them were binders who tied the crop into bales, which were then carted away, usually for storage in barns. Because reaping was a much more painstaking process than sowing, even farmers with land and seed to spare had to limit what they planted to what they would be able to sow at harvest time. Consequently, many people, including McCormick’s father, tried to build mechanical reaping machines. He supposedly failed but Cyrus took up the challenge and, working with Jo Anderson, a slave owned by his family, he developed a functional reaper in the early 1830s and began trying to sell them to other farmers.

But it wasn’t until the 1850s that his business really took off and it did so for several interrelated reasons. While his early machines were unreliable he kept making improvements until his machines worked better than those made by others, including at least two people who won patent claim lawsuits against him. Notably, in 1851, McCormick took his reaper to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London after his reaper successfully harvested a field unlike a machine made by a competitor who won a patent claim suit against him. He went on to show his machine all over Europe and was later elected into the French Academy of Sciences for “having done more for agriculture than any other living man.”

In addition, in the late 1840s, McCormick moved his operations to Chicago, an emerging hub of commerce that was closer to fertile Midwestern fields. And he became a groundbreaking businessman. He offered money-back guarantees and credit to struggling farmers, saying, “It is better that I should wait for the money than that you should wait for the machine that you need.” He established an extensive service organization, staffed with local agents who befriended farmers, showed them how to use the machines, and assessed their credit-worthiness. He also was among the first to advertise heavily because, he said, “trying to do business without advertising is like winking at a pretty girl through a pair of green goggles. You may know what you are doing, but no one else does.” As a result of all these efforts, production at his factory grew from about 1,000 machines in 1851 to 23,000 in 1857.

Ironically, although many argued that his machines helped the North win the Civil War (because it freed up farmers who could work in the North’s emerging industries or become soldiers) McCormick himself was a Democrat who favored a negotiated end to the war. An ardent Presbyterian, McCormick also supported a variety of educational entities. Among other things he provided funds that helped Dwight Moody start the YMCA, he provided funding for what became the McCormick Theological Seminar in Chicago and supported a host of other religious and educational institutions.

McCormick died in 1884; his last words supposedly were “work, work, work.” After he died, control of the company went to his grandson whose labor practices led in less than a decade to the infamous Haymarket protests in which several police officers and civilians were killed, deaths that led to the controversial convictions of eight anarchists, including four who were put to death. In the early 1900s, with financial backing provided by J.P. Morgan, his grandson created the International Harvester Company by merging several firms, including the McCormick company.

Money from that company as well as other investments made the extended McCormick family wealthy and influential. Notably, Cyrus McCormick was the great uncle of Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick, a conservative Republican who was the publisher of the influential Chicago Tribune newspaper until his death in 1955 and is the namesake of McCormick Place, a massive convention facility in Chicago.

The family, it also bears mention, was riven by some bitter feuds, probably driven by money, but focused on whether Cyrus was solely responsible for inventing the reaper that bore the family name or whether it was his father’s work, that had been entrusted to him on behalf of the family. In the early part of the 20th century, these disputes led Cyrus’ side of the family to expend considerable resources on efforts to burnish his already significant reputation, work that in some respects laid the groundwork for the 1940 stamp that honored him as one of America’s five greatest inventors.

There’s a deeper meaning in all this but I’m not sure what it is. So I’ll leave it at that for the night.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work, work, work for peace.