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Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones: Music and the Social Good in Progressive Era Toledo, Ohio

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.41.1.08

1945-2349

Mary Natvig,

Race, History, and American Society

Samuel Milton “Golden Rule” Jones (1846–1904), “the talk of the fin de siècle national reform community,”2 was an unconventional, rags-to-riches industrialist and mayor of Toledo, Ohio, who believed that music “had much to do with bringing about nearly every measure of reform that has thus far blessed this world.”3 Like those whom Derek Valliant describes as musical progressives,4 Jones used music as both a metaphor and means for his social, industrial, and civic reforms—in particular, the alleviation of the working man's feelings of social inferiority, which he believed was one of the systemic barriers to equality.For Jones and other musical progressives, all types of music, high and low, “symbolized . . . the harmony of the world.”5 He demonstrated that a wide range of musical styles and genres could serve as a means toward social empowerment: community singing in his factory park; art music performances in the dining hall; the amateur chorus and band that he established for his employees, the “Golden Rule Negro Quartet,” which took part in his last mayoral campaign; and his beloved Welsh (and other) Sängerfest traditions all upheld his belief in the power of music to facilitate a just American society. Jones's six “freedom songs,” his texts set to patriotic and religious tunes, expressed the core elements of his religious and reform beliefs in his factory and mayoral campaigns. His eight-hour day song, “Divide the Day: A Practical Reply to the Question, What Shall We Do for the Unemployed” (lyrics by Jones and music composed by his second wife, Helen Beach Jones, a prominent Toledo musician) is the only husband/wife collaboration in that genre. The music and leisure initiatives established in his factory and his commonly dropped musical metaphors all served to disseminate his reform agenda among his employees and the citizens of Toledo. Jones's initiatives illustrate what Eyerman and Jamison describe as the “identity-giving” agent of music as social reform, which Jones used as a vehicle for both “knowledge and action,” thus challenging the social and industrial status quo in turn-of-the twentieth-century Toledo.6As a factory owner, Jones was primarily concerned with labor conditions and the empowerment of the working class. He established an eight-hour workday (rare in Toledo at the time), music ensembles for his employees, and a community park for concerts, speakers, dancing, and other leisure activities. As mayor, Jones strongly supported municipal ownership of utilities,7 opened free kindergartens, provided public concerts, founded a zoo and public playgrounds, lowered trolley fares, and improved schools, streets, and the sewer system. He brought the police and fire departments under civil service regulations, took away policemen's clubs, and sought more equitable punishments for lawbreakers.8 Jones provided public baths and organized a committee to aid the city's poor and find lodging for the homeless.9Much to the dismay of the city's prominent citizens, Jones did not close the brothels; instead, he suggested that Toledo's clergy and upper-class citizens shelter at least one woman in their home until she found other employment (and he offered to take two “of the worst” home with him). Needless to say, the plan never materialized, and the brothels remained open. In addition, Jones (a teetotaler himself) did not support prohibition or blue laws and kept saloons (which he called the workingmen's social clubs) open on Sundays. Jones felt that when well-paid jobs were available for “every child of God,” saloon-goers would find other interests; he also criticized the clergy for thinking that saloons, gambling, and brothels were the only kinds of evils in the world. Jones felt that if rich churchgoers spent more time providing jobs for the unemployed, they would accomplish more for temperance than closing saloons.10The driving force behind Jones's reform initiatives was his adherence to the Social Gospel and, later, Christian socialism.11 Washington Gladden and George Herron, prominent leaders of the Social Gospel movement, as well as Christian socialists such as Leo Tolstoy, influenced him significantly. Jones repeatedly made no secret of his contempt for mainstream clergy and parishioners alike, often telling churchgoing oilmen that “they might as well quit praying and going to church and quit saying complimentary things about God” unless they supported social reforms for their workers.12 Jones maintained that the Christian message was “almost wholly social, having to do with the conditions of life that He [Jesus] found people in,” and that Jesus said very little about the “place beyond the skies.”13 For Jones and other Social Gospel adherents, Christianity was concerned with loving one's