Samuel Prescott Bush was an American businessman and industrialist. He was the patriarch of the Bush political family. He was the father of U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and great-grandfather of former U.S. President George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
Bush graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, New Jersey in 1884, where he played on 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. In 1901, Bush 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. Bush was the first president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association, and cofounder of the Columbus Academy. Additionally, he was the co-founder of the Scioto Country Club, a golf club in Columbus, Ohio.
Political prominence
In the spring of 1918, banker Bernard Baruch was asked to reorganize the War Industries Board as the U.S. prepared to enter World War I, and placed several prominent businessmen to key posts. Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms, and Ammunition Section, with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with munitions companies. Bush served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. In 1931, he was appointed to Herbert Hoover's President's Committee for Unemployment Relief, chaired by Walter S. Gifford, then-President of AT&T. He was once recommended to serve on the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, but Hoover did not feel he was sufficiently known nationally.
Personal life
On June 20, 1894, he married Flora Sheldon, the daughter of Robert Emmet Sheldon and Mary Elizabeth Butler. Her maternal grandfather was Courtland Philip Livingston Butler, a member of the Livingston family. Together, they had five children:
