Samuel
Milton Jones was born in Ty Mawr, Wales,
on 8th August, 1846. The family emigrated in 1849 to the United States
and settled in New York. After a brief
schooling he started work at the age of ten.
At eighteen Jones moved to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he found
work in the oil industry as a driller, pumper, tool-dresser and pipe-liner.
After inventing an improved oil-pumping mechanism, in 1892, Jones
set up his own business, the Acme Sucker Rod Company, in Toledo, Ohio.
Jones made a considerable fortune manufacturing his invention.
Jones was was also influenced by the views of William
Morris, Walt Whitman and Leo
Tolstoy. A generous employer, Jones introduced a profit-sharing
scheme, an eight-hour day, a forty-eight week week, paid holidays
and free recreational facilities. His critics claimed he was a Socialist,
but as his great friend Brad Whitlock
was to say later, "although he shared the Socialists's great
dream of an ordered society" he could never "endure anything
so doctrinaire as Socialism".
In 1897 Jones, a member of the Republican
Party, stood for the post of mayor of Toledo. During his campaign
advocated the public ownership of utilities, free parks and playgrounds,
and an end to corruption in city government. Jones was elected but
he was seen as too radical by the Republicans and they put up an alternative
candidate in 1899. Jones now stood as an independent and was so popular
he won 70 per cent of the vote.
Samuel Milton Jones was also re-elected in 1901 and 1903 but died
while in office on 12th July, 1904. In his will, Jones left a large
sum to his employees.
(1)
The Toledo Times (6 October 1940)
In 1893 Jones invented the "sucker rod." This permitted
deep-well drilling. He patented his invention and began to manufacture
it. In 1894 he began Acme Sucker Rod Company. His factory was open
during a time of depression and Toledoans sought work there. In his
company he enforced the Golden Rule. He treated his employees well
and paid them a fair wage. He also had workers keep their own time,
gave employees paid vacations, had company insurance plans, and allowed
employees to be active in profit sharing.
Jones was elected mayor of Toledo on February 25, 1897, after having
lived in Toledo for only five years. He was a progressive mayor who
preached Christ's teachings, supported the idea of equality of men,
and focused on establishing a uniform three-cent fare on streetcars,
as well as solving problems of unemployment and poverty. A campaign
promise was to establish public parks and playgrounds. He believed
this was important and, as an example, he purchased vacant ground
that adjoined his factory and equipped it with everything necessary
for a playground. This area, named Golden Rule Park, was created three
years after he was elected mayor.
(2)
Brand Whitlock wrote about Samuel
Jones in his book Forty Years Of It (1914)
Samuel Jones was a man who tried to practice the fundamental
philosophy of Christianity. All the newspapers were against him, and
all the preachers. When the people came to vote for his re-election
his majorities were overwhelming, so that he used to say that everybody
was against him but the people.
In those days I had not met him. One day, suddenly, as I was working
on a story in my office, in he stepped with a startling, abrupt manner,
wheeled a chair up to my desk, and sat down. He was a big Welshman
with a sandy complexion and great hands that had worked hard in their
time, and he had an eye that looked right into the centre of your
skull. He wore, and all the time he was in the room continued to wear,
a large cream-coloured slouch hat, and he had on the flowing cravat
which for some inexplicable reason artists and social reformers wear;
their affinity being due, no doubt, to the fact that the reformer
must be an artist of a sort, else he could not dream his dreams.
He had a practical air of the very practical business man he had been
before he became mayor. He had been such a practical business man
that he was worth half a million, a fairly good fortune for our town;
but he had not been in office very long before all the business men
were down on him, and saying that what the town needed was a business
man for mayor. They disliked him of course because he would not do
just what they told him to that being the meaning and purpose of a
business man for mayor. The politicians and preachers objected to
him on the same grounds: the unpardonable sin being to express in
any but a purely ideal and sentimental form sympathy for the workers
or the poor.
(3)
Samuel Jones, The New Patriotism: A Golden-Rule Government for
Cities (1899)
The ethics of the wild beast, the survival of the strongest, shrewdest,
and meanest, have been the inspiration of our materialistic lives
during the last quarter or half century. The fact in our national
history has brought us today face to face with the inevitable result.
We have cities in which a few are wealthy, a few are in what may be
called comfortable circumstances, vast numbers are propertyless, and
thousands are in pauperism and crime. Certainly, no reasonable person
will contend that this is the goal that we have been struggling for;
that the inequalities that characterize our rich and poor represent
the idea that the founders of this republic saw when they wrote that
"All men are created equal."
The new patriotism is the love of the millions that is already planning
for and opening the way to better things, to a condition of life under
this government when every child born in it will have an equal opportunity
with every other child to live the best possible kind of life that
he or she can live. This is the new patriotism - that feeling within
one's breast that tells us that there can be no prosperity for some
without there is a possibility for some prosperity for all, and that
there can be no peace for some without opportunity for some peace
for all; that man is a social being, society is a unit, an organism,
not a heap of separate grains of sand, each one struggling for its
own welfare. We are all so inextricably bound together that there
is no possibility of finding the individual good except in the good
of all.
