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Joseph Fels was born on December 16, 1854, in Halifax County, Virginia, of German Jewish parents, Lazarus Fels and Susanna Freiberg. His father and mother had come to America under the migratory impulse of 1848. Soon after Joseph's birth they settled in Yanceyville, North Carolina, where they lived till the end of the Civil War.
The boy’s schooling was irregular and apparently of slight permanent worth. At Richmond and Baltimore, where the family lived after the war, opportunities were better, but at fifteen Joseph left school for business.
For a year Fels worked with his father, who was engaged in the production of toilet soaps on a small scale. Then for three years father and son represented a Philadelphia soap house in Baltimore, but in 1873 they went to Philadelphia and took a commission with a larger house.
Two years later, when Fels had reached his majority, Joseph went into a partnership with another Philadelphia manufacturer, whom he bought out, after the first year, for the sum of $4, 000. This was the beginning of an uninterrupted business success continuing for twenty years.
In 1893 he bought an interest in a process of soap-making from naphtha and after experimentation and improvement discontinued the manufacture of toilet soaps and developed the Fels-Naptha plant, which eventually sent its products to every part of the civilized world.
While in England, planning for the extension of his export trade, Fels formed contacts with leaders of humanitarian effort, notably with George Lansbury, through whom he became interested in the English back-to-the-land movement.
At Hollesley Bay Fels bought 1, 300 acres of land for the use of the unemployed and later at Maylands, Essex, he devoted 600 acres to the same purpose. He promoted vacant-lot farming in London, as well as in Philadelphia. It was not until 1905 that Fels became identified with the Single-Tax propaganda, of which he was to become within ten years an outstanding exponent. The humanitarian phase of the movement appealed to him especially. He himself said that a Socialist (Keir Hardie) unwittingly inspired him with zeal for social service that led to his enrolment among the followers of Henry George. Economic theory seems to have had a secondary part in his conversion to the Single Tax; but of the completeness of that conversion no one ever had the slightest doubt.
He withdrew from business at a time when continuance seemed to promise great additions to a fortune already large and for the rest of his life devoted his time and his wealth unreservedly to the cause. He announced his decision in a speech to a Chicago audience.
Then Fels was given credit for obtaining the inclusion of the land-tax feature in the British budget of 1909 and the active support of the measure by Lloyd George in a campaign memorable in British politics. He devoted not less than $100, 000 a year from his private fortune for Single-Tax promotion throughout the world. Of this sum $25, 000 annually was spent in England, $5, 000 in Denmark, $5, 000 in Canada, and considerable amounts in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Australasia.
One of the Fels enterprises was to procure the translation of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty into Chinese. Tracts were printed in various languages and widely distributed. To the Fels Fund for Single-Tax promotion he gave $131, 000, as against a public subscription of nearly $83, 000; but the money represented only a small part of his personal contribution. For years Fels was in the habit of making platform addresses wherever an audience could be had. Joseph Fels died on February 22, 1914, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Quotations: "We cannot get rich under present conditions without robbing somebody, I have done it; you are doing it now, and I am still doing it, but I am proposing to spend the money to wipe out the system by which I made it. "
A man of small stature, slightly more than five feet in height, and endowed with extraordinary energy and vitality, Joseph Fels was a speaker of force, gifted with persuasive powers of no mean order.
In 1891, Joseph Fels met and married Mary Rothschild, a distant relative, in Keokuk, Iowa. They had a son, who died in infancy.
