(Harold) Fowler McCormick was a member of the third generation of the McCormick family to head the International Harvester Company, which had its beginnings in the McCormick Harvester Company founded by Fowler McCormick's grandfather, Cyrus Hall McCormick, the inventor of the reaper.
Fowler McCormick was the first child born to Harold F. McCormick and Edith Rockefeller McCormick. He was born in Chicago on 15 November 1898, heir to two of the country's most notable economic dynasties. His father was the third son of Cyrus Hall McCormick; and his mother, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune.
McCormick attended the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and then Groton in Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1916. During World War I, he served with the American Field Service in France as an ambulance driver, returning home in 1918 to enter Princeton University.
After graduation from Princeton in 1921, McCormick organized his own brokerage firm rather than choosing a career in either Standard Oil or the International Harvester Company, of which his father was then president. Until 1925, he operated this small firm while studying accounting at night. That year he started work as a twenty-five-cent-an-hour student-apprentice at Harvester's Milwaukee plant. For the next four years as student-apprentice he studied manufacturing, engineering, and selling. McCormick worked his way up in the company, becoming president of International Harvester in 1941, from which position he supervised the 1944 reorganization of the company. In 1946 he was elected Chairman of the Board, becoming the chief executive and policy making official.
As head of International Harvester, McCormick set up a research division on labor-management relations and instituted one of the foremost anti-discriminatory policies in American labor relations. In his dealings with the CIO, McCormick developed a new industrial relations theory, balancing the “tripod of stockholders, consumers, and employees.”
McCormick resigned as Harvester's Chairman of the Board in 1951, but remained a member of the Board until 1958.
McCormick married Anne Potter Stillman on 4 June 1931. They had no children, but raised her four children from a previous marriage. Anne McCormick died in 1969, and Fowler McCormick on 6 January 1972 in Palm Desert, California.