neighbor and treating others as one wanted to be treated.14 Music was his megaphone.At age three, Jones and his impoverished family emigrated from Wales to the United States and settled in a rural Welsh community in upstate New York. Unlike most Progressive Era reformers, Jones had little formal education—fewer than three years of elementary school. At 14 he left home, worked 12 hours a day in a sawmill, and then spent several years on odd jobs that included summers on a steamboat. At 22, Jones began to work in the Pennsylvania oil fields, where he was eventually able to invest in oil leases and build his wealth.15In 1875, Jones married his first wife, Alma Bernice Curtiss, of Pleasantville, Pennsylvania. Curtiss was from a landowning, upper-middle-class family, taught piano lessons, and was the Sunday school organist. Jones, who was described by contemporaries as a “musician of no mean ability”16 and a “fine violinist,”17 shared his affinity for music with Alma. His library, which contained works on poetry, aesthetics, and music, also included an annotated music-notation primer on basic rhythms and meters. One might wonder if the primer, labeled “Pleasantville 1870,” indicated an attempt to learn music notation during his courtship with Alma.18The couple had three children, but the death of their young daughter devastated Jones. After Alma's sudden death four years later, he and his two young sons moved to Lima, Ohio, where Jones and other investors took advantage of the recent northwest Ohio oil boom and formed the Ohio Oil Company.19 Jones would later sell his interest to Standard Oil, making him a multimillionaire by today's standards. At the age of 46, Samuel Jones had achieved the “American dream.”In 1892, Jones married Helen Beach (1857–1940), a Toledo native and professionally trained organist.20 Like Alma, Helen was upper class, educated, and a church musician who, at the time she and Jones met, was serving Lima's Market Street Presbyterian Church.21 Following their wedding, the couple moved to Toledo, where Helen would become the organist for her childhood church, Westminster Presbyterian, one of the city's most musically elite churches.22 Performer, music teacher, and clubwoman, Helen founded and directed Toledo's Eurydice Club, a women's chorus that was among the city's prominent music ensembles for 50 years.23In 1894, Jones founded Toledo's Acme Sucker Rod Company that produced his newly invented pump, needed for the deeper oil wells in northwest Ohio.24 His self-described “awakening” occurred when he encountered “swarms of hungry men . . . begging for work” at the newly opened factory,25 and his search for resolution was facilitated when he began to ask himself, “What would Jesus do?,” a reference to Charles Sheldon's popular Social Gospel novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1896).26 The book tells the fictional story of a midwestern minister who challenges his congregation to ask the titular question before making decisions or taking action. Sheldon's message resonated with Jones, who was primarily concerned with the fundamental message of Christianity. This message, as Jones saw it, was the Golden Rule: “I have no other purpose than to be Christian on the basis of loving my neighbor as myself whether my neighbor is a church member or a non-church member, a saloon keeper or a store-keeper; a gambler or an oppressor of labor; always remembering that he is my brother—an erring brother, perhaps, but my brother just the same.”27 During an interview in 1899, Jones remarked, “It is nearly nineteen hundred years since Jesus gave [the Golden Rule] to the world, and the least his professed followers can do is to try to follow it.”28 Shortly after reading Sheldon's book, Jones wrote his first song lyrics, “Divide the Day,” for which Helen Beach Jones composed the accompanying music (see below).29Like George Herron, Jones would come to believe that the church, as an institution, misrepresented the teachings of Jesus and was not Christian. Herron's works inspired Jones's most significant accomplishment, for which he was recognized by fellow reformers as well as modern historians: the establishment the Golden Rule Policy in his factory.30 Printed on a piece of tin and nailed to the factory wall, the rule—“Therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so onto them” [Matthew 7:12]—governed the shop, and “Golden Rule” quickly became his sobriquet. Whereas other factories featured long strings of rigid rules that always ended with threats of dismissal, only the Golden Rule was displayed at Jones's factory. He called it the “first radical move that was made at the Acme Sucker Rod Company.”31 Not only did the policy disregard contemporary labor practices, it also acknowledged a basis of equality for all in the community and assumed that the rule of conduct was a practical and livable ideal rather than an empty Biblical platitude. Jones's political and social Christian beliefs were firmly connected; he believed that a just society would never be realized