INTRODUCTION 



WHOEVER wishes to understand the mak- 

 ing of the United States must read the 

 life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one 

 man so truly represented the dawn of the in- 

 dustrial era, the grapple of the pioneer with 

 the crudities of a new country, the replacing of 

 muscle with machinery, and the establishment 

 of better ways and better times in farm and city 

 alike. Beginning exactly one hundred years ago, 

 the life of McCormick spanned the heroic period 

 of our industrial advancement, when great things 

 were done by great individuals. To know Me- 

 Cormick is to know what type of man it was 

 who created the United States of the nineteenth 

 century. And now that a new century has 

 arrived, with a new type of business develop- 

 ment, it may be especially instructive to review 

 a life that was so structural and so fundamental. 

 As Professor Simon Newcomb has observed, 

 " It is impressive to think how few men we should 

 have had to remove from the earth during the 



[v] 



188515 