The competitive idea at present dominant is most of our political
and business life is, of course, the seed root of all the trouble.
The people are beginning to understand that we have been pursuing
a policy of plundering ourselves, that in the foolish scramble to
make individuals rich we have been making all poor. "For a hundred
years or so," says Henry Demarest Lloyd, "our economic theory
has been one of industrial government by the self-interest of the
individual; political government by the self-interest of the individual
we call anarchy." It is one of the paradoxes of public opinion
that the people of America, least tolerant of this theory of anarchy
in political government, lead in practicing it in industry. We are
coming to see that the true philosophy of government is to let the
individual do what the individual can do best, and let the government
do what the government can do best.
Our cities are to be saved by the development of the collective idea.
We are coming to understand that every public utility and necessity
to the public welfare should be publicly owned, publicly operated,
and publicly paid for. Among the properties that according to any
scientific conception of the purpose of government should be so owned
are waterworks, heating and lighting plants, street railways, telephones,
fire alarms, telegraphs, parks, playgrounds, baths, wash-houses, municipal
printing establishments, and many other industries necessary to the
welfare of the whole family that can only be successfully operated
by the family in the interests of the whole family.
(4)
James Rodabaugh, Northwest Ohio Quarterly (January, 1943)
The story of his life was one that appealed to native Americans
and immigrants of the lower economic levels, for, as told in his autobiography,
it was a story of "rags to riches." Born in an ancient stone
house in North Wales in 1846, he emigrated in steerage to America
at the age of three. The family, including seven children, settled
in Lewis County, New York, where the father worked in the stone quarries,
as a stone mason, and as a farmer. Sam started to work at ten years
old; at fourteen he was working in a saw mill twelve hours a day.
A few years later lie left home for the oil fields around Titusville,
Pennsylvania.
Jones had been working on improvements for oil well machinery. After
Standard Oil declared lack of interest in his patents, he established
his own factory, the Acme Sticker Rod Company, to manufacture clasp
joint couplings, pull-rods, combination clamp stirrups, and line pumping
jacks. His entry into modern industry brought him a fortune and a
social awakening. When swarms of men sought work at his factory, he
met for the first time a different kind of man, piteous in his appeal
and groveling in his feeling of inferiority before employer and boss.
This Jones could not stomach. He immediately adopted as his motto:
"The Business of this shop is to make men; the making of money
is only air incidental detail." He "ignored the sacred rules
of business," and posted only one rule for himself and his industry,
"Therefore, whatsoever things ye would that men should do to
you, do you even so to them." His attempt to run his shop according
to this precept won for him the sobriquet, "Golden Rule"
Jones.
He determined to set up a shop without "rules" or "bosses";
he established the eight-hour day and forty-eight-hour week, while
other plants were working ten and twelve hours for six days; no child
labor was permitted, and no "piece-work" or "piece
price" plan; overtime was abolished to allow for the employment
of more men; there were no timekeepers, no timeclock, and no "ringing
in" (each man kept his own time); a week’s vacation with
pay was granted to every worker; every man with the company a year
got a minimum of twelve dollars a week, and at Christmas a bonus of
five per cent of the years salary was given. Outings and picnics were
enjoyed by the employees and their families.
Jones encouraged music, and supported the organization of a chorus
and a band by his workers. At the corner of Segur and Field Avenues
lie converted a lot into Golden Rule Park and Playground. Here on
Sunday afternoons he sponsored concerts and presented noted speakers.
With the help of his sister Ellen, he established Golden Rule House
as a community center, and here a kindergarten was established. Over
the shop he opened Golden Rule Hall for club and social meetings.
Here to he furnished the noon meal to his workers at fifteen cents.
A co-operative insurance program was inaugurated in which employees
and the factory established a fund to pay sickness arid injury benefits,
the workers managing the fund and making rules for distribution. In
1901 Jones established a profit-sharing system by which the employees
became stockholders. Finally, shortly before his death, Jones created
the Golden Rule Trust Fund which is used to pay insurance to families
of the workers. He encouraged his men to unionize, and marched with
them in Labor Day parades.
(5)
Melvin Holli, The American Mayor (1999)
In fifth
place is Toledo's colorful Progressive Era mayor, Samuel "Golden
Rule" Jones (1897-1904). A picturesque and eccentric millionaire
manufacturer who railed against the very monopoly system (patent laws)
that had made him wealthy, Jones sometimes took to standing on his
head on streetcorners to make a point, and he preached Christian love
and brotherhood to all who would listen. He instituted a "Golden
Rule" in his factories, having to do with higher pay and more
leisure time for workers to enjoy his Golden Rule Park while listening
to his Golden Rule Band serenade the proletariat. In office, Jones
tried to humanize the city's treatment of the poor and unemployed,
took nightsticks away from the police, and frequently discharged criminals
from the police court because he believed they were the products of
a bad society. He also campaigned for municipal ownership of the utilities,
public ownership of national trusts, fair pay for labor, and a better
social order for all. And thus one of the most chronicled-by-the-press
popular mayors of the fin-de-siécle period did not escape the
notice of our experts, who ranked Jones fifth-best among all the mayors
who ever held office.
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