unless religion and politics became one.32 Religion for Jones, however, was far removed (as he often reminded his audiences) from the Christianity preached from the pulpit.Jones practiced his religion in his factory, where he established unusually progressive labor practices: a company insurance plan, paid vacation, and an eight-hour day, allowing him to institute two shifts per day and employ more workers in a time of severe economic depression. Each shift paid as much as the going 10-hour day, and, as far as Jones knew, he was the first to implement such a practice in his field.33 He also engaged in profit sharing, did not hire children, encouraged his employees to create a union, provided a Christmas bonus of five percent, and personally subsidized a hot lunch program.34In the mid-to-late 1890s, with a goal toward improving lifestyles and breaking down class barriers, Jones began to establish musical activities for his factory workers and neighborhood residents. When he opened the factory, Jones realized that “for the first time [he] came into contact with working men who seemed to have a sense of social inferiority, wholly incapable of any conception of equality.”35 Determined to overcome what he called a “groveling [self-]conception,” Jones began to address his employees’ self-esteem. At first, he sponsored picnics that mixed employees and their families with others who, according to Jones, “lived in big houses and did not work with their hands.”36 Eventually his convictions led to the establishment of factory music ensembles (see below) and three significant gathering places: Golden Rule Park, Golden Rule House, and Golden Rule Hall, where the activities and purposes were similar to those of the settlement house movement in large cities such as Chicago, though, in this case, they were supported by Jones alone. He was particularly influenced by Jane Addams, a close family friend who was often a guest at the Joneses’ home. Samuel referred to her as “the Divine Jane.”37 The families of Jones's employees, as well as those from the working-class neighborhood that surrounded the factory, could avail themselves of the social, intellectual, and musical pursuits that emanated from these venues, all designed by Jones to enrich lives, build confidence, and promote the teaching and study of brotherhood.38The first of the gathering places, which opened in 1897, was Golden Rule Park (Figure 2), where 3,000 people once gathered to hear Toledo's first free outdoor concert. Attracting over 20,000 visitors in the first summer, the park became a popular meeting place as well as a center for music and free speech. “Its specific [intent],” Jones wrote, “was to push forward the idea of the importance of music in the public parks.”39The music director was Frederick H. Bargy, an acclaimed Michigan vocalist who was said to be “endowed with a voice far superior to that of most men.”40 He was also a choir director and the first director of the Toledo Police Band, which Jones helped to establish.41 Listed as a “musician” in the 1900 Toledo City Directory, Bargy was appointed the next year as Toledo's market master (city superintendent of markets) under Jones's mayorship.42 The two appear to have been close, and Jones's appointment of the musician reveals his belief that supporting artists was part of a socially just society (see Figure 2).Slightly less than an acre, Golden Rule Park was next to the factory and cost Jones $500 [ca. $19,000 today].43 It included a speaker's area, playground, ballpark, flowerbeds, and gravel walks. There was music on Wednesday evenings (which sometimes included a two-step for dancing) and longer programs on Sundays. Music was always an important part of the park's programming, and news of the park's musical events reached as far as Chicago: On certain evenings when the summer gets warm, a small band of four or five pieces usually plays here in a quiet sort of way, and when this occurs the young people sometimes seize the opportunity for an open-air dance on the tennis court. The pleasant Sunday afternoons held here during the summer and presided over by Mr. Jones himself draw together many hundreds of people. They are of a semi-religious character. Social or political topics, such as “brotherhood,” “the Golden Rule,” or “patriotism” are discussed with perfect freedom and there is a chorus singing, led usually by a small string band. One of the favorite songs of the place is the mayor's own eight-hour day labor song, “Divide the Day,” the words of which were written by him and the music by his wife.44Jones reminded attendees to “bring your voices with you so as to take part in the singing,”45 which featured Jones's labor songs. Words were printed in the programs or on colorful souvenir ribbons. Other songs must have been included, however, because in 1898 Jones wrote to a contact in New York City requesting labor songs “to use at our summer meetings at a little park that we call Golden Rule.”46 Two years later, he ordered 200 copies of “Brewers’ Collection of Songs,” issued