Arthur Nash: The Golden Rule in Business
by Bro. Harold Marshall, Massachusetts
The Master Mason - June 1924
Here is a story of a great man and a great Mason, who, discovering the Golden
Rule to be as much a law of human relations as the law of gravitation is in the
physical world, applied it to industry with amazing results - as shown by the
fact that on May 23, he distributed $600,000 worth of stock in his Company to
his fellow-workers. A fuller account of Brother Nash and his work may be read in
his book entitled The Golden Rule in Business, in which we are shown how a
profound spiritual experience worked itself out in a great industrial enterprise
- solving the tragic problem of capital and labor by doing away with it
altogether, and making use of a new - old principle taught in our lodges and
preached in our pulpits, but seldom used. Brother Marshall, the writer of the
present article, is also a Mason, and though a close friend, writes with fine
insight and detachment.
MASONRY is a fellowship of seekers for the lost way of life. "It is not an
accident of human association nor an invention of ecclesiastics, but a
fraternity rooted in the nature and need of humanity; an order of men initiated,
sworn and trained to uphold all the redeeming ideals of society and to make
righteousness and the will of God prevail."
The story of Arthur Nash is the story of a man far wandered from "the way,"
who rediscovered it for himself in terms of Masonry, and is revealing it to his
fellows in terms of industry.
The son of devout parents, educated in religious schools, and destined for
the ministry of a church that makes tip in perfervid zeal what it lacks in
numbers, Mr. Nash might well have said with the Apostle Paul, "After the
straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee."
Then came the shattering vision of a larger life than could be
contained in his little system. He escaped expulsion for heresy by leaving his
church before he was cast out, but he did not escape from becoming an outcast.
The young minister had to take whatever work offered, wandering from job to job,
and casual labor made him a casual laborer.
"I am often asked," he says, "how much my personality has to do with the
success of our company. I want to answer definitely and positively that I had no
personality until I accepted a principle, and that it is out of the principle
that the personality developed. When I was carrying the hod at the Soldiers Home
at Marion, Indiana, I had the personality of a hod-carrier; when I was working
in a bridge gang on the Vandalia Railroad, I had the personality of a bridge
gang worker."
Speaking recently in the neighborhood of his birthplace in Indiana, Mr. Nash
said: "Last night as I walked the streets of this city and my mind went back
thirty years and I remembered how I tramped these same streets in rags, a tramp
lost, without God and without hope in the world, working at all kinds of jobs
but never sticking to any for more than a few weeks, sleeping often in the
woods, I never became so little in my own eyes, so humble before God."
A short time ago the Masons of Cincinnati undertook to raise $2,000,000 for a
new temple. It was a big undertaking, and after a little seemed to halt with a
threat of failure. Then came a day when something happened. "Much like a revival
meeting, with men springing to their feet to confess their faith, so yesterday's
noon-day report of the zone chairmen and team captains in the $2,000,000 Masonic
Temple Campaign. Swayed by the eloquence of Arthur Nash, who delivered a
stirring address on the ideals of Masonry, the men at the meeting vied for the
privilege of increasing their personal subscriptions to the new fund. Mr. Nash
himself led in this by doubling his personal subscription of $5,000, making his
new pledge $10,000. It was the second time he had increased his gift.
" 'I thought I had given all I could,' he said, 'but when I stopped to think
of what Masonry did for me - how it took me, hardly more than a tramp, when I
came to Cincinnati, and its ideals made me what I am today - I felt that I had
given all too little, and I am here to tell you today that I want to do more - I
am going to start by doubling my subscription. We are not here to build a temple
merely of stone and mortar. If this new temple is not going to make better
Masons out of us, I am not interested in this building.
" 'I went into the Masonic Blue Lodge in 1909 in Waterville, Ohio. At that
time the lessons of the Degrees made no great impression upon my mind, perhaps
because my mind was not in a condition to be impressed. I took the higher
degrees of Scottish Rite Masonry in what was known as the Golden Jubilee Class
of 1919, at Cincinnati, and later in the same year went through the York Rite.
Then during the troublesome war times, in which my heart was crying out in agony
for deliverance of humanity from the bondage of hatred, envy and murder, it was
altogether another story, and as I have often said, my soul was not awakened at
a church revival, but through the exemplification of the lessons of the higher
degrees of Masonry, the new birth came to me and I became a new creature.' "
"To those who have caught a vision of its meaning," said Walter
Rauschenbusch, "democracy is a holy word." And to Arthur Nash the word
"brother," which to so many of us is in merely a part of our ritual, became also
holy and a literal living reality.
Shortly after this vision of brother-hood came to him, he had to decide how
far he was prepared to live it in his own life. He was forced to take control of
a sweatshop in which men and women had been exploited as they have been from
time immemorial. The pay-roll sheet which he took home with him that night
showed a wage scale ranging from a maximum of $18 per week for men down to a
minimum of $4 for women, at a time when the war had doubled living costs. It
burned and quivered before his eyes like the letters of doom on the walls of
Belshazzar's palace. For him it was the day of decision. The next morning he
went down to the shop, called the little group of workers together, told them
that he had been made to see that they were his brothers and sisters, and that
he intended to make the Golden Rule the governing law of the factory. That meant
that when any policy was decided he must ask himself, "If I were in your place
and you were in mine, what would I want you to do?" And he told them that he
expected them to let the same rule govern their actions.
