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 straightest
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.