monthly and advertised for four cents each.47 He also offered to send the publishers “a couple of labor songs of [his] own, words and music,” should they want to publish them.48 Jones's wording is curious here, as we know of only one of his songs with original music (“Divide the Day”). Perhaps he is referring to his contrafacta, or perhaps he and Helen collaborated on other songs that are not extant.Samuel and Helen's only coauthored song specifically addressed the workday issue. The song was copyrighted in 1897 and printed in the United Mine Workers’ Journal in September 1898.49 According to Philip S. Foner, no single labor movement has produced more songs than the eight-hour-workday initiative, but like most labor songs of the nineteenth century, they were contrafacta, with the lyrics usually set to popular melodies.50 Foner also supposes that many of these songs never “got off the printed page” and into oral tradition.51 Although it is unlikely that “Divide the Day” was widespread, newspaper accounts attest to its recognition among the citizens of Toledo.The Joneses’ song is unusual. Not only is the text composed by a factory owner, but the music is also newly composed—by a woman—and it appears to be the only husband-wife labor song of the time. The piece is one of the last documented workday songs, a tradition that dates back to the 1840s. The eight-hour day itself, however, was late to Toledo: Jones first established it for his factory workers in 1897 and instituted it for city workers during his tenure as mayor.Jones's straightforward, idealistic text appealed to the crowds. To argue his cause, he invokes the “good will of men,” “logic,” and God to show how simple and practical the “answer” is. With the line “if you're willing to help brother men on the way” (v.1), Jones appeals to man's good nature—and then to his common sense: “when father has work, there'll be no lack of bread” (v.1). Finally, there's no arguing the point when, in the second verse, God himself is cited as the source of the idea: “eight hours for work, eight hours for play, eight hours for rest: ’twas our Father above that gave us this plan” (v. 2). This line, which divides the day into three eight-hour segments, recalls the most famous eight-hour-day song written in 1878 by Rev. James H. Jones (no relation), words by I.G. Blanchard. Their refrain, “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will,” was chanted at the 1896 May Day workers’ strike and became the rallying cry for the movement and the inspiration for many subsequent songs.52Helen Jones's music consists of an introduction, three strophic verses, and chorus. The melodically related introduction and chorus are in triple meter with a lilting “boom-chunk-chunk” accompaniment, rendering the Tempo di Waltz marking almost unnecessary. The mood is reminiscent of a “Bowery waltz” (cf. the chorus to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”). For the verses, Helen switches meter to 6/8, although a triple meter feeling (times two) is maintained. In the verses, however, the accompaniment becomes more varied, with dotted notes that support the text when needed. The verses are more subdivided than the chorus (perhaps the reason she switched to 6/8), accommodating her husband's dense text that sometimes scans awkwardly (see for instance, Example 1, verse 1, mm. 23, 27). In the verses, the mood shifts to something reminiscent of an energetic revival hymn, with phrases arching up and down by leaps of thirds and fourths and with the first, third, and fifth scale degrees as melodic targets.The only extant Golden Rule Park program (Sunday, October 3, 1897, at 3:00 PM) featured the Toledo Musician's Union Band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” “Hunt for Happiness [by A. Brunde],” “Divide the Day” (with the text for the chorus printed on the program), “Light Cavalry Overture” [von Suppe], and “America.” The address was given by Reverend S. Sherin,53 followed by “short talks on the subject ‘Music for the People’ by Judge James Austin and businessman, Richard Kind—and others.” The audience was invited to sing along with the chorus to “Divide the Day” and “America.”54 According to Jones's writings, the program seems to have been representative of a typical Sunday afternoon at Golden Rule Park, with musical performances, group singing, and speeches. Eventually factory workers would perform as part of the Golden Rule Band and Chorus. Jones often spoke at the park's events, as did invited guests such as Washington Gladden, Jane Addams and George Hooker of Hull House, Eugene Debs, and Dr. John Henry Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan. Jones reported, “We have talks upon topics of general interest—brotherhood, man's relation to man, the golden rule, socialism, transportation and kindred topics, by people of varied phases of religious belief. At one time we had a Christian minister, a Jewish rabbi and an agnostic discussing from the same platform the subject of the Golden Rule.”55In 1899, one of the park's speakers