Will Clayton: A Short Biography 9780292772878

Citation preview

Will Clayton

WILL CLAYTON. Karsh,

Ottawa.

Will Clayton A Short Biography By ELLEN CLAYTON GARWOOD

AUSTIN UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

© 1958 by the University of Texas Press Published as a Supplement to The Texas Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 4 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58—14417 Manufactured in the United States of America by the Printing Division of the University of Texas

To My Mother

This page intentionally left blank.

vii

Acknowledgments to whom I am grateful for help with this biography—contemplated but postponed for so long—a few must be mentioned. Without the encouragement of Dr. Gerald Langford and Dr. Harry Ransom, the book in this form might never have been started. Without the aid of my mother, my aunts, Mrs. Frank Anderson and Mrs. Leland Barbee, my uncle, Mr. Ben Clayton, and Mrs. Helen Ainsworth, Mr. Hu Harris, Mr. Lamar Fleming, Jr., Mr. Ernest Jones, Mr. Winthrop Brown, Mr. George C. McGhee, and Mr. Jean Monnet, the study would have lacked important information. Without the help of Mrs. Frances Debogory Horton, the manuscript might not have been finished on time. In Tupelo, Mississippi, and Jackson, Tennessee, Clayton and Burdine relatives, as well as childhood friends of my father's, were gracious and generous to me in my search for material on the early days. Among those to whom I talked were Mr. John Anderson, Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Clayton, Mr. John Richey Clayton, Mr. Cacye Wax, Mr. Harris Brown, Mr. Curtis Bray, Miss Anna Butler, Mrs. Will Weis, Mrs. Will Holland, Miss Mary Timberlake, Mr. and Mrs. Seale Johnson, Mrs. T. A. Andrews, Mrs. Lotta Short, and Mr. Hugh Ross. Mr. Walter Chandler of Memphis was kind enough to send me his "Personal Recollections of Jackson." AMONG THE MANY PEOPLE

viii As these pages go to press, international affairs move into ever more disturbing crises—situations where Will Clayton's thinking seems as prophetic as in the emergencies herein portrayed. For his views on how to cope with new threats to peace, a later and more expansive biography will be needed. ELLEN CLAYTON GARWOOD

A Note to the Reader In a biography short enough to serve as a book supplement in The Texas Quarterly it was impossible to cover all Will Clayton's activities or to include all the important events of the times. A chronological table, supplying more fully both background and foreground detail, has been added to the biography here. It is hoped that this "Chronology" will serve the reader as a useful guide through the maze of principal world events which have paralleled or nearly coincided with the main events in Will Clayton's life.

ix

Contents Acknowledgments PART

vii

ONE—Government Service

1. The Marshall Plan and Multilateral Trade .

.

2. Reactions to the Clayton Theme .

.

PART

.

.

.

. .

3 . 1 9

Two—Youth

3. Work and Romance .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

4. A Period of Preparation in New York

43 56

PART T H R E E — M a t u r i t y

5. From New York to Oklahoma Territory 6. Houston and Washington .

.

.

. .

. .

. .

. 7 7 .

95

APPENDIXES

The Marshall Plan : The Speech and Some Pertinent Documents . . . . . . .

.

.115

Chronology of Events, 1880-1958

129

Index

159

This page intentionally left blank.

xi

Illustrations Will Clayton, frontispiece Between pages 84 and 85 : Clayton Wearing Finnish Decoration Benjamin Lockhart Clayton (Will Clayton's Grandfather) Fletcher Burdine (Will Clayton's Mother) Benjamin Clayton (Will Clayton's Younger Brother) Sue Vaughan, 1899 Sue Vaughan, 1900 Sue Clayton, c. 1941 The Will Clayton Family, c. 1905 The Clayton Family, Jackson, Tennessee, c. 1897 The Claytons in Egypt Will and Sue Clayton at Brownsville, Texas, Airport Clayton at Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City Clayton at the 1946 Peace Conference Clayton in Conference with N. I. Feonov Clayton at the Vatican Marshall Plan Talks American Experts Discuss Needs of Europe

xii ILLUSTRATIONS

Clayton Receiving a Farewell from News Reporters Clayton Indicates the Spread of Communism Will Clayton—Photograph which Inspired Raymond Neilson's Portrait The Will Claytons Inspecting a Houston Slum District Will and Sue Clayton in Their Houston Garden The Will Clayton Home in Houston

PART I

Government Service

This page intentionally left blank.

3

Chapter 1

The Marshall Plan and Multilateral Trade

O

NE DAY in June of 1946 the United States Congress api proved legislation creating, for two years, a new post in the F government—that of Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. The man for whom this post was created and whose nomination the Senate confirmed was not a career diplomat. He was a businessman who had held, since 1940, as many government assignments as his years of service, one promotion quickly following another. What were his qualifications? These, in a man impossible to stereotype, are not adaptable to summary or label. But certain things stand out. He was a man whose mind, like his life, spanned the dividing line of two centuries. In 1900 he was already twenty years old—a puritan from the still defeated South, whose ideals were receiving a harsh injection of realism in the business world of New York. Today, in the sweep of history which has zoomed transportation from the horse and wagon to the jet plane and has brought East and West into almost instant communication, this man's thinking has kept pace, bridging continents as well as centuries. He is my father, Will Clayton. Two years before the Vice-President of the United States was stoned and spit at in Caracas, Venezuela, before the situation in Europe grew dark with the French-Algerian crisis, and before rebellion flamed still

4

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

more dangerously in the Near East, Will Clayton was writing, in an article called "Atlantic Union—The Road to Peace" {International Yearbook of the Cotton Trade Journal for 1955-1956) : In this vast struggle which is raging throughout the world for the minds and loyalties of men, the weakness of the foreign policies of the democracies lies in the fact that such policy is mostly negative—it is against something. The Communist policy, on the other hand, is positive. They have a program to cure all the ills of all people everywhere. It is a false program, of course, but anyway it is something positive. And make no mistake about it, it is catching on in the world. The free world must shift from the negative to the positive if it is to win this struggle It is a tragic mistake to look upon Communism as the only obstacle to a continuation of our nation's enjoyment of a luxurious life while much of the rest of the world lives in abject poverty. Communism is but an outward manifestation of the world revolution now in progress—a revolution of the "have nots" not so much against the "haves" as against their own lot in life.... There are just too many . . . people in the world who go to bed cold and hungry every night to expect that victory in the fight to contain Communism will bring peace to the world. But someone will probably say: "But this misery . . . has always existed. How does the situation today differ from the past?" The answer is to be found in the techniques of the modern world. Formerly the miserable lived and died in ignorance. So far as they knew, the whole world lived and died in misery. Today they know better. They know better in Venezuela, in the Middle East, and in North Africa, as has been recently demonstrated. Two months before the fiasco of our Vice-President's Latin-American trip and four months before the overthrow of the pro-Western government of King Feisal in Iraq, Clayton—looking, as usual, beyond tomorrow—spoke out in a pamphlet called "What Price Oil?" on the urgent need to avoid antagonizing Canada, Venezuela, and the Middle East. By the question, "How long do they expect World War III to last?" he refuted certain producers' arguments that national defense requires that we restrict our importation of foreign oil. The implication was: "If the hydrogen war is to come because we've lost our leadership of the free world, what good will home reserves of oil do after a day's destruction?"

5 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

Clayton's 1956 article continued: The first job today for statesmen of the free world is to breathe new life and vigor into NATO Permanent world peace can only be built on a foundation of economic justice and economic progress for all peoples of the world. To create such a foundation is the second job of the free world. The United States alone can do neither job. Indeed neither job can be done adequately and efficiently except through the political, economic, and military union of the free nations of the world ; or most of them;... On June 25, 1958, in the hope that he might help avert the disaster of crippling amendments proposed by certain Senators to the bill for renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, Clayton sent a statement to the Senate Finance Committee, which was inserted into the Congressional Record by Senator Lyndon Johnson. Coming as it did only a short time before the intensification of the "cold war" through the rebellion in Lebanon and the revolution in Iraq—the latter so loudly applauded by the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, Arkady Sobolev—the statement was prophetic. Clayton ended by saying: If we are to win the cold war, there is so much to do and perhaps so little time in which to do it. Much capital, public and private, must be made available to the countries that need it for the development of their resources and for raising their standard of living. Only in exceptional cases should there be gifts; but loans and investments can be amortized only through the receipt of goods in multilateral trade. If we are to seize the opportunities for peace and prosperity offered us by the modern world, we must contemplate a great increase in our imports, raising our own standard of living, adding to the variety and richness of our lives, and increasing the efficiency of our production. Increased imports would mean decreased grants and smaller budgets. All of this means that tariffs and other barriers to the international movement of goods must be lowered, not raised. Economic nationalism just won't mix with political and military internationalism. If we try to make them mix, the present feeble unity of the free world will go to pieces, the cold war will be lost, and freedom, as we have known it, will disappear. In nearly every statement that has come from Clayton's pen since his resignation as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs on October

6

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

15, 1947, the central concept has been that the welfare of our country is integrally related to that of the other free nations and that world peace is dependent, both on this welfare and on the radiation of its benefits throughout the world by an unhampered flow of trade. Where did these ideas have their most dramatic manifestation? One's thoughts go back immediately to the Marshall Plan, proposed by Secretary of State George Marshall in his famous Harvard speech on June 5, 1947. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that the world faces today a climate almost as explosive as that of the ominous season of early 1947. It is an "out-of-joint" time, in which there may be some value in tracing the evolution of that imaginative thinking behind the plan which in 1947 saved much of Europe and the free world from catastrophe. The forthcoming biography of Will Clayton by Dr. Ross Pritchard, Director of International Studies at Southwestern College of Memphis, will present detailed information—both technical and, until recently, classified as confidential by the State Department—about the Marshall Plan and other activities in which Clayton played a crucial role. The present hour of uncertainty and risk makes increasingly important the foreign policy approach which the already published—and some unpublished—material reveals. It was further back even than eleven years ago that the ideas underlying the Marshall Plan began taking form. If we are to believe much of the printed material on the "fifteen weeks" (February 21 to June 5, 1947) in which the United States assumed the responsibilities of world leadership, then the concept of this plan was the outgrowth of studies which had been going on for some time in the economics division of the State Department, presided over by Will Clayton. In suggesting that the Marshall Plan owes much to Clayton's seven years' experience in government, the question arises as to how this plan points up and fits into the general philosophy reflected by his other accomplishments. To answer this question, one must review, first, what was happening in the State Department in the spring of 1947. Joseph M. Jones, in his book, The Fifteen Weeks, says : Clayton . . . spent most of April and May in Europe, negotiating for lower tariffs and a general pattern of liberal trading policies, attending the initial

7 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

session of the Economic Commission for Europe, traveling about getting first hand reports from leading economic and financial officials on Europe's calamitous condition, and reporting his views back to the State Department. He believed that nothing less than full economic federation of Europe and massive United States aid . . . would support the situation, and he freely said so during this period. Shortly before Clayton's departure for Europe, the Secretary of State had set out for a conference in Moscow. As Jones points out, before leaving on this trip, Secretary Marshall had asked George Kennan to establish and head a policy-planning staff, when his assignment with the War College ended in May. Jones states further that by mid-April, Marshall was sending back messages from Moscow urging that the staff be established without delay, and asking for recommendations within two weeks. Kennan, who exceeded the two-weeks deadline by only one week, did the only thing he could do, Jones writes: . . . he confined himself to figuring out an approach to a plan for a plan, using studies of the European situation for the most part already in existence . . . The most vigorous ideas current on the subject were... emanating from the economic offices of the State Department, presided over by Undersecretary Clayton... regarded as the nation's foremost economic statesman. Nevertheless, the Marshall Plan was, in Will Clayton's mind, only one part of a much larger plan for peace, a plan on which he had been working for over four years. This was the establishment of an international trade organization, for which a preparatory committee had met in London in October, 1946. On January 21, 1946, Clayton appeared before the Foreign Policy Association in Houston to make a speech on the British loan which he and Secretary of the Treasury Vinson had just negotiated with Lord Halifax, Lord Keynes, and Lord Brand and which was up for approval by Congress. He was introduced by Jesse Jones in a novel manner. Mr. Jones said, in part, "Probably no one in the country understands foreign trade better than Mr. Clayton . . . While I am not in agreement with the . . . British Loan which he advocates, there is no one for whom I have a higher regard." Part of Will Clayton's speech ran: In granting this assistance . . . we enable Britain to undertake with the United States, a full partnership in the enterprise of restoring the world to

8 WILL CLAYTON:

Government Service

a multilateral trade basis.... Perhaps of even greater long term importance is the fact that Britain is enabled by this credit to join with the United States . . . in . . . our proposals for the expansion of world trade and employment. These proposals have been in preparation in our government since the spring of 1943 They are to be considered at a world trade conference that we expect will be called by the United Nations Organization for the latter part of 1946. In fact the "Proposals for Expansion of World Trade and Employment . . . developed by experts drawn from several agencies of the United States Government, working . . . under the general chairmanship of William L. Clayton," were already in circulation in a State Department pamphlet put out for world-wide consideration and study in November, 1945. After the 1946 meeting of the preparatory committee in London, which Clayton had predicted in his address in Houston, another, and larger, meeting was held in Geneva in April, 1947. At this conference, a committee of fifteen nations drew up a charter for an International Trade Organization, to be considered and voted on at the final meeting scheduled for Havana in November. In an N.B.C. broadcast from Havana, on November 22, 1947, Clayton said, in answer to a question by his interviewer about the relationship between the International Trade Organization and the Marshall Plan : The Marshall Plan, or the European Recovery Program, has to do with the short-term emergency needs of one part of the world. The International Trade Organization has to do with the long-range trade policies and trade of all the world. They are highly complementary and inter-related. Will Clayton had high hopes that United States membership in the ITO—as it came to be called—would be approved by Congress. These hopes have not been realized. Nevertheless, the ideal has not been entirely lost. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—commonly called GATT—signed at Geneva in 1947 between the United States and twenty-two other countries (to which twelve new nations have since been added) embodies many of the proposals for which the Undersecretary had been working. The trouble is that G A T T has no administrative machinery. Only recently a proposal for an Organization for Trade Cooperation—an OTC—was put forward to correct this defect, and President Eisenhower, on January 5, 1958, highly recommended

9 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

United States membership in OTC. Nevertheless, Congress still hesitates to take action. Writing about Will Clayton's theories of trade, I. F. Stone, who had opposed Clayton's nomination to the State Department, said, in P.M., October 17, 1947, in an article on Clayton's recent resignation: This tall, lean, handsome Texan, with the tired, eagle expression, is a . . . man fighting a losing battle, for a dying philosophy [of free trade]. . . . In his last two press conferences, Clayton insisted again and again that East-West trade must be resumed, irrespective of political differences. . . . He, who was one of the architects of the . . . Marshall Plan, seemed as much opposed to a dollar curtain as to an iron curtain. . . . One felt in Clayton that he was not afraid of bogeymen, that he was big enough to try to understand the differences in the world, and that he was . . . genuinely desirous of peace. Earlier, Michael Hoffman, in the following excerpts from an article in the New York Times Magazine of September 21, 1947, had noted European criticism of the ITO program : The erudite Economist... bitterly attacks the Clayton doctrines of multilateral trade and nondiscrimination as blind application of outworn American theories. "The economic doctrine that Will Clayton seems to believe," says a recent sketch . . . in the London Observer, "has a faint scent of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. For Britons facing the tribulations of 1947 and beyond, such associations are far away;..." What the Economist overlooked was that the chief difference in Clayton's ideas and those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists is that free trade on a world basis—in an age of such improvements and acceleration of distribution and transportation as now exist—is a far wider concept, with a much greater latitude for gradual adjustment, than was the earlier free-trade theory. An extended Wealth of Nations is not obsolete in the world of today; instead, the opposite is true. The modern world of quick international access and interplay is by far the most logical world for untrammeled, multilateral trade. Michael Hoffman's article about Clayton's theories continued : . . . after... the ITO Charter... had been widely criticized as being at once

10 WILL CLAYTON:

Government Service

too idealistic and too full of loopholes designed to fit practical problems, Clayton summed up his position as follows : "We have come a long way toward agreement on some important principles. It would be too bad to lose this progress just because short-run troubles make it impossible to apply all these principles at once. If under the Marshall proposals Europe will be able, more or less, to take care of itself by, say 1951, we'll have something to go on from then forward. The alternative is to admit that we're always going to have chaos in international economic relationships. "It will be up to the United States principally to hold the line and prevent all those emergency measures from turning into permanent trade barriers. I don't think that is beyond the capacity of the United States, if we keep our eye always on the main objective of assisting the world to develop a better trading system that will open the way to higher living standards everywhere." Thus the Marshall Plan was designed, in Will Clayton's eyes, to prop up a weakened section of the free world so as to enable it to take part, eventually, in a universal exchange of trade by which every nation would benefit. (It is interesting to note that Life, on November 18, 1957, in an editorial called "A Giant Step," advocated—in view of "sputnik" and Russia's expanding economy—that we now take the free-trade "step." The step, in fact, grows more urgent daily. Only on April 28, 1958, Allen Dulles, head of our Central Intelligence Agency, warned that the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union was increasing at a rapid rate and that more and more she was using international trade as a weapon. Still more recently, both Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson have advocated much the same kind of freer trade that Clayton was urging over ten years ago. ) The crucial need for the prop to Europe in the spring of 1947 was something which—as Joseph Jones writes—Will Clayton voiced in May with "vividness and impressiveness" and a "sense of urgency . . . for taking immediate action." The fact that the urgency was so largely Clayton's may now be traced to a hitherto unpublished memorandum which he had written on March 5. He was on a plane going to a ranch in Tucson, Arizona, to recover from a streptococcus infection which had almost cost him his foot. (For anyone else, the foot would have been a strange place for a "flu" germ

11 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

to lodge. But Will Clayton put his feet through a vigorous routine of walking every day. His habit of walking to work was a practice which he did not relax even in Europe. Michael Hoffman, in the New York Times Magazine article previously quoted, wrote that no one could believe Clayton was sixty-eight, "as he strides up Geneva hills gingerly stepping aside for the whizzing limousines of delegates" from other countries.) Away from the Washington grind for his first vacation in seven years, he was able to look at world problems from the angle of their effect on coming generations. This gazing into the future is more than a habit; it is almost an instinct, a corollary to his native gift for logic—possibly inherited from his mother's French Huguenot forebears—a logic which views everything in the light of cause and effect, past and future. In fact the trait so often causes him to think on three levels at once—both of time and of subject —that his family calls it his "trance." So it was that on the way to Tucson his mind was working in its contrapuntal "trance" of interweaving themes, and he wrote the outline which would serve as a springboard to a later memorandum for the Marshall Plan—a plan that fits into his larger concepts like an urgent motif in a majestic symphony. When he returned to Washington a few weeks later, on the eve of Secretary Marshall's departure for Moscow, he did not hand this first memorandum to the Secretary because of the obvious impossibility of action on it until Marshall's return. The preamble of the memorandum speaks of the fact that the reins of world leadership, which "were fast slipping from Britain's competent but now very weak hands," would "be picked up either by the United States or Russia. If by Russia, there will almost certainly be war in the next decade or so . . . If by the United States, war can almost certainly be prevented . . . But the United States will not take leadership effectively unless the people . . . are shocked into doing so. To shock them, it is only necessary . . . to tell them the truth and the whole truth." This truth was to be found in cables daily arriving at the State Department from all over the world. The cables showed that in every country of the East and most countries of the West, Russia was boring from within—a new technique, "with which we have not yet learned to cope." Clayton pointed out that if Greece and Turkey should succumb, the Middle East would be lost;

12

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

France might then fall to the Communists, and as "France goes, all Western Europe and North Africa will go. These things must not happen. They need not happen." He went on to say that, assuming an unsatisfactory outcome of the Moscow conference, there should be issued —on the Secretary's return from Moscow—a joint statement by the President and the Secretary of State to Congress and to the American people. The memorandum then reads : . . . Such a statement should say : 1. The United States is determined on the preservation of world peace by all honorable means. 2. The United States does not covet the lands or possessions of any other peoples. 3. The preservation of world peace depends first of all upon the preservation of the integrity and independence of sovereign nations. 4. Nations can lose their integrity and independence either from the outside or the inside. 5. The United Nations is organized to deal with attacks from the outside but not from the inside. 6. The evidence is indisputable that a systematic campaign is now being waged to destroy from within the integrity and independence of many nations. 7. Feeding on hunger, economic misery and frustration, these attacks have already been successful in some of the liberated countries and there is now grave danger that they may be successful in others. 8. The security and interests of the United States and of the world demand that the United States take prompt and effective action to assist certain of these gravely threatened countries. 9. This assistance should take the form not only of financial aid, but of technical and administrative assistance as well. The United States does not wish to interfere in the domestic affairs of any country, but countries to which it extends financial aid must put their internal affairs in proper order so that such aid may be permanently beneficial. 10. Congress is asked to create a Council of National Defense, composed of the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the Chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House and the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate. 11. The Congress is further asked to appropriate the sum of five billions of dollars, for use by the Council of National Defense, either as grants or as loans, for the purpose of assisting sovereign countries to preserve their

13 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

integrity and independence, where such action is considered by said Council to be in the vital interests of the United States. 12. It had been expected that the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development would be able to furnish all requisite financial assistance to war-devastated countries, but it is now clear that this institution is not organized to render the kind of assistance which is required in the circumstances herein described. The facilities of the Bank will nevertheless be needed for worthy projects of reconstruction and development. 13. Two objections will be made to the program here proposed: one political and the other economic. 14. It will be said that this will involve us in the affairs of foreign countries and lead us eventually to war. The answer to this is that if we do not actively interest ourselves in the affairs of foreign countries, we will find that such affairs will become so hopeless that the seeds of World War III will inevitably be sown. 15. It will be said that our National Budget will not permit of this large expenditure. The war cost us over 300 billions of dollars and the blood of hundreds of thousands of our young men. We are now appropriating around 10 billions of dollars annually for the maintenance of our armed services. We are seriously talking of reducing taxes at a time when our people are enjoying the highest standard of living in their history, when our corporations and farmers enjoy the biggest earnings, after taxes, which they have ever known in peace time, and when our gross national product of goods and services has a greater dollar value than has ever been known in war or peace. Although the above memorandum was not circulated, a somewhat later one, written by Will Clayton on his plane trip home from Geneva May 19, 1947, was handed to Secretary Marshall. When a copy of this memorandum was sent to me on January 7, 1950, the accompanying letter said : I enclose copy of confidential memorandum which I handed to Secretary of State Marshall on my return from Europe the latter part of May, 1947. This was the basis of Secretary Marshall's speech at Harvard . . . (June 5, 1947) and was the basis of the Marshall Plan. This is the only copy I have left. The memorandum referred to is the one Mr. Joseph Jones speaks of in The Fifteen Weeks when he says :

14

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

Suffering from a heavy cold, occupied in hisfirstdays back with the urgent wool matter [the bill requiring a high tariff on wool which President Truman vetoed upon Clayton's urging] and then obliged to take to his bed on May 23, Clayton appears not to have circulated his memorandum outside his immediate office . . . until his return to the Department on May 2 7 . . . . This memorandum and the conversations that ensued had a powerful impact both upon the content of Secretary Marshall's Harvard speech and probably upon his decision to make it. As has been noted, the memorandum was the outcome of prior reports on the critical condition of Europe which had impelled the first memorandum, and to which Clayton now added first-hand knowledge. State Department concern had already resulted in Undersecretary Acheson's speech on May 7 before the Delta Council in Mississippi. With the May 27 memorandum, the need to take almost immediate action became imperative. A study of the memorandum—until recently classified as confidential —shows that Clayton felt it was his task, not only to supply the basis for the Marshall speech, but to convince the Secretary to make the address at once, and to give concrete figures and a plan with which the administration could go before Congress, later, to seek approval. The memorandum is replete with ideas and word pictures which were repeated in the Marshall speech. And it gives concrete figures on Europe's current annual balance-of-payments deficit, with a breakdown for each of four countries; it gives figures on coal and grain shortages; it suggests the amount of aid Europe will need from us, and it cautions that the aid must be based on a plan which the Europeans themselves should work out, an economic federation. This is the "joint program" which Marshall advocated in five sentences from the Kennan memorandum, produced for consideration at a State Department meeting, according to Joseph Jones, "either later . . . May 27, or the following morning . . ." As Clayton had urged, Marshall's speech was followed a week later by one from President Truman. The Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs then went abroad to render aid in drafting a European program and to get the Marshall Plan under way in which he was ably assisted by Ambassadors Lewis Douglas and Jefferson Caffery. Clayton's efforts did not stop there. In the Saturday Evening Post of November 29, 1947, there appeared an article called "Is the Marshall

15 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

Plan Operation Rathole?" by Will Clayton, as told to Beverly Smith. An "Editor's note" said: FROM THE MAN WHO KNOWS Former Under-Secretary of State Will Clayton, who continues in the capacity of Special Adviser to Secretary of State George C. Marshall, is probably better qualified to pass judgment on the Marshall Plan than any other American. In this article he reveals findings which are based on the four and a half months he spent overseas directing the first steps of implementing the plan In January, 1948, three months after his resignation from the State Department, Will Clayton, within little over a week, made no less than four speeches—in New York, in St. Louis, in Indianapolis, and in Philadelphia—urging support for the Marshall Plan, which was up for approval by Congress. In most of his speeches he spoke with prophetic and objective pride of the greatness of the proposal, and with the modesty of gratitude for the vision of the Secretary of State in whose name it was launched and whom he had been able to convince of its urgency. He was already viewing the "Plan" in the light of history, of the misery it would alleviate and the chaos it would avert. Will Clayton's clear analysis, in the Marshall Plan memorandum, of the interrelation of our own economy with that of the rest of the free world had been made possible by long experience as a founding partner in a firm of international cotton merchants which began, after World War I, to establish agencies in both hemispheres. Anderson, Clayton & Co. now has, in addition to offices in most European countries, an office in Japan, and subsidiaries in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, and Egypt. But the interdependence between our own country and others first became dramatically clear in Clayton's mind with the fall of Holland, Belgium, and France in 1940. The concept then began to include not only trade in the field of his cotton experience, but also security and survival in a shrinking world. During World War I Will Clayton had spent a year in Washington with the War Industries Board, under the direction of Bernard Baruch. His experience there and in business made it inevitable that he would be needed again in Washington in 1940, when it looked, already, as if the United States would be drawn into World War II. His first work for the

16 W I L L CLAYTON

: Government

Service

government was as adviser in the office of the Co-ordinator of InterAmerican Affairs, Mr. Nelson Rockefeller. In August, 1940, he resigned from Anderson, Clayton & Co. and shortly thereafter became a director and Vice-President of the ExportImport Bank. In October he was appointed, by Mr. Jesse Jones, as Deputy Federal Loan Administrator. In this capacity he was in charge of the purchase of strategic and critical materials for the United States stockpile. His assumption of these duties came at a crucial time for the Latin-American countries, which had already lost their markets in Europe, following the fall of France. It had been expected that these Latin-American nations, in order to remain stable, would require an unusual amount of financial assistance. But the United States purchases there soon exceeded in value the former exports of all the South American countries to all of Europe, and thus the crisis which had been apprehended was averted and there was no need to advance huge loans. At this time Clayton was also made Chairman of the Board of the United States Commercial Company, organized under Jones' "R.F.C." to do "preclusive" buying—the purchase of strategic materials at such speed and such prices as to prevent the enemy's getting them first. Bascom Timmons, in his book, Jesse H. Jones, writes : Clayton was quickly put in charge of the overseas procurement activities of Defense Supplies, Rubber Development Corporation, Metals Reserve Company, and eventually the U.S. Commercial Company. Defense Supplies was so well managed that it even collected its loan to Russia. One of the materials bought during these days was Portuguese tungsten, which the United States had to bid for at a far greater price than the same product was bringing in Bolivia. "We had agents studying the situation to see what the Germans were buying, so that we could go into competition to prevent them from obtaining the things they needed," Clayton explained. "We kept them from getting that Portuguese tungsten, but at what a price—$15,000 a ton, when in parts of South America it was selling for $ 1,500 !" Will Clayton told several stories illustrating the urgency and drama of this defense purchasing. One concerned the buying of materials from the Philippines, the Malay States, the Dutch East Indies, Australia, and

17 THE MARSHALL PLAN AND MULTILATERAL TRADE

North Caledonia, in the summer of 1941. Because of a shortage of ships it was feared the United States might be at war with Japan before all these goods could be transported. To effect a quicker turn-around for the ships, they were stopped from going through the Panama Canal to the eastern seaboard and were unloaded instead at ports on the Pacific coast, whence the goods would go by rail to the East—rubber to Akron, tin to Pittsburgh, etc. As a result, the west coast ports were soon clogged, since the railroads couldn't carry the goods away fast enough. But at least we were caught up, just in time, on the movement of these strategic materials to the United States when war broke. (The idea of changing the shipping route originated with Professor William Elliot of Harvard, who was doing special work for the War Production Board. ) Other things badly needed were mica and graphite—the former necessary for radios on planes and ships. The graphite had to be brought in from Madagascar, which, as a possession of France, was then under control of Vichy. Clayton sent an American ship, the Lone Star, into Madagascar to load graphite, mica, and quartz crystals which had been bought from private companies there. When relations between the United States and Vichy became strained, almost to the point of war, Secretary of State Hull advised that the Lone Star should sail at once. The order to sail was sent over the Navy's wireless, and the Lone Star slipped out at night with half a cargo, leaving ashore three American sailors. Later, when our relations with Vichy improved, Clayton sent in another ship to pick up the rest of the cargo and the stranded sailors. The ship was an old one. She was making ten knots when one engine gave out and she had to put into Capetown for repairs. While she was there the United States entered the war. Now we were not only "short" of all the Navy's ships sunk at Pearl Harbor, we were short of the essential graphite and mica needed for radios on the planes and ships we must build. Here was a situation that could prove most serious. The waters of the Atlantic between South America and Africa were infested with German submarines, and the ship was so slow that she would be a perfect target. In vain Clayton asked the Navy for a convoy; at that time not even two destroyers could be spared for so slow a ship. At last Clayton was able to find two sixteen-knot ships, which he sent out to unload the slow one, and "that," he says, "is how the badly needed cargofinallygot here."

