Commerce Cabinet Crisis IX: Jesse H. Jones
Harry Hopkins was followed by a second Commerce Secretary who was an important Roosevelt administration figure, but not really important in his capacity as Secretary of Commerce. That man was Jesse H. Jones. Born in Tennessee, as a young man Jones went to work for his uncle at age 19; the uncle then died when Jones was just 24, at which point he moved to Houston and took over the family business. Jones became a major Houston figure, and helped secure federal funding for the Houston Ship Channel that turned Houston into an important port.
Woodrow Wilson offered him the Commerce job back in the day, but Jones turned it down. Later, Wilson prevailed upon him to run military relief for the American Red Cross. After the war, Jones went back into private business, but Herbert Hoover called on him to serve as a member of the board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation which was initially tasked with trying to rescue troubled banks by providing loans and liquidity. This didn’t really work very well and, as is well known, the situation got worse and worse throughout the Hoover years. When FDR took office, he reorganized the RFC and put Jones in charge.
The new RFC had more funding and a broader mandate—it made loans directly to businesses and to state and local governments across the country. The result was perceived by Jones’ rivals inside and outside of the administration as a patronage empire, but it seems Roosevelt was happy enough with his work. When Hopkins was sent abroad to represent FDR in London and Moscow, his Commerce hat was passed to Jones. Soon enough, the war was on and domestic reform projects were out of the spotlight. Instead, the RFC was reoriented toward war production. By 1944, Roosevelt was sick of Vice President Henry Wallace and wanted him dumped from the ticket which he was, in favor of Harry Truman. But there was a desire to keep Wallace on the inside of the tent pissing out, so the Commerce job was given to him and Jones was forced out in 1945.
6 Responses to “Commerce Cabinet Crisis IX: Jesse H. Jones”
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February 22nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
If your next post in the series is about Henry Wallace, it’s going to have to be a loooong post. Dude’s got a fascinating bio.
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:28 pm
You know, you started this “Commerce Cabinet Crisis” series in order to lampoon the Department of Commerce and the general thread of patronage appointments, bringing-in-allies-from-big-business aspect of it all. But low-and-behold your narrative seems to involve itself repeatedly in the central political struggles of successive administrations. Sure, the fact that the protagonists are secretaries of commerce seems ancillary to the thrust of what’s going on, but enough of this and you have a hint at something greater, no?
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:56 pm
It seems to me that until the Bush/Cheney regime, most Commerce secretaries were competent and accomplished individuals, instead of hacks and cronies. And this change in qualification happened in every single department during the last 8 years, so why pick on the poor Commerce secretaries?
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Freebird : Lynyrd Skynyrd
Commerce : Matt Yglesias
What post is it you want to hear? [holds up lighter]
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I don’t think “By 1944, Roosevelt was sick of Vice President Henry Wallace and wanted him dumped from the ticket which he was, in favor of Harry Truman” accurately describes the situation. Wallace was dumped at the behest of conservative Democrats, who thought Wallace was a leftie and too friendly to civil rights. Truman was chosen, not because Roosevelt particularly liked him or because conservative Democrats (read: Dixiecrats) particularly liked him, but because he was a border-state Senator (and thus neither Northern nor Southern), a loyal party man (of the Pendergast machine), and his investigations committee work gave him a good-government reputation.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Appropos of nothing else in the comments. Growing up in Houston, the Jones name was massive.
Jones:
* was the longtime owner of the HOUSTON CHRONICLE
* donated $200K to the DNC to bring the national convention to Houston in 1928.
* was president of the biggest bank in town.
By the time, I was growing up in the 1980s, Jones was dead, but his name was everywhere:
* Jones High School.
* Jones Hall, home of the symphony and the ballet
* Jones College of Communications at UT-Austin
* Jones College at Rice (my friend was there).
Reading on some of this history later, Jones was one of the most prominent people trying to “normalize” Texas in the first half of this century, when oil money and western heritage made it possible for Texas to try to separate itself from the rest of the Old Confederacy.