was the radical feminist, Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman], author of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”56 Gilman had just published her book, Women and Economics (1898), a groundbreaking work that promoted the financial independence of women and a restructuring of marriage and family. Gilman advocated women's suffrage and was a socialist. Shortly after her talk, Jones wrote enthusiastically in favor of women's suffrage, arguing that equality is not served when “one half of the race [is considered to be] politically and socially inferior to men, and we can only have an orderly, fair play government as we abandon these barbarous notions and build on the idea of equality.”57 He believed that society would not be perfect until women were the political and social equals of men.58Three years after these written declarations, however, Jones wrote to Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, one of Ohio's leading advocates of women's suffrage, and asserted that, although he is in favor of women voting (“Am I for woman [sic] suffrage? Yes”), he sees the main obstacle is that “women do not want it.”59 (Perhaps his opinion was based on the fact that a 1904 census claims only five percent of the city's adult women were registered to vote in local Toledo elections.)60 Later in the letter, Jones cites Walt Whitman's assertions that the greatest “divine function” of women is maternity, and Jones tells Upton that until women get the vote, they should “set themselves to the task of becoming mothers of the right kind of voters.”61 Although Jones begins the letter with a pro-suffrage stance, one wonders how the rest of the content was greeted by Harriet Taylor Upton or Jones's own pro-suffrage wife and their friend, Toledo's Pauline Steinem (Gloria Steinem's grandmother).After Golden Rule Park, the next establishment was Golden Rule House, inspired by Jones's 1896 visit to Chicago's Hull House.62 Jones was impressed by what he saw and within two years established a similar, though more modest, institution across the street from his factory in Toledo. Among the many programs of Golden Rule House, which also provided temporary housing, was a “mother's club,” a library, and a free kindergarten—until that function was taken over by the public schools, which was one of Jones's accomplishments as mayor.63 Unlike Hull House, there is no evidence of musical activity at Golden Rule House.The third gathering place, Golden Rule Hall, was described by a reporter for Cleveland's Plain Dealer as “the most democratic dining room in the world.”64 A large, bright room above the factory, the hall featured pictures on the walls that included mottos from the Bible, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Burns, and, of course, the Golden Rule sign. It was a place where workers ate their noon meal with Jones, sang songs, and mingled with frequent guests: politicians, reformers, musicians, and poets, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, the son of former slaves and one of the first Black poets to attain an international reputation. Jones admired Dunbar, who lived in Toledo between 1895 and 1897, and his library contained four of Dunbar's books.65 Jones would later encourage Dunbar to take up the mantle of the reformer: “I yet hope to hear you sing for the disinherited and downtrodden millions, black and white. . .”66On one occasion, two members of the Walter Damrosch orchestra “sang as sweetly for and with the common man, as they did to their fashionable audience at the Valentine Theater.”67 There was a “good piano” in the room and a violin (perhaps belonging to Jones) nearby. Members of the Golden Rule Band, “which [had] a recognized standing among city musical organizations” and the Glee Club [also called the Golden Rule Singing Club and/or the Golden Rule Chorus] rehearsed in the hall and took part in the Friday evening programs. It is not hard to imagine that Helen Beach Jones, with all of her connections, also provided or arranged for music in the hall, as she sometimes did for the Sunday park programs.We get a glimpse of the results of these venues and the relationship that Jones had with his employees from a Cincinnati Post reporter, writing in 1903, shortly before Jones's death. After eating with Jones and the men in Golden Rule Hall, he reports: [We] ran into a bunch of bare-armed, hairy-chested workmen, lounging around, smoking up their noon hour . . . The Mayor stepped in among them, and waving his arms began to sing: “I'm a man without a party” . . . [one of Jones's contrafacta] during which the men joined in the chorus and cheered him. [Later] a hum of machinery was wafting across the yard through the open door, and a group of laborers, starting to work, commenced to sing the refrain of a freedom song to an old weird Welsh air [“Freedom Day,” see below]. “Do you hear that?” exclaimed the Mayor, as he began swaying from side to side, and beating time to the tune with both arms. The men wound up with a cheer.68Figure 3.Newspaper