Though his name has since faded from the minds of most Americans, without Samuel P Bush, the Bush family as we know it today would’ve never come to be.
And whilst he never held political office himself, the relationships he forged as a businessman and industrialist allowed his son to make a fortune on Wall Street, his grandson to become vice president and later president, and his great-grandson to become president as well!
Ancestry
Descended from a family primarily of English and German ancestry, Samuel P Bush’s earliest recorded ancestor was John Bush Sr., who was born in the English village of Messing, in Essex circa 1510.
Fast forward three generations and 83 years, the Bush family were still living in Messing. In 1593, John Bush III was born to Reynold Bush and his wife Isabella Hall, both of whom were devout Puritans.
As a part of the wider Puritan Migration, John left England for the New World onboard the Neptune, arriving in Maine in 1618, thus marking the beginning of the Bush family in the United States.
The first of the Bush family’s American-born ancestors was Samuel (Semmel) Bush, who was born on May 7 1647 in Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
Over the next four generations, the Bush family slowly moved from Massachusetts, to modern-day Rhode Island, to New York, where Obadiah Newcomb Bush was born in January 1797.
A schoolmaster by trade, Bush became a Captain during the War of 1812 and an abolitionist of some note. In 1849, Bush traveled to California to become a gold prospector, acquiring a moderate amount of wealth in the two years he was there.
In 1851, he returned to the East Coast to move his family to California, but died en route and was buried at sea. Bush married Harriet Smith on November 8 1821 and had seven children with her, the fifth of whom they named James Smith Bush.
Born on June 15 1825 in Rochester, New York, James grew up and became an Episcopalian priest, lawyer and author of some note, publishing several books on religion throughout his lifetime.
Early Life
Samuel Prescott Bush was born in East Orange, New Jersey on October 4 1863 as the second of four children born to Rev. James Smith Bush, and his second wife, Harriet Eleanor Fay.
As his older brother, James Freeman Bush, had been named in honor of his father, when Samuel was born, his mother named him in honor of her grandfather, Samuel Prescott Philips Fay – a former US Army captain and judge from Concord, Massachusetts.
When Samuel’s father became a rector at San Francisco’s Grace Church (now Grace Cathedral), Samuel, along with the rest of his family, followed his father there, living just a stone’s throw away from the church for five years, between 1867 and 1872.
Growing up the son of a priest and a deeply devout mother, religion naturally played a huge role in Samuel’s early life, with he and his siblings attending their father’s sermons all the time and learning to read by reading the Bible.
Yet Samuel’s education wasn’t solely informal. Though the majority of his early education was done by his parents, Samuel attended the prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and graduated in its 1884 class.
Much as his son, grandson and great-grandsons later would, Samuel P. Bush excelled academically and at sports, playing on SIT’s college football team – one of the first of its kind in the country!
A Start in Business
Though there was initially an expectation that Samuel would follow in the footsteps of his father and older brother and become a priest, Samuel made it clear to his family that he intended to become a mechanic and engineer.
To that end, he managed to secure an apprenticeship upon graduation as a junior mechanic with the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railroad, better known as the Pan Handle Route.
Based in Logansport, Indiana, Samuel P. Bush learned all there was to know about maintaining the steam engines used along the Pan Handle Route and quickly became one of the company’s star mechanics.
Moving to Dennison, Ohio, and later Columbus, Ohio bases, Bush rose to become the company’s Master Mechanic in 1891, and again in 1894 to the position of Superintendent of Motive Power.
And all seemed to be going well for Bush. He married the beautiful and well-connect Flora Sheldon (a descendant of the Livingston Family) in 1894, was in a well paid job he enjoyed, and his first son, Prescott, was born in 1896.
Yet as the years progressed, Samuel’s family began to grow – his second son, Robert, was born in 1896, followed by a daughter, Mary, in 1897 – but Samuel found himself constantly at odds with management, who began telling Bush how to run his mechanics.
Despite not being mechanics themselves.
As such, when the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad put an ad out looking for a Superintendent of Motive Power, Samuel P Bush was first in line to apply, and moved his young family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1899 after being given the job.
Industrialist
Though he was free to run his mechanics however he saw fit at Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, Bush didn’t stay there long.
In 1901, Columbus, Ohio-based steelmaker, Buckeye Steel Castings (owned by Frank Rockefeller, the youngest brother of oil magnate and then-richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller) was looking for a new general manager.
Though he had no experience in the steel industry, Samuel P Bush was intimately familiar railroad car couplers (Buckeye Steel Castings’ main product at the time) from his years as a railroad mechanic and was an expert leader of men.
After a quick interview, Frank Rockefeller hired Samuel to run Buckeye Steel Castings, whilst he worked to become the company’s president, which he succeeded in doing in 1905.
As general manager, Samuel’s primary job was to ensure that the company ran smoothly. His secondary job was to maintain Buckeye Steel Castings’ relationships with its clients and ensure that their orders were delivered on time.
Whilst the company had literally hundreds of clients, by far their largest client was railroad baron E. H. Harriman, who controlled railroads across Denver, Illinois, Georgia and New York, and used Buckeye Steel Castings for all of their railroad car couplers.