18

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

Soon after we entered the war, the President abolished the Federal Loan Administration, and transferred all its duties to the Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Jesse Jones. On February 24, 1942, Clayton was named Assistant Secretary of Commerce, to carry on as he had before. He also had under his supervision the Department's responsibilities in aviation. In 1943, he assumed, in addition, the Presidency of the War Insurance Corporation, which insured against damage by war. While with the Commerce Department, he helped organize the Committee for Economic Development, to plan for an orderly postwar reconversion of industry. Also, he became a trustee of the School for Advanced International Studies. The only way he relaxed from his duties, these days, was at a game of bridge. Actually, it was not so much his work from which he needed diversion as a growing sense of frustration. Beginning in 1943 the responsibility for the purchase of strategic and critical materials had gradually been delegated to the Board of Economic Warfare, headed by the Vice-President, Mr. Henry Wallace. Since the only duties remaining to the RFC in this field were those of footing the bill, Clayton—the initiative he had originally been given no longer his—considered his work finished. In January, 1944, he tendered his resignation.

19

Chapter 2

Reactions to the Clayton Theme

O

N JANUARY 20, 1944, President Roosevelt wrote from the White House the following letter : Dear Mrs. Clayton,

Recently Will told me of his desire to leave Washington. I am sure that he was influenced by the very natural desire to comply with your wishes. He has been doing a grand job and I want to draft him to remain here and take over some new duties. However, I know that so far as he is concerned, you are the real Commander-in-Chief, and I am writing to ask you to order him to remain here and undertake the task for which I am drafting him. Please let me know when you have issued the orders. Sincerely yours, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

Don't relinquish your authority over him! Soon after Clayton's resignation from his job as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, the President, by executive order, appointed him Surplus War Property Administrator. Ten months later, when Will Clayton saw that the bill about to be passed by Congress for surplus war property disposal was unworkable—because it called for an Administrative Board instead of a single Administrator—he resigned this job, too. (Congress tried the bill for a year, saw it wouldn't work, and finally amended it as Clayton had advised in the first place. )

20 WILL CLAYTON

: Government

Service

The time for a vacation from government work, however, had not yet come. Clayton's knowledge of world economy, sharpened by his experience in buying strategic and critical materials all over the world for the United States stockpile, was sorely needed by his government. Shortly after his resignation as Surplus War Property Administrator, in 1944, he was asked by Secretary of State Stettinius to become Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. Before this nomination was confirmed by the Senate there was vigorous opposition. Like every man of strong convictions, particularly when the convictions are ahead of the times, Clayton had enemies. Added to that, his wealth, alone, made him a natural target for the "left." On December 5, 1944, the cover page of P.M. ran headlines which read, in part : STATE DEPARTMENT TRAGEDY WILL CLAYTON NEW ASSISTANT SECRETARY HIS FIRM HELPED NAZIS FIGHT BOYCOTT BEFORE WAR

This issue also carried an article accusing Clayton's firm of being the member of a cotton committee in 1939 which cooperated closely with the German authorities in arranging cotton barter deals. P.M. said : The cotton committee was an outgrowth of the notorious Transmares Corp., which was incorporated in New York by Nazi interests to defeat the boycott of German goods and help the Reich obtain the raw materials it needed to prepare for war. P.M. also accused Clayton's firm of selling cotton to the Japanese, "not from any ideological sympathies but purely on a 'business is business." basis." In answer to similar accusations made by a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clayton said : I don't remember that the Secretary of State placed a moral embargo on Japan on all products, but even so it is not something I was responsible for. I had divorced myself completely from the executive board [of Anderson, Clayton & Co.]. When Senator LaFollette asked him if he didn't, as principal stock-

REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

21

holder, feel a certain responsibility, Clayton replied that he did, but that he believed the men running Anderson, Clayton & Co. would have responded in the right way to a moral embargo. He was next questioned as to whether he was not a believer in international cartels. He answered by saying "nothing could be farther from the truth." This he documented by referring to his record and his speeches. He cited, among others, a six-year-old speech he had made before the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1938 and a speech made before delegates to the Cotton Research Congress at Waco in 1940. In these he had spoken out against bilateral trade agreements as destructive, and had argued in favor of multilateral trade as opposed to the so-called barter system, and, by implication, opposed to the type of restrictive agreement between companies whereby a patent is shared in secret, as in a cartel, thus increasing the price of the product affected. Clayton added : If any senator believes my own foreign interests would prevent me from taking an objective and patriotic position with reference to the interests of my country, I would expect him to vote against my nomination. Arthur Krock, in the New York Times of December 14, 1944, commented on Will Clayton's testimony : Mr. Clayton . . . finds himself in an anomalous position. Because of his unusual talents, his experience in world trade and his liberal economic viewpoint, he is satisfactory to the President as executor of the Administration's world trade policies through the State Department. But because at the same time he is the type of citizen whose personal achievements the President's preferred associates have aspersed as a point of New Deal doctrine, he is under fire from those very associates, particularly in the exportcrop States. And the fact that he belonged to the Liberty League is proof enough for many of them that he will try to substitute the capitalist-brokerprocessor philosophy for that which favors Vice President Wallace's "common man." Under the free enterprise system as it existed in this country while Mr. Clayton was rising from a lean farm in Mississippi to the highest and most lucrative post of command in the cotton business, his success and his acquisition of wealth were inevitable. He demonstrated greater ability than his competitors; he worked hard; and personality and good luck provided the other assets he required. But his firm made money both when the growers

22

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

weren't making their own small share of it and when they were. And that is always resented by many, notably those who are disposed to link success with shady doings or an unfair scheme of things. So Mr. Clayton is a shining mark for all sorts of persons in Washington and in the cotton country, and the local contingent was determined not to miss the chance to train its artillery on him. Actually the economic platform he enunciated is as far from that credited to Big Business and predatory capitalism as that of the nineteenth century liberals was from the creed of contemporary industrialists on the Congo. He is almost a free trader, being opposed to tariffs and other public subsidies to keep alive industries that cannot compete in world trade under good management. He is the ideological foe of private cartels and seems to share the New Deal inclination toward limited Government ones in special and temporary circumstances. He is sure, as are many distinguished economists, that our capital loans and export and import policy in the post-war world must be very generous if we are to have paying customers and our fair portion of the international markets. In all this there is nothing of the "robber baron" viewpoint and almost everything opposed to it. In January, 1946, when Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson was nominated to be United States Governor of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for a term of five years, Clayton was nominated as United States Alternate Governor for an equal term. In October, however, the newspapers carried a story that the Assistant Secretary of State had turned down the Presidency of the World Bank. A more important assignment had been in the offing months before. That was Clayton's appointment, on June 9, 1946, as the first Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. By mid-January of 1947, Representative Paul Shafer, Republican of Michigan, in a speech assailing both Will Clayton and Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, was demanding Clayton's removal. Shafer claimed that Clayton had used his office to help Anderson, Clayton & Co., in which the Clayton family owned 40 per cent of the stock. The Republican admitted his remarks were prompted by the fact that the "State Department now is holding conferences relating to further extension of the reciprocal trade agreements," which he opposed. One of the men . . . taking a leading p a r t . . . is Clayton . . . a well known

23 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

"one-worlder" in "do-gooder" circles—and I must admit he does believe in one world—one world for Will Clayton and his family. . . . Mr. Clayton . . . is always in favor of foreign loans. He made thefirstannouncement in 1945 that the British were seeking a three or four billion dollar loan and it was he who opened the preliminary discussions in London. He was the principal negotiator of the $3,750,000,000 British gift-loan which a Democratic congress passed and a Democratic president signed. Now Mr. Clayton is something also besides the undersecretary of state for economic affairs. In Anderson, Clayton & C o . , . . . he and . . . his . . . family jointly own 40 per cent of the stock. When he came to Washington to join the New Deal in 1940 he resigned as president of this company, but he did not divest himself or . . . his family of their huge stock holding in a company that depends for its very livelihood on foreign dealings—and, to a large extent, on the decisions made by Will Clayton. Shafer then read a public report of Anderson, Clayton & Company's earnings for the year 1946. The Congressman argued further: The record earnings, it is clear, were made in the year in which Great Britain was given a $3,750,000,000 American loan. Remember, that loan was negotiated principally by and through Will Clayton. Without American dollars, Great Britain would be unable to make large cotton or other purchases in this country. As we all know, Mr. Clayton is an active propagandist for more loans to other nations—to China, to France, to the Netherlands, and to Italy. Next, Shafer returned to the subject of Anderson, Clayton & Co.'s profits for the fiscal year ending July 31, 1946, which the company report had listed as around fourteen million, over five and one-half million of which, Shafer said, went to "stock under control of . . . Clayton and his wife and children." In connection with this statement the following impressions of Clayton and his wealth are instructive. They come from the book De America by the Italian author, Guido Piovene, who describes a visit to Houston several years after Clayton's resignation from the government. An interesting person I met was Will Clayton, former Undersecretary at Washington, and one of the principal founders and authors of the Marshall Plan. Clayton has an open mind, knows Europe thoroughly, talks of it as a European. With him I had the impression of being in Rome or Paris. He

24

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

sees the salvation of the Atlantic Nations in a still closer union, aside from any menace of war Clayton . . . created from nothing the firm of Anderson, Clayton & Co., that has spread throughout the world. It seems incredible but his personal profit is . . . reinvested immediately in new enterprizes and gifts to charity. At the end of the year 1950 Clayton was compelled to appeal to the banks for loans to pay taxes. This is liked in Texas because it goes back to the gospel of productivity. In answer to Shafer's charges, Will Clayton said : Whatever his intention, Mr. Shafer's statement is clearly wrong on its facts. The British loan was approved on July 13, 1946, by the House. The fiscal year of Anderson, Clayton & Co. ended July 31, 1946, so that obviously the loan could not affect the profits to which Mr. Shafer refers. I have no connection with Anderson, Clayton & Co. except as a stockholder, but I have ascertained that during that year Anderson, Clayton & Co. sold only 3500 bales of American cotton to Great Britain. This was less than one-quarter of one per cent of its total sales of 1,979,023 bales of American cotton for the season, which sales were very largely to domestic mills. Of total exports of 3,600,000 bales of American cotton during the cotton season 1945-1946 (which corresponds to the fiscal year of Anderson, Clayton & Co.) the Commodity Credit Corporation shipped directly 2,060,000 bales under lend-lease, UNRRA, and arrangements with the army in occupied territories. No cotton merchant profited from these governmental transactions, but quite the contrary. The remaining private exports of some 1,540,000 bales were made under the Commodity Credit Corporation surplus sales program and directly reduced government-owned stocks to the substantial benefit of the government and American cotton farmers. It is, of course, quite obvious that the exportation of cotton and other American products has been assisted by Export-Import bank credits. In the case of cotton the principal beneficiaries have been the Commodity Credit Corporation and American farmers. In the case of cotton credits, moreover, the loans have been uniformly short-term, interestbearing and virtually self-liquidating. Thus, they cost the American taxpayer nothing, unless there are unexpected defaults. Anderson, Clayton & Co. are not only cotton merchants, but are engaged in cotton-seed-oil milling, cotton-ginning and other local industrial activi-

25 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

ties in this country and abroad not much affected by foreign trade, and these activities contribute substantially to its profits. The newspapers, in commenting on this statement, said that Clayton's reference to Anderson, Clayton & Co.'s industrial activities was apparently in answer to Shafer's assertion that the company "depends for its very livelihood on foreign dealings—and, to a large extent, on the decisions made by Will Clayton." Clayton's defense of himself was less vigorous than his defense by the press, a consistent phenomenon whenever he has been attacked. One of the Houston papers carried an editorial which said, in part : Shafer charged . . . that Mr. Clayton supported the American loan to Britain last year for selfish reasons—to promote the foreign cotton business of Anderson, Clayton & Co., of which he formerly was president. He asserted that the company made record earnings in the year the British loan was negotiated. After noting how Clayton had refuted these charges—"Mr. Clayton nailed that one by pointing out," etc.—the editorial continued : He [Clayton] might have added that England has not been a major cotton customer of the United States since obtaining the loan, but has bought most of her cotton from countries that will take pounds sterling rather than American dollars in payment. It is understood that subsequent sales to Britain have accounted for a small percentage of Anderson, Clayton's business. Aside from those facts, it is a bit ironical that this Republican congressman should insinuate that Will Clayton has sought to feather his own nest by bolstering European business, when the historical fact is that his company's growth resulted principally from the impoverishment of Europe during and after the first World War. The decline of the European cotton market, due to loss of currency stability, capital and credit, continued until the European markets practically vanished. Even the great Liverpool market was closed a year or so ago, and the British government took over the cotton business. This eclipse of the European cotton business, shifting the world's financial center of gravity to New York, opened a vacuum, which Will Clayton was smart enough to enter and partly fill. His company stepped into the place formerly held by European firms which had once dominated the cotton market.

26

WILL CLAYTON : Government Service Thus, since Anderson, Clayton's greatest period of expansion was during, and in large measure by reason of, the financial adversity of the European firms—since Mr. Clayton owes his success largely to the decline of English markets—it doesn't add up to charge that now he wants to rehabilitate them for his own selfish interest. Rather, it is to his credit that he has striven to reverse their decline. Representative Shafer's charge on this score is as baseless and unjust as his alleged facts are wrong. For the inside story of Clayton's negotiations with the British in connection with commitments to a multilateral trading system, one of Clayton's assistants paints a picture which might have enlightened Mr. Shafer. This man states that Clayton, in his talks in 1946 with Sir Stafford Cripps (then President of the British Board of Trade) believed that the British had agreed, in return for United States assistance, to abandon the imperial preference system. Later, when Clayton found out that Cripps interpreted the agreement to mean only that Britain would attempt to negotiate away imperial preference over a period of years if she could get compensation from us in certain tariff concessions, Clayton— in favor of tariff concessions, but sure that his first interpretation had been right—was ready to scrap completely the commercial agreement recently negotiated with the British. Only the pleas of Mr. Harry Hawkins and Mr. Winthrop Brown that cancellation of this agreement would be a major tragedy prevented Clayton's taking this action. From Richard Gardner's book, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy (subtitled Anglo-American Collaboration in the Reconstruction of Multilateral Trade), published in 1956, the rather full account of Clayton's part in the loan negotiations is also of interest. Mr. Gardner says : Cordell Hull had retired from the Department of State, but his vigorous attitude on preferences was still shared by a large number of American officials—in particular, by Will Clayton, the new Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, who had charge of the American side of the commercial policy negotiations in Washington. As Gardner points out, Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson, chairman of the American Delegation for talks with the British, was in charge of that part of the negotiations concerned with the British request for financial aid, while Will Clayton, vice-chairman, was in charge of the

27 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

part concerned with the "Proposals" on commercial policy. The differences in the two men and the strong public opposition in the United States to the idea of a British loan are emphasized by Gardner. For instance, the election of a Labor government in Britain caused anxiety in this country, and Vinson, although he wished to help the British, typified the "grass roots" sort of government official whose main objective is to translate into policy the "will" of the people back home. Congress, besides, was being particularly rebellious. Of Clayton Gardner says: . . . [he] was certainly one of the most striking and original personalities to have served the . . . government in recent years.... His career was eloquent testimony to the tremendous potentialities of unfettered private enterprise In foreign economic policy Clayton was an even more uncompromising exponent of free enterprise principles than Cordell Hull himself . . . Clayton's attitude in the Washington negotiations was an expression of this philosophy, combined with courage, magnanimity and goodwill. He had always taken a sympathetic view of the British predicament. He was not a person to shrink from unpopular policies out of fear of domestic political difficulties. At the same time he was by no means soft or forgetful of American interests. America's primary interest in aiding Britain, so it seemed to him, was reconstruction of a multilateral regime. Mr. Gardner's chief criticism of Will Clayton is that he presented to Congress and to the people too optimistic a picture of the possibility of achieving the multilateral trading system which he envisioned. As we have noted, the empire preferences which the Assistant Secretary of State had thought to see relinquished were not entirely given up, and Mr. Gardner feels that the hope he had held out for the beneficial results to trade, both from the British loan agreement and later from the Havana proposals for an International Trade Organization was too much of an overstatement. This criticism was doubtless influenced by the gloomy trade outlook which prevailed at the end of the period Gardner covers in his book, and which, according to Professor R. F. Harrod, of Christ Church, Oxford, who writes a preface to the book, is becoming brighter. Harrod says: Mr. Gardner finds that by 1947 the aim of multilateralism, which at the outset was common ground between the two countries, had been completely

28

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

frustrated. In 1947 one might wonder whether the obstacles to its achievement were mainly transitional difficulties connected with the immediate aftermath of the war or whether the whole shape of things in the world today was inconsistent with the aim. The subsequent course of events should incline us to the former and more cheerful point of view. That point of view—the long perspective—was, of course, Clayton's. Another sidelight on his negotiations with the British is amusing. His talks with Lord Maynard Keynes in 1945 had been so long and arduous that Mrs. Clayton said she scarcely saw her husband during this time. Finally, at an embassy reception, she met Lord Keynes, and her first words were, "How are you, Lord Keynes, and when are you going home to England?" The Britisher, who had almost overdone casting the barbs of his own wit into the obdurate and homespun Vinson, now met his match. Glad to find someone with whom to sharpen his shafts of irony, he answered, "As soon as I can get through with your stubborn husband !" "Oh, Lord Keynes," Mrs. Clayton cried, "I'm so glad you find him stubborn too !" Again, with reference to the loan to Britain, a story told a few years ago of Clayton's experience with the British in the early days of the war, throws colorful light—rather the opposite to that of Shafer's slander— on relations between Great Britain and Anderson, Clayton & Co. Will Clayton tells the story in this way : At the beginning of World War II the British were seizing our shipments of cotton abroad all the time [before entrance of the United States into the war]. Anderson, Clayton & Co. had a lot of trouble with them. They designated the spinners in Italy who could and could not receive our cotton. They put many of them on the black list. I remember one lot of our cotton destined for Italy which the British seized in the Mediterranean and unloaded on the Island of Malta. We finally just wrote off Malta as a loss—it was being bombed all the time and we were sure our cotton there was gone for good. But later on—in 1940—after Italy entered the war and there was no question of sending her cotton any more, the British finally released our cotton in Malta and loaded it on a ship for Bombay—every bale of it including a few bales which were a little scorched from the bombings. And we made a profit off it, too, for it was selling high then.

REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

29

While in the State Department Will Clayton held a host of special assignments. Perhaps the one which carried most responsibility was an appointment announced in a dispatch from Washington to the Houston Press, August 7, 1945. Clayton had been named a member of a commission to decide policy relating to the atomic bomb. The statement in the Press pointed out that President Truman intended for the government to maintain control of atomic energy. It named the members of the commission as follows : Stimson is chairman of the interim commission. Other members are Secretary of State James Byrnes; Ralph A. Bard, former Undersecretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; Dr. James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and President of Harvard; Dr. Karl T. Compton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, field service chief of OSRD; and George L. Harrison, President of the New York Life Insurance Company. Among Clayton's other assignments were those as chairman of the Economics Section of the United States Delegation at the Chapultepec Conference in February, 1945; chairman of the Economic Committee at the Potsdam Conference in July of the same year; and chief of the United States delegation at the various UNRRA council sessions in 1945 and 1946. An amusing story is told of Clayton's arrival for the fourth UNRRA council session in Atlantic City in March of 1946. He had been in Savannah at a meeting of the Boards of Governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and of the International Monetary Fund. On his way north to the UNRRA meeting, where he was scheduled to make a speech, he encountered, on a Sunday afternoon, a bottleneck in Philadelphia. He could find neither train, plane, nor taxi which would take him to his destination on time. (Taxis, in fact, were not allowed to take long trips out of the city.) With grim humor, he rented the only conveyance available, and arrived in Atlantic City perched on the front seat of a hearse ! Perhaps he thought of this hearse as a symbol, later, when he saw how the Russians often took United States labels off of UNRRA pack-

30

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

ages for the destitute and substituted their own. In his second memorandum on the Marshall Plan he warned, by implication, against letting this sort of thing happen with the new proposal for European aid, though he was willing that Russia should participate in the plan if she would observe the rules. Russia stayed out because she was not willing to join any over-all European council for supervision of the plan. On April 22, 1947, Will Clayton was named to represent the United States on the Economic Commission for Europe, which had been established by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The Houston Chronicle, in an article on this appointment, remarked that the assignment would not interfere with the Undersecretary's other duties. By now such assurance was doubtless deemed necessary because of the great diversity offieldswhere Clayton's abilities were being called into service in many crucial spots, in addition to his own field of economics and international trade: world bank, atomic energy, LatinAmerican relations, UNRRA, reparations, and, now, postwar recovery of Europe. It will be remembered that, among his special assignments, Clayton's principal one was that as chairman of the United States delegation at the trade conference in Geneva in the spring and summer of 1947, where he worked to carry out his theories of multilateral trade. After resigning from the State Department in October, he was asked to stand by as Special Adviser to the Secretary of State. It was in this capacity that he headed the United States delegation to the final world trade conference in Havana, in November, 1947, for the approval of the International Trade Organization Charter, which had been in his mind for so long and was so dear to his heart. Attending the Havana Conference was an array of representatives from fifty-seven nations. Of these, fifty-one signed the Charter, giving their approval to the plan which would have to be ratified, in each case, by the home government in order to go into effect. The other six, including men from the Communist satellites who had shown great daring in even attending the Conference, since it had been boycotted by Russia, looked on but did not go so far as to commit themselves. One of the fearful nations, at this time, was Finland. Nevertheless, in March of 1952, the Finnish Minister to the United States and Mexico, the honorable Johan Nykopp, presented Will Clayton with the Order

31 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

of the White Rose, Finland's highest award, in recognition of the faith he had shown in assisting the postwar economic recovery of the tiny republic. "The Finnish Minister said"—so ran an article in the Houston Post of March 22, 1952—"that Mr. Clayton proved himself a friend of Finland in his many governmental posts, as Undersecretary of State, as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and especially as head of the Export-Import Bank. 'He extended us credit and helped us in other ways when we were in short supply of raw material,' said the dignitary . . ." Evaluating Will Clayton's work as the first Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, Michael Hoffman wrote in the New York Times Magazine of September 21, 1947 : For nearly five months . . . the United States has been represented in Europe by William Lockhart Clayton . . . he has been the dominating figure in the international tariff discussions. In Paris, . . . his has been the voice of America at the sixteen nation conference on the Marshall Plan. . . . Because of his white hair, his bronzed profile, and his height towering above the average European, he is a marked man wherever he goes. . . . Having turned his knowledge of economic forces with spectacular success to his own advantage, it is small wonder that Clayton has more confidence than most men in his ability to exploit these forces for the greater good of humanity. . . . He is probably the only man who ever created a $75,000,000 business and lived to hear himself denounced as an impractical dreamer. . . . critics assume that the ideas behind the Marshall Plan, of which they approve, are superseding Clayton's in the counsels of Washington. The ideas behind the plan are Clayton's. Up to now Clayton is the Marshall Plan... In spite of the perception of Michael Hoffman, Will Clayton has been almost better appreciated in France, Switzerland, and England than in his own country. Although, of course, some adverse criticism has appeared abroad, most of the remarks about him have been complimentary. The Paris Le Monde of October 17, 1947, called him the "champion of liberalism" and the man who had played a chief role in the labors of the committee of the Sixteen for the preparation of the Marshall Plan . . . Our diplomats . .. will deplore the absence of one of the Americans who knew best European affairs . . . who brought to international discussions a spirit of wisdom and moderation.