clipping from the Cincinnati Post, April 13, 1903.Figure 3. Newspaper clipping from the Cincinnati Post, April 13, 1903.Regardless of whether the men were posturing for the reporter, the story reflects a music-inspired congeniality between boss and worker that was rare for the time.In Tolstoy's What Is Art, a volume found in Jones's home library, we see similarities between the two men's ideas regarding the arts and politics.69 Jones's many writings, filled with musical allusions, indicate that he subscribed to Tolstoy's basic premises that the purpose of art was to engender feelings of brotherhood, to make the love of one's neighbor a universal sentiment, and “that art should unite different people in common feeling and destroy separation,”70 a concept that Jones also subscribed to and practiced. Given his affinity for music, it is no surprise that Jones suffused his writings with references to art, music, and poetry that illustrated his ideas of music as both an agent of social reform and as a metaphor for social justice. For instance, in an undated Labor Day address entitled, “The Art Idea as Associated with Labor,” Jones states: Both the overworked poor and the idle rich are out of harmony with a just social order, and the artistic idea of life is thus outraged much as your ear is shocked by the discordant noise of musical instruments tuned to a different key. The artistic idea would harmonize every individual life, tune it to the basic chord of justice, as it were, as all of the instruments in a band must be tuned to one basic chord. Not until this is done will we have a social system in which we can hope for peace.71In the same vein, he opens his 1902 speech at the opening of the sixth season of Golden Rule Park by stressing the importance of understanding (by studying) the causes behind current social ills, for which he predictably invokes musical imagery: We are here to bring out harmony, and we cannot bring this about without study. It would be just as reasonable to take these instruments from the members of this band and give them to those little girls and tell them to play and make harmony, as it would be to suppose that because you joined some society or party we would have harmony in the social body. It would be just as reasonable to take these instruments and give them to thirty people out there in this audience and expect them to play the music before them and expect them to give harmony when they had never studied the art. We have not studied the art of love enough to make things work harmoniously. Justice in the social body will be the same as harmony in music—the ear must be tuned to the vibration before you can tell if you are in harmony with your neighbor.72He continues his metaphors by comparing social injustice to out-of-tune instruments. The band leader doesn't stop playing, but gradually guides the musicians to the “true tone and into harmony”: The true tone in the Social World is Justice. What we want [sic] need then, is to place the instruments to our lips and do our best, and we will find that we are coming closer to others and getting into harmony with the basic tone which is Justice.73When Jones addressed his factory workers or the crowd at Golden Rule park, he used the band itself, not its repertory, as a metaphor for social change. He told the crowd to tune their instruments to each other, to practice, and to do their best for social justice. Jones's messages were never complicated: “Do unto others,” “play in tune,” “be in harmony with your neighbor.” He never pointed to composers or works as elevating agents.Although the fundamental thread that unifies all of Jones's writings—brotherhood and equality—clearly resonates with Tolstoy's philosophy of art as a means to loving one's neighbor, they differed on the place of the artist in society, and their views can be gleaned through their respective ideas on artistic patronage. Tolstoy argues against direct support for artists, maintaining that those who have secured livelihoods have cut themselves off from the experience of “the condition natural to all men—that of struggle with nature for the maintenance of both his own life and others . . . [a] position more injurious to an artist's productiveness than that . . . of complete security and luxury in which artists usually live in our society.”74 Tolstoy's artist of the future would be a common man, a laborer, whose art would reflect the feelings of all, not the expression of “exclusive feelings” that are available and interesting only to the upper class (non-laborers).75Jones, however, never abandons the traditional concept of the “professional” artist. Perhaps we can attribute this perspective to Alma and Helen and their musical gifts, which he admired. Jones writes: “’Tis useless to boast our material wealth unless we have artists and art,” a comment that implies professional specialization.76 In his autobiography, in which he printed Tolstoy's personal letter, Jones writes that he believed in the “economic independence of genius” and was adamant th