Despite their differences, both men had a deep respect for one another that eventually evolved into a lifelong friendship.
Though they didn’t know it then, their friendship led to the Bush and Harriman families working with one another for next four decades. They would even get into business with each other!
In 1908, Frank Rockefeller stepped down as president of the company due to failing health. As general manager, Samuel P Bush was Rockefeller’s natural heir, and quickly assumed the office of president, whilst Rockefeller became vice-president.
Samuel P Bush held this position for next two decades, until 1928, when the Buckeye Steel Castings’ board forced the then-65 year old Samuel into retirement.
During his time as the head of Buckeye Steel Castings, Bush took advantage of new technology, implementing it on his assembly lines to increase production, allowing Buckeye Steel Castings to quickly become one of the most powerful steelmakers in the country!
Politics
As the head of one of the most powerful steelmakers, who supplied railroads (then one of the most important industries in the country), Bush was able to wield a significant amount of power over Washington.
After all, if he wanted to, he could stop production of railroad car couplers all together and cripple the US’s transport and logistics in a matter of months.
Respected for his skills as a businessman, when banker Bernard Baruch was appointing prominent business leaders to key positions for the War Industries Board in the spring of 1918, Bush was made the Chief of Ordinance thanks to his experience as a factory boss.
In this capacity, Bush was responsible for advising the government how it could assist munitions companies, as well as act as the official intermediary between the two in case relations broke down.
Following the death of founder P W Huntington in 1918, Bush joined the board of Huntington National Bank based in Columbus, Ohio and used it as a springboard to get elected to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in the 1920’s.
When the Great Depression hit, President Hoover appointed Bush to the President’s Committee for Unemployment Relief, based on the recommendations of the committee’s chairman, Walter S. Gifford, who was concurrently the president of AT&T.
Owing to his success on the committee and his experience as a businessman, Bush was briefly considered for the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, though he was ultimately dismissed because he wasn’t that well-known nationally.
Later Life & Death
On November 10 1910, 17 of Ohio’s most prominent industrialists were invited to the Chittenden Hotel in Columbus, Ohio by fellow Ohioan industrialist Colonel J. G. Battelle. Among those industrialists was Samuel P Bush.
Despite their businesses often competing against one another, they came together to form an association of manufacturers that could officially represent the Ohio’s lager manufacturing industry.
Known as the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, Bush was elected to serve as the association’s first president due to his reputation for being a dynamic leader and savvy backroom political player.
Owing to his own lack of a formal education, Bush was deeply interested in establishing schools that could give kids like him the opportunity to go to school, leading him to help establish the Columbus Academy in 1911 with a group of other like-minded businessmen.
Having helped found the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association in Ohio in 1910, when the country’s businessmen wanted a nationwide lobby group to represent all businesses, Bush was one of the men who were asked to help establish what we now call the US Chamber of Commerce.
A keen golfer for much of his life, Bush was one of three co-founders to help establish the Scioto Golf Club in 1916, being the one to personally hire Donald J. Ross to design the club’s course and play its first round with him when it opened.
100 years later, in August 2016, the Scioto Golf Club hosted the US Senior Opens and is one of only four golf clubs to host the US Open, PGA Championship, Ryder Cup and US Amateur.
Tragedy struck the Bush household on September 4 1920, when Samuel’s wife Flora was killed after being hit by a car. Though devastated at the loss of his wife of 26 years, Samuel quickly remarried Milwaukee native Martha Bell Carter.
Samuel P Bush died on February 8 1948 at the age of 84 years old in his Columbus, Ohio home. Bush’s funeral was held at Mortuary Chapel (now known as Huntingdon Chapel) and was attended by numerous industrialists and politicians. He was later buried at the connected Green Lawn Cemetery.
At the time of his death, his estate was worth about $5 million (roughly $57.5 million adjusted for inflation), most of which was inherited by his son Prescott, who was himself already a self-made millionaire investment banker.
Though his descendants are arguably some of the most famous Republicans to have ever lived, Samuel P Bush himself was a registered Democrat, a biproduct of his friendship with E. H. Harriman, whose family had been members of the party since its founding in 1814.
Legacy
By all accounts, Samuel P Bush was a self-made man: he came from nothing and quickly amassed great wealth. And though this wealth could’ve allowed his family to live comfortably for the next few generations, he didn’t want that.
He instilled in his children a desire to build something of their own and not live off their parents. In turn, Samuel’s children instilled this desire into their own children, who did it to their own as well.
This is what convinced Samuel’s son, Prescott, to get into the world of investment banking. Though he was interested in railroads, he knew his father’s reputation would follow him for the entire time he was in the industry.
Whilst he wouldn’t live to see it, this is also what drove his son into politics, as it did his grandson, George H. W. Bush, and two of great-grandsons, George W. Bush and Jeb Bush. It was also this desire that has driven other members of the family into journalism, modelling, philanthropy and sports.
Despite his fortune paling in comparison to the riches his son would amass, it was partly Samuel P Bush’s money that financed the early political campaigns of the Bush family, including Prescott’s senatorial runs and George H. W. Bush’s congressional run.
What do you think about Samuel P Bush? Would the Bush family have still risen to prominence without him? Tell me in the comments!