32

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

The Journal de Genève, under headlines announcing Clayton's resignation, said, in its issue of October 17,1947 : The personal qualities of the American Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs will be sorely missed . . . But one is convinced . . . that his resignation comes at the moment when the die is cast In the British delegation . . . the same feelings are expressed: "Mr. Clayton has steered the ship of American affairs into sight of the port. . . . We shall miss the personal qualities of the Under-Secretary of State who has shown himself a negotiator of thefirstorder." The ParisL'Aurore of October 16, 1947, said that news of Clayton's resignation had come with the "effect of a bombshell." L' Aurore went on to say of this "first economist of the United States : " It is hardly necessary to recall that he was the first who took cognizance of the famous agreement of the Sixteen Marshall Plan participants and that it was on his recommendations that the final version, now being studied in Washington before being sent to Congress, was drawn up. . . . (It is then a little the "Clayton Plan" that is found to be up for consideration.) Has the "lawyer advocate of Europe" (l'avocat de l'Europe) wished to remain behind the scenes in this critical phase? The last dispatches from Washington allow the admission, in specifying that the retirement of Mr. Clayton is only temporary and that he will take up again, at his post, when the present difficulties have been surmounted, the defense of that Europe whose record (dossier) he knows better than anyone else. In the summer of 1957 Mr. Jean Monnet, President of the Comité d'Action pour les Etats-Unis d'Europe, said of Clayton, whom he had first met in 1944: I also met him in 1947, in Paris, when I talked with him about how to best implement the Marshall Plan in France. Soon after the Marshall Plan was pronounced, Mr. Clayton came to Europe. I remember having many meetings with him in the Meurice Hotel in Paris. During these talks I had my first vision of how the Marshall Plan could best help in the reconstruction of Europe, by using the counterpart of the American goods imported in investments in basic industries. I will illustrate what I mean. The French government imported coal, for instance, and sold it to French

33 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

merchants, who gave the counterpart in francs to the French government so that it could have funds to use in investment in France to develop dams, railways, steel mills, etc. (basic industries). I had already worked out a modernization plan for France—to create within our country the means of production needed to make progress, but the difficulty was how to finance it without inflation. It was your father who, in his talks with me, developed the idea that the counterpart in francs of Marshall Plan aid could be used for investments to modernize the coal mines and other basic industries . . . Of course other officials, too, talked with Mr. Clayton, in which talks I joined, and out of these conferences and my private talks with him the idea of how to link the Marshall Plan aid with modernization of French industry evolved. Your father never gave a word or thought to whom the credit of any of these ideas should go. He is an exceptional, a very exceptional man. As I said, we met first over the question of supplies from the United States to France at the time of the liberation—1944, 1945. He was very helpful in arranging things with the administration and government agencies, etc., to get the materials for France—the goods, food etc. Then I met him at the time of the Marshall Plan. I also met him another time in connection with the Ruhr. We met before the Ruhr coal and steel community had come to fruition. It was in my talks with Mr. Clayton that the germ of the idea developed that Ruhr production should be utilized not only for Germany or as the result of bilateral arrangements, but that it should contribute to the production of the whole of Europe. The talks with Mr. Clayton helped me clarify my ideas which resulted in the creation of the coal and steel community [commonly known as the Schumann Plan]; the idea that the goods produced must serve all and not just one. Mr. Clayton also played a vital part in GATT. This and all his other activities were marked with extreme simplicity. Mr. Clayton's superiority over most people was in the fact that he discussed the problem objectively, never introducing himself into the center. His great gift is in solving difficult things with the utmost ease, in clarifying complicated matters and making them seem simple. It was also noted that he was not interested in a situation just from his own country's point of view, but that he dealt with problems in a way to help others generally, and this was undoubtedly mentioned many times in the French newspapers of the times. It is true that in England there was criticism of Clayton's hardness in

34

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

the British Loan negotiations—a hardness which grass-roots America had to be persuaded was hard enough. Also there appeared from the pen of Barbara Ward a rather strange commentary. In her book, The West at Bay, she criticized Clayton for urging, in 1947, the sixteen prospective recipients of Marshall Plan aid "to create in Western Europe a 'low tariff area' in which the Sixteen would give each other advantages denied to other nations." This, she says, is discriminatory, and looks "perilously like the formation of cartels," which Mr. Clayton was against in his support of international trade at the Geneva conference. Miss Ward wonders at his inconsistency. She fails to understand that Clayton, looking much farther ahead, was already viewing "the sixteen" as one entity—and, in fact, for trading purposes, almost as one nation, which, indeed, the "Comité d'Action pour les États-Unis d'Europe" may yet realize. More in tune with the other European evaluations of Clayton is the view of John Dalgleish. Writing for Everybody's Weekly, August 30, 1947, in an article entitled "Man Behind Marshall," Dalgleish called Clayton "General Marshall's guide and mentor" in things economic, and said further: the things that Clayton has been fighting for all his life are mirrored in the public utterances of the Secretary of State. When the full story of the genesis of the Marshall Plan is told, it will become evident that the inspiration was Clayton's; which means he will have a firm niche in history, for this, if for nothing else. After Clayton's resignation, his advance from the Marshall Plan and freer multilateral trade to support of the Atlantic Union proposal was a natural progression. In 1949, at the request of Clarence Streit—originator of the idea—he became one of the two vice-presidents of the Atlantic Union Committee. The president was the late Owen J. Roberts, former Supreme Court justice, and the other vice-president was the late former Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. Today the Committee— which continues to carry on under the presidency of Elmo Roper—has been greatly strengthened by the addition to its Council of Adlai Stevenson. The Atlantic Union Proposal—introduced in the Senate July 26, 1949, by Senator Kefauver—asked that there be called a convention of

35 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

delegates from the democracies which had sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty, for the purpose of exploring how far their peoples, and the peoples of such other democracies as the convention might invite, could apply among them, within the framework of the United Nations, the principle of free federal union. In the hope of facilitating passage, the wording of this resolution was altered in 1956, and among the changes was the substitution of the word "unity" for "union." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on this version on July 11, 1956, but further hearings were postponed on the advice of Secretary Dulles, who said the N A T O Council of Foreign Ministers was, itself, exploring ways of achieving greater unity. And this advice was given in spite of the fact that a resolution similar to the original was passed by the Canadian Senate as far back as 1950. On June 11, 1949, the Houston papers reported a speech which Will Clayton made on Atlantic Union at the Forum of Civics. Of this speech, the following excerpts are illuminating : Soviet Russia has split the world into two parts—the communist world and the free world. . . . The Communists are organized as one. The free world is divided into separate compartments, but in . . . limited respects it must also organize as one if it would remain free. . . . As a minimum the Union should have the power to maintain armed forces, conduct foreign relations, regulate currency, and . . . commerce between its members and with non-member nations. Its powers would be as great or as small as its citizens decided. I would expect that the delegation of powers to the Union would be explicit and limited. This was the first of a number of such speeches made in 1949, 1950, and 1951 by Will Clayton throughout Texas—in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, and elsewhere. He also testified before Congress in support of the Atlantic Union resolution on February 13, 1950, and later, in 1951, when the resolution was again introduced. In the October 22, 1950, New York Times Magazine, there appeared an article by him, entitled, "We Must Trade Sovereignty for Freedom." In it he said, using the analogy of architecture, as if he were speaking with the voice of his famous ancestor, Sir Christopher Wren : If a supranational government were to be established, the doubters ask, would the battle for American rights have to begin anew? What would the

36

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

superstate do to governmental forms which now guarantee civil liberties . . . ? To unite democratic governments is not to remodel the present structure, but to add another story in the same architectural design. This is not a proposal to mix dictatorships and democracies, but rather to unite the democracies in order to contain the dictatorships. . . . All civil freedoms would be safer in a world where nations that respect human dignity pooled their facilities for keeping the individual free. On the economic side, every producer in a Union of the Free would have 350 to 400 million consumers. Again, in 1955, in the Cotton Trade Journal article previously quoted, Clayton spoke out for Atlantic Union, warning that the strengthening of N A T O was not enough. "The ferment which is working at the heart of the world, keeping it in pain and anguish, is too potent to yield to the persuasion of armies, battleships and bombs." While he was working for Atlantic Union, Will Clayton was asked to perform another task for his government. His appointment to the National Security Training Commission, created to work out a program for universal military training, was approved by the Senate, October 29, 1951. On this commission Clayton worked again, this time for a two-year term, alongside Dr. Karl T. Compton, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with whom he had been associated in 1945, when both men were members of the policy commission on the atomic bomb. (Other members of the National Security Training Commission were James W. Wadsworth, former Republican member of Congress from New York; Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, U.S.N., retired; and Lieutenant General Raymond S. McClain, United States Army. ) The program recommended by the commission provided for six months' military training for all boys between high school and college, with later service in the reserves, entailing two weeks' training every summer for a period of years. The trainees were to be subject to call for army duty only in case of emergency. Although universal military training, under that name, did not pass Congress, most of the Commission's provisions were later incorporated into the present reserve training program. Of Clayton's work on this commission, Edgar Shelton, former executive director of the Commission, has said : Mr. Clayton was never vague in his decisions. Although he never be-

37 REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

came emotional or lost his temper over the bungling of a subordinate, he was always the most firm in cutting off the services of anyone who had committed an unpardonable error. In 1952 Will Clayton was honored by the creation of a Clayton Center for International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy conducted by Tufts College in cooperation with Harvard. The "Center" had been preceded, two years before, by a Clayton Chair of International Finance. At that time Dean Robert Stewart of the Fletcher School indicated the "Chair" was being set up in recognition of Clayton's service to his nation in the various posts he had held in connection with the State Department. On the flyleaf of a recent book by Dean Acheson called Power and Diplomacy, based on Acheson's "Clayton Lectures" and published in 1958 by the Harvard University Press, there appears the following description : The program of the Clayton Center—devoted to education and research —includes the William L. Clayton Professorship of International Economic Affairs, a program of research and current policy studies, a program of Clayton Fellowships to encourage and assist outstanding young men and women to prepare for careers in international economic affairs and diplomacy, and the annual Clayton Lectures by persons distinguished in the field of diplomacy, trade, or scholarship in international affairs. The Clayton Lectures were inaugurated by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson in October, 1957, which also marked the opening of the 25th year of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. While Will Clayton's chief thinking is along international lines, it cannot be said that he has neglected since his retirement conditions in his own city of Houston. In the summer of 1950 he and Mrs. Clayton, favoring, as they did, the establishment of a low-cost housing project for Houston, were strong supporters of slum clearance. Fiercely opposed to the idea was almost every real-estate firm and mortgage company in town. Among the opponents of slum clearance and a federal low-cost housing project there appeared some of the same people who opposed Clayton's championship of Atlantic Union. On July 4, 1950, Will Clayton wrote a letter to the Houston Post pointing out that the words of

38 W I L L CLAYTON

: Government

Service

the Declaration of Independence asserting "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" entailed an obligation in men of responsibility and wealth to see that less fortunate people were provided with decent homes in which to live. He said : Certain of these responsibilities which were easily carried by individuals and communities in the early days of our Republic must now be assumed by organized society in our modern, industrial world or not carried at all. Certain of these rugged individualists coming to the aid of the real estate and housing lobbies, say that slum clearance is socialism. Reactionaries made the same charge when public schooling was first proposed. Federal Judge Joseph Hutcheson, in a letter to the Houston Post, July 11,1950, said: Mr. Clayton's statement, if not an acceptance of the Marxist, the Socialist, the Positivist doctrine that men have no inherent, no God-given, no natural rights, that might and might alone gives rights, leaves me wondering whether many of us . . . have not been too complacent for too long. With the same confusion about Clayton's meaning and the issues involved, Judge Hutcheson, at a meeting of the Texas Bar Association later in July of the same year, indirectly attacked the former Undersecretary of State's championship of Atlantic Union by stating that the idea, as advocated by Clayton's son-in-law, would mean "renouncing allegiance" to the United States of America and a "destruction of American independence." While the "Right" criticizes Clayton for being "socialistic" and a dreamer, from the "Left" he is accused, as he was in P.M. of December 5, 1944, of possessing an insidious "business-is-business" philosophy. The following picture of Clayton might give his critics from the "Right" and from the "Left" a better understanding of him. One winter day, back in Jackson, Tennessee, the twelve-year-old Will was trying out a new sled on a hillslope covered with snow. A ragged boy from Irishtown—the tough section across the railroad tracks—came up and watched him with envy. Will handed his sled to the boy and told him to try it out. The youngster tried it not only once, but a dozen times

REACTIONS TO THE CLAYTON THEME

39

or more. Instead of asking for the sled back, Will stood to one side until the afternoon grew dark, enjoying the pleasure of the other boy. Finally the borrower returned the sled and left. A week later an Irishtown gang followed Will and some of his friends to school. "Let's jump on those kids," Will heard one of the tough boys say. Then another voice cried, "Not that bunch. Naw. Look who they've got with 'em. It's the guy who loaned me his sled !" It may have been partly memory of the above incident which influenced Clayton to say in his 1957 day-after-Christmas letter to the New York Times: We must adjust our thinking and acting in the political and economic fields to the needs and interests of the free world rather than the selfish interests of our own minority groups. . . . As long as there are in the world . . . people who go to bed hungry and cold every night, there is not really a surplus pound of cotton or a surplus bushel of wheat. As leader of the free world, it is our job to seek ways to increase the buying power of these people, instead of indulging in schemes that reduce it and thus add to their misery. Congress reconvenes on January 7th. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act comes up for renewal. The very minimum that we can do now is to renew this act for five years... Thus, although Clayton's theory of economic cooperation among nations under an international organization finds only partial fulfillment in extension of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, he has known, realistically, that this extension is far better than nothing, and he has vigorously supported it each time the act has come up for renewal. In the same way he has urged the idea of a union of democracies which would be political as well as economic, where, to quote his own words, again, "nations that respect human dignity" would pool "their facilities for keeping the individual free," and to which other nations, would, in time, be attracted and admitted. This emphasis on self-government and freedom was reflected recendy, at the time of the Suez crisis, in Sam Rayburn's strongly worded statement, the authorship of which correspondent Robert Allen, January 13, 1957, noted as being credited to Will Clayton. (On January 27, a reporter for the Houston Post said of the memorandum, "Clayton

40

WILL CLAYTON :

Government Service

jotted it down on a scrap of paper in Baltimore, while waiting for his wife, who was undergoing medical tests." ) The statement said, in no uncertain terms, that the United States regarded as vital to her interests the preservation of the integrity and independence of the Middle East. According to the New York Times, of January 20, it was rejected by Secretary of State Dulles as proposing "unilaterally" a United States "protectorate over the area, irrespective of the desire or request of the countries themselves." To understand the reasons for Clayton's philosophy one must seek for causes in the man's background and training. Here may be found the answer to the confusion of opinion about him, the solution as to whether he will be looked on by future ages as the curious "dinosaur" of a dying and tangential trend or as the defender and advancer of the main stream of evolution, by which man progresses to a broader individualism and to peace.

PART II

Youth

This page intentionally left blank.

43

Chapter 3

Work and Romance

S

ON OF a Mississippi cotton farmer, William Lockhart Clayton grew to be a child offineproportions and erect stature, while year after year the cotton, battered by the floods, drooped and mildewed in the fields. Will's father, James Monroe Clayton, was a descendant of seventeenth-century English settlers in Virginia, who had moved progressively west. James, in fact, was doubly a Clayton, for his parents were first cousins. In him a strain of strong passion, combined with an aversion for the "petty details" of physical labor, was accentuated. This trait was doubtless pronounced in the man who first bore the name of Clayton in England. According to one report the name began as de Claie and belonged to a French captain who came over in the army of William the Conqueror. In England de Claie became Clayton. If this evolution is correct, Will, James' eldest son, born on February 7, 1880, inherited on both sides a mixture of the Gallic with the Anglo-Saxon, for Will's mother had received an even stronger and much more recent heritage from France—one which brought with it the restraint and the gift for organization which were the civilized development of a later age. The action of these qualities in controlling the almost unbridled emotion of James gave Will, in many respects, a lucky start in life. With this heritage, he was peculiarly fitted—as he would be later by his business—to fill the role of representative for his country in a coalescing

44

WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

world. Financially, however, the beginning was ill-starred; and his material status, instead of growing better, grew progressively worse. Before his experience with farming, James Clayton had been a school teacher. He did not take readily to agriculture. With a mind more slanted to pedagogy than to practical problems, he felt little inclination for the farm which his parents had deeded to him, their only son. Yet the farm, with its white-frame, one-and-a-half-story house— fronted by a long gallery and balustrade—was situated in beautiful country. It was near Tupelo, which takes its name from the lacy tupelo gum trees rising out of the swamps and lining the streams like screens of fragile green embroidery. On this land there were apple and peach trees, and pink and white dogwood as well. The setting was alive with history, too, with the lore of Indians who had once inhabited it and with the legend of battles. The surrounding region of forests and gently rolling hills was part of the land ceded to the United States by the Chickasaw Indians in the Treaty of Pontotoc in 1832. And during the Civil War, troops from both sides were quartered in the town, which lay in the path of all the hard-fought battles for northeastern Mississippi. Will's mother, born in a village nearby, remembered how, as a girl, she had heard the guns at Shiloh. Thus the land was full of fascination for a growing boy, who could stretch his legs to his heart's content, wandering over it in search of Indian arrowheads and relics of Civil War fighting. At the same time, it was unresponsive, during the rainy seasons, to the needs of the boy's father. Time and again James found that the proceeds of his cotton sales were less than he expected. What made matters worse was that he had "gone on" notes for several friends who were defaulting. When the due date of a note and his poor sales coincided he was overcome by a despondency so acute that even his children became seriously worried. Instead of the look of authority and strength to which they were accustomed in their tall, handsome father, they saw a wave of resentment flush his fair complexion and bring a clouded expression to his usually clear blue eyes. Then it took all their mother's gentle poise to reassure them that she knew their father would work out of his mood and begin again. Throughout the early 1880's James Clayton had had so many crop

45 WORK AND ROMANCE

failures that he moved his wife and children from the farm into town, into Tupelo. With the land mortgaged to his Uncle Lafayette, a lawyer, James then began looking for other means of livelihood. He found it in a contract to build a section of railroad bed west of Jackson, Tennessee. In 1886, when Will was six years old, he went with his mother, his two older sisters, and his younger brother to join his father in Jackson. Beginning with Jackson, the Claytons' fortunes suffered a series of crises. Memories of the railroad camp, where he spent some time with his father, are still vivid to Will. He was catapulted from the comparatively carefree, homespun life of the farm and of lush, leafy Tupelo— filled with Clayton relatives—to the harsh atmosphere of a job in a strange town, where his father was working against insurmountable odds. Although, later, there were many occasions when Will received a sound thrashing from James—who had a fiery temper—during this difficult period the father and son became very close. It was the rainy season, and James could not cut through a pass where the clay kept shifting and oozing. Even the famous "snatch team" of mules, which his crew hitched up to the regular team to pull the wheelscrapers in difficult places, could not do the job. It was after the day's work, when Will—anxious to help—tried to guide the mules to water, that he felt a special kinship with his father and sympathy for him. The six-year-old-boy rode one of the mules and led the others, but it was as hard for him to succeed in this small piece of work requiring manual dexterity as it was for his father in his bigger job. Work which depended to a large extent on physical ingenuity was alien to them both. James' chief drawback in the construction of the roadbed, however, was the fact that he had underestimated the cost. He soon lost everything he had. During these days the family was held together by the determination of Will's remarkable mother, who, before her marriage, was Fletcher Burdine. The Burdines had been among the French Huguenot émigrés who had settled in Charleston, South Carolina, shortly after Louis XIV's Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1680. In their move westward, however, they had become Methodists. Fletcher's father was a Methodist minister—tall, stalwart, silent, and studious. Her grandfather had been one of the five commissioners chosen to conduct the Cherokee

46 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

Indians, in the 1830's to the new home of the "five civilized tribes" near Muskogee, Oklahoma. But there were enough black sheep among the numerous Burdine brothers to add spice and daring to the blood. On her mother's side, according to family tradition, Fletcher was a descendant of Sir Christopher Wren. Fletcher devised an ingenious scheme to meet the bills and at the same time salvage her husband's fastidiousness and pride. Since there was no money for rent, Fletcher made a contract with a widower who had a large, attractive house, to lodge her family there in return for providing meals for his family of three, her own, and enough other boarders to pay for the food. She accomplished this task with the aid of a cook, and saved the expense of a maid by waiting on the table herself. The children went regularly to school, so neatly and nicely dressed that clothes of impeccable correctness and spotlessness have been a fetish of her son, Will, ever since. Under the strain, however, Fletcher came to wear on her face an expression of trial by fire. Every line of her features—thin, aristocratic nose, lips whose fullness was restrained by chiseled modeling, finely etched, rounded chin—suggested that she was doing work too heavy for her, but her burning, dark eyes said she would die before giving in. Will, her favorite, came to reflect this expression of concentrated determination. Will's younger brother, Ben, has said that Will never had any true childhood. There were several contributing factors. One was the bitter memory, throughout the South, of the difficult period of reconstruction. A proud people had suffered defeat, but had not lost an inherent nobility which could not admit downfall. And Will—his complex nature shaped by tenderness and trial—doubtless felt the impact of their hopes and sensed the need to balance the scales again to help, not only his family, but the South. From his earliest years he loved history. The Civil War experiences of his great-uncle, the lawyer who held the mortgage on the Tupelo farm, lived again in the telling. Uncle Lafayette had led his Twelfth Mississippi regiment of cavalry so often into battle—substituting for his commanding officer—that, although his rank was captain, he was called "Colonel" by his men. The outstanding incident of these tales was not, however, one of killing, but of rescue. At the Battle of Atlanta, the Confederates dismounted tofight.They were losing, the Yankees had

WORK AND ROMANCE

47

started in hot pursuit, and Lafayette was spurring his horse to escape, when he heard a young boy of fifteen, whose mount had been killed, call out for help. He could stay, with the probability of death for both of them, or he could ride on. Lafayette stayed. Twice the boy tried to mount the saddle behind him and failed. The third time, the girth broke. Lafayette, with the enemy nearly on top of him, in one stroke discarded the saddle and reached down to lift the boy up. Together they galloped away to safety. The boy turned out to be Fletcher Burdine's older brother, John. This story of rescue, and the Confederate Reunion of 1895 at Shiloh, to which the fifteen-year-old Will was invited by one of the Tennessee veterans, made a strong imprint on his nature. He was so impressed by the conciliatory reunion (the first one attended by both Confederate and Union veterans) that he wrote it up for the Jackson paper. Not only was Will struck by the comradeship of Federals and Confederates, but something happened on the way to Shiloh which he would never forget. The veterans from Tennessee made the trip on horseback and in a wagon, and they and Will slept out at night. Part of the way was through wild, uninhabited, rolling country, with thick underbrush. Here, as they started to unpack their bed rolls one night, there appeared, out of nowhere, some moonshiners from the hills. They were desperate men, and they didn't like visitors. At last the Confederate veterans were able to persuade them that they were not revenue officers, and that they meant them no harm. Will, in spite of his own fears, sympathized with the frightened men. Still it was the memory of a reunion shared by former enemies which remained with him so long afterwards. Henceforth, faith to take humanitarian risks (as his great-uncle had done) and belief in reconciliation and cooperation between differing peoples were to be his watchwords. Clearly the one avenue of rescue for his family was, at this time, financial. In his mind, he early assumed the burden, with as much naturalness as if he were head of the family, and at the same time with all the deference for his father that his mother showed and that his position as son demanded. For a few years before Will left school, however, these weighty decisions were still not consciously formed, and, regardless of his brother's impression, his earnestness was often overlaid by a kind of idyllic, Tom

48 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

Sawyer, country-town existence. During these days the Claytons were living in a home of their own, to which they had moved soon after James found employment in a hardware store. The place was small compared to the Tupelo farm house, with its wide gallery, but it was on the "right side" of the tracks, at 144 Hurt Street—a street prophetically bearing the name of the man who would give Will his first job. It was a white, wooden, two-story structure, as unadorned as a shoe box turned on one end. There was no front porch; there was very little yard. Still it was their own, and behind it, on Cumberland Street, was the red brick house of Will's best friend, Hu Harris, standing in the midst of a large, treebordered, rolling lawn, with fascinating dips for coasting on a sled in winter. There were to be some exciting projects for the two boys in this yard. Meanwhile, Will's father, who was an expert at hunting and fishing, often took Will and Hu along with him. The boys were a contrast : Will, lean and tall—almost six feet—with dark hair and eyes, and Hu, short and blond. While Will was usually serious, Hu had a lively sense of humor, and a talent for playing the clown. This he often did in the amateur circuses the boys staged. For these affairs—which cost so many pins entrance fee—Will and Hu also practiced stunts on the horizontal bar. Hu even trained himself to be a slack-wire walker. And Ben, Will's younger brother, who was a good mimic, put on a vaudeville act, in which Hu joined. In addition to possessing these talents, Hu was something of an inventor, and the most vivid memory of these days is a roller coaster Hu built to take the dips in his spacious back yard. Will traded a prize bantam rooster for a sample typewriter in the book store belonging to Hu's brother, and set to work typing out stock certificates to sell in the venture, at a dollar each, and tickets for rides at ten cents. There were many more adventures with Hu—joint projects for making money to buy bicycles, Sunday school picnics at Forked Deer River on the edge of town, Thursday evenings at the library when members of the Shakespeare Circle—organized by the Episcopal minister—read papers and fired Will with a desire for more education than he would ever feel he could afford. If it had been only a question of working his way through college things would have been easy. By now he was realizing it was a question first of helping to support his family.

