Toledo's Golden Rule.(Samuel Jones)(Biography)

Toledo, Ohio has been home to baseball-playing Mudhens, cross-dressing MASH corporals, and-stranger yet--the most colorful Tolstoyan anarchist ever to bear the honorific "Mayor."

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 thunder of Christianity, was a livable and practical thing."

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 filing 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 ...