Arthur Nash (June 26, 1870 – October 30, 1927) was an American business man, author, and popular public speaker who achieved recognition in the 1920s when he determined to run his newly purchased sweatshop on the basis of the Golden Rule, and his business prospered beyond all expectation.
Childhood and education The eldest of nine children, Arthur Nash was born in 1870 in a log cabin on the Cloverleaf railroad, about five miles from Kokomo, in Tipton County, Indiana. His parents, Evermont "Mont" and Rachel Mitchell Nash, were strict Seventh-day Adventists, sending their son to religious school when he was thirteen years old. Nash graduated from high school at Greentown, Indiana, and then from the Adventist Theological Seminary in Battle Creek, Michigan. Ordained in 1894, he subsequently took a position as an instructor at the Adventist school for ministers and missionaries in Detroit.
Soon after he began teaching in Michigan, Nash befriended an elderly woman, Agnes "Mother" d'Arcambal, founder of The d'Arcambal Home of Industry for Discharged Prisoners, visiting her every week for eight or nine months. The elders of Nash's church informed him that d'Arcambal had rejected Adventist teachings years earlier. They pressed him to admit that according to Adventist doctrine which forbade Sunday worship, d'Arcambal, who had been holding Sunday services at the home, could not, therefore, be saved in death. Nash reacted by abandoning his faith, his family, and his religious ambitions, becoming a train hopping hobo, itinerant worker, and conflicted atheist.
Early years In his autobiography, The Golden Rule in Business, Nash wrote; "For four or five years I wandered about the Middle West, doing odd jobs here and there ... I never cared two straws which way a freight train was headed ... or what it was I did to keep body and soul together." He lugged bricks, did plastering work, labored in a broom factory, and with a bridge-construction gang—all the while studying Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll, endeavoring to bolster his contempt for religion. Eventually Nash found his way back to Detroit, where, with the help of some locals, he opened a laundry, and then married Y.W.C.A. boarding school superintendent, Maude Lena Southwell, calling her his "life partner." Described by Nash as being "possessed by a strong, robust faith," under Maude's influence, Nash came to view his arguments as being not against Christianity itself, but against its misinterpretation. He reentered the ministry with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and in 1900, accepted the pastorate of a small church in Bluffton, Ohio. But Nash's rekindled career in religious work ended with "bewildering suddenness," when, in a funeral sermon, he extolled the many virtues of a kindhearted but professedly unreligious man, recently departed. The Disciples of Christ called for Nash's resignation forthwith.
Marriage and children Married Elizabeth Carlston, June 25, 1894
William Albert Nash, born January 9, 1890
Married Maude Lena Southwell, April 9, 1899
Ralph M. Nash, born April 21, 1900 Grace Nash Straehlev, born 1902
Career With a wife and three children to support, Nash was persuaded by a group of Chicago clothing salesmen to join their crew, and it soon became apparent that he made a better salesman than preacher. In 1909, he moved his family to Columbus, Ohio, and began manufacturing men's clothing to sell direct to the consumer. By 1913, Nash had a dozen outside salesmen in his employ, and had begun to show a profit, when the Great Flood of 1913 all but ruined him financially. He found security for a seven hundred dollar note he owed the bank, and obtained permission from his creditors to move his inventory.
In June 1916, with the United States positioning to enter World War I, the A. Nash Company was incorporated with a capital of sixty thousand dollars, and opened for business in Cincinnati's depressed garment and textile market. With an office, cutting room, but no working factory of his own, Nash supplied his customers with made-to-order men's suits by having the garments cut at his facility, and then contracting their manufacture to an Austrian man who leased floor space from Nash in the Power Building on East 8th Street.
Expanded description In early 1917, with his son, William, already fighting with the Canadian Corps in France, Nash was approached by the pastor of the First Universalist Church in Cincinnati, and asked to fill in as preacher on a Sunday upcoming—the pastor stating he would select the subject for Nash's sermon. Having himself been challenged by Nash regarding Christianity's role in what Nash called, "the frightful carnage going on in Europe," the pastor asked Nash to go and talk to his people about what, in Nash's opinion, was the matter with Christianity. Just as he was preparing for his verbal "assault" on the Christian faith, Nash received word that William had been seriously wounded in the Battle of Vimy Ridge. When Nash's youngest son, Ralph, heard that his brother was, "hanging between life and death in a hospital in England," he immediately joined up with the Marines. His factory unequipped to handle government contracts, Nash became so discouraged that he almost closed up shop, spending most of his time selling Liberty bonds, and other war work. By the time the Armistice was signed, he had all but suspended business operations.