49 WORK AND ROMANCE

Since Jackson was county seat, home of the Madison County courthouse, as well as a growing railroad center, it attracted not only businessmen and authors in search of local color, but many litigants. The docket at the courthouse became so crowded that, in 1893, Mr. Robert Hurt, clerk and master of the chancery court, asked the school to recommend a bright boy to help him. Will was sent to do the job. Meantime Will had discovered that it would take more time than he had at first thought to learn shorthand and typing. Since he was now earning ten dollars a month, he put aside four dollars to pay the former deputy clerk—one Will Ingram—for night lessons. Even at meals he practiced shorthand with his fork on the tablecloth. Within about a year he was performing the duties of deputy clerk and master. Will Clayton, through intense application, soon became the fastest shorthand writer and typist in Jackson. For this reason he was early in demand by some of the men who stopped at the Armour Hotel and needed a secretary. He typed for John Fox, Jr., and for William Jennings Bryan. Bryan's speech attributing the ills of the South and the cotton farmer to the high tariff created such a ferment in Will's mind that at home he talked of nothing else for days. As Shakespeare had pulled him in the direction of scholarship, Bryan's tariff theory was now pulling him, with greater force, in the direction of government and law. Largely because of the third visitor for whom Will typed, neither of these magnets—still standing for unsatisfied goals in his nature—was to control his direction. Mr. Jerome Hill, cotton factor from St. Louis, had made several trips to Jackson to observe the operation of a new round-bale cotton press which was being developed by a company of which he was general manager. With the canny perception of a merchant he knew that he had discovered something of a "boy wonder" in the fifteen-year-old youngster who took down his dictation, and he asked the boy to come to St. Louis as his secretary. But Will's mother struggled to keep him at home. For one thing, Fletcher felt keenly that it would be a pity for her son to discontinue his schooling. True, she had consented to his withdrawal from classes when he went to work at the courthouse in January, 1893, shortly before his thirteenth birthday. But that was different : what the boy lost from daytime attendance at school—which he left in the seventh grade—he more than made up for at night, under the guidance

50 WILL GLAYTON:

Youth

of Professor Miner, the school principal. Many a night, Fletcher remembered, Will had crammed for an examination in her room, by the light of the only good lamp in the house. There were times, in fact, even this early in his life, when he was carrying on several serious activities at once, thus laying the foundation for his habit of simultaneous concentration on a number of different problems. In addition to carrying on his school work and the courthouse job, he was helping with the Model Laundry—his father's latest precarious venture—for which he sometimes balanced the account books and drove the wagon. Meanwhile Professor Miner praised his pupil, and Fletcher told herself that, with his health under her careful supervision, her son could safely continue his mental gymnastics until the family fortunes took a turn for the better. Also by keeping him in Jackson, she could see that he did not take on too much other work to crowd out his study. In St. Louis—no, she could not give him up. One day, when his mother was saying for the tenth time that she could not let him go, Will staged a tantrum. He threw himself on the floor—face down—, tore at his hair, pounded the rug with his fists, groaned and laughed mockingly at his fate. He cried out that Jackson was too small for him. "You mustn't hold me back !" he hurled at his mother. "I'll never make a decent living here !" He had to get away, he went on. This was his chance to make a real contribution to the family income. At the age of fifteen he'd be making sixty-five dollars a month—it seemed unbelievable. Heaven knew his father's business needed the help ! "Don't you see I can't turn it down !" he cried. At last Fletcher gave in, but not without reservations. She hoped that, after a while, Will would return home to take up his schooling again. It was not to be so. In 1895, when Will left for St. Louis, after finishing the seventh grade, he never came back for instruction in the classroom. Whatever he learned out of books from then on would be self-taught. And he was to learn so much that even his enemies would call him "an intellectual" (I. F. Stone in P.M. of October 17, 1947), and his friends would speak of his "scholar's knowledge" (Michael Hoffman in the New York Times Magazine, September 21, 1947), and of the fact that "even his casual

51 WORK AND ROMANCE

remarks have a structure that fits them for the written page, without alteration of a word, a sentence, or a dependent clause" (Beverly Smith in The American Magazine, April, 1938 ). Will remembers well the trepidation and excitement of his first long journey away from home. This was different from the three-day camping trip he had taken with the Confederate veterans to Shiloh. Now there were no friendly companions with whom to share the adventure or to face a possible danger. And although, of course, riding on a train was a lot tamer than a trip on horseback, it was still, in those days, something of an awe-inspiring novelty. Elated as thefifteen-year-oldWill was at sight of the wide Mississippi River, he was, nevertheless, taking no chances when, carrying his own suitcase, he walked up to the desk of the strange, big city hotel to ask for a room. The hotel clerk looked quizzically at the tall, gangly boy with the youthful, inexperienced expression. Then he glanced down at the suitcase. Strapped to one side of it there was a metal press in which the boy's extra pair of brown trousers was folded. The sight was not reassuring. "You'll have to pay for your room in advance," the clerk said. "No, sir." Will's full lips clamped tightly shut. Then he repeated, "No, sir. I won't do that." Then he turned on his heels and walked to the office of his employer, Mr. Hill, who gave him lodging for the night. After Will had been in St. Louis for a year, Mr. Hill wrote his parents asking permission to take him to New York, where the Round Bale Company had its head office. Fletcher, to whom most decisions of this nature were left, wrote back that she wanted her son to continue his schooling, and she wanted him near her. It was not that she feared for his morals in New York. Nobody ever did. He had taken a pledge, requested of him by his Sunday-school teacher in the little red brick Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Jackson, that he would never drink or smoke. (Not until a few years ago, when his doctor advised him to take sherry, has he ever departed from this pledge. ) Instead of cautioning Will about such matters, most people —old and young—in the town of around ten thousand, looked on the boy as a dependable youngster who could be called on in emergencies. Although he was not above mischief—teasing the girls and pulling their hair in school—he had on him the mark, which certain persons possess

52

Youth very young, of being a leader, a boy who would go to the trouble of taking responsibility. So it was that Mr. Hurt, at the courthouse, used to call on Will when the town poet, always destitute, would come around to beg for a quarter to buy himself a square meal. "Go with him, will you, Will?" Hurt asked the thirteen-year-old. "Steer him past the saloons and take him to a restaurant and see that he eats." On spring days, when the Kentucky oriole swooped like a darting red arrow in and out of the leafy greenness of willow and elm on the courthouse square, Will liked especially to accompany the town poet. As they walked along, the man recited to him—Shakespeare, Shelley, Poe. Later, the girl he fell in love with would recite—from the repertoire of the elocution classes where she starred—just such verses, and would sprinkle her everyday speech with Shakespeare. Now, after a year in St. Louis, Will had seen too much of the difference in opportunity between a larger city and Jackson to want to return home for good. Although he hated to go still further away from his family and his friend, Hu, and the town he had grown to love, he could stand still less to see the sacrifices his mother made and the almost total lack of conveniences she and his sisters had to endure. Both his sisters were good students, but there would be little chance for them to go to college if his support became an additional strain on the family budget. He was now sixteen, and, he told himself, he had to continue to help. Again Fletcher reluctantly agreed. In April, 1896, Will left St. Louis with Mr. Hill for New York. Less than a year later Will's mother was regretting her consent. With New York there began a grind of work for Will which, in some respects, rivaled the tasks of the worst drudges in a Dickens novel. He was working so hard during the week that on Saturdays he longed for escape. One wintry Saturday afternoon, with his mind excited by the life of the city which he had so little chance to see, and his spirit curious for the foreign lands to which American cotton was being sold, he walked eagerly down to the docks to look at the big ocean freighters anchored there. It was free entertainment and he did not ask for better. Striking up a friendship with a sailor who had just shimmied down a rope on a ship flaunting tremendous blue and red smokestacks, he asked WILL CLAYTON:

53 WORK AND ROMANCE

the man to take him into the engine room. In the steaming heat of the hold he spent almost an hour, fascinated by the engineer's answers to his questions about how the machinery worked. When he came out, drenched with perspiration, and started walking home, a knifing cold wind cut into his body. The next Monday at the office one of the other secretaries looked at him and said, "You're ready for the hospital !" Will had taken pneumonia. His friend took him to the hospital. For thefirstfew days the slender boy had a hard fight against his illness. But the outdoor hunting trips in Jackson and the training he and Hu had put in on the horizontal bar for their amateur circuses stood him in good stead now. At last he pulled through. With his usual stoicism he had not let his family know, until he was convalescing, how ill he had been. When his mother found out, there was no longer any arguing with her. She demanded that he come home, at once. The summer of 1897, when Will was at home, Fletcher thought she had an excellent argument in his health to keep him there. At this moment, however, a new, and still further determining factor, entered Will's life. Her name was Sue Vaughan, and she was just sixteen. She measured not much more than five feet tall; she was blond and blueeyed; and her complexion was almost translucent—pink and white like an apple blossom. She had a wit that was quicker and funnier even than that of his best friend, Hu. As soon as they met, he knew he wanted to see more of herrightaway. Sue had come from Clinton, Kentucky, to nurse her older sister, Hattie, who had taken typhoid while visiting her school friend, Lillian Truss. Will went one afternoon to the Truss house down the street to inquire about Hattie. The door was opened by Sue, dressed in her older sister's clothes—in long skirts for the first time in her life. When she saw Will—tall, handsome, and serious as a knight of the Holy Grail —the make-believe was so complete that she felt like clapping her hands. Puzzled, Will asked, "Is this Miss Vaughan?" Sue's blue eyes snapped and her cheeks glowed, reflecting the color from the pink cameo she wore at the throat of her pale blue blouse. She was amused and delighted. "I'm Hattie's sister," she said.

54 WILL GLAYTON:

Youth

Will then introduced himself and fired two questions in quick succession. He asked about her sister, and, almost in the same breath, he asked if she could go rowing on the river that evening with Lillian, his friend, Hu, and himself. "I'll have to ask my sister,first,Mr. Clayton," she said. "Miss Vaughan," he begged, "please don't call me Mr. Clayton." The eyes really cavorted then. "I think you'll have to be Mr. Clayton as long as I'm Miss Vaughan," she laughed. As the days passed and he and Sue saw each other frequently, his mother began to know that it would be impossible to keep him from returning to New York eventually. About this time he must have started thinking in terms of making a fortune someday. It had always been a delight—almost a compulsion—with him to give presents, particularly to his mother and his sisters, who had so little. Now he'd found someone else to whom he could make gifts. She was a girl who would not expect them, but this only intensified the desire. He overlooked the fact, for the moment, that giving presents and helping support his family would delay the foundation of the fortune for many years. The Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms which his older sister, Burdine, played every night on the piano, accompanying his younger sister, Leland, on the violin, with two young men playing the flute and viola, stirred in him a greater response that summer. When he returned to New York he would save a little something out, he told himself, for cheap gallery seats at the opera. Sue remembers that she was struck by a strange paradox in Will, as she saw more of him on her visit. At first she had held herself back from falling in love because she wondered if he were not playing a game. He told her, somewhat defiantly, that she was the first girl he had ever known who refused to let him kiss her. He even bragged a little further. They were on their way to a "gypsy tea"—a picnic for which the girl furnished the box supper, while the boy furnished the transportation. Seventeen-year-old Will had rented from the livery stable a buggy and his favorite horse, a high-stepper called "Fancy Frank." Turning to Sue he said : "All right, just wait till I get back East and buy me some striped pants, a cut-away coat and a high silk hat. With my New York manners and

55 WORK AND ROMANCE

my dude clothes, I'll wager no girl can be around me ten minutes and boast she's sweet sixteen and never been kissed !" Sue, hurt, shrugged her shoulders. It seemed strange to her that, with all this assurance, Will should act, a few days later, on a hay ride, as if she were his brother Ben's girl, instead of his own. Did he like her less, or had he lost confidence? The latter was partly right. News and gossip flew quickly in the little town. Ben—the "cut-up" in the family—changed girls frequently and was safe. But if the Jackson people formed the idea that Sue was his girl, they would at once jump to conclusions. Everything he did was serious. Therefore if he had a girl it must mean he'd been offered a handsome raise in salary. The doleful truth was that he had not. He'd better put on the brakes, until he could earn that promotion and begin to save. The thought of the whole thing—of the possibility of failure, still so plausible that he could not bear to speak of it—made him painfully shy. Sue noticed his diffidence, and wondered what on earth was the matter.

56

Chapter 4

A Period of Preparation in New York A F T E R SUE went home that summer, an unlooked-for chance came to Will to make more money than he'd ever made before. His Uncle Lafayette Clayton, the lawyer-colonel of Civil War fame—whose library contained not only law and history books but classics in Latin and Greek as well—needed an expert court reporter to take down depositions in the famous Clark will case where he represented one of the heirs. Will hurried back to Tupelo. In his uncle's office he again felt the tug of scholarship and of the law. Unfortunately there was no time to indulge this longing. Clark, a member of Clark, Hood & Co., cotton merchants, had died, leaving half a million dollars, and depositions had to be taken from dozens of witnesses—all of the countless heirs who were fighting for this fortune. After working all day, Will would take his typewriter down into the lobby of the Reed Hotel, where it was cooler than in his room, and type away his notes in the midst of milling, laughing, jostling crowds until ten o'clock at night. Lafayette's son, Stewart, two years older than Will, remembers how he used to marvel at his cousin's ability to work in the midst of so much noise. Looking back now he realizes that this early gift of concentration was part of Will's genius. With the two thousand dollars Will earned from his work on the

57 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

Clark will case, he came home to Jackson and invested part of his money in a typewriter supply agency, which he started with a man named Ed Mercer. The new firm, Mercer and Clayton, opened a modest office on the second floor of the Pythian Building, the downstairs of which was occupied by the Pythian Palace—one of the two theatres which Jackson boasted. Most small towns provided, in those days, houses for traveling stock companies. While rehearsals went on below for East Lynn or As You Like It, Will sold supplies or taught budding stenographers above, but only in "off hours." The rest of the time Mercer took over, for Will was doing court reporting again. There seemed to be no other openings. At this time the town of Jackson was dominated by three families— the Andersons, the Dunaways, and the Wisdoms—all related, all connected with banks, and all as cautious with their money as only "children burnt by the fire," or the memory of it, can be. In this case the fire was the aftermath of the Civil War, from the ruin of which the families were making a slow comeback. It was the young flutist, Frank, son of the Anderson who was president of the First National Bank, that Burdine, Will's older sister, had married the year before. While Monroe, Frank's brother, remained in the bank, Frank soon branched off into buying cotton. Monroe, the perennial bachelor, carefully saved his money, but neither of the Andersons felt himself in a position to offer anything to Will. The partnership that would grow into Anderson, Clayton & Co. was not yet thought of. Will put in all the time he could spare from Mercer and Clayton at the courthouse, where he was reporting trials (murder and railroad cases) and helping the clerk and master, Mr. Hurt. The telegram from the American Cotton Company which would offer him a thousand dollars a year to return to his job had not yet arrived. Before it did, Will readily fell in with a scheme which his friend, Hu Harris, wanted to try out. Hu's plan was that he and Will should ride their Century bicycles a hundred miles a day, not only in order to qualify for membership in the National Century Club, but to get in training for a bicycle trip to explore West Tennessee and visit Clinton, Kentucky, where the Vaughan sisters lived. Sue had invited Will, and Hattie—the delicate, Dresden-type beauty who had recovered from typhoid—had invited Hu. The trip to Clinton became a turning point in Will's life. The country

58 WILL CLAYTON

: Youth

the boys rode through—west of the Cumberlands—was one of rolling hills and valleys, with the wild flowers making bright splashes of red and blue and yellow in the fields, and the friendly farmhouses often offering shelter for the night. At one farm a crowd of white-frocked girls, playing crack-the-whip and hide-and-seek out under the spreading trees, called to the boys to join them. Hu and Will were even invited to dinner. Afterwards they pressed on to Ripley, where their friends, the Barbees, offered them lodging in a small house in the farmyard called "the office." "There were musicians and they had a mandolin for me," Hu remembers. "And we serenaded the girls so long that, when we went to bed, it seemed we'd hardly lain down before Dr. Barbee got us up to come to family prayers. Will and I dropped to our knees, lay our heads on the seats of the chairs, and fell asleep again before daylight !" Nearing Clinton, the boys coasted down a long hill, and there at the bottom were Sue and Hattie in their Stanhope "trap" with the top down. The girls—dressed in their daintiest white, with ruffles and sashes —were protected from the sun by parasols: Hattie's of a robin's egg blue, and Sue's of a brilliant cherry color. "Mercy, where did you two tramps come from?" Sue cried. The remark, like most of Sue's merry thrusts, at once put the boys at ease. It was then, Will said, that he saw his "finish." The drive up "Lovers," Lane," a wide path arched over by a green canopy of branches of hickory and walnut trees, led them to the Vaughans' white-columned farmhouse, called "Bellwood." Here Sue's mother, a widow whose husband had died years before, lived with her several unmarried sons and two daughters. And here Will spent some of the happiest days of his life. Shortly after this trip, Will received the offer to return to his job in New York. When he went back to the American Cotton Company in the fall of 1897, he found himself caught up in work so relentless that only the memory of his insistence to his mother on a larger "field" than Jackson kept him going. In September, after he left home, Fletcher Clayton—who knew her son's tendency to self-denial and work almost beyond the limit of endurance—was still worried about his health. On the eighth of the month she wrote :

A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

59

My darling Will, Your departure was so sudden I can hardly realize you've left home. I went up and slept with Ben that night and we sobbed ourselves to sleep. He was so lonely . . . I was sorry you did not get a sleeper. I fear you were sick yesterday . . . Will had become secretary to a man in the American Cotton Company who exploited him not only during the week but on Saturday and Sunday, as well. The boy's courtesy and attractiveness, as well as his efficiency, now became less assets to him than liabilities. He was the kind of handsome young man you liked to take to dinner and introduce to your friends, and Mr. D. C. Ball, who lived in the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with his wife and son, invited him to spend every weekend with his family. After dinner on Saturday, however, Mr. Ball began dictating to Will. The dictation continued late into the night—with the man changing his mind again and again about how he wanted to express himself—and started again early Sunday morning, with Will working the full day, except for the brief hour devoted to midday dinner with the Balls. It was such a relief to return to Jackson for his vacation in the summer, that Will began to wonder why he had ever left home. He used part of the ten days allotted to him to visit Sue Vaughan at "Bellwood" again. When his vacation was over, he found it especially hard to return to New York. Often during these days it was a temptation for Will to leave his job. Mr. Hurt wanted him back in Jackson in January. Work in the courthouse might be combined with the study of law, which always exerted a pull. Three of his great-uncles were lawyers. Two, who had been partners with Uncle Lafayette, had left and gone to Texas. Might he not, someday, take one of their places? The trouble was that Uncle Lafayette had not asked him. As usual Will wrote to his mother, in the fall of 1898, for advice concerning Mr. Hurt's offer. She replied : Honey, don't worry over the change you're thinking of making. You have three months . . . things may come up during that time to help you make a wise decision. Pray over it, and trust the Lord to lead you . . . If you

60

WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

come home, go to Mr. Searls and tell him all about it and offer to return him the expense money. The American Cotton Company had probably wanted Will back enough that fall to pay his rail fare, which he had conscientiously held down to the minimum by taking a day coach. These days, he drew strength from his mother's advice and from the Bible she had given him, on the flyleaf of which she had written : "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you." By the fall of 1899 Will had again visited Sue, during his summer vacation of that year, had proposed to her, and had been told that he must wait for his answer. It was not so much that Sue was balancing him against young Alben Barkley—another one of the several suitors for her hand; it was rather that she was not yet sure whether the boy who had pretended, one day, that she was his brother's girl, was really in love. Will might have been more worried about his chief rival, Walton Adams, had not Sue, as he was leaving that summer, run after him down to the gate to say : "Will, I'm not in love with Walton !" It was those words which gave him hope and filled his letters with poetic imagery and longing. Will's letters written from New York during the winter of 1899-1900 to Sue, then a student at Washington College in Washington, D.C., speak often of the beauty of "Bellwood." Since his earliest years, when he had roamed the forests and the river valleys—the Faulkner country of Tupelo—he had loved nature, going into a kind of ecstasy over a full moon. Now it was the surrounding forest and the lane and the lake at "Bellwood" which he remembered in his letters, with yearning. These days his response to the magic of city scenes, as well as to landscape, was being sharpened by the impact of his love for Sue. On September 29, 1899, he wrote her about New York's homecoming reception for Admiral Dewey, hero of the Spanish-American war. Last night the town was ablaze with electric lights. There were hundreds on top of every tall building, some so high up in the sky you could hardly tell them from little stars. On the Brooklyn Bridge could be seen the words, "Welcome Dewey," in huge letters stretching probably one eighth of a mile

61 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

and thirty-six feet high, made out of hundreds of lights. Dewey, on the Olympia, eight miles away, could read it plainly without the aid of a glass. On each tower of the Bridge is placed a powerful searchlight. Well you saw the searchlight at Nashville . . . and you can imagine how beautiful these two were, when their golden rays were thrown out on the dark river in front of ferry boats... or up against some huge building. The scene suggests a Whistler "nocturne." On Sunday, December 24, 1899, Will went to Washington to call on Sue, whose sister, Hattie, was visiting her for the Christmas holidays. Sue had asked Will and his friend, Irving McNeil, to meet her and Hattie in the Riggs Hotel at ten o'clock, where Will had invited them all to have dinner. Will still remembers how lovely Sue looked this first time he'd seen her in winter clothes, with her glowing complexion and blond hair set off by her black coat and furs. Sometime during the day, probably when Hattie and Irving were taking a sight-seeing trip, Will and Sue, in a little parlor on the mezzanine floor of the hotel, became engaged to be married. Will called at the school on Christmas day, and on December 26 he was back again in New York. The scant two days, in which he became engaged and saw his fiancée, were prophetic of the shortness of the vacations which he was to allow himself for the rest of his life. Will's letters from New York to Sue during the three years they were engaged show a dependence on her resilient gaiety and steady encouragement which might have been foreshadowed in the serious boy's early friendship for the mandolin-playing, comedian-inventor, Hu. Certainly it was echoed, later, in his attachment to another jolly companion, Ernest Jones, who came from Jackson to be his roommate in 1900. Will was working so hard now that, had it been otherwise, even he might have cracked under the strain. In fact, the strain soon told on him in an act of self-preservation which helped him to advance, but which caused him soul-searching regrets later. It was, by his own admission, the wrong thing to do, and his only excuse is that he was desperate. Will had a friend who wanted a job, and one day he promised the boy that he would put in a word for him with the American Cotton Company. That night he came home and realized that this was his chance to shake loose from the slave-driving Mr. Ball. Without letting

62

WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

his friend know the tedious hours he would have to expect, Will told him that he could have his job. In turn he recommended the boy to Mr. Ball and managed to get himself shifted into better work. Since he had been planning the change for a long time, and had been spending every spare moment in the cotton-classing room to familiarize himself with the different grades of cotton, it was not hard for him to fit into another department. But the means he chose to effect the change were less in keeping with his mother's admonition, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness . . . " than he liked to remember later. Soon after he had made this shift, Will started to night school once a week to study French. Still he wrote Sue, "Sweetheart, they are about to work me to death." He had so little time to write that his weekday letters were short notes, in which he promised to write her a "volume on Sunday." By this time he was indulging his love of giving presents by sending Sue books to read. Months before their engagement, when Sue first arrived at school, she had found waiting for her The Battle of the Strong, an historical novel which Will had sent ahead to tide her over the first days and keep her from being homesick. Historical fiction appealed most to him, he wrote her. He advised his eighteen-year-old sweetheart to read Scott, particularly Ivanhoe and Kenilworth. He told her, in answer to one of her letters, that he knew she'd like As You Like It, which he had read several times; he remembered well the quotation she spoke of, "just as high as my heart." He wrote : "When I come down to Washington, I'll see if you're 'just as high as my heart!'" But he was afraid he, himself, would not have a chance to read again until the next summer. It takes lots of courage and grit to live up here . . . and work day and night, without a single pleasure in a whole month, or a single hour to read a book. Still, he knows youth is the time to work. Two quotations always struck me forcibly. One was, "The saddest words of tongue or pen are these : it might have been." I've thought if I should just go through life and merely exist and nothing more, how bitter it would be to look back on wasted opportunities . . . Under such circumstances I'd be sorely tempted to "shuffle off this mortal coil!"

63 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

Again: There is nothing in New York to compare with the Congressional Library in architecture and magnificence of construction—not even the glorious Waldorf which is the pride of all New Yorkers; fitted up at a cost of millions, it is not nearly as artistic as the Library Building. Later he writes: I'm glad you liked Janice Meredith. Have you read Richard Carvel— another fine revolutionary story? I'm fond of those and of Civil War stories . . . When I send you a book or something, you send a letter of thanks that is worth a hundred books and more. Why, if I had the whole world I'd give it to you, just for the pleasure of having you thank me for it! The gift of books to Sue continued at a rate of about one a month, alternating, now and then, with a five-pound box of Huyler's candy. Sue scolded him for spending too much on her. It was typical of him. "Whenever we went anywhere with another boy and girl in Clinton, it was always Will who picked up the check," Sue remembered years later. On January 1, 1900, Will wrote his fiancée that he had been at the office all day, by himself, working : I didn't have anything else to do and nowhere to go, so I thought I would work, as I never get sad while I am busy. But I am never going to be sad again because I love you As on Thanksgiving I ate my New Year's dinner today, all alone, in a restaurant in New York. I thought of you and knew that if you were eating in a large, jolly crowd, I was in your thoughts. On New Year's eve, having been ill, he had gone to bed early. But the midnight noise of horns and whistles had awakened him, and he thought of Sue and how he longed to see her and could not go back to sleep. Near the end of his letter he said : I take a new position with the company tomorrow. It is a small promotion, but I think others will come ere long. In the next two weeks, Will, encouraged by his small advancement, was taking time to see a few plays, among them Robespierre and The Merchant of Venice with Henry Irving in the leading role. A week later,

64 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

however, the illness which had kept him in bed on New Year's eve developed into appendicitis. Towards the end of January his condition grew worse, and he was operated on at St. John's Hospital in Brooklyn. Here he stayed two weeks, after which time Mr. Lamar Fleming, an official of the American Cotton Company, took him to his house to finish out his convalescence. Will never forgot this kindness. It nurtured a friendship which later developed into a partnership. (In 1917, when Anderson, Clayton & Co. decided to open its own office in New York, Mr. Fleming, who had been representing the firm there since 1904, was offered a partnership, and the New York firm was called Anderson, Clayton & Fleming. Only six years before, in 1911, Will Clayton had taken Fleming's son, Lamar, Jr., into the Anderson, Clayton & Co. office in Oklahoma City. Mr. Lamar Fleming, Jr., recently resigned from the presidency of Anderson, Clayton & Co. to become chairman of the board. ) The last week in February Will's prediction of other promotions came true. The head classer had gone on a "protracted spree," he wrote Sue, so that the assistant manager took his place, and Will, in turn, was made assistant manager of the Cotton Sales Department. The promotion might not last long, he thought, because the company would probably find another head classer, and then he would go back to his old position. It was his new job, however, which had caused him to work so hard the last two weeks that he could not write Sue as often as he wished. Would he be able to stand the extra work so soon after his operation? Sue's letters show her concern, and Will is sorry that he had let her know his hard schedule. Yet he, himself, was worried. Only a few months before, his roommate, Chalmers Campbell from Jackson, had left for home, "back in Dixie," because his throat and eyes had been bothering him. His departure had left Will lonely, as he had been the winter before, not knowing any of the people in his boarding house other than the landlady. He was particularly depressed by the large dining room, where he ate his breakfast with thirty or forty people with none of whom he had a speaking acquaintance. That's the way these folks live up here [he wrote Sue]. You are never introduced to anybody and nobody cares about you. If you get sick you get a doctor and a nurse, and your next door neighbor doesn't care.

