James Cash Penney (J. C. Penney) was born in 1875 outside present-day Hamilton, Missouri. He experienced poverty as a child, but amassed wealth over his long life by building the first national department store chain, beginning with his first store in rural Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902. During the company's rapid growth in the 1920s, the J. C. Penney Company (Penney's) opened one thousand new stores and outsold Macy's. As the nation became more urbanized, so too did Penney's, which established its headquarters in New York City, the center of commerce, in 1914. On the eve of the Great Depression, Penney's operated fourteen hundred stores in all forty-eight states. In the 1930s, the chain began moving into urban areas. In 1951, Fortune magazine called J. C. Penney (the man) “The King of Soft Goods” when Penney's topped $1 billion in annual sales. By this time, Penney's had followed potential customers into the growing American suburbs, making J. C. Penney a national celebrity. To cover all potential customers, Penney's added mail-order catalogue service in 1963. When J. C. Penney died of a massive heart attack in his New York City apartment, in February 1971, all sixteen hundred Penney's stores closed for the day in his honor.

The Penney's chain celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2002 but, like many traditional retailers, it has struggled with the changing retail landscape that includes stiff competition from large discounters and e-commerce.

The story of J. C. Penney and his retail empire has been told elsewhere. Here, author David Delbert Kruger, agricultural research librarian at the University of Wyoming, uses company records and personal papers deposited at Southern Methodist University to uncover J. C. Penney's lesser-known but extensive agricultural ventures. As Kruger shows throughout, however, retail and agriculture were not mutually exclusive but instead linked by J. C. Penney's “Golden Rule” philosophy. Following the Golden Rule—which he learned from his father, a college-educated Baptist minister, and his retail mentor, Thomas Callahan, a Colorado chain store merchant—J. C. Penney built his business on mutual respect for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community.

J. C. Penney also applied the Golden Rule to his agricultural ventures in New York, Florida, Indiana, and Missouri: “From the 1920s through the late 1960s, Penney . . . used his rural properties to further experiment with his Golden Rule philosophy for tenant farmers and agrarian workers, providing profit-sharing opportunities and agribusiness partnerships, just as he had applied that same philosophy in J. C. Penney stores to develop stock clerks into store managers, and in many cases, store managers into independently wealthy men” (p. 7).

J. C. Penney's numerous agricultural projects spanned decades and were aimed, in his own words, “to do the best possible job I can in agriculture and livestock, for the benefit of my fellow man” (p. 10). In a few places, Kruger is emphatic that J. C. Penney did not engage in these endeavors for tax breaks or as a “rich man's hobby.” He also distinguishes J. C. Penney from other wealthy businessmen. In contrast to Sam Walton, Kruger argues, J. C. Penney's “moral conviction that a merchant's obligations did not end by simply providing low-priced merchandise or wage-based jobs through the stores that bore his name” (p. 286). Instead, J. C. Penney's Golden Rule led him to use his wealth, expertise, and time to benefit his rural customer base that had helped him accumulate wealth.

Four chapters cover the Penney's retail chain using mainly secondary sources, but the bulk of the book is devoted to J. C. Penney's extensive and lesser-known agricultural efforts to improve the lives of rural Americans through better breeding of livestock and horses and farm modernization, between the 1920s and the 1960s. Kruger highlights his successes and his personal and business failures—notably, one involving a 120,000-acre utopian experiment called Penney Farms, in Florida (1925–1937), where he sought to assist hundreds of families. By the onset of the Great Depression, however, a number of factors had conspired to doom the project and cost J. C. Penney his entire $40 million fortune, which sent him into depression and time in a Battle Creek, Michigan, sanitarium. It was there that he experienced a life-changing religious epiphany, and by 1934 both he and his company had recovered.

After the failed Florida project, and with the support of his third wife (the two previous ones—and one son—succumbed to illnesses), J. C. Penney plowed ahead, establishing farms to raise and breed cattle and horses and experiment with modern farm-management techniques with mixed success. He also worked closely with professors and students from a few colleges and universities, to whom he also donated large sums of money and property. Along the way he took on farm partners, some of whom, like their retail analogs, prospered financially. Their stories add a human angle to this larger account of farms and animals.

James Cash Penney's retail legacy continues, but what of his agricultural one? The retirement community he established at Penney Farms in Florida is still in existence. An endowed dairy research center at the University of Missouri continues to fulfill its mission. Buildings that he owned and donated helped to establish the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Genetic imprints from his livestock breeding can still be found in Guernsey, Hereford, and Aberdeen-Angus breeds. In agricultural communities in the Midwest where J. C. Penney established farms, there are people who still fondly remember him. As Kruger notes, “One of his former herd boys at Home Place Angus (1948–1964) still owns and operates the Missouri farm where Penney himself was born and raised. Forty miles from (his) birthplace, two more large family farms remain as human monuments to his agricultural benevolence, and children and grandchildren of his farming partners now own and operate the agrarian enterprises he helped them create” (p. 296).

Business history is not Kruger's main focus in this deeply researched book, but business and agricultural historians can learn much about how J. C. Penney applied his Golden Rule philosophy to improve the lives of poor rural farm families. A century later, we might consider unearthing Penney's Golden Rule and applying it to reducing poverty and income inequality.