He sold the floor once. He sold the shine again and again.
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This is the twenty-second profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are
The story goes that Samuel Curtis Johnson mixed his first floor wax in a bathtub. His company calls that a legend, and it should be told as one.
The man is better documented than the bathtub, and S.C. Johnson history begins with a run of failures. Born in Ohio in 1833, he started as an office boy for a railroad and later kept a book and stationery store in Kenosha. By the company’s account, a railway venture cost him his job and his savings, and the store failed too. In 1882, nearly fifty, he moved his family to Racine to sell parquet flooring for the Racine Hardware Manufacturing Company.
In 1886, by the company’s reckoning, he bought the flooring business. Five days a week he sold to contractors who built fine houses, churches and hotels. A company history says his ledger carried an account headed “Tithes,” and that he gave away a tenth of his income.
Then the letters came. The customers had handsome floors and did not know how to keep them. Soap and water ruined the finish and warped the small blocks. Shellac built up and peeled. By 1888, the company says, Johnson had a wax of his own, and soon every Johnson floor went out with a can of Johnson’s Prepared Wax.
A customer bought a floor once.
The wax to keep it had to be bought again.
The Rise: Shine Without Rubbing
People who had never bought a Johnson floor began writing for the wax. By 1898, the company says, wax, finishes and fillers together outsold the flooring. In 1906 his son Herbert became a partner, and the firm became S.C. Johnson & Son. The last parquet shipped in 1917.
Paste wax was work. You got down on your knees with the can and a cloth, and you rubbed. In 1932 the founder’s grandson, Herbert F. Johnson Jr., called Hib, brought out Glo-Coat, a floor wax that dried to a shine by itself. Hib, the company says, shipped about half a million pints to stores that had not ordered them, to sell or send back at the company’s expense. By its account, they sold it.
From 1935 to 1950 the company sponsored Fibber McGee and Molly on NBC radio. The announcer, Harlow Wilcox, worked the wax into the plot, and Fibber called him Waxy. The company says up to 20 million people listened, and what they heard, week after week, was that a good floor shone.
In 1935 Hib set out for Fortaleza, Brazil, in a Sikorsky amphibian named Carnaúba, looking for a steady source of carnauba, the hard palm wax in his products. Afterward he wrote to his young son, “To Sammy, I hope you make this trip some day.”
He also hired Frank Lloyd Wright. The Administration Building opened in Racine in 1939. Its columns rise from bases nine inches across to broad concrete disks Wright called lily pads. The state wanted a test column to carry twelve tons. Wright had it loaded to sixty.
Between the lily pads Wright laid glass tubing. It was Pyrex, Corning’s heat-resistant glass, run in rows along the walls and across the ceiling like bundled reeds. Light came through it the way light comes through ice. From a desk you saw brightness and no sky. It was beautiful, and it leaked. No caulk of the day could seal the joints. Eventually some tubes were covered with protective glass and others replaced with acrylic that could be sealed.
The Turn: S.C. Johnson History After Wax
Sam Johnson, Hib’s son and the Sammy of that letter, ran a new-products division from 1955. When he brought his father a bug spray, the company tells it, Hib looked at the can and asked, “Don’t you realize we don’t make any products without wax in them?” Sam said he could add a little wax but doubted it would kill bugs any better. Raid came out in 1956, with Glade, OFF! and Pledge close behind.
Later the company bought what it had not invented: Windex with Drackett in 1992, Ziploc with Dow’s consumer brands in 1998. That year its ads and logo changed from Johnson Wax to “S.C. Johnson — A Family Company.” By then, a standard reference history notes, wax was only a small part of the business. In 1999 it sold Aveeno to Johnson & Johnson, the subject of the previous profile and no relation.
In June 1975 Sam announced that the company had taken chlorofluorocarbons, then suspected of thinning the ozone layer, out of its aerosols in the United States and would do the same abroad. Federal rules came three years later.
