Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 147

The name of John Deere is today known as the marque of the largest farm machinery manufacturer in the world. It is also the only one of the industry’s great nineteenth-century enterprises to have remained independent. The present public view of the company is formed by seeing the green and yellow tractors and combine harvesters at work in the fields. Yet from 1837, when the elder John Deere made his first plough, until after the death of his son Charles in 1907, the enterprise was almost exclusively concerned with making ploughs. It was only after the death of Charles that it branched out into other lines of farm machinery, and, after the First World War, into the tractor business.

The book by Neil and Jeremy Dahlstrom is confined to the period of the plough business, and attempts to flesh out the characters, lives, and achievements of the two major actors: the founding father John (1804–86) and his son Charles (1837–1907). To do this they have made excellent use of a range of material extra to that deployed by the writer of the only substantial previous history of the firm, Wayne G.Broehl, whose John Deere’s company: A history of Deere & Company and its times was published in 1984. Broehl’s main source was the extensive Deere archive still held at the company’s headquarters in Moline, Illinois. The Dahlstroms have supplemented the work of Broehl by extensive research in local and state historical society archives, and amongst the files of the many contemporary local newspapers.

The result of the Dahlstrom’s researches is a much fuller picture of the internal workings of the firm, as operated by the leading personalities, and of their own lives and aspirations. One or two examples may be given. The personality of the elder Deere which emerges from the Dahlstroms’ book is of a man driven to succeed, in spite of serious early setbacks which would have broken a lesser man. One might surmise that he was a man who probably never left off feeling insecure financially. This explains the convoluted paper transactions of 1857–9, which shifted ownership of the Deere partnership away from John and onto Charles, in order to make it impossible for creditors to seize the partners’ assets in the event of collapse. ‘No one would guess that Deere was sitting on a small fortune, largely because he never considered it secure from creditors, the next national financial crisis, or a poor business decision on his part’ (p.40).

When it comes to Charles, who was effectively in charge of the enterprise (changed from partnership to company in 1868) from the age of twenty-one in 1858, a much fuller picture emerges of the personality of the quiet, low-key individual who took the firm to the level of a national institution. He was clearly a very effective chief executive and planner, and had the good luck or judgement to appoint capable men to run the daily business. He was also, at least in the early days, an excellent hands-on salesman. He is given proper credit here for his inauguration of the branch business, which became an essential ingredient of the firm’s growth, and for dealing with the problems posed by the Granger movement and the more frequent labour unrest, as the firm got larger, and intimate contact between masters and men became a thing of the past. However, as time went on his energies were diverted to other things; lobbying at Washington on tariffs, currency, and the (never built) Hennepin canal between Rock Island and Chicago, or promoting the amalgamation of the leading plough firms into a Plow Trust (along the lines of Standard Oil), which would have bolstered the farm machinery manufacturers against the steel suppliers. However, if it had succeeded, the Trust would have entailed the end of Deere as an independent company, although Deere would have had a commanding position in the new organization.

In all, this is a most useful addition to the literature on Deere and Company, and the environment in which the business operated.