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accused of monopolizing the cotton marketing industry during a series of congressional investigations between 1928 and 1936. Clayton vigorously defended the company at the hearings. During the Great Depression the firm expanded its multinational operations. The early years of the depression resulted in a drop in cotton exports to Europe and a significant increase in foreign cotton production. As a result, U.S. cotton trading never resumed its earlier importance, and over the next few decades Anderson, Clayton withdrew from cotton marketing and developed as a conglomerate. With expanding international interests, Clayton emerged as one of the outspoken defenders of worldwide enterprise and opponents of protectionism. Clayton also moved into federal government positions. He served on the cotton committee of the War Industries Board during World War I. In the 1930s, when Jesse Jones became Federal Loan Administrator, he brought Clayton into the government as his deputy. After Jones, Clayton may well have been the most important link between the Houston and Texas business elites and the federal government in this period. After serving as Jones’s deputy, Clayton was appointed Assistant Secretary of State, in which position he reportedly played a principal role as one of the architects of the Marshall Plan. Clayton was also very active in the Business Council, which took an internationalist position on issues. He served as a chief trade negotiator for the United States after World War II and negotiated the first international integrate the Houston business community into international markets and politics. These extensive outside activities may account for his lesser role in the local power structure. In addition to Suite 8F figures and to Clayton, the larger power structure of the city, according to one 1960 study, included J. Morgan Davis and Rex Baker. However, these men seem to have devoted most of their time to Humble Oil and the oil business. Hines H. Baker and W. B. Bates were mentioned in the same study as partners in leading law firms, but they do not surface elsewhere as influential leaders, except on a few specialized issues. Another prominent local lawyer, Dillon Anderson, was very active in national politics as special assistant to President Eisenhower but seldom in local matters. This study of the local elite reported that a few other executives were mentioned locally as influential: Palmer Bradley, a Sun Oil executive; Al Parish, head of Houston Light and Power; Lamar Fleming, head of Anderson, Clayton; and L. F. McCollum, an executive at a firm then called Continental Oil. It would appear, however, that these latter influential individuals played a less significant role than 8F members on most major local issues. BARKER TEXAS HISTORY CENTER Allan Shivers, Tom Clark, James Elkins and Gus Wortham THE BUSINESS ELITES AND SEVERAL LEVELS OF GOVERNMENT Houston’s history is a history of the business establishment creating, shaping, and running local governmental bodies, as well as securing aid from and participating in the running of state of Texas agencies and of certain federal agencies. Houston’s business leaders have been involved with national politics and the federal government since before World War I. Men like Edwin Parker and John Kirby filled important roles but Jesse Jones was perhaps the most active at the federal level. Jones was a major force behind the proposal to the U.S. Congress to pay half the cost of improving the Houston Ship Channel. In the early 1900s Jones led a group of business leaders to Washington, D.C., to convince Congress to fund half the cost of dredging Buffalo Bayou; he headed the Houston Harbor Board that supervised the dredging project, completed in 1914 and celebrated with a cannon firing triggered by President Wilson from the White House. Wilson later invited Jones to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of Commerce. Jones had become a major powerbroker in the Democratic Party by the 1920s. He was a Texas delegate to the Democratic convention in 1924 and became director of finance for that ill-fated Presidential campaign. In the late 1920s Jones used his position in the Democratic Party to put Houston on the political map. When the time came for various city elites to bid for the location of the 1928 Democratic Party convention, San Francisco’s business leadership offered $250,000. Jones himself countered with a successful recommendation that Houston be chosen as the site, wrote out a personal check for $200,000, and promised a 25,000-seat hall for the convention; it was barely completed in time for the delegates to see the Catholic New Yorker Al Smith nominated by Franklin Roosevelt in Houston, a Protestant town of the Old South. Moreover, during the 1930s and 1940s Jones served President Roosevelt as head of the FCC, as Federal Loan Administrator, and Secretary of Commerce. Yet during these years Jones kept in constant contact with his National Bank of Commerce back home; he set bank policy and attended some board meetings while a Washington official. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston and other Texas cities had a lot of powerful friends in Washington, D.C. John Nance Garner, as House member and VicePresident, had represented Texas for decades. A Texas Senator chaired the Senate military affairs committee while Texas House members chaired the judiciary, agriculture, and rivers and harbors committees. Between the 1930s and the 1960s there were many direct links between Houston’s business leadership and the federal government. An important politician associated with the Suite 8F crowd was House Majority Leader and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. In his .1944 campaign Rayburn faced a tough opponent, and, although regarded as “not conservative enough” by many Texans, Rayburn received behind-the-scenes backing from the Suite 8F crowed, particularly Judge Elkins. But perhaps the most important politician associated with the Suite 8F crowd was Lyndon B. Johnson. The Brown brothers were effective in cultivating national politicians. During the Great Depression, New Deal contracts helped save Brown and Root from bankruptcy. In the mid-1930s the Browns had received a federal contract to build a dam project near Austiti, but Brown and Root’s contract needed further congressional approval. The brothers helped get a young New Deal Representative named Lyndon B. Johnson elected. Within two weeks of his arrival in Washington, Johnson got the necessary approval for the dam. Johnson became a full-fledged member of the Suite 8F crowd. The Brown brothers were sometimes called “New Deal capitalists” because of the federal contracts they received, which in the 1930s and 1940s included dams, naval air stations, and warships. After World War H, the Brown brothers bid on two war surplus pipelines, and the Texas Eastern Co., now a Fortune 500 firm, was created to operate the pipelines. DURING WORLD WAR II there was much contact between the local business leadership and the federal government, in addition to the individual work of Jones, the Browns, Lyndon Johnson, and Will Clayton. For example, during the war the Chamber of Commerce was involved in bringing war projects to the Houston area. 16 SEPTEMBER 2, 1988