65 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

Fortunately for Will, Mr. Fleming did care. Once again, when Will had a relapse, he was to take the boy home to help tide him over. But what chiefly disturbed Will now was the need to turn up his gas heater in the intense cold. If he did not light the heater he felt a chill, and if he did, it made the room so hot he could not stay in it. Also, the fumes were so strong that he wondered whether they might not have been the cause of his roommate's earlier throat and eye trouble. His only solution was to wrap himself up, keep the stove barely lighted, and cheer his mood by tracing, on Sunday afternoons, Sue's name in the ice on his window pane. After a month or so, he was beginning to feel that his promotion to assistant manager—which he had feared might be temporary—might "stick," after all. He wrote Sue that he still held the position and imagined he would continue to do so. Soon Sue was asking for his picture but the only time he could spare to have it made was on a Sunday. He wrote her : This is another peculiar characteristic of New York life . . . The studios do their largest business on Sundays. Busy people don't have time during the week. He was interested in the Washington receptions Sue had attended, but wrote to her, "Excuse me from taking part in any of them." He preferred the informality of picnics. Yet, he continued : It must have been a novel thing to be entertained by the Minister of the Chinese legation and his wife. The educated Chinese are very interesting. You ought to see a Chinese Theatrical company. That Will's understanding of other nationalities was already being formed in New York is frequently evidenced in his letters. Another time, when a boy who had used his desk locked it and went off with the key, he used the stationery of a Swedish friend and wrote to Sue on paper which bore the heading of the Swedish American Press. Later he wrote Sue of walking around the block to see "my friends, the Japs," to whom he had sold thirty thousand bales of cotton for shipment to Japan. And on another occasion he was invited to a luncheon given by the American Asiatic Association for Baron Shibusawa of Japan. Still his diversions were few, for his work continued relentlessly. By

66 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

June he had had several recurring attacks of severe indigestion, which he exploited by using the time in bed to read Ben Hur and Great Expectations. Doubtless his illness was aggravated by the fact that something "was going wrong in the company." There had been an internal fight among the directors, which Will deplored. The only relief to his worry was the thought of the two weeks' summer vacation he would soon have, for Sue had invited him again to come to "Bellwood," and had consented, besides, to go from Kentucky with him to Jackson to visit his sister, Leland, who had recently married, and to spend ten days. Will would soon need the memory of those days to cheer him : the times he and Sue spent in the hammock under the trees at "Bellwood" and she allowed him, for the first time, to kiss her, and the drives they took in the hired buggy in Jackson making calls on the girls who had called on Sue, and the picnics and rowing parties on the river. He needed the memory especially when he returned in midAugust, 1900, to one of the hottest summers New York had known. Before he had left on his vacation the heat had been worse. But now it seemed harder to bear. On the streets crowds jostled around the softdrink venders and the lemonade stands. Everywhere could be seen peddlers of palm-leaf fans, and heat prostrations were not infrequent. Some nights Will walked the streets until midnight because it was too hot to sleep in his room. The return to New York had also been more difficult this time because Sue was not going back to Washington to school. In the next few months Will asked himself again and again whether he wanted to continue to live in New York. He was doubtful for two reasons: he was afraid Sue would not like it, and he was discouraged by the jealousy of other men in the office. He began to think again of studying law. It was a letter from Sue which helped him decide finally to make business, instead of law, his career. Sue wrote: "You have put too much into the cotton business to give it up . . . Don't let the jealousy of men in the office disturb you." Will's promotion over the heads of older men was creating friction. At the end of August, 1900, he was "afraid of this old company because it has lost so much money lately." He wrote Sue : With the exception of one man, all the officers hate me to perfection.

67 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

They have all been fighting Mr. Fleming, who is the man I work with . . . He is one of the finest men I ever knew . . . If it weren't for him, I would quit in a minute . . . but he has been my friend and I propose to see him through . . . The company is trying to borrow the enormous sum of two million dollars. Should they fail to get the money, something will happen. By October 14, 1900, the company had succeeded in borrowing the money, but had already lost two hundred thousand dollars in forty days. Will felt that by January the company "will go to the wall as a grand example of greed, jealousy and mismanagement. They will either break or be reorganized some time in the spring." In December, 1900, Will almost left his job. He handed his resignation to the president on the ground that the company had refused to raise his salary. The fact was that the general manager, to whom Will had handed his application for a raise, had turned down his request. The president, who had not received the application, now offered Will three hundred dollars more a year to stay on. Soon afterwards Will went Christmas window-shopping, and felt "so sorry for the poor sales girls who have to work so hard," and for the "scrub women who have to sweep confetti up from the offices" after the usual pre-holiday celebration parties. It was not until May of 1901 that the company changes which Will had predicted in his letters to Sue began to come about. Early in that month a new president was elected, and there was started a reorganization which would put Mr. Fleming in the position he deserved. Will wrote Sue on May 4, 1901 : "I shall never forget your sweet words of encouragement to stay and fight it out. They had more to do with my staying than you know." Sue and Will now felt free to set the date for their wedding. It would be in August of 1902—over a year away. After another vacation, spent partly in Clinton with Sue and partly in Jackson, Will returned to New York and to further disillusionment with the company. By April, 1902, he was writing that everything had gone wrong at the office the past three weeks. He hoped, however, that, with a new season beginning soon, things would improve. In June some of his advice must have been heeded, for he was elected secretary-treasurer of the Texas Cotton Products Company—a corporation formed with

68 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

one million dollars capital to take over all the American Cotton Company's business in Texas. With characteristic modesty, the twenty-twoyear-old secretary-treasurer of the million-dollar business wrote his fiancée : It's only a complimentary position to me, as there's nothing to be done but sign checks and notes, and my position with the company will be the same as formerly. By this time Will was doing all the selling for the company, and was so important to the business that it was not possible for Mr. Fleming to leave unless Will was there to take his place. Absorption in his business, alarming pains in his side, and a serious relapse because he had gone back to work too soon after his operation, did not keep Will from looking, as soon as he could, for a house for Sue and himself to live in when August came, if it ever would. He and his roommate, Ernest Jones, a young Jackson boy who, at Will's request, had come in the fall of 1900 to take a position as stenographer for the company, spent nearly every weekend house-hunting. The house Will eventually liked best was a new, three-story structure in East Orange, New Jersey, with rooms which he was afraid would be too small. Before signing the contract, he was careful to ask Sue's approval. He wrote her a description of each room, and enclosed a drawing— which he had executed himself—of the three floor plans. One of the chief attractions was the yard, with room for a garden. In all previous discussions of their future home, Will had stressed the importance of a library. He had already collected a few books: his encyclopaedia, a three-volume dictionary, and the beautiful set of Shakespeare which Sue had sent him for Christmas. (Before receiving this gift he wrote her that he had bought Shakespeare in small paperback volumes, which he could carry around in his pocket and read in spare moments. Macbeth, one of his favorites, he had read eight times.) To recommend it, the house in East Orange had a library—ten by eleven— and something else which he now considered essential—a servant's room on the third floor. Sue wired him that the house would be fine. The winter of 1901-1902 had been the hardest period of waiting for them both. There is no question that it was made bearable for Will by

69 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

the friendship of Ernest Jones. [Mr. Jones is now President of Jones, Gardner & Beal, Inc., Cotton, of Providence, Rhode Island.] When Ernest, aged fifteen, arrived in New York, "so green," in his own words, that the "greenest grass was white by comparison," he found out the first day that he was utterly incompetent for his job, that being a stenographer in Jackson was far different from being one in New York. Will, unknown to Ernest, then asked the boy's superior to give him a month's trial, and during this time, Ernest wrote : . . . he took charge of my typing and shorthand, dictating to me, in the evening, editorials from the New York Times, and making me type them without errors . . . In one month's time I could take care of my job, and in three months' time Will let up a little, and I could actually see what New York looked like . . . Nobody else in the world would have given anything like this to a green boy to whom he had no obligations . . . Then and there began the hero worship I have never gotten over... With my job secure, Will took my education in hand. He read the New York Times religiously, particularly the foreign news, the markets, and the editorials . . . He drilled into me that one must read a good paper (not Hearst's New York American which appealed to me with murders, the lost child wife, etc.), and I remember his telling me again and again "If you read and absorb every line on the editorial page of the New York Times, you will keep posted on all the worthwhile current events at home and abroad," . . . The next thing he drilled into me was that you cannot waste time. Time, to him, was something given to you to prepare for the future. At first, I couldn't subscribe to this constant plugging, but by this time, I was a very small puppy, hounding his every footstep and feeling sure if Will Clayton did it, I must do it also. As I look back on the next several years, it seems impossible that a man could work hard all day and just as hard in the evening on serious study, particularly on what I considered stupid things, like foreign affairs, foreign exchange, foreign banking and European politics. He did allow us one evening each week for relaxation. Every Saturday we'd go over to Manhattan and stand in line for a 25¢ seat in the third balcony. At first, I kicked about such things as Sarah Bernhardt in L'Aiglon when my thoughts ran to Flora Dora, etc., but much to my surprise, I found out I really enjoyed the other . . . During the fall months, however, the American Cotton Co. made us work every evening. They allowed us $1 for

70 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

supper money. Since we could get a nice sirloin steak for 25¢ at a nearby restaurant, no one kicked about the work, but just as soon as the rush was over, back we [Will and I] went to study . . . . . . About this time I had my first blow. Will had been studying French and decided he would move into a French boarding house where nothing but French was spoken . . . The next three months were the longest I can ever remember, and his rejoining me at 113 State Street was indeed a reunion. At this time Will and Ernest were living in a boarding house in Brooklyn, Will's third living quarters since his move to New York. The second boarding house at 261 Clinton Street had been a gloomy place, even though it was better than the first one, which he had tried for a while because the board was ten dollars a month cheaper. In the Clinton Street house one Sunday, the lonely boy had eased his feeling of isolation by playing with his landlady's little four-year-old girl, pretending he was her horse, jumping her up to the ceiling two or three times, and giving her candy. When the mother took the child away, she cried as if her heart would break. Now with Ernest, in the house on State Street, life was brighter. When Ernest first arrived, Will moved from his "third floor front" room to a larger one, "second story back." The new room, which he and Ernest shared, was warmer and better furnished. It was well carpeted and the wall paper was pretty. In it were a roll-top desk, a "beautiful folding bed," a large mirror, and "lots of nice things." Will and Ernest adorned it further by hanging pictures on the walls. Prominent among these was Will's photograph of Sue. After rising at six-thirty, the boys took twenty minutes' exercise, and then a cold bath. After breakfast they began their brisk walk to the office. Ernest has described these walks as follows : . . . We lived on the heights of Brooklyn, so that it was about a three mile walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to our office. After a while, a stroll across the bridge seemed very tame and slow until Will developed a racing technique. He would pick out some young fellow stepping briskly along, walk up along side of him and perhaps half a yard ahead . . . and maintain his lead. Pretty soon the man would get tired of this and speed it up a little, and the first thing you know a race would be on hand. Well, old long legged Will

71 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

could not be beaten, but the result was that I had to dog trot to keep up and when I arrived at the office, I had had plenty of exercise. In hundreds of races I never saw him beaten. Ernest continues: Will's ability to impress his personality on anyone, old or young, was unbelievable. I remember asking him how he did it. His answer was very simple. "Never let the conversation get on Ί . ' Always keep it on 'you.' " For Will, this practice was not a matter of calculation, but rather of instinct. Since the age of thirteen, he had spent most of his life with older people, and had developed the habit of being a good listener. Besides, he had a natural love of people of all ages—not only the little girl, who was his landlady's daughter, but people who were old and infirm as well, particularly the unfortunate. In one of his letters to Sue he describes his disappointment at the fact that it had been raining all day that Sunday and he had had to countermand an order for a horse and buggy in which he'd planned to take a Mr. John Martin for a ride to see the country in New Jersey, where he was staying at the time. Mr. Martin was an old man, a "very good friend" of his, who was in feeble health. "He has lost nearly all his money," Will writes, "and his family is scattered in different parts of the world, and the poor old man is almost entirely alone. He used to be General Manager of our Company." Another bit of advice Will gave to Ernest was, "If you have a problem, get off by yourself and think it out, but be sure you think it out to the end—not just part way." A few years ago, Mr. Winthrop Brown, who worked under Will Clayton in the State Department in 1946 and 1947, made a similar observation about the Undersecretary's coaching of his staff. "When Clayton asked one of his subordinates to study— say out of three possible ways—the best method to deal with a situation, and the subordinate came in to give his report, he would not let him leave the room without a decision having been made . . . When you worked for Clayton you worked like a beaver, because you wanted to. If you gave bad advice, or didn't brief him, you felt horrible, because he always took the blame and never criticized you." Ernest went on to say :

72 WILL CLAYTON:

Youth

Yet with all of this [Will's studiousness and determination not to waste a moment] his heart was big enough to take in the whole world. In the years I was with him I never saw a mean thing, a falsehood, or an immoral act. Under Ernest's influence, Will started taking dancing lessons and began to make more social engagements than before. With complete candor, he wrote to Sue about each one of the New York girls he went to see. It was understandable that the mention of the dancing lessons and the girls made Sue begrudge a little more the long separations from her fiancé. Saddened by the death of her only sister in the spring of 1901, she began to show a certain despondency in her letters. Upon Hattie's death, Will—sick, at the time, with a serious relapse from his appendix operation—sent two telegrams of sympathy, and later wrote to Sue : How I do love and sympathise with you from the bottom of my heart . . . I am afraid your Mother's health won't be so good now. You must try to get her out for a ride occasionally so she will get some fresh air. Please take good care of yourself for your sake and your Mamma's sake. Sue's letters of the next few weeks show a questioning as to whether she means as much to Will as before. He answers her with expressions of a mature philosophy : We'll not get through life without some errors and some mistakes and sorrow, but we'll try to let each thing lift us up and make us better. Do you think I could stand cold and unresponsive to your love and your every wish? And again : Life is full of little troubles and some great ones. We should never let the little troubles get the upper hand, for if we did we would not have the strength to bear the great sorrows of life which come to everyone . . . Just think of the thousands of poor people in Jacksonville who lost everything [in the recent fire] and of the other thousands at Galveston who l o s t . . . all [in the 1900 flood].

73 A PERIOD OF PREPARATION IN NEW YORK

Later: If you could compare our condition to that of the miserable creatures I saw last night [when he took a walk with Ernest through the tenement district] you'd be surprised to see how rich and favored we are. Fortunately, Sue and Will would not have much longer to wait before they could be married. On August 14, 1902, the wedding occurred at "Bellwood." A year later, Will received his final and most important promotion with his company.

This page intentionally left blank.

PART III

Maturity

This page intentionally left blank.

77

Chapter 5

From New York to Oklahoma Territory

W

HEN HE M A R R I E D at the age of twenty-two, Will Clayton was making twenty-four hundred dollars a year. Nevertheless, shortly before his marriage, because of money he'd been sending his family, he was forced to write to his first employer, Mr. Hurt of Jackson, Tennessee, for a loan of three hundred dollars. The frankness with which he described his liabilities, as well as his assets, in this letter explains the quality that always made the New York banks, later, willing to lend to him when he went into business for himself. He wrote Mr. Hurt : I enclose you a statement of my assets [bank stock, real estate, life insurance, totaling $1825] and liabilities [notes totaling $1025]. I realize I haven't saved . . . as much as I should, but it has been . . . an up-hill job. I've helped at home . . . and my sickness and operation last year cost $400 . . . Out of $2400 I figure I can save $600. He also wrote of his assurance that his salary would be raised to three thousand dollars in another year. Mr. Hurt's faith in lending his former "deputy clerk" the sum of three hundred dollars was amply rewarded, years later, when he came to Will for a loan of fifty thousand dollars, which was readily given.

78 W I L L CLAYTON

:

Maturity

In the American Magazine of April, 1938, Beverly Smith wrote: Cotton seems a simple staple. But the mechanism for marketing it is so complex that some men never understand it. To grasp some of its operations requires a mental power akin to the gift for mathematics. Clayton happened to have this power, plus the sustained application necessary to use it. Because of it, he rose in his company as inevitably as a balloon. At 24 he was the treasurer. The company owned a patent for a new type of "round bale" cotton compress. Another company owned a similar patent. Placing these compresses in the South, the two companies got into cutthroat competition. Trying to expand too rapidly, and meeting the antagonism of Southerners interested in the square bale, both companies headed for failure. Clayton saw this coming and decided to strike out for himself in a new field. In 1900 Will's eldest sister and her husband, Frank Anderson, had gone to Oklahoma City, attracted by the opportunities for a cotton merchant in the fast growing territory, which had been opened up only eleven years before. In 1904 Frank made a trip to New York to investigate bank support for his ventures, and stayed at the Claytons' house. The bank loan may not have been as available as Frank wished, but he went away with something he wanted more—Will Clayton's consent to go into partnership with him and his brother, Monroe, the careful cashier of the People's Bank in Jackson. The three men would each put in $3,000. Thus, with a cash capital of $9,000 ($2,500 of Will's $3,000 having been supplied by his wife's inheritance from her father's estate), Anderson, Clayton & Co. was formed in Oklahoma City on August 1, 1904. In 1905, Will's brother, Ben, joined the firm. (Frank Anderson died in 1924; Ben Clayton retired in 1929 because of ill health; and Monroe Anderson died in 1939.) To this modest beginning Will brought his knowledge of foreign markets, built up over the years in New York. Beverly Smith wrote : They [the firm] began in a small way, buying cotton from the local gins and from merchants in the towns and villages. Through their knowledge of the cotton markets they were able to buy the types of cotton most in demand and sell it to American mills and to European importers at a profit. . . . Most American cotton merchants in those days were content to sell their export cotton to foreign cotton merchants and let it go at that. The

79 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

foreign merchant then took his profit, which increased the price spread between the farmer and the foreign mill. Clayton's firm . . . was one of those which saw the advantage of setting up European offices and selling direct to mills in England, Russia, or Italy. It was not for nothing that Will had been studying French in a French boarding house, and foreign exchange, banking, and politics after office hours in New York. The first year, Anderson, Clayton & Co. handled 30,000 bales on which they made a profit of $10,000. For each of the next two years a profit of about $60,000 (representing about 1 per cent on the cotton handled) was cleared, and most of this was put back into the business. The locale in which the new company made its way was responsive, in the extreme, to the era of rapid development of the country through individual, big-business enterprise. It was the age, too, of ruthless competition, of concentration on the local scene, of an America feeling its oats, headstrong and secure between its two oceans, and, until 1914, scarcely aware of Europe. Will Clayton, with his gaze fixed on far horizons, was almost an anomaly in the town which overnight, was pushing up local flour mills, lumber companies, furniture warehouses, railroad stations, hotels, beauty parlors, saloons, and banks. The banks, in fact, were often reluctant to lend money to go into something as risky as the cotton business. Funds to aid in the opening of European offices seemed especially far-fetched to the type of new smalltown banker who prevailed. Yet the international flavor of the Anderson-Clayton firm persisted, attracting to its offices young men with experience in cotton in Austria, England, and Italy, who never ceased to wonder at the kindness, understanding, and lack of condescension with which Will Clayton treated them. Thus, from the beginning, the business—and Will—stood out as something different—probably, to most, something slated for failure —in the zestful, booming town. The Oklahoma City of those days was a true melting pot of all kinds of people who were often one-generation Americans of German, Bohemian, Danish, and Swedish stock, as well as descendants of the older families from the Eastern and Southern states, with a handful of Indians, and part-Indians thrown in. In 1889, when the territory opened

80 W I L L CLAYTON :

Maturity

up, there had been an unprecedented rush for land, with twenty thousand newcomers vying to stake claims when a pistol was shot off at twelve, noon, on April 22, to signify the opening for settlement. In 1907, just three years after the formation of Anderson, Clayton & Co., the territory became a state. And in 1910 Oklahoma City won its colorful fight with Guthrie to become the capital. This atmosphere of frenzied ferment and change was both crude and stimulating. It was exciting to see a town grow, under one's very eyes, from a string of stores and banks on Main Street, to a city with churches, a capítol building, theatres, and even a country club. Always there was a kind of magic electricity in the air, a quality which matched the sudden cyclones, and made the aftermaths, with the appearance of wild violets on the slopes under the trees in Wheeler Park, all the more miraculous. The seasons were sharp in those days—maple leaves turned red in the fall, there was snow in winter, there were Maypole dances and flower parades in spring, and hot, gaudy fireworks on the Fourth of July. In the enjoyment of these seasons, there was a strongly democratic spirit, in which the families with Indian blood—among whom there were some strikingly beautiful girls—mingled freely with the others. Most vivid of all was the celebration of the "Eighty-niners" on April 22, when the families of the first white settlers paraded with a band— on horseback and in carriages—throughout the town, and wound up the day with a grand performance at the City Auditorium, for which the dancing class of Mrs. Reed gave a stage exhibition never to be forgotten. One year there was a pageant portraying the drama of an Indian princess who turned down the love of a white man to better serve her tribe. But the day was given over to the first white settlers, so that it was with a feeling almost of humiliation that people who could not wear the badge of "Eighty-niner" watched the others. For twenty-four hours an inverted snobbery gripped the town, whereby the lusty, and often the unscrupulous, were the "king-pins" of the day. In Oklahoma City, so breezily on the make, it was a question of sink or swim. Yet, in spite of the rough element, the newness and the hope created an air of optimism, of easy comradeship, which—although deficient in culture—was doubtless a healthy atmosphere for a beginning business to grow up in.

81 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

In tune with this fast tempo, the methods of cotton merchandising were developing in those days with a rather sharp departure from earlier procedure. The process was a peculiarly accurate thermometer of a similar change in the historical evolution of the United States and its growing importance as a nation. Before the founding of Anderson, Clayton & Co., the United States had been largely dependent on loans from Europe to finance its development. In the cotton states, this dependence on European capital and credit for the development of communications and resources was accentuated by the cost of recovery from the Civil War and by the rapid westward development. When the new settlers sold their cotton, wheat, or cattle (which were almost their sole sources of income) they needed the cash at once for payment on their debts. Thus the crops had to be sold as quickly as possible to people who had the cash to pay with— meaning to Europeans. The way in which the cotton was marketed, for the most part, resembles the procedure which now holds in some underdeveloped countries where American importers establish agencies for the purchase of materials needed over here, except that today our businessmen often build their own warehouses, oil tanks, and other storage facilities in the less wealthy countries. In the days when we were a debtor nation, however, our people did not have the capital for building warehouses. Thus the European importers, buying the cotton crop as it was harvested through their American agents, or through offices they established in the United States, or through partnerships with American cotton men, paid cash for the cotton and had it shipped to them as quickly as possible. The cotton went to Liverpool, Le Havre, Bremen, and other ports, where the merchants had it stored until the mills wanted it, and where it constituted satisfactory collateral for their bank borrowings. There were a few American firms, however, (such as George H. McFadden and Bro., Stephen M. Weld & Co., Alexander Sprunt and Sons) who had accumulated enough capital to depart from this pattern. Since bank loans were not plentifully available in this country, these firms established themselves in Liverpool, Bremen, and Le Havre, often in partnership with Europeans so that they could arrange bank lines abroad and carry stocks of cotton, on the strength of which the European banks would advance the needed loans.

82

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

By 1904, when Anderson, Clayton & Co. was founded, this picture was beginning to change. In New York, Will Clayton had seen, from his daily study of the balance-of-international-receipts-and-payments, that the United States was gradually earning and saving more than the debt and dividend service we owed to foreigners. From now on, banking accommodations in this country should be more readily available. Thus Clayton and his partners developed their business in Oklahoma City to furnish services which reached farther toward the mill door abroad, services furnished formerly only by the few well-established firms in the East which had accumulated capital. It was a daring move for an "upstart" firm in a part of the country that was not even yet a state—that was still a territory, and, not too far back, "Indian Territory," at that. It meant that Anderson, Clayton & Co., founded on almost a shoestring of capital, would need to establish excellent credit with the banks. For this need, Will's previous experience with the New York banks in connection with the American Cotton Co. was invaluable. As World War I dragged on, Clayton saw that a still more drastic change in the cotton business would follow. With war consuming the savings of belligerent Europe and frightening deposits away from European into American banks, the European importers would no longer have the means to carry large stocks of cotton. Such stocks would have to be carried in the United States until required by the mills of the world. For this reason Anderson, Clayton & Co. started building warehouses in American ports, particularly in Houston, and elsewhere throughout the cotton belt. While Anderson, Clayton & Co. made money the first three years, the early days were not all smooth sailing. Cotton merchandising requires much bank credit. Although Anderson, Clayton & Co. had established good lines of credit, nevertheless during the panic of 1907, (when banks were closed for a week, and upon re-opening established limits, even, upon withdrawal of deposits) there were some anxious moments for the firm. It was during these days that I, the eldest child, began to feel a certain fear both of and for my father. When he came home at night he always wore a strained look, so much so that, even when I was very little, I was frightened lest he had taken on some task that was too much for him.

83 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

Then it seemed that only a talk with my mother could dispel this look of his. For reasons I cannot now remember, but which probably had to do with childish interruption of my parents' talk, my father had begun much earlier to spank me almost every evening. He had played with his landlady's little girl in New York, but he did not know how to play with me. The neighbors used to say they could tell when "Mr. Clayton" came home by hearing me cry. When we first moved to Oklahoma City we lived in the Marion Flats —a red-and-brown-brick apartment house of three stories. To one side there was a lawn, with trees and an old-fashioned wicker swing, built of two seats facing each other. For a while I had a colored nurse, who sat with me in the swing or took me for walks in front of these apartments. The building looked enormously high and ugly to me. I resented its impersonal, public look—like a railroad station turned on its end. Mother had taken me several times on visits to her home in Kentucky, where I had had the run of the large, old-fashioned house and the wide lawn. To make up for the cramped feeling of the "flats," Mother and I invented all sorts of games. We put my dolls through scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It. The days were filled with imaginary forest romances, marked for me, forever, by my mother's joyous laughter and by the look of adoration in her eyes. Then, night time : my father's return, an act or gesture from me which struck him as showing off, or my insistent demand that Mother stop talking to him to continue a game or a story or a poem she had started, a stamping of my foot, and then, quick as a flash, the sudden punishment. For a long time six o'clock for me meant entering the dark tunnel of my father's homecoming, where the only light was a tiny flare at the end—the puzzled brilliance in my mother's eyes. In those days my relationship with my father was more than that of the eldest child who supposedly always receives the severest discipline. Looking back, I believe that one cause of my punishments was the tight rein my father kept on himself to smother impatience with irritating things at the office, or even objection to a difference in outlook on the part of my mother, whose thinking was always on a more localized plane. His control had to break somewhere, and his temper (an inherit-

84 WILL CLAYTON

:

Maturity

ance from his own father who frequently thrashed him for reasons he cannot remember) flared out beyond the bounds of his usual "Burdine" restraint and spent itself on me. Another cause was, I am sure, my own kind of awkward pertness and independence, something which expressed itself, later, in my sister, Susan, much more gracefully, and, in my mother, by a flashing repartee which made my father laugh, but probably also made him wince often enough. In me the quality, coupled with a likeness to himself, was, for a long time, too much for him to tolerate, especially when he was worried about his business. His venting of his resentment on a child was indicative of the same high-strung temperament shown by his tantrum at the age of fifteen, and was, of course, evidence of a flaw in his nature which was akin to the emotional immaturity of his father. It was the greatest weakness he ever showed, just as it is one of his greatest achievements that, later, he completely conquered it. There was a time when the friction between us seems to have become intensified. This period may have had its beginning in an incident both amusing and revealing—revealing because of the different ways in which my parents reacted to it. One day my colored nurse, Fanny, no longer came at her appointed hour. The reason was soon apparent when Mother and I met Fanny walking along with the child of a friend who lived in one of the other apartments of the Marion Flats. This woman's husband was a man who was making a rapid fortune in mules, and Mother soon found out that "Mrs. X" had offered Fanny a higher salary. It was natural for Fanny to leave us for a better-paying job, but the abrupt and secretive method by which Mrs. X had enticed her away infuriated Mother. She argued with Dad that they should both refuse to speak to Mrs. X from then on. My father, who placed less importance on the incident, perfunctorily agreed. One Sunday, however, as they passed Mrs. X on the way to church, and Mother held her head high, my father, forgetting for the moment, instinctively raised his hat. For a while, after that, the already electric, competitive atmosphere of the town was intensified, for my father at least, by a double charge of current in the bristling indignation of my Kentucky-bred mother, which struck out, every now and then, in our apartment, like lightning. From then on, because of this extra irritant, Dad probably resented my bursts of flippancy more than ever.

