Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plain

Chapter 1. On the History of Binders and Twine: Agricultural and Industrial Transformations in North America

C h a p t e r 1 ❖ On the History of Binders and Twine Agricultural and Industrial Transformations in North America In 1830 a bushel of wheat had taken three hours to produce. By 1900 it took ten minutes. —Howard Zinn T HE history of the henequen-wheat complex begins with the transformation of the American and Canadian plains from a land of prairie grass where bison and later cattle grazed to a region of cereal grain production. As Donald Worster explains it, “The grassland was to be torn up to make a vast wheat factory: a landscape tailored to the industrial age.”1 In tune with this industrial revolution were farm implement companies that rallied to invent and mass-produce machinery that could not only bust sod and plow up the grassy rangelands but also increase and quicken the production of grain.2 The most important of those inventions was the mechanical reaper that Cyrus McCormick patented and demonstrated successfully in a wheat field near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia, in 1831. Before the mechanical reaper, farmers had to harvest grain crops with the age-old scythe, improved only with the addition of the cradle that helped scoop the gavels of cut stalks into piles. The stalks would then be hand-gathered, tied into sheaves, and stacked in shocks to dry, after which it would be threshed to separate the grain from the chaff. McCormick’s reaper was a horse-drawn machine with a moving cutter bar that cut the stalks with knives and a reel that laid them onto a platform where they could be hand-raked and later tied into sheaves (Figure 1.2). Although the reaper was seemingly a simple device, McCormick spent nearly a decade seeking funds to establish the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, 2 B o u n d i n t w i n e build a factory in Chicago, and market the reaper. Farmers quickly adopted the new machine. “The mechanical reaper was probably the most significant single invention introduced into farming between 1830 and 1860,” according to historian Wayne Rasmussen, and “its advent marked the transition from the hand to the machine age of farming.” The McCormick Company claimed in promotional literature that the reaper “marked the beginning of the successful race in which mechanical equipment on the farm has kept ahead of the world’s demand for food.”3 McCormick biographer and industrial historian Herbert Casson takes this point further, arguing that without the reaper “the whole new structure of our civilization with all its dazzling luxuries and refinements would be withered by the blight of famine. The reaper has done more to chase the wolf from the door—to abolish poverty and drudgery and hand labor, than any other invention.” He also went so far as to assert that the implement made possible “a nobler human race”: “Every harvester that clicks its way through the yellow grain means more than bread. It means more comfort, more travel, more art and music, more books and education.”4 Regarding the reaper’s impact on the United States, McCormick brochures stated that with farmers Figure 1.1. The North American wheat belt. Courtesy Wenonah Fraser, Department of Geography, Brandon University. t h e h i s t o r y o f B i n d e r s a n d t w i n e 3 “growing a surplus of grain, transportation systems began to develop, new railroads were built over the fertile prairies of the middle west. Farmers went westward by the thousands, taking with them their precious reapers. Towns sprang up, and industry after industry was started. Thus, the invention of the reaper was the beginning of prosperity not only for the farmer, but for the nation.”5 Casson concurs: “This magical machinery of the wheat field solves the mystery of prosperity. . . . It makes clear how we, in the United States, have become the best-fed nation in the world.”6 Much of this philosophy was warmly repeated in 1931—the centennial of the reaper’s invention. Farming and implement trade journals and newspapers around the United States honored McCormick with numerous accolades during the year. An article from the Hutchinson (Kansas) News is representative: “McCormick’s Reaper put the cradle on its permanent peg in the museum. . . . It was to the Midwest what the cotton gin was to the South.”7 Mechanical reapers represented a...