Whatever Happened to McCormick-Deering?

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Logo for the International Harvester McCormick-Deering line of equipment.

Not long ago, someone asked: “Whatever happened to McCormick-Deering?”

As most of you know, McCormick-Deering was never a “company” itself, but the trademark name of a line of tractors and farm machinery manufactured by the International Harvester Co.

Between the mid-1880s and 1902, a vicious battle known as “the Harvester Wars” was waged on America’s grain fields. The farm equipment manufacturer’s capacity to build harvesting machines far exceeded demand, so sales representatives of the two giants, McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. and Deering Harvester Co., along with their smaller rivals, tried every trick possible to sell their binders to reluctant farmers. The struggle became so intense that competing salesmen would not only bribe farmers to buy, but also allegedly sabotaged the competition’s machines and physically attacked people.

As the war dragged on, binder prices fell drastically and selling expenses grew to more than 40 percent of total sales. Something had to be done and, in 1902, a merger among the five largest companies was brokered by the J.P. Morgan banking firm. The McCormick, Deering and Milwaukee Harvester companies, Piano Mfg. Co., and Warder, Bushnell & Glessner (Champion harvesters) merged to become the mighty International Harvester Co.

For many years after the merger, IHC sold two parallel lines of equipment, one named McCormick and one named Deering, each slightly different from the other, but wearing the IHC logo. This was deemed necessary since each line had its loyal customers, and there was usually both a McCormick and a Deering dealer in every farm community.

The U.S. government filed an antitrust action against IHC in 1912, and the suit dragged on until a consent decree was signed in 1918. One of the terms of the agreement called for IHC to have only one dealer in each town, meaning that the dual McCormick and Deering lines of equipment could no longer be maintained. Indeed, the expense of designing, building and supporting both lines of equipment had been a serious drag on the company, so in 1923 a new grain binder – one combining the best features of each of the older machines – was introduced and called the McCormick-Deering. All of IHC’s other farm implements soon followed suit, and the famous McCormick-Deering line was born.

McCormick-Deering farm implements and Farmall tractors helped IHC become the giant of the industry. Its 1923 U.S. farm equipment sales of $150 million tripled those of second place Deere & Co. “Harvester is, of course, the greatest single agricultural enterprise in the world,” trumpeted Fortune magazine at the time.