CLAYTON wearing Finnish decoration,"Order of the White Rose," April, 1952. Courtesy ACCO Press.

father—an unordained Cumberland ister, holding his Bible, about 1875

Presbyterian

B E N J A M I N LOCKHART CLAYTON, Will Clayton's

min-

Grand-

FLETCHER BURDINE, Will sixteen

Clayton's

Mother—at

the age of

BENJAMIN

CLAYTON,

Younger Brother—as een, 1900

Will

Clayton's

a youth of eight-

S U E V A U G H A N — o n a visit to Jacksonville, Florida, November, 1900

S U E V A U G H A N — a t the time

engagement,

of her

age eighteen, 1899

S U E CLAYTON about

1941

T H E W I L L CLAYTON FAMILY about 1905 ( Will, Ellen,

Sur)

T H E CLAYTON FAMILY, JACKSON, T E N N E S S E E , about 1897 (Will, in center of

back row, pictured with his sisters and brothers-in-law, and father, and his baby nephew)

his brother, his mother

in Egypt,

Miss LULA WALDO)

The Claytons

1925 ( W I L L CLAYTON, M R S . CLAYTON, their daughters,

BURDINE and JULIA, and

W I L L and S U E CLAYTON at the Brownsville, trip to South America, February, 1937

Texas, Airport—on

return

from

CLAYTON at Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City—addressing Inter-American Commission during Inter-American ence on Problems of War and Peace, February 27, 1945. Houston Post.

Confer-

CLAYTON at the Peace Conference, Luxembourg Palace, Paris, August I, 1946—with Secretary of State J A M E S B Y R N E S (left) and U.S. Ambassador to France J E F F E R S O N CAFFERY (center). Wide World Photos Inc.

CLAYTON, Assistant Secretary of State—in conference with N. I. FEONOV, Soviet Council member, at Fourth UNRRA Council Meeting, Atlantic City, New Jersey, March 21, 1946. Houston Post.

CLAYTON, Undersecretary of State—passing a group of Swiss guards at the Vatican after an audience with Pope Pius XII, Rome, Italy, July 24, 1947. Houston Post,

Plan Talks—Ambassadors

W I L L CLAYTON (second from left),

Marshall

1947. Houston

Post.

J E F F E R S O N C A F F E R Y , L E W I S D O U G L A S , and ROBERT M U R P H Y in Conference

Paris, August,

with

American Experts Discuss Needs of Europe—CHARLES BONESTEL, Special Secretary to Robert A. Lovett, Acting Secretary of State; L E W I S DOUGLAS, U.S. Ambassador to England; W I L L CLAYTON, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs; JEFFERSON CAFFERY, U.S. Ambassador to France; and GEORGE K E N N A N , head of the Policy Planning Division of the State Department—in conference at the U.S. Embassy, Paris, France, August 31, 1947. Houston Post.

CLAYTON Receiving a Farewell from News October 16, 1947. Wide World Photos.

Reporters,

Washington,

D.C.,

W I L L CLAYTON Indicates Spread of Co?nmunism—during Texas, September 27, 1949. Houston Post.

a speech

advocating

Atlantic

Union,

Austin,

W I L L CLAYTON—the photograph which inspired the portrait by Raymond Neilson, hung in 1958 in the William L. Clayton Center for International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Medford, Massachusetts

T H E W I L L CLAYTONS Inspecting a Slum District-—Schrimpf April, 1952. Courtesy David E. Scherman.

Alley,

Houston,

WILL and SUE CLAYTON—on a walk of their garden in Houston, 1952. Copyright 1952 Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

The Will Clayton Home in Houston—offered as a gift to the Houston Public Library. Houston Chronicle, January 11, 1958.

85 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

However much they may have irked him, it was, nevertheless, through Mother's criticisms of him that my father grew in character. He had begun as a conscientious puritan, with whose rigid code a driving ambition—whetted both by need and by a tremendous curiosity and imagination—created an inner conflict. And this conflict, together with the frictional meeting of his own farseeing nature with the more usual, shortsighted outlook of others, could have pushed him, at the beginning of his own business, either into unscrupulous acts of revolt and conquest, or into melancholy failure. Mother, with her natural ebullience, encouraged him out of the melancholy. And with her biting tongue and quick perception of the slightest breaking of his word to her—even sometimes about trivial things—she sharpened the influence of his early code of honor. She not only did this about small deviations towards her, but also, whenever there was a question of being fair to some troublesome employee or business connection, she emphasized in her talks with my father a point of view which he shared—that one should be more than fair rather than not fair enough. Much, indeed, of my father's success and of his modesty in the midst of it, has been due to my mother's combination of buoyancy and criticism. But it is a tribute to him, as well, that he should have chosen for his wife someone who would lash out at him with all her strength, from a nature built partly on the ideals of the romantic novels he used to send her. In the early days, it was I who bore the brunt of many of these conflicts, which the shut-in apartment intensified. When we moved to our brown frame house on Robinson Street, where Susan was born, I had more freedom. There was a porch where I could play now, and there were honeysuckle vines—one pink and one white—lacing through the lattice work trellis and spreading their perfume. Nevertheless, it was here that I began, after the panic in 1907, to feel concern for my father. It was with a strange sympathy that I watched him leave in the morning or return at night with the knees of his long, thin legs see-sawing the air as he pedaled his bicycle down the street, his dark brows pressing against the furrow in his forehead. Something in me that was akin to him reached out, but I could not tell him. When Susan grew older, he became more relaxed. Often on wintry evenings, after the "busy season" in the cotton business had passed, Dad would seat one of us on either side of him in front

86

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

of the fire and tell us stories, while Mother hemmed napkins or shortened a dress of mine for Susan. He told us the story of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, he told us John Fox, Jr.'s, Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. And often he gave us an installment from one of his own creations—a continued story about a heroic dog named "Bruno," who rescued his little mistress from one peril after another. He was a superb story-teller, and he loved dogs, although I don't believe he ever owned one when he was a boy. In his account of The Call of the Wild, he made Buck seem so human that we asked for the story again and again. Other favorites were Two Little Confederates by Thomas Nelson Page, a story of plantation life called Diddie, Dumps and Tot, and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In the last three it was the humor that appealed most to my father, and he could make Tom Sawyer's strategy for enticing his friends to paint the fence funnier each time he told it. His unusual memory for the details in these stories and for the history which he had largely taught himself was doubtless helped by the fact that, never having been able to read as much as he wished, he had made it a point to be judiciously selective in what he did read. Hu Harris —who was, until his retirement in 1942, Chief Engineer for the Production Department of the Humble Oil Co. in Houston—remembers how he and Will used to meet the trains which brought the out-of-town newspapers and magazines to Jackson : Will and I sold the newspapers, and brought the magazines back to my brother's book store, where they would be sold over the counter. As soon as we opened up the magazines in the store, Will would not move until he'd finished poring over them all—he was so hungry for something to read. Right away, though, he discarded one—I think it was the Saturday Afternoon Review—which was the favorite with the railroad fellows because it carried spicey love stories. Will's favorite was a magazine something like Time, called Frank Leslie's Magazine. What my father's reading lacked in quantity was compensated for by the quality, and by the sharply etched impression made by passages for which he had had to carve the time. In the late summer the busy season in the cotton business started again, and, once more, my father was devoted to the office.

87 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

Meantime, the thirst for culture in the Clayton family was partially satisfied by the arrival of Lamar Fleming, Jr., then in his junior year at Harvard. "Uncle" Lamar—who said he was tired of riding around in other people's automobiles—left college to come to work for my father in 1911, and lived for three years in our house. The eighteen-year-old boy was so quiet, studious, and gentle, that as I recall him now walking along beside the taller man every morning and, many times, after dinner in the evening, to the office, he was the projection of a hidden side of my father. The balanced cast of the "apprentice's" features and the middle part in his hair, indeed, seemed to echo the older man; whereas the scholar's bent, which Dad had been unable to satisfy because of his need to help his family, had been fulfilled in Uncle Lamar. When Lamar Fleming, Jr., left us in 1914 to take up an important position for the firm in Europe, it was, for a while, as if part of the life stream of the family had been drained off. While he was with us, he had served as a link between us children (my two sisters and me) and our genius-driven father, whose dignity and rectitude had been sharpened almost into an armor to shut out the rowdy spirit of the town. In relieving the rigid, puritanical atmosphere of the house which my father imposed on Sundays—no loud games or amusements—my mother, who was gayer, found an ally in Uncle Lamar. With him, on Sunday nights —when we all gathered in the kitchen to help Mother serve out her delicious scrambled eggs, bacon, corn muffins, and homemade wild grape jelly, and re-gathered afterwards to do the dishes—supper became a kind of jolly, cooperative lark. With Uncle Lamar as our confederate, we made up songs and sang them, with Dad joining in, while we worked. Heeding Uncle Lamar's judgment and his pleas for us, Dad even consented to devote Saturday evenings to taking us to the picture show, Uncle Lamar having assured him that Mary Pickford and Marguerite Clark would not corrupt us. More than that, he supplied us with good children's books, among which I remember Lorna Doone and some of Stevenson and Hawthorne. About his walks to the office with my father during these days, Uncle Lamar has written me : He liked to walk and he walked fast. Trying to keep up with him walking to and from the office, I developed a leg-stretching, semi-trot that kept my

88

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

heels worn down on the outer edges for years thereafter. These walks were a great thing for me. He would talk seriously about all kinds of subjects, including business. He had the rare quality of talking with a younger person as if both were of the same age and mental maturity; and of course this helped greatly to stimulate serious thought in the young men around him. At the office, we did not notice that he made any particular didactic effort; but it was very noticeable that he did not conceal anything or try to keep anything to himself. For instance, when he calculated prices or made other business calculations, he would leave them on his desk or pin them to papers to which they referred, so that any of us who wanted to could see and study them. He was glad to see any of us take initiative. Once Uncle Lamar found out that my father thought some Liverpool futures contracts he had sold were already too low compared to New York prices, and that he had done the wrong thing. But, wrote Uncle Lamar: . . . his comment was that he was glad I had done something, even if wrong; and that it was a good thing for anyone to make mistakes in the beginning of business life in order to have no illusions about his capacities for making mistakes. The long business hours the two men kept, and the returns to the office after dinner during a part of the year become understandable in the next section of Lamar Fleming's reminiscences. In them he tells why it was necessary to spend part of almost every evening in the office during the busy season—for all cotton merchants—from late summer to mid-winter. This was the time when ginners and local dealers would be buying from farmers during the day, and when most of the purchases by the firm would occur late in the day or after supper. A vivid memory of my childhood, in this connection, is the constant interruption of our dinner—during the "busy season"—by long-distance calls for my father. Usually these calls would have to do with buying cotton from a girmer or dealer in a small country town where the longdistance connection was so poor that my father had to shout to be heard, making his voice so loud that it was deafening. In most cases the firm would not know where it stood in its transactions until after supper, Uncle Lamar explained, and that became

89 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

the natural time to decide upon and send its offers to Europe. Also, the crop moved very fast in those days, within a few months, because the center of capital and credit was Europe; American dealers had to sell the cotton they bought and turn it into money as quickly as possible in order to have the means of continuing to buy. As a result, lots of classing and of paper work connected with buying, shipping, selling, and invoicing had to be done within as short a time as possible. The reason was that no dealer could afford to carry a twelve-month organization capable of handling the peak load in a short working day; what had to be done was for everybody to stay late enough at night to get rid of the day's load during the peak period. Uncle Lamar writes : . . . Your father did not spare himself in this respect, and he seemed to enjoy it; and this had a lot to do with his employees' enjoying it. I said your father was not ostensibly didactic. However, he knew every operation that took place in the business, because at one time or another, he had performed each of them personally; and this gave him the faculty of perceiving the cause of anything that went wrong and of pointing out to us how to correct it. The faculty described here finds an echo in the following words of Mr. Winthrop Brown, assistant to Will Clayton in the State Department, years later: Clayton's outstanding gift was that of the terms in which he developed support within the United States for the ideas he believed in. He was particularly good with Congressmen, because they could not laugh him off as a theoretic idealist. The reason was that before going to Congress he got himself thoroughly briefed. He would first sit down with his staff and take shorthand notes on the details of the matter under discussion. Then, when he went before Congress, he read a prepared statement. The minute questions were asked on this statement, he was ready with answers concerning the slightest detail. In his proposals, he dug below the surface always. If a Congressman came up with an impossible alternative to his proposal, Clayton, instead of saying "that's a stupid idea," would say something like this, "Yes, it's true there are two or three ways to deal with the situation. As a matter of fact, we've considered your solution for some time, and, after mature consideration, we have believed that the way we propose is the better one." Sometimes, when

90

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

the alternative put forward by a Congressman was too absurd, he threw back his head and laughed—that wonderful, genial laugh of his. He never made them mad. Lamar Fleming's reminiscences continue : He knew and accepted more completely than most others that every phenomenon has a cause and that the sequence of the one from the other is governed by a natural law. His mind looked for the sequences and laws explaining phenomena of the present, and forecasting phenomena of the future. He has been a fundamental student all his life. He also has been a voracious reader and accumulator of the factual knowledge of the present, which is the springboard to future sequences. This kind of study and attitude have given him a recognition of and submission to the inexorability of evolution, both on a grand scale and in its minor aspects. Through it he overcame, almost more than anyone I know, the static viewpoint and aversion to change that is hereditary. One way in which Will Clayton showed his adaptability to change, early in his business, concerned the round bale. As Beverly Smith had pointed out in his article in The American Magazine, Clayton had already had experience with this new type of bale in the American Cotton Co. Although the bale had met opposition in the South, he knew that its compactness and the complete burlap covering—far superior to that of the square bale which gave only partial protection—made it more economical, cleaner, and more acceptable to the European mills. The round bale, for instance, was a gin-compressed package and had a density of about thirty pounds per cubic foot, whereas the square bale, as it came from the gin, had a density of only twelve to thirteen pounds per cubic foot and was transported in this form by rail, sometimes one hundred miles or more, to a compress, where it was pressed to a density of twentytwo to twenty-four pounds per cubic foot, and was then ready for export or shipment to American mills. Obviously, the railroads performed much more transportation service for the square bale than for the round bale, but they successfully refused to recognize this in their rates—the two bales paid the same rates. The steamship lines, on the other hand, gave lower rates on round bales than on the square. Anderson, Clayton & Co., handling both types of bale, decided to invest more heavily in the better packaged round bale. They acquired patents for a very effi-

91 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

cient round-bale press, and leased several hundred of them to gins throughout Texas and Oklahoma. As "competition is the life of trade," the square-bale people were stimulated to find some way to overcome the advantage enjoyed by the round bale in ocean freight. Nearly all square-bale compresses were "Webb" presses, named after the inventor and manufacturer, a Dr. Webb, of Minden, Louisiana. In due time he invented "side doors" to be attached to his presses, so that the square bale could be pressed on four sides instead of two, and by this means a density of thirty-two to thirty-four pounds was obtained. Such presses were called "highdensity" compresses. In the beginning, they were established only at ports. Except in areas close to the ports, the cotton still had to be compressed twice, for it was sent, from the gins, first to the compress at the interior junction point for standard pressing, and then to the ports to be re-compressed if it went overseas. The round bale still retained its railway transportation advantage, but the railroads succeeded in resisting all attempts by Anderson, Clayton & Co. to obtain recognition of this in rates. In time the high-density presses were established in the interior, and the round bale, in which Anderson, Clayton & Co. had invested so heavily, lost its advantage. The firm wrote off its one-million-dollar investment in the round bale to one dollar on its books and sold most of the presses for scrap. Thus Will Clayton and his partners followed the trend as soon as they saw that the round bale no longer held any substantial advantage. This quality of facing facts realistically was put to use by Clayton, later, in the service of his government as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. "Once I came in to see Mr. Clayton because I was very worried about not being able to get something through the Senate," one of his subordinates remembers. "Mr. Clayton said to me, 'Never wrestle with the facts. It isn't your fault that the facts can't be changed. Wrestle with what you can do about them !' " Although the firm weathered the panics and stayed abreast of the changes in cotton handling and compression, it found itself in a very difficult position at the beginning of World War I. It had sold a large amount of cotton to Russia for shipment to Riga and Reval, but delivery to these ports became impossible because of the heavy German block-

92

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

ade of the North Sea. In the end the cotton was sent across the Pacific to Vladivostok. Clayton has described vividly the serious straits his firm would have been in if it had not managed to deliver and receive payment for this cotton—much of which he, himself, had sold on a trip to Russia that spring. We had bought futures at around 121/2cents to hedge our sales to Russia, and just before the war broke these futures slid to 91/4 cents a pound. That meant we had to put up $15 a bale. It took about all our available cash and it meant a dead loss if we couldn't eventually deliver the cotton to the Russians at the [earlier and higher] price at which we had sold it and get paid. Fortunately Mr. Clason, our agent in Moscow—although a German— was so loved by the Russians and so trusted that they allowed him to stay on without harm and do business. He remained in Moscow until November. And it was he who arranged with the spinners to take delivery in Vladivostok, whence the cotton would be shipped about 5000 miles by rail to the area around Moscow where most of the mills were located. In fact, once this way was established, American cotton was shipped by this route to Russia all during the war. The story of what happened to the cotton which Anderson, Clayton & Co. and other American merchants sent to Vladivostok during the war reads like a commercial romance. A great deal of this cotton was stored out in the open, on the hill above the harbor at Vladivostok. In fact, because there were no available warehouses there and because the singletrack Trans-Siberian Railway was operating far beyond its capacity, tarpaulins to cover the bales for protection from the weather accompanied each cargo of cotton to Vladivostok. At the end of the war approximately 100,000 bales—covered by these tarpaulins—were still there. Then it was that the 30,000 Czech prisoners of the Russians arrived in Vladivostok for repatriation. Because the counterrevolution in the Ukraine had made the shorter route home impossible for them, their transportation had been provided for in the Versailles Treaty negotiations, and a number of ships were sent to Vladivostok for transport of the prisoners. Before the soldiers left there, however, they managed to load most of that piled-up cotton onto their ships. Thus it was quite some

93 FROM NEW YORK TO OKLAHOMA TERRITORY

time before Anderson, Clayton & Co. could sell any more cotton to Czechoslovakia—the "legionnaires' cotton" (as it was called) had to be used first. In fact, soon after the prisoners' arrival home, the Anderson, Clayton & Co. agent in Czechoslovakia sent the firm a number of their ACCO tags taken from those Vladivostok bales. Meanwhile wartime risks and the inability of some European importers to secure sufficient bank credit was hurting the export business of several American cotton firms. The opposite was true of Anderson, Clayton & Co. As World War I progressed, Will Clayton and his partners foresaw that capital and credit would expand in this country in proportion to their wartime decline in Europe, and that the Far East— Japan, China, and India—would increase their consumption of American cotton. Therefore Anderson, Clayton & Co. decided to extend their services still further to the mill door abroad. In the words of John Chamberlain (in the May 19,1947, issue of Life) : The rich business of ACCO was built up by Will Clayton's fanatical application; his wife says he worked until midnight for 12 years of his life. Quite early in his career he fixed upon the idea of the "economic line of transit," and it was in pursuing this line that he revolutionized the cotton merchandising business. To effect "the economic line of transit" the company constructed compresses and warehouses at the ports in this country, where the bales could be given a final compact form and could be stored, insured, and financed until both the American mills and the European spinner wanted to buy. It was in order to establish the headquarters of the company in the port of Houston that Will Clayton moved his family there in 1916. Before we left Oklahoma an incident occurred which brought me closer to my father, and which I was to remember years later, even after another intervening period of feeling rejected by him. It happened when I was about ten years old that Mother had to go away on a trip to see my grandmother in Kentucky. She left word with Dad that he must move Susan's bed and mine into his room, so that, if we needed anything in the night, he would know. One night, before an arithmetic examination, I was so worried lest I should fail that I could not sleep. Finally I crept out of bed and started

94

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

pacing the floor, repeating to myself the rule for decimals. Dad heard me and asked what was the matter. When I told him, he took me into his bed, put his arm around me and said, "Darling, it doesn't matter if you fail, but you won't. I know how you feel. I'm the same way. I worry about things all the time that, in the end, turn out all right." Then he told me one of his "serious jokes." "Once there was a man who said, 'I'm old and grey, and I've had many troubles, most of which never happened !' " He laughed. "That's the way you and I are, Ellen !"

95

Chapter 6

Houston and Washington

S

HORTLY AFTER the move to Houston, Anderson, Clayton & Co. began the expansion of their business on a world-wide basis. Already in 1916 they had opened an office in Le Havre, France. Immediately after the war, the firm set up in England and in Germany arrangements which gave them practically the status of domestic merchants in those countries. Later, they opened offices in Japan and China. If my father had seemed distant before, occasionally, he seemed even more so, now. We were living in a house which he and Mother had designed themselves—a red brick, Georgian house, with white columns on either side of the door, and a whole block of land, which provided ample space for a tennis court and stables for two riding horses. Houston, besides, was less headlong and less crude than Oklahoma, and much more Southern and "genteel"—an atmosphere that Mother liked. But I missed my Oklahoma friends, and, in spite of our bettered fortunes, was acutely miserable. There were four children by this time, all girls: besides Susan and me, there were Burdine, born in Oklahoma City, and Julia, born shortly after our arrival in Houston. Although Dad was busier, actually we saw as much of him as before. Most days he drove us to school, as in Oklahoma he had walked with Susan and me, giving out Susan's spelling on the way. He always had lunch at home on Saturdays, and he took us to

96

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

Sunday school and, during the first year in Houston, before he became even busier, he read to us from the Bible and occasionally from Dickens or a Baroness Orczy mystery story on Sunday afternoons. Yet in none of this did he completely participate, with all of himself, as he had seemed to do on winter evenings back in Oklahoma. Here, with the responsibilities of his business always creating more demands, things were different. When he told stories or read to us now, he seemed to be communicating with us only through the surface layer of his mind, while, underneath, he was absorbed in something too complicated for us to reach, or for him to explain—like Poe, who composed poetry while working out problems in mathematics. This abstraction of his worried me more than the others. Since I was the first child, I had received more concentrated attention in the early years. And I wanted nothing diluted. Even the punishments I'd once been subjected to were better than this. When Dad, sensing for a moment my resentment, would put his arms around me, I felt that his sudden move was hypocritical and I always drew away. My sisters, more gregarious than I, did not seem to notice our father's absorption. Susan's complete assurance that he would be interested in her school or social problems always made him throw himself, momentarily, into another gear. "Daddy," she would sometimes say, with a roguish challenge, much like Mother's, in her eyes, "I want you to practice up on those dumbbells and Indian clubs in the attic. Maurice" (her childhood sweetheart whom she later married) "hasn't been treating me right, and he's awfully good at boxing; so I want you to practice up, in case you have to take him on !" This was the kind of make-believe my father loved. From then on a sort of conspiracy grew up between him and Susan, who used to ask his advice about every note Maurice or any other boy passed to her in school. Susan even persuaded my father to make a fourth at tennis, now and then, when two of her friends came over to play on our new court. At this time Julia (who, later, made him so proud by winning the Order of the Coif in law school, where she graduated second in her class) was too young for much of his attention. But with my sister, Burdine—golden haired, delicate, and angelic of countenance as well as temperament—he was gentle and wistfully responsive. When arguments broke out at the table between us, and Dad, after restoring order,

97 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

sat silent, with a look of stern distaste on his features, Burdine could always bring back a lighthearted mood by leaning her head over to one side (pretending she needed to do so in order to look up into my father's dark, clouded eyes), and then saying, with the silveriest tinkle to her voice : "I think I see a little sunshine coming !" She would say it maybe two or three times, and then, my father, in spite of himself, would un-freeze his features and break into a laugh. Soon the whole table was laughing with him. Most of his absorption at this time may be traced to the fact that he was going through one of the greatest trials of his life, a trial of which I, wrapped up in my own teenage problems, was only barely conscious. This was his fight for southern delivery on the New York Cotton Exchange and his investigation by a Senate committee, which, in some respects out-McCarthied even the McCarthy methods. The difference, here, was that the witness never thought of invoking the Fifth Amendment. Instead—showing some of the fire with which he used to punish me, but keeping it under control—he made the committee and his accusers wish they could invoke the amendment before he had finished. In 1947, John Chamberlain, writing in Life an article called, "Will Clayton and His Problem," said : Cotton is a risky commodity; there is so much of it that violent price swings are inevitable, and a merchant who buys, say, one million bales at $60 a bale could lose $10 million overnight by a mere $10 drop in the price. To make themselves safe, Anderson, Clayton & Co. always hedged scrupulously; every time the firm bought a bale it sold a future hedge on the Cotton Exchange. Nevertheless, Anderson, Clayton & Co. was accused of manipulating the cotton market of 1926. Although he had not been called, my father volunteered in the spring of 1928 to appear before the Senate subcommittee making these charges. He began by saying, "We are 'spot cotton' merchants. The words 'spot cotton' are synonymous with 'actual cotton.5 Our function is that of middleman between producer and consumer.55 Then he launched into an economics lesson in cotton merchandising. He explained how because the farmer wants to sell his crop when it is

