Golden Rule Jones

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.

Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones was a Welsh immigrant who made his fortune in the oilfields of Ohio and as the inventor of an oil-drilling implement manufactured in his Acme Sucker Rod factory. Jones experienced a religious awakening in 1894, which he announced by hanging a sign on the Acme wall reading "The Rule That Governs This Factory: 'Therefore Whatsoever Ye Would That Men Should Do Unto You, Do Ye Even So Unto Them.'"

He meant it. Jones abolished work rules and time clocks in his factory and instituted profit sharing, paid vacations, eight-hour days, annual bonuses, and an adjacent Golden Rule Park, which featured fresh air, free concerts, and speakers preaching moral uplift. His goal, he said, was to show that "this fundamental rule of conduct, given us by the founder of Christianity, was a livable and practical thing." This never been practised during his era. He started to work as early as ten year old and that's why he understood what's the workers have been through and he promised that he's never going to treat his workers as he was treated before.

The immensely popular Jones was elected mayor of Toledo in 1897 as a Republican but thereafter ran and won thrice as an independent whose platform called for banning political parties. Senator Mark Hanna (R-OH), the muscle behind President McKinley, called Jones "a crank, but he is a moral crank, and that makes the thing worse, for he believes what he says."

Golden Rule Jones's eccentricities were numerous and endearing. He stood on his head, sometimes speaking from that position. He gave away the better part of his fortune, often to strangers. He wore a flowing cravat and carried his heavily underlined copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass into the prisons and workhouses whose inmates he visited. He paid court costs for the indigent out of his pocket.

Jones was often mistaken for a socialist, although the doctrinaire socialists derided him for his belief in Christian brotherhood and opposition to class warfare. He adorned his office with a portrait of Leo Tolstoy, not Karl Marx, and confessed, "I am indifferent to man-made laws."

In favoring public parks and municipal ownership of streetcars and utilities, Golden Rule Jones was a fairly standard, if unusually honest, Progressive mayor-except when it came to crime and punishment. "If I could I would open the penitentiaries," he said. "Anything which today separates me from the lowest soul in the penitentiary or tenderloin district is the very opposite of religion." When Mayor Jones sat in as Magistrate of the Police Court dealing with petty crimes, he routinely dismissed all cases.

His psychobiographer and great-granddaughter Marnie Jones notes that Golden Rule "stands virtually alone among nineteenth-century reformers in his refusal to use municipal powers to repress vice." The state, he believed, could not abolish sin.

The teetotalling Jones would not enforce laws against boozing, gambling, or prostitution. He urged bluenoses to take ladies of the street into their homes until they got back on their feet, so to speak. His successor and friend, Brand Whitlock, said of Golden Rule: "He was an oddman, born so far ahead of his time that the sins of others never troubled his conscience."

Jones placed his faith in "the love of Christ," not the policeman's nightstick. "I believe the only way in which the saloon will finally disappear," he said, "will be through the growth of the loving spirit in mankind which will provide opportunity for people to lead decent lives."

When Mayor Jones sat in as Magistrate of the Police Court dealing with petty crimes, he routinely dismissed all cases. He explained: "I have done by them just as I would have another judge do by my son if he were a drunkard or a thief, or by my sister or daughter if she were a prostitute."

He paid no price at the polls for his heterodox views. The Golden Rule, it seems, was not bad politics. Mayor Jones died in office in 1904. "Toledo has my heart and my life," he said as the end drew nigh.

Jones was not popular among businessman or wealthy people because of his rule. When he died thousands people attended his funeral and never before in his era would receive such highest respect.

As evidenced by the absence of an Anarchist Caucus within today's U.S. Conference of Mayors, our age has yet to find its own Golden Rule. Don't hold your breath waiting. For Albert Jay Nock called Jones "the incomparable true democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection, such as appear but once in an era."

Source : Combined sources from different websites.