Samuel Simeon Fels was an American businessman and philanthropist.
Background
He was born in Yanceyville, Caswell County, North Carolina, the sixth of seven children and the youngest of four sons of Lazarus and Susanna (Freiberg) Fels. Both Samuel and his father became partners in the firm in 1881. His parents were Jewish emigrants from the Bavarian Palatinate who had left Germany after the revolution of 1848.
Lazarus Fels, who had begun in America as an itinerant peddler, owned a general store in Yanceyville and prospered by trading in real estate and commodities, but was ruined by the Civil War. Moving his family to Baltimore, he began a soapmaking venture in 1866. This enterprise failed in 1870, and he moved on to Philadelphia in 1873.
Education
Samuel attended public schools in both cities but left high school with a "partial certificate" in 1876 to join the firm his brother Joseph had established that year for the manufacture and sale of toilet soaps.
Career
Both Samuel and his father became partners in the firm in 1881.
He nevertheless took increasing authority over the manufacturing aspects of the business. Although the company initially made a wide variety of soaps, Joseph favored concentrating on one product, and in 1894 the family acquired the Philadelphia company of Charles Walter Stanton, who had succeeded in introducing a naphtha or benzine solvent into laundry soap.
Thus began the manufacture of "Fels-Naptha" soap (the spelling simplified for convenience). Essentially depression-proof and marketed by seasoned promoters, it was an overnight success and built the family fortune.
In 1914, after Joseph's death, Fels and Company was incorporated with Samuel as president, a post he held until his death.
He once described himself as early inclined to be "sot" in his ways, a marked characteristic of his business leadership in later life. His career as a civic leader and philanthropist, by contrast, displayed a wide-ranging curiosity and a venturesome and scientific turn of mind.
In 1929 he helped establish the Regional Planning Federation of the Philadelphia Tri-State District, and in 1937 he served on the commission to draft a new city charter. Among his other interests were the Philadelphia Civil Liberties Committee and the Philadelphia Housing Association.
His desire to "rouse a sense of participation in our universe" induced him in 1933 to give to the Franklin Institute the planetarium instrument that bears his name. Fels's principal philanthropic medium was the Samuel S. Fels Fund, incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1935, which he founded to aid research projects, especially in the fields of medicine and government.
Major activities sponsored by the fund over the years have included the Research Institute for the Study of Human Development at Antioch College, the Research Institute of Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia, the Institute of Local and State Government of the University of Pennsylvania, programs at Philadelphia's Wistar Institute for the study of the aging process in rats and of human fertility problems, and the Dissertation Fellowship Program. Reputedly Fels donated more than $40 million to various causes during his lifetime.
Spry, wiry, and mentally alert to the end of his life, Fels died at Temple University Hospital, Philadelphia, at the age of ninety, following a brief siege of acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis.
His body was cremated, and his ashes deposited at the Chelten Hills Cemetery, Philadelphia.
Achievements
An active philanthropist, in 1936, Fels established the Samuel S. Fels Fund, which provides support to Philadelphia-area non-profit organizations, even today. Fels also founded the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government. Fels is known for commissioning Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto Op. 14 in 1939.
He was a co-founder of the Big Brothers Association in Philadelphia and of the Crime Prevention Association. His lifelong goal to improve local government led him with others in 1904 to found the Committee of Seventy as a watchdog body of citizens, and in 1908 Philadelphia's Bureau of Municipal Research.
Politics
Although never an ardent Zionist, he made many contributions to projects in Palestine, and during the 1930's he assisted Jewish scientists fleeing Germany.
Membership
Always a generous benefactor, he helped organize the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 1884, the Federation of Jewish Charities in 1901, and the Allied Jewish Appeal in 1938.
He was a member of to the American Philosophical Society,
Personality
Barely five feet tall, Fels as a youth was nervous, impulsive, and somewhat sickly.
Connections
On May 15, 1890, Fels married Jennie M. May of New Haven, Connecticut They had no children.