98

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

ready—between September and December—and the spinner normally doesn't wish to buy his whole year's requirements in that time, the merchant middleman must buy more in that period than he can sell, which creates a risk of loss if the market declines before the spinners decide to buy. Also he must sell to the spinner before the producer has the cotton ready because the spinners have to sell yarn and goods when their customers wish to buy, and normally they will not risk the loss of an advance in price from the date of these sales until the crop is ready. So the "spot merchant" takes the market risk for both producer and spinner. And he uses the futures market as a means of passing on these risks to others who have opposite risks or to the speculative public. That is, he uses this machinery "to hedge his purchases and sales of actual cotton." As a general thing, no cotton is actually delivered on such futures contracts. When the actual cotton is sold to the mills, the merchant buys his futures back in. But because of the fact that futures contracts entered into on the New York Cotton Exchange required delivery in New York—which had long since ceased to be a spot-cotton market, and was far removed from the economic path of travel from producer to the mill—the New York cotton contract became subject to manipulation. The "opposite number" of the merchant who had sold the futures and was trying to buy them back could refuse to sell at a reasonable price and could demand delivery of the cotton instead. Yet the freight costs from the cotton-growing centers to New York were so high that the merchant stood more to lose from shipping the cotton than from buying it back at the speculator's price. Thus the New York manipulator was able to operate a "squeeze" on the merchant, forcing him to buy in at an unnaturally high figure. Indeed, the New York market often moved one way when the market for spot cotton in the South moved another. Naturally, under such conditions, the New York futures contract was a very unreliable device for the hedging of merchants' risks. This had been noted in the reports of various committees appointed by the Exchange to study the matter since about 1900, and a recommendation—so far unheeded—had been made that delivery be permitted at Southern ports. One of the complaints against Clayton's company, made by certain firms trading on the New York Exchange, was that Anderson, Clayton &

99 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

Co. had stored in New York in 1926 an unduly large amount of cotton —200,000 bales—at a loss to themselves, and, thus, that the storage must have been for the sinister purpose of depressing the cotton market. Will Clayton, in answering the charges, explained that the crop of 1926-1927 was the largest on record, and that there was almost a panic on the part of producers to rush it to market. The mills, expecting lower prices, were not free buyers. By October 1, the price had dropped to about 13 cents per pound. A meeting of bankers and cotton exchange representatives convened in New Orleans to consider the situation, and agreed that merchants should recommend to the producer to stop selling at such ruinous prices and should urge their spinner connections to buy cotton for an investment, since it was selling below the cost of production. Three days before this meeting, Anderson, Clayton & Co. had cabled their selling agencies in Europe and Asia to transmit to their spinner buyers advice to buy at once a substantial part of their season's requirements as an investment. They also offered, through their interior buying connections, financial and storage facilities to farmers who wished to hold their cotton. Clayton testified : We had to find storage room for over 1,000,000 bales of cotton. Our own warehouses in Houston and New Orleans had a capacity of 500,000 bales, . . . but one of these was under engagement to the Farmers' Cooperative Association, which immediately filled it, so that our own available space would accommodate only 350,000 bales . . . But even this [and warehouses rented elsewhere] were insufficient, so that we had to ship large quantities abroad for storage. If we had not shipped to New York . . . that cotton, too, would have gone abroad . . . or else we could not have bought it . . . In shipping this cotton to New York we did not consider that it was delivered against our hedge contracts futures any more than the much greater quantities we held in the South, and indeed we still own much of the cotton shipped to New York, the buyers of our hedge contracts having preferred to let us carry it, rather than assume that burden themselves . . . If at any time the gentlemen in New York who claim New York is a great spot market for actual delivery of cotton had wished to demonstrate that it is, they might have done so by taking this cotton on their contract and merchandising it in the consuming markets of the world. Without the shipment of this cotton to New York for the protection of

100

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

our short hedges in that market we could never have risked our capital and our credit in the merchandising of anything like 2,600,000 bales . . . during that season. This, by the way, is the biggest percentage we have ever bought of any crop; it is 15% of the 1926-27 crop . . . which certainly does not place us in the category of monopolists. After exhibiting tables and figures representing the total United States cotton shipments from various ports and the amount received in European ports for 1926-1927, Clayton went ahead to disprove the allegation that his firm had transported at a loss the bales which it stored in New York. In all his statements he hammered home the fact that New York was not a natural spot-cotton market, for, at this time, he was trying to bring about that radical change in the New York contract which —for lack of anyone with the courage and the fight to defy the manipulators—had been as long overlooked as it had been recommended. This change would allow delivery of cotton on futures contracts in ports other than New York—such as New Orleans, Houston, and Galveston, cities closer to where the cotton was grown and in its natural line of transit, thus preventing the disastrous squeezes which had become a part of transactions on the New York Exchange. This innovation was called "Southern delivery"—delivery in Southern ports. The Senate investigation, often conducted in an insolent manner, continued, probing into the firm's records for as far as three years back. This exacted a tremendous toll from Will Clayton, for he was not content to give anything but complete and minutely accurate facts. Nevertheless, he emerged the winner, and his arguments in the Senate and elsewhere brought about, at last, the reforms he'd hoped for in a system of "Southern delivery." Thus one of the old goals he had set himself— establishment of a principle whereby the South's chief product could be marketed with greater certitude—had been achieved. On May 1, 1928, the Knife and Fork Club in Houston gave a dinner to honor him and celebrate his "victory" for Houston and the South. As he had explained early in his appearance before the Senate, the contract dealt in on the New York Cotton Exchange was obsolete, and had to be altered to meet modern conditions. He had argued : A futures market close to the markets where the great supplies of actual

101 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

cotton are, reacts most quickly to the conditions that determine the prices of actual cotton, and reduces to a minimum the wasted time and money of moving cotton from the storage place to the place of delivery on futures contracts. Just after the Civil War, New York qualified in this respect, for disruption of ocean shipping, financing, etc. in the South, caused cotton to move to New York for storage ; but this movement. . . has ceased . . . New Orleans, Houston and Galveston are the greatest American storage and trading centers for actual cotton. A Houston paper of May 1,1928 said : W. L. Clayton will be honored tonight in his hometown and by friends and neighbors who know him as "Will," rather than as the biggest cotton dealer in America and perhaps in the world . . . For years Mr. Clayton has been one of the biggest factors in the growth of Houston and the South. More than that, he is a citizen of such rugged honesty, such zeal for all good causes, such compassion for the unfortunate, such willingness to exert time and spend money to aid community progress and philanthropy, that, in showing appreciation of him, his friends also honor themselves. Shortly after Clayton's championship of Southern delivery before the Senate, Congress passed in 1929 an Agricultural Marketing Act which provided for government loans on farm crops, and authorized the creation of so-called "stabilization corporations" with powers to buy surplus crops. This legislation, an attempt to ease unrest in the twenties, grew out of the fact that much of the greatly expanded agriculture in the United States was being financed on a mortgage basis, partly because of low foreign buying which had resulted from economic dislocations after World War I. Also mass production in this country had caused a sharp contrast in prosperity between people in industry and people in agriculture. The Congressional act occurred as my parents were about to sail from New York to accompany me and my one-year-old son to Buenos Aires, where my husband had taken a position. From the ship, my father wrote his partner, Mr. Lamar Fleming, Jr., a pen-and-ink letter forecasting changes which the firm would have to make as a result of the act. He foresaw that in the United States the trend for a long time would be to bolster agricultural prices, including that of cotton. A loss of world markets for American cotton would be sure to occur, he wrote, because other cotton-producing countries, encouraged by the

102 W I L L CLAYTON

:

Maturity

fact that our cotton was being priced so high, would increase their production and undersell us. Anderson, Clayton & Co.'s organization for merchandising American cotton and its selling agencies abroad would suffer unless the firm established branches in other cotton-producing countries, as they had already done in Mexico and Egypt. It was this policy, then, which was followed in the ensuing years, and which grew also, later, into the manufacture and handling of cottonseed by-products in Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, and Paraguay. Several years earlier the firm had embarked upon the financing of cotton farming in Arizona and California. In John Chamberlain's previously quoted article of May 19, 1947, he wrote : Clayton argued that any artificial attempt to keep the price of U.S. cotton up as the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations had done would .. . result in increased acreage in Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere. Thus .. . government intervention to save the U.S. cotton farmer . . . would only increase . . . his troubles. Things turned out as Clayton had predicted Clayton does not counsel a do-nothing policy about cotton or any other commodity. But he would prefer to subsidize cotton growers for sowing improved varieties of cotton seed, not for plowing under their acreage. Reduction of our tariffs, he thinks, would inevitably help the U.S. cotton grower, for it would increase the amount of dollar exchange in foreign lands and a good proportion of those dollars would . . . flow into the U.S. South for cotton and into the U.S. West for wheat. It was because of Cordell Hull's proposal for reciprocal trade agreements that Will Clayton supported Roosevelt in 1936, although he did not approve the President's "plow under" policies. However, as late as 1945, the Texas Spectator criticized Clayton for his free-trade stand, and his company's handling of foreign cotton. In an issue of December 21, it said: Clayton was a violent hater of the Triple A and most of Roosevelt's farm program Clayton told the [Senate Agricultural] Committee [in 1935] that the company had gone into South America because the company could no longer hold the German business with North American cotton. How envious Clayton might have been if he had ever stopped to consider what a breeze the sulphur business was along about that time. . . .

HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

103

It seems that when Clayton couldn't whip the New Deal, he joined it Clayton is an ex-Liberty Leaguer. Will Clayton had joined the Liberty League because his old friend, John W. Davis, had asked him; he never attended a meeting. Later, because of certain League actions which he did not approve, he resigned from the Liberty League. In 1946, the Texas Spectator of September 20 quoted Mr. Jim Patton, president of the National Farmers' Union, as saying in 1944, when he opposed confirmation of Clayton as Assistant Secretary of State : Mr. Clayton favors free trade. . . . This is the liberalism of 100 years ago. It is the imperialism of today. . . . [Its results would be] that within a . . . short time the large cotton producers would have driven out of the business . . . every family farmer . . . big operators would continue to pay sweatshop wages in order to keep down costs of production Clayton's firm helped stimulate the pitiful pilgrimage of thousands of Oakies and Arkies to Arizona and California, drawn by handbills promising employment in the cotton fields... Mr. Clayton's firm, through a subsidiary . . . helped . . . finance the notorious Associated Farmers of California. . .. Industrialized agriculture has been permitted to serve as an economic poorhouse for the unfortunates who have no other means of livelihood... The Texas Spectator, in this same issue, presented Clayton's answers to such charges as the above. In these answers he demonstrated that large-scale mechanized farming should pay the laborer more rather than less, although it would require fewer hands. In answer to a question from Senator Pepper as to whether he would favor government aid to people who might be hurt by large-scale, mechanized farming, Clayton replied : I have said from the beginning, going way back to 1933, that, in my opinion, the Government owes the cotton farmer something for the fact that he has to buy in a closed market and sell in a free market. I believe that some adjustment or income payment to the cotton producer by the United States government was in order. What I have cautioned against and warned against repeatedly is that the program should not try to make the market make that payment to him, because in attempting to have the market pay it to him, you throw the market out of line with the world market and destroy

104

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

your export trade in cotton. . . . We have gone too far on the road we are now on to turn the cotton farmer loose and just leave him to shift for himself. We must adopt some constructive program with a humanitarian, broad, social background which will assist in the reconversion of this great industry with the view of getting it where it can take care of itself. Will Clayton was referring to freer international trade, with, meanwhile, subsidies to farmers until such products as cotton and other things could regain some of the world markets they had lost. The difficulty which the general public has in understanding the benefits of free trade is caused by the shortsighted policy of many industrialists in fighting for protection of their own product rather than in spending this energy for the improvement of the product or in developments in another field. This difficulty is not shared by intelligent feature writers. John Chamberlain, in 1947, even blamed Clayton for not "dramatizing" more forcefully his program. In his Life article of May 19 of that year Chamberlain wrote that Will Clayton had told him the cheap-foreign-labor theory of tariff-making was, in most cases, pure moonshine. This is how Clayton put it : In the first place, the genius of America has always managed to speed up our unit production per man-hours to the point where it can [with profit] pay wages no foreign sweatshop can . . . undermine. When the Japanese laborer began making electric light bulbs for a pittance, Westinghouse and General Electric began to undercut even this poor, sweated devil by developing mechanical fingers Chamberlain pointed out, also, Clayton's belief that the security argument—"we must protect essential industries for emergency in case of war"—is greatly overdrawn. Again Chamberlain quotes him as saying: . . . if we do not have control of the seas in wartime, there can be no security for the United States anywhere. Our economy . . . is running low on copper, zinc, even iron ore. It lacks manganese, chrome, mica, tungsten, quartz crystals for electronics, tin, graphite . . . it will become more and more dependent on raw materials from Canada, South America, Asia, and Africa. Even its oil is running low. As for uranium, that comes from north of the border . . . we must also have foreign trade in order to maintain the industrial capacity needed to fight a modern war. If our machine tool industry, for example, had not been able to sell lathes and presses to England

105 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

and Soviet Russia in the depression years of the 1930's, it would not have been ready for war production in 1941. In the style of these terse, fact-crammed, emotionally objective sentences, one recalls the comment made by Mr. Jean Monnet : Mr. Clayton's superiority . . . was . . . that he discussed the problem objectively, never introducing himself into the center . . . His great gift is in . . . clarifying complicated matters and making them seem simple. This quality of style is exhibited even more clearly in passages from the June 25,1958, pamphlet, "We Are Losing the Cold War" : As of today we are losing the cold war. If anyone doubts this, let him look at a recent map of the world shaded to show the Communist areas and he will see the frightening inroads made by Communism throughout the world in the thirteen short years since the end of World War II. If still in doubt, let him take a realistic view of the situation in the Middle East, just now the powder keg of the world. The Russian objective in the cold war is the isolation of the United States. If they get control of the Middle East, they will substantially have achieved this objective. If in the end we lose the cold war, we will have lost just about everything that we hold dear, except life itself, without a shot being fired. The West is losing the cold war principally because the free world lacks that degree of economic unity which through N.A.T.O. it has achieved in the military field. . . . The free world must shift from the negative to the positive if it is to win this struggle... . Permanent world peace can be built only on a foundation of reasonable opportunity of economic progress for the peoples of the world. To create such a foundation is the job of the free world. Just as the United States took the lead in military unification of the democracies, she must take the lead in the economic field. . . . To do this, we have to stop the prostitution of our national policy to serve the special interest of minority groups. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements program has come to be regarded over the world as a kind of symbol of our intention to do this. Thus, while most speaker-writers are concerned either with themselves, with the occasion, or with the audience, Clayton writes and speaks

106 WILL CLAYTON

:

Maturity

almost exclusively to the subject. This trait gives his style a modern and, at the same time, nearly unique distinction—that of a man discussing government and law with the precision and controlled zeal of a humane scientist. John Chamberlain summed up his impressions of Will Clayton in 1947 as follows: By his astonishing persuasiveness and pertinacity Will Clayton has managed to keep his program [for 1945 extension of Reciprocal Trade] from being sabotaged in the . . . Senate. . . . But if he has managed to keep his lines clear in the Senate, it might be fairly said of him that he has failed to dramatize his program to the country. Or maybe it is his country that has failed him. During the years before my marriage in 1927, my closest contacts with my father were connected with train trips. At the times of Susan's and my departures for boarding school and college, in the fall and at the ends of Christmas and Easter vacations, Dad's solicitude in taking care of details was so great that I often feared I might become helpless as a traveler on my own, for having leaned so heavily on him. He arranged for round-trip tickets, checked our baggage and hotel accommodations in New York if we wished to stop there on our way, and frequently even purchased for us theatre tickets. It was a gala event when he came to visit Susan and me at Shipley School in Bryn Mawr. He came several times a year the two years I was there, in 1921 and 1922. One weekend he took Susan and me to New York and escorted us to three plays, including one matinee. In the mornings, at the Plaza Hotel, he would order breakfast brought to the room, and we three would sit around a table—Susan and I in our dressing gowns—and have the most delicious breakfast imaginable with melba toast, marmalade, and scrambled eggs almost as good as Mother's. From the New York Times Dad would read to us what was happening in the world. Then we'd plan our day. On these occasions, he always leaned over backwards to put himself in our places, asking usfirst,before making reservations, what we wanted to do and see. He took us to the Metropolitan Art Museum. At times he even took us shopping for clothes. (In the old days, when he returned from his trips abroad, he brought us, from Paris, the prettiest dresses we'd ever had.)

107 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

The most educational trip he ever gave us, however, was one on which we stopped a few days in Washington, D.C., just before we moved to Houston. He was taking us to spend the summer at a camp in Maine, as Mother, who was expecting my youngest sister, had not felt equal to the trip. It was the first time we had ever seen the Mississippi River, and I remember Dad's pointing it out to us with as much excitement as if he were a boy. "Look at that, girls!" he cried. "Isn't it a wonderful river? The largest in the United States. Oh, I'll never forget the first time I saw it, at the age offifteen,when I went to St. Louis to work." In Washington, he took us to Mt. Vernon, to the Washington Monument, to the Smithsonian Institution, to the Capitol, and to the Mint. We were very tired children when night came, but it was impossible not to catch his enthusiasm for all the historic places he'd planned for us to see. Whenever he came to see me at Smith College, during the four years I was there from 1922 to 1926, my classmates looked on me with new favor, after seeing my father. During my freshman year, after he would leave, I used to ask myself how I could stand going back to one particular class—where the "Yankee" professor had the habit of barking at us—after the gentleness and courtesy of my father. If it hadn't been for the perfect manners of President William Allen Neilson—the gracious, Scottish-born head of the College—and his fascinating talks on current events every morning in chapel, I would have been more tempted to leave Smith that first year. Of course, later, I was very glad I hadn't. Although Dad had been stern when we were little—and had been, with me, at least, intemperate in his punishments until I was twelve— he had never raised his voice menacingly to us. And when my sisters and I grew older, he had always risen when we came into the room, had opened doors and stood back for us, had invariably seen that we were seated at the dinner table before he sat down. Not until I went away from home did I realize that this courtesy was unusual. This old-world gallantry is, indeed, so much a part of my father that it is always with him, and today, when most men do not even take their hats off in elevators, he is distinguished in his gentlemanly manner as no other man I know. Since my father had spent a year in government work during World

108

WILL CLAYTON :

Maturity

War I, it was not surprising to us that he should be asked to Washington again, as the war clouds, which had broken over Europe, gathered closer and closer to the United States in 1940. We girls and Mother had stayed behind in Houston when Dad was away during World War I. I can remember how hard it was for Mother to drive us all to our separate schools in her "electric" that seemed to creep along, and how, day after day, she carried meals to the servants, who came down with the flu. When World War II started we were all married, so that Mother could easily go to Washington with my father. For a while, however, it was doubtful whether he would go there in any official capacity. Before we entered the war, the earliest impact on our own security occurred when the Latin-American countries lost their markets in Europe with the fall of Holland, Belgium, and France. Both for humanitarian motives and for reasons of our own safety, the United States government contemplated measures to help these "good neighbors." One plan was the formation of a huge consortium of capital with a billion dollars to buy up and store the Latin-American products. My father felt that such a plan would make it difficult for businessmen in those countries to resume individual enterprise after the war, and it was to suggest other measures that he first went to Washington in the summer of 1940. After working with Mr. Nelson Rockefeller, the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, he came back to Houston. His return to Washington in the fall was an event in which my mother's views and political acumen played a decisive part. For a long time my mother had argued that so large a business as Anderson, Clayton & Co. was taking too great a toll from my father. She disapproved not only because of the scant time he could spare for us and for recreation, but because she felt that my father's values were being pushed out of balance, to a degree where he was seeing less and less the viewpoint of the "little fellow" with whom he had so often sympathized in his early letters written to her from New York. When Roosevelt's N.R.A., A.A.A., and W.P.A. instituted measures which focused on aid to the unfortunate in industry and agriculture, Mother was sure she had found a champion whose ideas she could use to fortify her side of the debate. My father's long-range view was that many of Roosevelt's measures were stopgaps, and that the inequities to be corrected needed the more basic cure of liberal international trade. But he

109 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

listened to my mother. And it was she who helped prevent his realistic reasoning from assuming dogmatic proportions and who kept him from arguing—as did so many big businessmen—that palliative measures which were contrary to free enterprise should not be applied, even temporarily. The Texas Spectator of December 21, 1945, said: "He [Clayton] has been both in and out of the Roosevelt circle. Mrs. Clayton—an extremely gracious lady—was for Roosevelt four times." Yet when Jesse Jones first asked Will Clayton to return to Washington in the fall of 1940, he refused because of his wife's opposition. His ability here—in deference to his wife's wishes and oudook—to turn down a position where he definitely wished to serve, marks a turning point in his philosophy and in his career. Because of his gift for listening to and learning from the views of another, especially when those views underlined an early orientation of his own, Clayton was to exhibit throughout his career as a government official, a combination of realism and idealism—such as that shown in his speech on the British loan—a chill, rational literalness and an emotional intensity, together with a wide-mindedness that made him consider the whole world and an almost boyish patriotism. These qualities are reflected in passages of his article, "Is the Marshall Plan Operation Rathole?" from the Saturday Evening Post of November 29, 1947: My own opinion is that the Marshall Plan, adequately financed and competently administered, will succeed ; and that its success will yield priceless dividends in world peace and security—which also means American peace and security—in comparison with which the cost of the plan will be insignificant. . . . The task will require much from both America and Europe. On our part it will need a combination of understanding, firmness, and tact. We must not only send Europe food, fuel, and raw materials. We must give them something of ourselves . . . I remember from childhood the verse of James Russell Lowell : "The gift without the giver is bare." Will Clayton had been willing to relinquish "part of himself"—to surrender his inclination to serve in Washington—out of sympathy for his wife's opposition both to his assumption of harder work and to his connection with wider world "business" problems. His self-denial was

110 W I L L CLAYTON

:

Maturity

rewarded by another call from Washington, this time from President Roosevelt himself. When Sue Clayton was convinced that the President needed her husband, she consented. It cannot be denied, besides, that her outspoken devotion and support of Roosevelt helped influence him to put through the personal long-distance call to Will Clayton. In the 1936 campaign, Sue Clayton had organized in Houston a women's division of the National Democratic Committee. On February 12,1936, an editorial in the Houston Post commented : The gift of Mrs. Clayton to the [Democratic National] committee, together with her expressions of confidence in the President's leadership, and her gratitude to him for bringing the country back to better economic conditions, received favorable notice throughout the country, and the National Democratic leadership was cheered by these manifestations of support from one of Texas' most prominent and influential women. In the summer of 1940 Sue Clayton was making speeches and issuing statements for Roosevelt and against his opponent, Wendell Willkie. A Houston Post article of August 27 quoted her as saying, in part: Our splendid New Deal has taught us to shake off what William James calls the besetting sin of America—"the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the witch-goddess, success"—and to find new values in the home of the free and the land of the brave. On September 26,1940, the President wrote to her: The financial support, which you extend with such a bountiful hand, is essential in the face of the many and heavy expenses which a campaign entails. But when a material gift is accompanied by the pledge of confidence in my leadership which your letter bears, it gives me faith and courage and real spiritual strength to carry on. Although,without doubt, Sue Clayton's strong support of Roosevelt unwittingly turned the President's attention to her husband sooner than might have happened otherwise, Will Clayton's qualifications for government service could not have been long overlooked. Certainly in the fall of 1940 it was Clayton's business experience with Latin-American and European economies and his long knowledge of international trade which made him valuable to his government in its efforts to build a stockpile of strategic and critical materials for defense.

111 HOUSTON AND WASHINGTON

On his return to Washington he worked again, for a while, in the office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, where he was Deputy Co-ordinator. About the middle of October he was appointed Deputy Federal Loan Administrator, with the additional title of Vice-President of the Export-Import Bank. Later assignments, culminating in his appointment as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs in 1946 (from which he resigned late in 1947 because of illness in his family) came along inevitably. Thus, inescapably, Will Clayton's ideas and experience took the form of ever broadening circles of activity, like the age marks in the trunk of a tree, rooted deeply in the American soil and nourished by the air of freedom. And always the concentric circles harmonized : first, Southern delivery on the New York Exchange futures contracts, which curtailed manipulation in the merchandising of the South's chief product; next, investment in large cotton farms, gins, and cottonseed oil mills in this country and abroad, for the purpose of continuing to merchandise cotton and cottonseed products in the markets of both hemispheres; then, the use of this knowledge and experience to serve his government in buying all over the world the strategic materials which would be required in case of war. Each activity fits into the other and leads to the belief that the downfall of any large part of the free world (in this case, Europe) is our downfall—a catastrophe which must be averted, as was accomplished in 1948 by the Marshall Plan. With equal logic the Marshall Plan to save Europe—the "short-range" emergency plan—fits into the "long-range" plan—the larger concept of world peace rooted in a free flow of trade and capital among all nations. That this last idea may yet be realized—starting with the European Customs Union and its probable expansion, some day, into an economic federation with the United States—is evidence of the gradual acceptance of that broad-gauged progress for which Will Clayton has so often taken his stand.

This page intentionally left blank.

APPENDIXES AND INDEX

The Marshall Plan The Speech and Some Pertinent Documents

Chronology of Events 1880-1958

Index

This page intentionally left blank.

115

The Marshall Plan The Speech and Some Pertinent Documents A. Some of the Preliminary Steps toward the Marshall Plan are a partial representation of the evolution of the Marshall Plan in Will Clayton's thinking.

T H E FOLLOWING THREE DOCUMENTS

I [The first is a memorandum written by Will Clayton March 5, 1947, while traveling on the plane to Tucson, Arizona, for a short rest from State Department duties; because of Secretary of State Marshall's departure for Moscow almost immediately after Clayton's return to Washington, the memorandum was not shown to anyone. Clayton reserved it to spur his own action on the subject at the time of the Secretary's return.] Memorandum 3/5/47 I am deeply disturbed by the present world picture, and its implications for our country. The reins of world leadership are fast slipping from Britain's competent but now very weak hands.

