Harold Fowler McCormick, Jr.

Harold 'Fowler' McCormick, Jr.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/120216977/harold-fowler-mccormick

Fowler McCormick Dies at 74; Ex‐Chairman of Harvester

PALM DESERT, Calif., Jan. 6 — Fowler McCormick, former chairman of the board of the International Harvester Company, the world's largest manufacturer of agricultural implements, died here today after a lingering illness, company officials announced. He was 74 years old.

Mr. McCormick was a third generation member of the McCormick family to head International Harvester, which was founded by his grandfather, Cyrus Hall McCormick, inventor of the reaper.

Born in Chicago on November 15, 1898, Mr. McCormick was an heir in two of the country's most notable economic dynasties. His father, Harold Fowler McCormick, was the younger son of Cyrus McCormick, and his mother was the former Edith Rockefeller, daughter of John D. Rockefeller Sr., heiress to part of a Standard Oil fortune.

In keeping with family tradition, Mr. McCormick in 1918 entered Princeton University. After graduation in 1921, he weighed the possibilities of career in either Standard Oil or the International Harvester Company, of which his father was then president.

However, he organized a small business of his own, a brokerage firm, which he operated for four years, while studying accounting at nights.

Then in 1925, he went to work as a 25‐cent‐an‐hour student at Harvester's Milwaukee plant, and for the next four years studied manufacturing, engineering and selling. He went on to become a chief executive and policy‐making official when elected chairman of the board in 1946, a post he held until retirement in 1951. He remained on the board of directors, however, until 1958.

Mr. McCormick continued to reside in his native Chicago, where International Harvester has its headquarters. He also spent several months of each year either at his ranch in southern California, where he bred Ayshire and Angus cattle, or in Switzerland, where, in his youth he studied with Dr. Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst.

During World War I, Mr. McCormick served for a while with the American Field Service, an ambulance corps, in France. He then returned home to enter Princeton.

In 1925, before joining International Harvester, he took part in an expedition to Africa with Dr. Jung to study African natives, an experience that followed a winter's study among American blacks.

Years later, as head of International Harvester, Mr. McCormick set up a research division on labor‐management relations, and instituted one of the foremost anti-discriminatory race policies in American labor relations.

His concern for black Americans continued throughout the remainder of his life as a parIticipant in the United Negro College Fund Campaign and the Committee on Race Relations.

In his dealings with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which organized agricultural industry workers, Mr. McCormick held to the theory that the task of big business was the “balancing of the tripod of stockholders, consumers and employes.”

Expounding on his business theories before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Economic Report in 1947, he said that “when a company, attains a certain size it becomes, in a sense, a social institution and, as such, should be operated, not in the interest of any single group, but equally lin the interests of our stockholders, our employes and our customers.”

His wife, the former Anna Potter, died at their former Scottsdale, Arizona ranch in 1969. Surviving are four stepchildren, 16 step-grandchildren and 22 step‐great‐grandchildren.

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/07/archives/fowler-mccormick-dies-a...

THE GROTON AVERY CLAN, Vol. I, by Elroy McKendree Avery and Catherine Hitchcock (Tilden) Avery, Cleveland, 1912. p. 587