Samuel P. Bush

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For the bluegrass musician, see Sam Bush.

Samuel Prescott Bush

Samuel Prescott Bush (October 4, 1863 Brick Church, Orange, New Jersey^[1] – February 8, 1948 Columbus, Ohio) was an American industrialist and entrepreneur, and the patriarch of the Bush political family. He was the father of Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George H. W. Bush, and great-grandfather of President George W. Bush.

1 Biography
2 Political prominence
3 See also
4 Notes & references
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Bush was the son of Harriet Fay and the Rev. James Smith Bush, an Episcopalian priest at Grace Church in Orange. He grew up in New Jersey, San Francisco, and Staten Island, but spent the majority of his adult life in Columbus, Ohio. He married Flora Sheldon on June 20, 1894. They had four children: Prescott Sheldon Bush, Robert (who died in childhood), Mary (Mrs. Frank) House, Margaret (Mrs. Stewart) Clement, and James.

He lost his wife Flora on September 4, 1920 in Narragansett, Rhode Island when she was hit by a car. He remarried to Martha Bell Carter of Milwaukee.

Bush graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken in 1884, where he played in one of the earliest regular college football teams. He took an apprenticeship with the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad at the Logansport, Indiana shops, later transferring to Dennison, Ohio and Columbus, Ohio, where in 1891 he became Master Mechanic, then in 1894 Superintendent of Motive Power. In 1899 he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to take the position of Superintendent of Motive Power with the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

Just two years later, in 1901 he returned to Columbus to be General Manager of Buckeye Steel Castings Company, which manufactured railway parts. The company was run by Frank Rockefeller, the brother of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, and among its clients were the railroads controlled by E. H. Harriman. The Bush and Harriman families would be closely associated at least until the end of World War II. In 1908 Rockefeller retired and Bush became President of Buckeye, a position he would hold until 1927, becoming one of the top industrialists of his generation.

He was the first president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association^[2], and cofounder of Scioto Country Club and Columbus Academy. He was an avid sports buff.

[edit] Political prominence

In the spring of 1918, Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board of Bernard Baruch - a close associate of E.H. Harriman and Clarence Dillon - with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with weapons companies including Remington (at the time controlled by Percy Rockefeller- who along with Averill Harriman took time to arrange for Harriman's and Bush's sons Bunny Harriman and Prescott Bush to be admitted to Yale University's Skull and Bones in 1916.) Remington dominance of ammunition and small arms contracts during World War I continued during Bush's government service and many years beyond.

Samuel Bush was a close advisor to President Herbert Hoover.^{[citation needed]}

During the height of American isolationism, a Senate Munitions Inquiry, often called the Nye Committee after its chairman, Senator Gerald Nye, critically examined the military-industrial complex of government agencies, corporations, labor unions, and banking. The Nye Committee has been portrayed as a naive isolationist search for evil arms dealers ("Merchants of Death") who caused wars, underplaying the social, intellectual, political, and cultural currents of the 1930s which have more recently been re-examined (see reference Coulter). The Committee was formed in August 1933. It examined World War I military-industrial finances in January and February 1936. In spite of this second historical connection, most of the records and correspondence of Samuel P. Bush's arms-related work with the government were destroyed at the National Archives, in order 'to save space'.^[3]

Bush is interred at Green Lawn Cemetery, Columbus, Ohio.^[4]

[edit] See also

Bush political family

[edit] Notes & references

^ Bush's obituary in the New York Times, February 8, 1948, incorrectly stated that he was born October 13, 1864 on Staten Island, New York.
^ Phillip R. Shriver, "A Hoover Vignette" Ohio History, Vol. 91, p.74. Many sources, including Bush family biographer Kevin Phillips, erroneously state he was first president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which was founded in 1895.[1]
^ Matthew Ware Coulter (1997). The Senate Munitions Inquiry of the 1930s: Beyond the Merchants of Death.
^ Greenlawn Cemetery. Forgotten Ohio. Retrieved on 2006-08-07.