And it reveals the explosive desperation that propelled McCormick through the steel shutters on a bathroom window and out onto the manicured grounds of his 87-acre estate, where he wound up with his physician’s pet orangutan, each masturbating the other.
Did McCormick really break out of his private rail car and attack a woman while being transported by train from a Boston asylum to California? Did his sister Mary Virginia, who also suffered from mental illness, strip naked in front of Stanley in the bathroom of their Rush Street mansion while their father’s body lay in state in the parlor? Was the only woman he ever had sex with a Paris hooker he picked up hours after seeing off his domineering mother on her voyage home to Chicago? Did he sleep in a harness? Did his wife have a long-term lesbian relationship while trying to find a cure for him? When he looked in the mirror, did Stanley sometimes see a dog’s face instead of his own?
A recent New York Times story observed that “with the growing popularity of personal memoirs, political confessionals and ‘nonfiction novels,’ truth is coming under increasing pressure in the publishing industry’s quest for entertaining, vividly written stories that are easier to market with the stamp of authenticity.”
“I like the story of Stanley and Katherine because there was trouble between them that hooked up to questions about who we are, what is normal, and what fidelity means in a marriage,” Boyle says. “In our heterosexual lives, some people can do it and some people can’t. They can’t cross the barrier of letting their animal nature come through, of shutting down their conscious mind for a while. Stanley is an extreme case of that.”
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Word quickly spread far beyond Cyrus’s home turf, Rockbridge County, Virginia, that someone had at last developed a machine that farmers had wanted for centuries. According to Seed-Time, 1809-1856, the first of two volumes in a biography of Cyrus written by University of Chicago history professor William Hutchinson in 1930, horsepower had been applied years before to other labor-intensive farm tasks such as plowing, seeding, and hay raking, but harvesting grain was still being done the way it had been for 6,000 years–by hand. “There were few tasks of the farmer less idyllic or more back-breaking and exhausting,” Hutchinson wrote.
In 1848 McCormick sold 800 reapers, and the business kept booming. By 1864 he was said to have a personal income of $2,000 a day. With his brothers overseeing things in Chicago, he traveled around the world touting his machine, defending his patent against all competitors, and befriending Napoleon III and other world figures.