Now, of course, any sane business man would instantly see that such a policy
could only lead to bankruptcy and ruin, especially in the clothing industry,
where competition is fierce and merciless. There is a homely old saying,
however, that the "proof of the pudding is in the eating," and the verdict as to
whether Mr. Nash's policy of making the Golden Rule the governing law of his
factory was sane or insane must be decided by results.
There was nothing in Mr. Nash's own business past or in the previous history
of his company to lead anyone to anticipate a rapid growth, but bear in mind
that Mr. Nash insists that brotherhood is not a counsel of perfection but a
divine law of life. He insists that the Golden Rule is God's greatest economic
law, the divine law governing human relationships. Now all modern-minded men
have come to realize that to discover and obey the laws of the universe is to
succeed, to ignore or disobey them is to fail. What evidence can Mr. Nash offer
to sustain his assertion that the Golden Rule is the law of life?
In 1918, the company occupied half a floor in a small building containing
many other clothing manufacturers and had twenty-nine employees, and the total
business for that year amounted to $132,000. In 1919, the business amounted to
$525,000; in 1920, $1,580,000; in 1921, $2,077,000; in 1922, $3,750,000; and in
1923, nearly $6,000,000.
This means that from making a few hundred suits and overcoats a month in
1918, they have increased to an output of 10,000 to 12,000 a week, which means
four completed suits or overcoats a minute for every working day.
The capital of the company had grown from $60,000 to $1,000,000, and is now
$3,000,000.
But this is not the story of a factory but the study of a man. One who knows
him intimately remarked not long ago that the most remarkable development of
these six years has been Arthur Nash himself. When he determined to make
brotherhood the law of life, it was with the expectation of business failure,
not with the hope of business success. By 1920, however, he saw his faith in
brotherhood as the law of life working an industrial miracle. The Golden Rule
was for him becoming literally the Rule of Gold.
But this threatened to make him personally the victim of another kind of
misfortune. "I became conscious," he says, "that with a company working in
obedience to this law, while practically all other companies were drifting or
disobeying the law of success, a spectacular development was inevitable. As I
owned practically all the stock of the company at the beginning of the
experiment, in the natural course of events I was doomed to become a rich man.
Please let that word 'doomed' register in your mind, for that was the horrible
mental picture that was before me. A little later I met my friend, Harold
Marshall, of Boston, and told him something of this. He seemed to sense deeply
the thing that was in my mind, and I have heard him many times tell great
audiences that I had said to him with a look of deep concern in my face and
agony in my eyes that I saw no way to keep from becoming a millionaire."
Mr. Nash has not told the whole story of that interview, moved perhaps by
generous consideration for the writer of this article. For he himself had then
decided to escape from the possession of great wealth by giving the business to
the workers. He outlined to me the plan by which he proposed to supplant his
corporation by a co-operative workers' association. The discussion lasted far
into the night, he insisting that he must do it immediately, I insisting that he
was dealing with a group still incoherent and most of whom were economic
children, and that he must keep control until he had taught them self-control
and given them opportunity to develop a group consciousness. Finally he yielded,
saying, "Well, if I must, I must, but how I dread it!"
"Yes," I said, "but remember this, that crucifixion is not a fact of history
but a process of life. This is what Paul meant by 'dying daily.'"
Of course, misunderstanding has been inevitable. Many times and by many
people the old sneering question has been raised, "Does job serve God for
naught?" Three or four years ago certain magazines made bitter attacks on his
motives and his integrity, based on entire misstatement of facts. I then wrote a
statement of what I knew to be the truth, but before publishing it sent a copy
to him. Here are some paragraphs from his reply.
"Once and for all remember that we have passed the point where it should ever
occur to you that I have any human feeling. We are only pawns in the great game
of life, to be moved as seems best regardless of what particular square we may
be on or the direction in which our inclination would carry us.
"I note what you say about making reply to the charges that have been made. I
hope you will think carefully regarding this before you do so. Read over again
the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah and study carefully the seventh verse, and
remember that war is destructive, whether it be a battle of words or a battle of
cannon and that there is only one standard in the final judgment and that is 'By
their fruits ye shall know them.' What we need is not someone to fight battles
for us or someone to answer our tormentors, but the prayer of all the Father's
children that the mind which was in Christ Jesus may be in us."
To have watched not only Arthur Nash's own development but the way in which
the workers associated with him have caught his spirit and in turn passed it on
to the newer workers in the group has been a rich and thrilling experience. Step
by step they have found their way to ever-increasing economic efficiency. Day by
day they have developed an ever closer fellowship. It would have been easy to
understand how the small original group could have been welded into a family
under the influence of a great personality, but there are now nearly four
thousand of them, recruited from many races, members of diverse and often
conflicting religious sects. Yet together they have taken and together they are
living this workers' pledge:
"In the spirit of Jesus we unite ourselves in the Fellowship of the Golden
Rule, pledging our utmost endeavor to make God's law of brotherhood the law of
our lives."
Here is an adventure in dynamics, not an experiment in mechanics. It ignores
our common class and caste philosophy and advances to a new insistence upon
elemental democracy. It is as illogical, as thrilling, perhaps as prophetic as
primitive Christianity. If there is any body of men in the world who ought to
understand it, to sympathize with it, and to imitate it in their own lives, it
is the brothers of our Great Fraternity.
back to top |
