70 percent of the vote. He was re-elected in 1901 with 57% of the vote and again in 1903 with 48% of the vote in a three-way race. Progressive journalist and lawyer Brand Whitlock, who succeeded Jones as mayor, portrayed Jones as almost lighthearted in his approach to reform, especially when upsetting norms observed by the police:[H]e was most in his element when the police judge was absent, as he was now and then. In that exigency the law gave Jones, as mayor, the power to appoint the acting police judge; and when Jones did not go down and sit as magistrate himself, he appointed me; and we always found some reason or other for letting all the culprits go.Police frustration with Jones led the Ohio General Assembly, which Republicans dominated, to enact a statute taking control of the Toledo police department away from the mayor and giving it instead to a commission appointed by the governor. In 1902, however, the Ohio Supreme Court struck the statute down as violative of the Ohio Constitution after Jones mounted a legal challenge. "Golden Rule" Jones died suddenly during his third term as mayor on July 12, 1904. Citizens of Toledo lined the streets to view his funeral procession. His successor, Brand Whitlock, continued Jones' reform efforts. Whitlock's 1914 autobiography, Forty Years of It, contains an extended, admiring discussion of Jones. A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Jones ranked as the fifth-best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993. Legacy Jones was a Christian Socialist. He was influenced by Henry George, but argued in his 1899 book: But, because of Jones's iconoclasm, the Socialist Party of his day "disowned him, and were at one with the capitalists in their hatred and abuse of him." According to historian Robert M. Crunden, Jones was In his will, Jones left a "Golden Rule Trust" to the workers in his factory for $10,000 (over $328,400 in 2022). See also List of mayors of Toledo, Ohio Footnotes Further reading Boase, Paul H. "Samuel M.(Golden Rule) Jones: Unorthodox Champion of Free Speech." Free Speech Yearbook 19.1 (1980): 32–39. Bremner, Robert H. The Civic Revival in Ohio: Samuel M. Jones: The Man without a Party," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 8#2 (Jan. 1949), pp. 151–161. onlineIn JSTOR Bremner,