Just to set the record straight — and who doesn’t want to hike deep into the tall weeds of literary origin? — the sociologist Max Weber didn’t coin the term “elective affinities.” He borrowed it from the title of Goethe’s 1809 novel about the tragic consequences of an almost chemical pull into illicit sexual attraction. Which makes sense, because Goethe himself borrowed the phrase from the early days of chemistry, where “elective affinity” was used to name certain catalytic chemical reactions that were not yet well understood.
So, just to make everything clear, a pre-scientific description of chemistry stands behind a novelistic description of tawdry sexual desire, which stands behind a description of sociological effects. In his classic 1905 study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber used “elective affinity” to explain how otherwise apparently unrelated intellectual and sociological trends could somehow push in the same direction, combining, like Protestantism and capitalism, to create a new age. Elective affinity gave us the birth of the modern.
Which is cool, of course, and fits perfectly the use I want to make of the idea, explaining how we got gas-powered tractors. Or, at least, it fits perfectly if we’re willing to ignore the absurdity of comparing the grand birth of the modern age with, you know, the minor birth of tractors.
But bear with me, for the widespread use of tractors on American farms came about through an odd set of trends and ideas — mostly unrelated and yet pushing in the same direction. The elective affinities that gave us the tractor may be small and unlikely, but they also form a useful figure, a synecdoche, for how the modern age happened.
At least, that’s what’s suggested when we think about the history that Neil Dahlstrom describes in his recent book Tractor Wars. A historian at the John Deere company — and builders of giant farm machines apparently need historians if they’re going to host such things as the John Deere Historic Site in Dixon, Illinois, or the John Deere Tractor & Engine Museum in Waterloo, Iowa — Dahlstrom sits on boards at the Smithsonian Institution and various national archivist associations. He appeared on the History Channel, PBS, National Geographic, and Book TV, mostly because he loves to talk about his research into tractors. “I definitely have the best job on the planet,” he told Agweek in a featured January interview.
That research has now issued in Tractor Wars, with a subtitle that ought not to surprise us: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture. Something fascinating was happening, something revealing of the modern project, in the rising use of powered farm machinery at the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a story of business strategy, a story of sociological change, and a story of modernization, all balled up together.
Only the history of business strategy is really present in Dahlstrom’s mind, and he relates the story in such detail that enthralled readers will discover that maybe they need a cup of coffee to continue. Thus, for example, Tractor Wars explains that William Butterworth, president of John Deere, wrote a note to his board in 1916 saying he wanted to “put a stop” to any further discussion about the company’s development of tractors. And that seems to make him a bad guy, ruining John Deere’s chance to claim the emerging tractor market.
The truth, however, is that Butterworth wrote the note from St. Louis, where he was finding it difficult to raise money from banks — all saw, as Butterworth himself did, that Henry Ford had dropped a bomb on the industry by revealing a new mass-market tractor at a farm show in Fremont, Nebraska, two months earlier. In Dahlstrom’s extensive telling, Butterworth was asking his board to hold off any decision for a few days while the company rethought how it could compete in the market into which the behemoth Ford Motor Company had just lumbered. We should stop thinking of Butterworth as the mustache-twirling villain in the melodrama of American tractors.
Unfortunately, most of us didn’t have any prior picture of Butterworth, and we didn’t need quite so much instruction in the wrongness of a story we’d never heard. Still, the business tale Dahlstrom tells is generally interesting. The use of powered machinery on farms was an idea in many people’s minds in the first decades of the 20th century — partly because so many of the nation’s tinkerers and engineers had grown up on farms or in the small towns centered on the business of agriculture. Most of them ended up joining the era’s drift from countryside to city, itself a phenomenon important to add to any list of the elective affinities of the modern age, but they knew from their childhoods just how hard farming was. They wanted to make tractors because they wanted to help their cousins and siblings. Plus, some of them, like Ford, hated horses.
Ford’s engineers began by building a prototype from leftover automobile parts. By 1918, “Fordson” (the ridiculously trademarked subsidiary, named in an attempt both to capitalize on Ford’s automobile success and to avoid any image damage to the Ford brand) was producing a steady stream of Model F tractors.
Ford would soon have serious competition, however, especially International Harvester and John Deere. And each took a different approach to the market. Ford, for example, thought to dominate with publicity, with Ford’s tractor on the cover of every magazine for even the most transient of reasons.
Meanwhile, International Harvester had been born in 1902 when JPMorgan financed the merging of the McCormick farm-equipment company with several smaller firms, instantly creating the fourth-largest corporation in America. And International Harvester continued this strategy through the tractor wars that came to an end only with the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 — buying up smaller competitors, stripping them of their ideas and inventory, and closing them down.
John Deere took the canniest approach. Relying on the cash box of its farm-implement business, the company developed its own tractor slowly. The key was purchasing a midsize tractor manufacturer, the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company, in 1918 and silently running that company to build up dealerships before introducing in 1923 its own Model D tractor in the long-enduring paint job of green and yellow. In 1928, Ford gave up the fight, leaving International Harvester and John Deere as the survivors of the business war that had raged since 1906.
And there Dahlstrom more or less leaves it. But let’s take his fine history of rival business strategies and ask what tractors actually accomplished. The decline of the rural population made mechanized farming necessary, but it also accelerated the movement to the city. In the same way, those farm machines were both a response to the boom-or-bust economics of farming and a magnifier of the financial cycles, with those huge harvest machines requiring a second layer of mortgage-level loans for farmers. The rise of corporate farming is just one result, as large companies were increasingly needed to shoulder the risks.
Perhaps more to the point, mechanization itself was both an effect and an accelerant of the changes of the modern world. Farm machinery is made for a genuine ethical gain. No romantic vision is left in anyone who has actually worked the land. It’s brutal and backbreaking labor, and tractors saved the bodies horse farming would have crippled. At the same time, tractors modernized land and food production. Such advances as the Green Revolution, saving hundreds of millions from starvation, require machines that also sever the human link to the land. Thanks to the tractor as it has developed over the past hundred years, we live much better. And we live with less meaning. Food is disenchanted: It appears in the grocery store, and we eat, unthankful for the miracle of our daily bread.
The capitalization of farm economics, the population drift to the cities, the engineering imagination that applied the gas-powered engine to fantastic new uses, even the advances of botanical science (Ford, the clever seeker of publicity, gave his first tractor to the famous botanist Luther Burbank) — every trend of the time contributed. They formed elective affinities: lacking a strong logical connection, but somehow all pushing in the same direction. And like tilling rotors, changing the land, we were all pulled along behind the tractors of modernity.
Joseph Bottum is director of the Classics Institute at Dakota State University. His most recent book is The Decline of the Novel.
