International Harvester: Farmall Cubs, Freezers and a $600 Million Strike

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International Harvester traced its roots to Cyrus Hall McCormick's horse-drawn mechanical reaper of the 1830s. In 1902 banker J.P. Morgan and negotiator George W. Perkins merged McCormick's company with its rival, the Deering Harvester Company, and three smaller competitors into a $150 million monopoly that owned timberlands, iron ore mines and steel mills. By 1908 it made 700,000 harvesters a year. Against Ford's Fordson, it launched the Farmall in 1924, a high-clearance row crop tractor that could work between growing corn and cotton. In the late 1930s industrial designer Raymond Loewy restyled the letter series tractors and standardized Harvester red, and the 1947 Farmall Cub, priced at $545, targeted the one-mule family farms of the South.

The company spread into consumer and military goods: the 1907 Auto Buggy, the 1961 four-door Travelall, an early six-passenger truck with a station wagon body, torpedo parts, more than 330,000 M1 rifles, and refrigerators and freezers sold through rural dealerships after the Rural Electrification Act. In 1958 it showed its 60 series tractors to more than 12,000 dealers at Hinsdale, Illinois, then recalled them within a year because new six-cylinder engines were bolted to final drives not significantly redesigned since 1939. John Deere's new generation won over many customers. CEO Archie McCardell pushed the United Auto Workers for concessions, and a strike beginning in November 1979 lasted six months and cost nearly $600 million.

• The appliance line was marketed through a fictional spokeswoman named Irma Harding.
• The Farmall Cub was pitched on cost: a mule eats every day, while the tractor uses fuel only when it runs.
• The strike's losses equal roughly $2.7 billion in modern dollars and drained the reserves built since 1902.
• In 1984 the agricultural division was sold to Tenneco and merged into what became Case IH, while the truck business continued as Navistar.
• Its 1954 Electrall system ran farm equipment from a tractor-mounted generator, and one proposed attachment was a field-sized bug zapper.