Samuel M. Jones

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Samuel Milton "Golden Rule" Jones (1846 - 1904) was Mayor of the Progressive Era of Toledo, Ohio from 1897 to the time of his death in 1904. Jones is famous for his loud advocacy of the proverbial Ethics or " Gold, "then his nickname. Jones was an influential advocate in city reform and oversaw the implementation of a series of humane modifications to the Toledo government during his term as mayor.

Video Samuel M. Jones

Biography

Initial years

Samuel Milton Jones was born on August 3, 1846, in T? -mawr near Beddgelert in Caernarvonshire, Wales. The Jones family was poor when Samuel was 3 years old, they immigrated to the United States to seek economic opportunities, closing in central New York state.

Because of family poverty, Jones was forced to work from a very young age and he received little formal education. After working on his family's small farm, he left at the age of 14 to work in a sawmill. From the age of 16 he started working in the summer on a steamboat.

When he was 18, Jones went to Titusville, Pennsylvania to try to find work in the growing oil industry in Western Pennsylvania. He was initially unsuccessful there and he returned to New York the following year, where he found a job and managed to save a small amount of money over the next three years.

Business career

Jones returned to Pennsylvania at the age of 22, where he began speculatively investing his little nest egg in oil leases, from which he began to accumulate wealth. Jones married and fathered three children and spent the next 15 years in the oil industry in Pennsylvania.

After the death of his wife, Jones and his two surviving children left Pennsylvania for the Ohio field in 1886. There he helped set up Ohio Oil Company, a company that was later purchased by Standard Oil Company, making Jones a wealthy man.

In 1892, Jones moved to Toledo, Ohio, the first time he lived in a major city. The following year, Panic of 1893 erupted, with the United States becoming depressed and millions of people thrown into the grasp of poverty. As a fairly wealthy person, Jones was not personally affected by the suffering around him - with an estimated 7,000 people in Lucas County, Ohio being poor and the city of Toledo forcing millions of dollars in debt - but apparently he remains emotionally affected by the economic collapse.

Jones turned his talent into a mechanical invention, acquiring a patent in 1894 for a new variation of iron pumping rods for deep well drilling. He opened a manufacturing plant in Toledo in the same year for the manufacture of so-called "sucking rods" for the oil industry - Acme Sucker Rod Company. This marks the turn of a new career for Jones, from a mineral rights speculator and an oil drilling operator with a hired wage employer in a factory environment.

Jones made the decision to operate his new company according to some emerging ideas about workplace reform. While the prevailing wage in a depressed local economy reaches $ 1.00 to $ 1.50 per day, Jones pays a living wage from $ 1.50 to $ 2.00 per day. Jones implements 8 hours a day for his workers and offers them paid vacations, income-sharing, and subsidized meals in the company's cafeteria. Jones also contributes to the workplace culture by paying instruments to employees so they can form company bands. Instead of a long list of company rules governing employee behavior, Acme Sucker Rod only posts one rule on the company's notice board: "The golden rule: Do it to others as you do to yourself."

Jones's abundance in the face of public misery grew into a legendary proportion among Toledo's inhabitants and he earned Jones's popular "Golden Rule" moniker.

Toledo Mayor

In 1897 Jones received a Republican nomination for the mayor of Toledo. Workers love the policies of his golden government and unite behind him, and he wins the election of the mayor. He is trying to improve conditions for the working class in his community. Again based on his belief in the Golden Rule, Jones:

open the free kindergarten,
develop a parking system,
set up a playground for children,
set up free public baths,
instituting eight hours a day for city workers,
take the truncheon from the police,
refused to enforce the blue law, and
reforming the city government.

These policies made Jones unpopular among the Toledo business community and his tolerance to the saloons caused him to lose the support of many moral reformers. When his term ended in 1899, Jones was not nominated back by the Republicans. He ran as independent instead of under the slogan "Principles Before the Party" won a second term with 70 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 1901 with 57% of the vote and again in 1903 with 48% of the votes in the three-way race.

Death and inheritance

Jones is a Christian Socialist. He was influenced by Henry George, but argued that "the land is not the only property that is in the social and not the individual.... Is not the machine a social product, the result of centuries of experimentation and discovery? In short, Is not all of our civilizations essentially social product? Back from every inventor stands a thousand others who make his invention possible.The backs of every enterprising capitalist stand all over the nation, without which one of his plans can succeed...... No one can point to his gold pile and say 'Himself I got it.' The so-called Socialism is not a visionary plan for remodeling society, it is a current fact, which has not been recognized in the distribution of wealth. "

"Golden Rule" Jones died suddenly during his second term as mayor on July 12, 1904. Toledo residents marched on the streets to see his funeral procession. His successor, Brand Whitlock, continues Jones' reform efforts.