Distraught at having two sons involved in a war to which he viscerally objected, Nash experienced his darkest hour. Though he still thought himself an atheist, his mind harkened back to the teachings of his youth. In his own words: "Under great agony of soul I was finally driven to my knees, and there was torn from my heart perhaps the first real prayer that I had ever uttered. It was, 'O God, if there is a God, show me the way and I will walk in it.'" He reread the gospels—a text he had once virtually committed to memory—to gain a deeper understanding of "what it really was Jesus sought to establish, what to teach, [and] what, if anything, to condemn." Nash discovered that the Golden Rule governed Jesus' life and was the central theme to all of his teachings. He concluded that Jesus' "chief concern was the establishment of the principles of the kingdom of God on earth," through the application of the Golden Rule, as expressed in Matthew 7:12. This realization caused Nash to undergo a complete change of heart regarding the theme of his upcoming sermon. For more, see Philosophical and religious views.
Business takes off The year 1919 Shortly after the Armistice, which effectively ended the war, the Austrian, who wished to return to Europe and see to his mother, offered Nash the purchase of his small factory, which consisted of three or four tables, a few tools and machines, and twenty-nine workers. Nash agreed, and the transaction was completed at the beginning of 1919. Subsequently, and upon examination of his new business's payroll, he was "dumbfounded" to discover that he had bought a sweatshop." As he consulted his family, the idea of raising wages was mentioned. William—just home from the war—protested that the company had lost four thousand dollars the previous fiscal year, therefore any significant new payroll expense would put them swiftly out of business. Nash, who had begun giving talks on the Golden Rule around town, informed his fellow stockholders that he would rather close up shop than exploit the men and women in his employ. Calling his workers together, including a woman of nearly eighty who had been earning four dollars per week sewing on buttons, another woman with kyphosis (hunchback), earning the same, and two Austrians with no English, Nash said to them, in part:
First, I want you to know that Brotherhood is a reality with me. You are all my brothers and sisters, children of the same great Father that I am, and entitled to all the justice and fair treatment that I want for myself. And so long as we run this shop [which to Nash meant three or four months longer] God being my helper, I am going to treat you as my brothers and sisters, and the Golden Rule is going to be our only governing law. Which means, that whatever I would like to have you do to me, were I in your place, I am going to do to you.
Then he raised both women's wages from four dollars per week, to twelve—tripling their pay with a two hundred percent increase. And having established the precedent, he worked all the way through his wage-sheet to the pressers whose weekly pay was eighteen dollars, raising them to twenty seven—a higher wage scale than had ever been paid in comparable shops in the city. In hopes he would have enough money left over after liquidating equipment and surplus fabric and then making up stockholder losses, Nash turned attention away from his business and toward Indiana, where he went in search of a small farm on which to retire.
Two months later, a friend in serious financial need sparked Nash's visit to his bookkeeper to inquire how much cash he could command, and he was astounded to discover that his newly acquired factory had more than tripled its business from the previous year. When Nash questioned his employees, he learned that after he had raised their wages and departed their company, "the little Italian presser" had addressed his fellow workers, saying that if he was boss and had just raised everyone's wages as Nash had, he would want everyone to "work like hell"—and that's just what they did. Nash shelved the idea of buying a farm and instead caught a train for New York to purchase more fabric.
In 1919, the year Nash took over the little sweatshop, America experienced the greatest wave of labor unrest in its history, with more than four million workers striking (though A. Nash Company workers never staged a walk-out). Anti-union sentiment swept the country's business community, and Nash was determined not to further antagonize it. His factory was small, one of the smallest concerns in Cincinnati, his workforce largely inexperienced, and he required credit with bankers and suppliers, and so he concluded that his should remain an open shop. Though many accused Nash of standing with the anti-union movement, according to Philip I. Roberts—who, for a posthumous edition of Nash's autobiography, wrote of the four years intervening between its publication and Nash's death—this is "an absolute mistake."
Nash called it, "the year of strikes, [and] industrial upheavals," especially in the garment and textile industries known for their underpaid, underfed, "pauper labor." Clothing prices skyrocketed, and production slowed to a near halt. Five other garment firms housed along with Nash's in the Power Building participated in Cincinnati's fourteen-week-long clothing workers strike. During the first week of the strike, which lasted from March through mid-June, A. Nash Company employees had to fight their way across picket lines. The remainder of the strike, for reasons Nash said he could not explain, his workers were able to cross unmolested, and were even treated courteously by the pickets. That year Nash's company did $525,678.43 worth of business, as compared to $132,190.20 the year previous, and by July, had outgrown its floor space in the Power Building, and moved into the vacated Joe Magnus Whisky Distillery building, also on East 8th. Going from one floor, to six, and hesitant to advertise, Nash told his employees that if they liked their jobs, to spread the word to their friends and neighbors, and then bring them into the factory and train them themselves. Nash's workforce quickly grew six hundred percent, without a single want ad.
The year 1920