Narratives of Slavery and Invention at the Mccormick Plantation
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Reaping History: Narratives of Slavery and Invention at the McCormick Plantation Blaine Dzwonczyk Tufts University American Studies Program May 2017 Dzwonczyk 1 Dzwonczyk 2 Table of Contents Introduction………….………….………….………….………….………….………….………...4 Chapter 1: Brief History of the McCormick Plantation………….………….………….………..11 Chapter 2: Counter-narratives by Black Journalists, Authors, and Historians………….…….…19 Chapter 3: International Harvester and “The Romance of the Reaper”.………….……….……..32 Chapter 4: Stories and Silences in my Family History …………….………….………….……..40 Chapter 5: Plantation Narratives………….………….………….………….……………………54 Conclusion: Responsibility, Reparations………….………….………….………...….…………65 Bibliography………….………….………….………….………….……….………….………...70 Acknowledgements………….………….………….………….………….………….…….…….76 Dzwonczyk 3 We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake…The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility, the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots. Michel-Rolph Trouillot; Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 1995 Dzwonczyk 4 Introduction The first building visible to visitors approaching the site of the former McCormick Plantation, a few minutes’ drive from Interstate 81 South in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is a structure that once served as slave quarters. This small brick building, tucked behind the looming McCormick mansion, housed – imprisoned – some of the 19 or more African Americans who were enslaved by the McCormick family throughout the 19th century. Some of the people enslaved at this work camp include Charles and Eunice Anderson and their son, Jo Anderson; Emily Harris; Hannah; and Anthony – among many others. But at the present-day site of this former work camp, it is not their stories that are centered or even retold. Instead, the plantation memorializes the White residents of “Walnut Grove,” the McCormick family. In particular, the present-day site of the plantation celebrates the memory of Cyrus Hall McCormick, a man credited with inventing the grain harvester known as the McCormick Reaper in 1831. In this way, the site’s version of history is representative of many of the loudest narratives surrounding the reaper. Most dominant narratives of the reaper history praise McCormick as the genius, sole inventor of this “revolutionary” grain harvester, while the histories of the people his family enslaved – and their role in the reaper invention – are pushed to the side, concealed, or erased. My own history is wrapped up in the history of this work camp, which straddles the border of Rockbridge and Augusta Counties. The daughter of two California transplants, I grew up hearing from my parents that my ancestor, Cyrus McCormick, invented the reaper, which Dzwonczyk 5 they described as an important piece of farming equipment. For twenty years, this was more or less the only story I knew about McCormick or the reaper. I did not hear about his family’s participation in the enslavement of African Americans on their plantation; neither did I hear that Jo Anderson, enslaved by the McCormicks, was responsible for much of the “invention” of the reaper, but received neither credit nor compensation – nor freedom – when my ancestor went on to mass produce the reaper and make millions from its sale. These narratives were absent from the stories told among my family members. It wasn’t until I began researching my family history in the fall of 2015 that I began to question the version of history I had been told. I am not directly related to Cyrus McCormick. My great-grandmother, Eleanor Gooding, married his grandson Emmons Blaine, and they had a daughter, Nancy; but when Emmons died young, Eleanor went on to marry my great-grandfather, Clark Lawrence, and give birth to my maternal grandmother Audrey. But the strength of family history-telling – at least, of certain histories – has kept me connected to the memory of the McCormick family. More than that, the McCormick wealth remains in my family today. When I asked my mother how our connection to the McCormicks has impacted our family, she responded: “Well, it’s made our family wealthy.”1 In interviewing my father for this project, he commented on a certain irony: “The McCormick money paid for you to go to Tufts and do this research.”2 That “McCormick money” – money now in my parents’ hands and someday in mine, which has shaped their lives and mine in innumerable ways – can be traced directly to the exploitation of the African American people that my ancestors enslaved. I am deeply connected to these histories of enslavement and exploitation. Yet for most of my life, silences have concealed my family’s connection to this violent legacy. 1 Meri-Beth Bird, telephone interview by author, April 6, 2017. 2 Mark Dzwonczyk, telephone interview by author, April 9, 2017. Dzwonczyk 6 Given these silences, I took on this project with two goals. First, I wanted to learn about the history of enslavement and exploitation that my family has ignored – and profited from – for so long. Thus, my first chapter is a partial history of the McCormick work camp, the lives of enslavers and enslaved there, and the much-celebrated invention of the reaper. This chapter would benefit from an analysis of the many McCormick documents archived in the McCormick- International Harvester Collection at the Wisconsin Historical society, which I was unfortunately unable to visit during my research this year. Partially for this reason, I do not intend for this chapter to serve as a complete history of that land, a full picture of what life may have been like for anyone who lived there, a thorough account of the violence of enslavement, a comprehensive discussion of slavery in the Shenandoah Valley, or a technical history of the reaper machine itself. Instead, I hope this chapter will serve as a starting point for my own and others’ learning, and provide necessary context for subsequent chapters. My second goal in embarking on this project has been to consider the various narratives constructed around the history of the reaper invention, partially in an effort to understand how and why I ended up with such a narrow and misrepresentative version of this history. Thus, I have researched the themes, structures, and implications of four major categories of narratives regarding the history of the reaper. First, in Chapter 2, I examine counter-narratives to the dominant reaper history, all of them written by a number of Black authors, journalists, and historians. Since the 1930s and likely earlier, Black writers have challenged dominant narratives of the reaper invention by acknowledging Jo Anderson’s role in this history. These counter-narratives have appeared in African American newspapers, Ebony magazine, books and encyclopedias celebrating Black history, and, more recently, the mainstream press. The narratives referenced in this chapter Dzwonczyk 7 represent powerful resistance to the sometimes overwhelming story that many powerful actors – and most US history textbooks – have worked to present: that Cyrus McCormick is primarily or entirely responsible for the invention of the reaper. One of these powerful actors is the International Harvester company. IH, an agricultural manufacturing giant of the 20th century, was the result of a 1902 merger between a number of agricultural equipment manufacturers and the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which Cyrus and brother Leander McCormick founded in Chicago in 1847 to mass produce and sell the reaper. IH remained McCormick-led well into the 1900s. As a corporation, IH was invested in profiting off the authenticity of the “McCormick Reaper,” a narrative threatened by many patent disputes from other White inventors of similar harvesting machines. Thus, as I discuss in Chapter 3, IH frequently published advertisements and promotional material celebrating Cyrus McCormick as the sole inventor of the reaper. These narratives sometimes included Jo Anderson; but rather than fully honoring his contribution or compensating his descendants, IH narratives throughout the 20th century typically exploited Anderson’s memory, erased the violence of chattel slavery, and romanticized the relationship between McCormick and Anderson – all to sell McCormick Reapers and, in some cases, to exploit the Black workforce of Depression-era Illinois. While International Harvester narratives have exploited the memory of Jo Anderson in order to increase their profits, my family has completely purged Jo Anderson – along everyone else enslaved by the McCormicks, and even the McCormick plantation itself – from our collective memory. In Chapter 4, I analyze interviews I conducted with my mother and father regarding their experiences of learning and passing on McCormick family histories; I also consider my own experiences and the stories I grew up hearing. When it comes to histories of the Dzwonczyk 8 reaper invention in my spoken family history, both the stories passed on and the deep silences maintained have worked to distance our family from the legacy of slavery. It is my hope that this project might be a step towards changing that. Finally, as part of my research, I visited the site of the former McCormick work camp, which is now owned by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. While the site today primarily serves as an agricultural