A hard thing has to be said here. Many of the warmest facts in this story come from the company itself: the bathtub, the tithes, the half-million pints, the 20 million listeners. A private company discloses little, so its memory can be checked only in pieces. Where those pieces exist, the story has sometimes grown. The company’s website now quotes that announcement as clearing fluorocarbons from “our production lines,” with no mention of the United States. By the company’s own account, the change saved it millions. In 2008 it put a “Greenlist” seal of its own making on Windex. After two class actions said the seal looked like outside approval, the company settled in 2011, agreed to drop that logo from Windex in the United States, and its chairman said it could have been more transparent.
The Reckoning: The Palm in Ceará
Hib died in 1978. At his request, the company says, a carnauba palm was engraved on his tombstone.
The palm grows in Brazil’s northeast and is farmed nowhere else. Its wax comes from a powder beaten out of the dried leaves, which are cut by hand in some of Brazil’s poorest towns. Inspectors keep finding workers in the groves in conditions Brazilian law calls analogous to slavery. Papel Social, a Brazilian group that investigates supply chains, counts about 400 rescued between 2012 and 2023.
Papel Social says that in 2016, working with the International Labour Organization, it traced powder from those groves through a dozen processors. Its published account names SC Johnson among the companies those processors sold to directly. The same account says the cheaper powder goes into car wax and polish for floors and furniture.
That is an investigator’s finding about 2016, not a government charge, and its public summary does not show the shipments behind it. I found no public record of where SC Johnson buys carnauba now. Brazilian police and prosecutors say no buyer of carnauba can claim a clean chain; the harvest is too informal to trace. SC Johnson’s stated policy is zero tolerance for forced labor among its suppliers. What the public record does not show is how far that policy reaches: which groves, which processors, which workers’ leaves end up in which can.
Closer to home, in January 2000, at the EPA’s urging, the company recalled its AllerCare dust-mite powder and spray, sold to people with asthma and allergies, after more than 400 reports that included asthma attacks; later that year it paid a $200,000 penalty to settle EPA allegations that the spray was an unregistered pesticide and funded a year of a mobile asthma clinic for Baltimore children.
What Endures: Under the Lily Pads
Five generations on, the family still holds the company. Fisk Johnson, the founder’s great-great-grandson, runs it as chairman and chief executive. Raid, Glade, Windex and Pledge come off the lines just outside Racine, and Ziploc bags by the billions out of Bay City, Michigan.
Why did it stay with one family? The company’s answer is that being private lets it plan for the next generation. Maybe. The record is rougher than the slogan. Herbert Sr. died in 1928 without a will. The reference history says Hib and his sister Henrietta fought over control for more than a decade, settling in 1939, the year the Wright building opened; a 1999 newspaper account also describes the struggle, though not its end. From 1958, outsiders often held the president’s or chief executive’s office. Decades later, the reference history says, Sam set up separate family businesses for three of his children to run, to spare them that kind of fight. Was the continuity a virtue, or a quarrel settled and then managed so it would not recur? I lean toward the managing, and I am not sure.
The headquarters is still in Racine, under the lily pads. In Fortaleza Hall on the campus hangs the replica Carnaúba that Sam and two of his sons flew to Brazil in 1998. Sammy made the trip.
Gather it up. A can of wax that went out with a parquet floor. Half a million pints of Glo-Coat sent out on faith. A radio announcer called Waxy. Glass tubes that let in the light and the rain. A seaplane named for a palm, the palm engraved on a tombstone, and its leaves still cut by hand in Ceará.
For a long time the gleam on many American floors came out of a can from Racine.
S.C. Johnson waxed the American floor, and that is worth remembering.
Why S.C. Johnson? Johnson’s Wax taught the country to keep a polished floor, first with paste and a cloth, then with Glo-Coat that shone without rubbing, and radio carried the name into millions of homes. When wax no longer carried the business, one family kept the name on the door in Racine and put it on other things a house needs — bug spray, air freshener, glass cleaner, plastic bags.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.