116 THE MARSHALL PLAN

These reins will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia. If by Russia, there will almost certainly be war in the next decade or so, with the odds against us. If by the United States, war can almost certainly be prevented. The United States must take world leadership and quickly, to avert world disaster. But the United States will not take world leadership, effectively, unless the people of the United States are shocked into doing so. T o shock them, it is only necessary for the President and the Secretary of State to tell them the truth and the whole truth. The truth is to be found in the cables which daily arrive at the State Department from all over the world. In every country in the Eastern Hemisphere and most of the countries of the Western Hemisphere Russia is boring from within. This is a new technique with which we have not yet learned how to cope. We must cope with it and quickly or face the greatest peril of our history. Several nations whose integrity and independence are vital to our interests and to our security are on the very brink and may be pushed over at any time; others are gravely threatened. If Greece and then Turkey succumb, the whole Middle East will be lost. France may then capitulate to the Communists. As France goes, all Western Europe and North Africa will go. These things must not happen. They need not happen. The Secretary of State is leaving now for Moscow. The odds are heavily against any constructive results there. The Secretary will probably be back in Washington before May 1st. Meantime, we have discussed with the Congressional leaders a program to help Greece maintain her independence. This goes only part of the way; it tells only part of the truth. We must go all out in this world game or we'd better stay at home and devote our brains and energies to preparation for the third world war. Assuming an unsatisfactory outcome of the Moscow conference, I

117 THE MARSHALL PLAN

think on return of the Secretary of State a joint statement should be made by the President and the Secretary to the Congress and to the American people. Such a statement should say : 1. The United States is determined on the preservation of world peace by all honorable means. 2. The United States does not covet the lands or possessions of any other peoples. 3. The preservation of world peace depends first of all upon the preservation of the integrity and independence of sovereign nations. 4. Nations can lose their integrity and independence by attacks either from the outside or from the inside. 5. The United Nations is organized to deal with attacks from the outside but not from the inside. 6. The evidence is indisputable that a systematic campaign is now being waged to destroy from within the integrity and independence of many nations. 7. Feeding on hunger, economic misery and frustration, these attacks have already been successful in some of the liberated countries, and there is now grave danger that they may be successful in others. 8. The security and interests of the United States and of the world demand that the United States take prompt and effective action to assist certain of these gravely threatened countries. 9. This assistance should take the form not only of financial aid, but of technical and administrative assistance as well. The United States does not wish to interfere in the domestic affairs of any country, but countries to which it extends financial aid must put their internal affairs in proper order so that such aid may be permanently beneficial. 10. Congress is asked to create a Council of National Defense composed of the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretaries of War and Navy, and the Chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House and the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate. 11. The Congress is further asked to appropriate the sum of Five Billions of Dollars, for use by the Council of National Defense, either as grants or as loans, for the purpose of assisting sovereign countries to preserve their integrity and independence, where such action is

118 THE MARSHALL PLAN

considered by said Council to be in the vital interests of the United States. 12. It had been expected that the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development would be able to furnish all requisite financial assistance to war devastated countries, but it is now clear that this institution is not organized to render the kind of assistance which is required in the circumstances herein described.—The facilities of the Bank will nevertheless be needed for worthy projects of reconstruction and development. 13. Two objections will be made to the program here proposed: one political and the other economic. 14. It will be said that this will involve us in the affairs of foreign countries and lead us eventually to war. The answer to this is that if we do not actively interest ourselves in the affairs of foreign countries, we will find that such affairs will become so hopeless that the seeds of World War III will inevitably be sown. 15. It will be said that our national budget will not permit of this large expenditure. The war cost us over three hundred billions of dollars and the blood of hundreds of thousands of our young men. We are now appropriating around ten billions of dollars annually for the maintenance of our armed services.—We are seriously talking of reducing taxes at a time when our people are enjoying the highest standard of living in their history, when our corporations and farmers enjoy the biggest earnings, after taxes, which they have ever known in peace time, and when our gross national product of goods and services has a greater dollar value than has ever been known in war or peace. II [The following memorandum was also the result of a short leisure period "in transit." It was based on notes Clayton had written on the plane which was taking him back to Washington from Geneva, May 19, 1947. It is dated May 27, 1947—the day he handed it to Secretary Marshall. The memorandum became the chief basis for Marshall's speech at Harvard, June 5, 1947.]

119 THE MARSHALL PLAN

The European Crisis 1. It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war. We understood the physical destruction, but we failed to take fully into account the effects of economic dislocation on production—nationalization of industries, drastic land reform, severance of long-standing commercial ties, disappearance of private commercial firms through death or loss of capital, etc., etc. 2. Europe is steadily deteriorating. The political position reflects the economic. One political crisis after another merely denotes the existence of grave economic distress. Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving. More consumer's goods and restored confidence in the local currency are absolutely essential if the peasant is again to supply food in normal quantities to the cities. (French grain acreage running 2025% under pre-war, collection of production very unsatisfactory— much of the grain is fed to cattle. The modern system of division of labor has almost broken down in Europe. ) 3. Europe's current annual balance of payments deficit: UK _$21/4 billions France 13/4 " Italy ...... 1/2 " " US-UK Zone Germany 1/2 $5 billions not to mention the smaller countries. The above represents an absolute minimum standard of living. If it should be lowered, there will be revolution. Only until the end of this year can England and France meet the above deficits out of their fast dwindling reserves of gold and dollars. Italy can't go that long. 4. Some of the principal items in these deficits : From the U.S. : Coal, 30 million tons $ 600 million " " " : Bread grains, 12 million tons. 1,400 " " " " : Shipping services at very high rates on imports and exports., xxxxx " Before the war, Europe was self-sufficient in coal and imported very little bread grains from the United States. Europe must again become self-sufficient in coal (the U.S. must take

120 THE MARSHALL PLAN

over management of Ruhr coal production) and her agricultural production must be restored to normal levels. (Note: No inefficient or forced production through exorbitant tariffs, subsidies, etc., is here contemplated. ) Europe must again be equipped to perform her own shipping services. The United States should sell surplus ships to France, Italy and other maritime nations to restore their merchant marine to at least prewar levels. . . . 5. Without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe. Aside from the awful implications which this would have for the future peace and security of the world, the immediate effects on our domestic economy would be disastrous: markets for our surplus production gone, unemployment, depression, a heavily unbalanced budget on the background of a mountainous war debt. These things must not happen. How can they be avoided? 6. Mr. Baruch asks for the appointment of a Commission to study and report on our national assets and liabilities in order to determine our ability to assist Europe. This is wholly unnecessary. The facts are well known. Our resources and our productive capacity are ample to provide all the help necessary. The problem is to organize our fiscal policy and our own consumption so that sufficient surpluses of the necessary goods are made available out of our enormous production, and so that these surpluses are paid for out of taxation and not by addition to debt. This problem can be met only if the American people are taken into the complete confidence of the Administration and told all the facts and only if a sound and workable plan is presented. 7. It will be necessary for the President and the Secretary of State to make a strong spiritual appeal to the American people to sacrifice a little themselves, to draw in their own belts just a little in order to save Europe from starvation and chaos (not from the Russians) and, at the

THE MARSHALL PLAN

121

same time, to preserve for ourselves and our children the glorious heritage of a free America. 8. Europe must have from us, as a grant, 6 or 7 billion dollars worth of goods a year for three years. With this help, the operations of the International Bank and Fund should enable European reconstruction to get under way at a rapid pace. Our grant could take the form principally of coal, food, cotton, tobacco, shipping services and similar things—all now produced in the United States in surplus, except cotton. The probabilities are that cotton will be surplus in another one or two years. Food shipments should be stepped up despite the enormous total ( 15 million tons) of bread grains exported from the United States during the present crop year. We are wasting and over-consuming food in the United States to such an extent that a reasonable measure of conservation would make at least another million tons available for export with no harm whatever to the health and efficiency of the American people. 9. This three-year grant to Europe should be based on a European plan which the principal European nations, headed by the UK, France and Italy, should work out. Such a plan should be based on a European economic federation on the order of the Belgium-Netherlands-Luxembourg Customs Union. Europe cannot recover from this war and again become independent if her economy continues to be divided into many small watertight compartments as it is today. 10. Obviously, the above is only the broad outline of a problem which will require much study and preparation before any move can be made. Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Union of South Africa could all help with their surplus food and raw materials, but we must avoid getting into another UNNRA. The United States must run this show. W. L. CLAYTON. 5/27/47. III [Written September 19, 1947, the day of Clayton's departure for London, the following memorandum came after completion of the report of the CEEC (Committee for European Economic Cooperation) in Paris. This

122

THE MARSHALL PLAN

committee, which had started work July 12, had used for its guidance another memorandum, based on talks which Clayton and Ambassador Douglas had had in London the last week in June with Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin and other members of the British Cabinet. The publication of this June, 1947, memorandum, denominated an Aide-Memoire, must await clearance with the British.] Memorandum on the Marshall Plan Before leaving within a few hours I would like to jot down quickly a few notes on some aspects of the Marshall Plan on which it has been difficult for us to determine our policy here: 1. I do not favor asking the Paris Conference to reconvene and I believe it has been decided not to do so. It will be impossible I think to avoid some modifications in the Plan, to conform to views of the administration and the Congress; in fact I think it is really desirable that this should happen. No matter what is done the Communists are sure to charge that it is a United States imperialist plan. I don't think we should let this worry us. 2. I think $16 billion is the maximum amount of aid we should consider to meet balance of payments deficits of the 16 countries plus Western Germany for the 4 year period 1948-51. Another $2 billion might be considered as a loan to bolster the monetary reserves of these countries. The $ 16 billion could be divided : 1948 61/2 β*/» billion 1949 5 billion 1950..... ......3 billion 1951 . . . 1 / 2 billion Total 16 billion These figures are from my general knowledge of the situation and without very much reference to the general report. For example I think we know that the following should represent maximum balance of payments deficits of the different countries for 1948: U. Κ ..$2,500,000,000 France 1,300,000,000 Italy 850,000,000

123

THE MARSHALL PLAN

Western Germany All Other Countries

1,150,000,000 700,000,000 $6,500,000,000

Of course some of them would like to have more but the above will be sufficient to enable them to continue to eat and work unless prices advance materially. If we compare this with the balance of payments deficits of these same countries in 1946 we will find that it considerably exceeds those figures. We can also get a check against the above figure of 16 billion by taking the figures in the general report : Grand total balance of payments deficits with Western Hemisphere 22.44 billions less capital goods 3.13 " nets .19.31 less balance of payments surplus which the 16 countries expect to have with soft currency countries 2.81 nets

-.16.50

" " "

We can still deduct from this at least 750 millions for the shipbuilding program (we should sell or charter our own ships to them) and another 750 millions for various types of capital goods still in the program. 3. In my opinion the bulk of this money can never be repaid and we would only be fooling ourselves if we took notes and included them in our assets. The U.K., France, Italy, and Germany can never repay, particularly when we consider the dollar obligations which these countries already have outstanding and which they must hereafter incur with the International Bank and other credit agencies for purposes of reconstruction, development and modernization. All the sums advanced to these countries should therefore be in the form of grants. Some of the other countries can repay and will doubtless wish to do so. 4. The above amounts contemplate of course procurement of materials in short supply outside the United States. We should take the position immediately that we will ask the Congress to do this, otherwise in my opinion the program will be a failure. The United States cannot furnish all the food and other raw materials required and such supplies

124 THE MARSHALL PLAN

cannot be obtained in other countries unless we put up the bulk of the money. We can probably get some help in the program from Canada, Brazil and Argentina. I understand Canada expects to have a surplus of exports over imports with these countries of about 850 millions annually. If we could pay out dollars for half this amount she might be able to furnish the remaining one-half on grant. Argentina ought to put up 100 millions annually of food and raw materials and Brazil 50 millions. Cuba might furnish 50 millions worth of sugar annually. Venezuela might do something. I doubt if any other Latin American country would be able to do much. 5. I think the local currency counterpart of our aid should be deposited with trustees (perhaps the International Bank) in each country under very definite conditions as to use. In no case should any of these funds go into the budget. Such funds can probably be used to best advantage in paying the local expenditures (wages, materials, etc) in reconstruction and development projects by the terms of the trust instrument. It should be so drawn as to make it possible to prevent any such capital expenditures from unduly competing for labor and materials with the production of food, coal and goods for export. Administration. I believe we must be reconciled to the setting up of an independent agency for the administration of the program. Of course State, Treasury, Commerce and Agriculture should be represented on this agency. Furthermore, the questions of foreign policy, negotiation of agreements with foreign countries, and all relations with foreign countries in connection with their commitments should be left exclusively in the Department of State. I suggest the Department of State have a representative making his headquarters in Geneva to visit and keep in touch with our missions in the capitals of the 16 countries to check up constantly on the performance of these countries of their commitments to be set out in the bilateral agreements with them which of course will include their mutual undertakings in the proposed multilateral agreement. It will probably be necessary to have one or two well selected men attached to our missions in the principal capitals—London, Paris, Rome—handling this

125 THE MARSHALL PLAN

aspect of the matter with the heads of the missions. Obviously the representative at Geneva should work only through our established missions. This Geneva representative would pretty well correspond to the Harriman Mission in London in connection with Lend-Lease during the war and it would be very desirable if he had the status of an ambassador at large. There would be little or no danger that the right kind of man would in any way trespass upon the responsibilities or functions of the heads of mission in the various countries. W. L. CLAYTON

B. The Marshall Plan Speech presents Secretary of State Marshall's Harvard speech, which was based in large part on the ideas expressed in the first two of the preceding documents. T H E FOLLOWING PRESS RELEASE

Remarks by the Honorable George C. Marshall, Secretary of State, at Harvard University on June 5, 1947 I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world. In considering the requirements for the rehabilitation of Europe the physical loss of life, the visible destruction of cities, factories, mines and railroads was correctly estimated, but it has become obvious during recent months that this visible destruction was probably less serious than the dislocation of the entire fabric of European economy. For the past

126

THE MARSHALL PLAN

ten years conditions have been highly abnormal. The feverish preparation for war and the more feverish maintenance of the war effort engulfed all aspects of national economies. Machinery has fallen into disrepair or is entirely obsolete. Under the arbitrary and destructive Nazi rule, virtually every possible enterprise was geared into the German war machine. Long-standing commercial ties, private institutions, banks, insurance companies and shipping companies disappeared, through loss of capital, absorption through nationalization or by simple destruction. In many countries, confidence in the local currency has been severely shaken. The breakdown of the business structure of Europe during the war was complete. Recovery has been seriously retarded by the fact that two years after the close of hostilities a peace settlement with Germany and Austria has not been agreed upon. But even given a more prompt solution of these difficult problems, the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe quite evidently will require a much longer time and greater effort than had been foreseen. There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile people in the cities are short of food and fuel. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next

127 THE MARSHALL PLAN

three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help, or face economic, social and political deterioration of a very grave character. The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies the continuing value of which is not open to question. Aside from the demoralizing effect on the world at large and the possibilities of disturbances arising as a result of the desperation of the people concerned, the consequences to the economy of the United States should be apparent to all. It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piece-meal basis as various crises develop. Any assistance that this Government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative. Any government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States Government. Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States. It is already evident that, before the United States Government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on its way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this Government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place

128 THE MARSHALL PLAN

Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations. An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.

129

Chronology of Events 1880-1958 LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON Principal Events

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS Events of importance, many of which reflect Will Clayton's statement that there is a "world revolution now in progress, a revolution of the 'have-nots' not so much against the 'haves' as against their own lot in life."

1880-1891 1880: Feb. 7—William Lockhart Clayton was born on a cotton farm near Tupelo, Miss. 1882: Jan.—Panama Canal was started by French. (Unfinished canal bought by U.S. in 1904, finished in 1914.) 1883: Triple Alliance—Germany, Austria, Italy (denounced by Italy 1914). May 24—Brooklyn Bridge opened. 1884: Grover Cleveland elected President— first Democratic candidate to win since Civil War. 1886: Clayton farm was mortgaged away 1886: May 4—Haymarket Anarchist riots in and family moved to Jackson, Tenn., Chicago. where Will's father became a railroad 1887: Feb. 4—Interstate Commerce Law. contractor. 1888: Benjamin Harrison, Republican, elected President. 1892-1897 1892-1893: Will took a job at the court- 1892: Grover Cleveland again elected Presihouse in Jackson; he left school and dent. studied after hours with the principal, Diesel engine patented by Rudolf Professor Miner. Will also took shorthand Diesel, German engineer. lessons at night and taught himself to July 16—Pinkerton guards killed sevtype. eral steel strikers at Homestead, Pa. 1893: May 1—World's Fair opened at Chicago.

130

CHRONOLOGY

LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1894: Will, now the fastest typist and shorthand writer in Jackson, became deputy clerk and master of the chancery court, under Mr. Robert Hurt, clerk and master. Will also did court reporting, and typed for some of the men who stopped at the Armour Hotel, among them William Jennings Bryan, Democratic candidate for Senator from Nebraska; a speech he typed for Bryan attributed economic ills of South mainly to high tariffs and impressed Will. 1895: Will went as guest of Tennessee veteran to Confederate Reunion at Shiloh, first reunion of both Confederate and Union veterans. Fall—Will went to St. Louis as secretary to Mr. Jerome Hill, cotton merchant, one of the visitors to Jackson for whom he had typed. 1896: Will went to New York to work for the American Cotton Co., head office of Mr. Hill's round-bale company. Will took pneumonia and returned home.

1894: July 25—Chinese-Japanese War began. (Treaty Shimonoseki, Apr. 17, 1895, gave Japan Liaotung Peninsula, Formosa, the Pescadores.) June-Aug. 7—Strike of employees of Pullman Co., South Chicago, led by Eugene Debs. Debs and others imprisoned. Aug. 7—Strike called off.

1897: That summer, in Jackson, Will met his future wife, 16-year-old Sue Vaughan, a visitor from Clinton, Ky. In the late summer Will went to Tupelo to take down depositions in the Clark will case for his lawyer-uncle who represented one of the heirs. Will was tempted to study law, but could not afford it. He returned to Jackson, invested part of his earnings in a typewriter supply agency. Will and his friend, Hu Harris, visited Sue and Hattie Vaughan in Clinton, Ky. In the fall Will returned to American Cotton Co. in N.Y. He later became secretary to a man who overworked him.

1895: Diesel engine built from patent acquired 1892 by Rudolf Diesel, German engineer. Feb. 20—Cuban Revolution began.

1896: President Cleveland interfered in boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana on basis of Monroe Doctrine; he appointed arbitration commission which settled the issue, Feb. 2, 1897. Marconi invented wireless telegraph. Nov. 4—William McKinley, Republican, was elected President of the U.S. 1897: The Turkish-Greek War.

1898-1906 1898: Short summer vacation—Will visited 1898: Apr. 24—War began between Spain and the U.S. Dewey destroyed the SpanSue Vaughan in Clinton, Ky. ish fleet in Manila Bay on May 1. Will received offer from Mr. Hurt— July 7—Annexation of Hawaii to the clerk and master of the chancery court U.S. in Jackson, Tenn.—to assist him. Will was Dec. 10—Peace treaty signed by Amertempted to accept and study law, but ican and Spanish delegates at Paris, the decided to stick by his job in N.Y. U.S. acquiring the Philippines and Puerto Rico. 1899: Feb. 6—Spanish treaty ratified by 1899: Summer vacation—Will visited Sue U.S. Senate. Vaughan, proposed to her, was refused.

131 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1899: Autumn—Sue came to school at Washington College in Washington, D.C. Christmas vacation—Will visited Sue in Washington, proposed Dec. 24, was accepted.

1899: May 18—Universal Peace Conference at the Hague called by the Czar. Sept. 30—Dewey given hero's welcome in N.Y.; this was described by Will in a letter to Sue. Oct. 11—South African War began. (Ended in 1902.) 1900: Boxer Rebellion in China: Peking captured by foreign allies, Aug. 14. June 26—Campaign begun by doctors to wipe out yellow fever. June 30—Disastrous fire at Hoboken Docks. Sept. 8—Galveston hurricane.

1900: Jan.—Will received a promotion with the American Cotton Co. Feb.—Will was operated on for appendicitis in Brooklyn. After leaving the hospital, he went to finish out his convalescence at home of Mr. Lamar Fleming, an official of the American Cotton Co., whose son later came to work for Will. Will was promoted to assistant manager of the Cotton Sales Department of the American Cotton Co. Will had relapse from his appendix operation because of working too hard. Summer—Will visited Sue in Clinton, Ky. and she came to visit his married sister in Jackson. Sept.—Ernest Jones, a friend of Will's from Jackson, came to work for the American Cotton Co., roomed with Will and made life much more pleasant. Will moved to a French boarding house for 3 months to improve his French, which he had been studying at night. Oct.—Will feared that the American Cotton Co. would fail. Dec.—Will handed in his resignation. He was offered a raise of $300 a year to stay on; he remained with the company. 1901 : May—The American Cotton Co. was reorganized; Mr. Lamar Fleming, for whom Will had been an assistant, was given a high position. Will was encouraged. Sue's sister, Hattie, died. Summer—Will spent part of his vacation in Clinton with Sue, and part in Jackson. Will and Sue set the date for their wedding for August, 1902. 1902: The American Cotton Co. was in trouble again, due, Will thought, to mismanagement. June—Will was made sec.-treas. of the Texas Cotton Products Co., a subsidiary. Will was manager of the Sales Dept. for the American Cotton Co. Aug. 14—Will and Sue were married at "Bellwood," Sue's home in Clinton, Ky.

1901 : Sept. 6—President McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. Sept. 14—Theodore Roosevelt, the Vice-President, became the 26th President. He was re-elected in 1904.

1902: May 12—Pennsylvania Coal Strike occurred; it was settled in October. May—The Cuban Republic was inaugurated. American Occupation under General Leonard Wood ended May 20. Oct.—First International Arbitration Court opened in the Hague, Holland. Dec. 21—First radio message.

132 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1904: Aug.—Will Clayton, his brother-inlaw, Frank Anderson, and Frank's brother, Monroe, started Anderson, Clayton & Co. in Oklahoma City. Sept. 7—The failure of the American Cotton Co. was announced. 1905 : Ben Clayton joined the firm of Anderson, Clayton & Co. The firm leased the Oklahoma round-bale gins of the defunct American Cotton Co. Will Clayton made a business trip to Europe.

1904: Feb. 6—Russo-Japanese War began; peace treaty signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Sept. 5, 1905.

1907-September, 1940 1907: Spring—Will Clayton, with his wife 1907: Financial panic in U.S. The banks throughout the country closed and two daughters, made his 2nd busifor a week. ness trip to Europe. Anderson, Clayton & Co. underwent trying times when banks closed for a week during heaviest movement of the cotton crop. 1908: William Howard Taft, Republican, was elected President of the U.S. 1911: Lamar Fleming, Jr., came to Okla- 1911: First transcontinental airplane flight. May 25—Mexican Revolution; Presihoma City to work for Anderson, Clayton dent Diaz resigned; was succeeded by Ma& Co; he lived with the Claytons. dero. Dec. 14—Captain Roald Amundsen, Norwegian explorer, reached the South Pole. 1912: Apr. 14-15—U.S. Titanic sunk by iceberg. Nov. 4—Woodrow Wilson, Democrat, was elected President of the U.S. 1914: Nov.—Lamar Fleming, Jr., went to 1914: Apr. 21—U.S. Marines landed at Vera Cruz, Mexico. Italy to represent Anderson, Clayton & July 28—Austria declared war on SerbCo. on the continent of Europe. ia; by Aug. 1, World War I was started, Russia, France, coming in against Austria, who was joined by Germany; when Belgium was attacked, G. Britain entered against Germany. Aug. 15—First ship passed through Panama Canal. 1915: Anderson, Clayton & Co. started 1915: Aug. 17—Galveston hurricane. building compresses and warehouses in ports in order to extend their services further toward the mill door abroad. 1916: Sept.—Will Clayton moved his family to Houston. Anderson, Clayton & Co. continued expanding its business on a worldwide basis. 1917: Anderson, Clayton & Fleming was 1917: Feb. 1—Germany began unrestricted established in New York, Mr. Lamar submarine warfare. Fleming, Sr., becoming a partner in the Apr. 6—The U.S. declared a state of New York firm. war existed with Germany. The U.S. entered World War I. The Russian Czar abdicated. The superiority of the round bale of

133 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1918: Will Clayton was appointed member of Committee on Cotton Distribution of War Industries Board under Bernard Baruch; he served as a "dollar-a-year man" in Washington until December, 1918.

1925: Jan.—Will and Sue Clayton (with their two younger daughters) took trip to Europe and Egypt. 1926: April—Clayton delivered address to Amer. Cotton Shippers' Assn., at Augusta, Ga., on "Manipulation of the Cotton Futures Market"; reprinted in Com-

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS cotton for export abroad was first challenged by the construction of high-density presses for the square bale at ports. (About the time of World War II the square bale was further improved, forcing abandonment by AC&CO. of round bale. ) Nov. 7—The Bolsheviks under Lenin seized supreme power in Russia. 1918: Jan. 8—President Wilson made his 14 Points of Peace speech. Mar. 3—Peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk between Bolsheviks on one side and Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey on the other. Oct. 20—Germans surrendered to the Allies. Nov. 11—Armistice. 1919: June 28—Versailles Peace Treaty signed, ending World War I. Oct.—Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) passed over President Willson's veto. 1920: Jan. 10—League of Nations began at Geneva; U.S. membership in League was rejected by the U.S. Senate. Aug. 2—International Court of Justice was adopted by League of Nations. Aug. 26—Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave suffrage to women. Nov.—Warren G. Harding, Republican, was elected President of the U.S. Nov. 12, 1921-Feb. 2, 1922:—Limitation of Armaments Conference met in Washington. 1923: Jan. 11—French and Belgian troops began occupation of the Ruhr Valley to enforce reparations from Germany. Mar. 9—Beer Putsch in Munich was led by Ludendorff and Hitler. Hitler was arrested, imprisoned, wrote Mein Kampf. Aug. 2—Upon President Harding's death, Vice-President Calvin Coolidge became President; re-elected 1924. 1924: Jan. 21—Lenin, Premier of U.S.S.R., died. Aug. 16—Dawes Reparation Plan was accepted by Allies and Germany. Aug. 18—French troops began evacuation of Ruhr Valley. 1925: July 24—Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tenn. High School; fined $100 and costs. 1926: May 3-12—General strike in Britain. Sept. 8—Germany admitted to League of Nations. Sept. 14—Locarno treaties with Ger-

134 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1926: merce and Finance, Vol. XV (Apr. 14, 1926), 753-756. The address was a signal one in fight for Southern delivery, attracting nation-wide support from cotton men for Clayton's efforts to get Southern delivery of cotton on New York futures contracts. 1927: May—Will and Sue Clayton and daughter, Ellen, took trip to Europe; Will Clayton visited—besides France—Italy, Britain, and Germany.

1926: many (1925) went into effect, guaranteeing peace and establishing existing boundaries.

1928: In 1928, 1929, 1930, and 1936 Anderson, Clayton & Co. underwent investigations by the U.S. Senate on charges brought principally by New York cotton brokers that the firm had "manipulated" the market; the charges were successfully disproved by Will Clayton, who, in testifying, championed "Southern delivery" of cotton on the N.Y. futures contract to prevent "squeezes" by speculators and others. May 1—Knife and Fork Club, Houston, gave a "Victory Dinner" for Clayton. 1929: Summer—Clayton foresaw that, with passage of A.M.A., American cotton would be priced out of the world market. He advised his firm to invest in by-products of cotton and to set up branches in Egypt, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay, and Argentina. The Claytons made a trip to Argentina.

1930: Apr. issue of ACCO Press carried article by W. L. Clayton, "What Price Cotton?", including his statement, Dec. 14, 1929, to Senate subcommittee investigating cotton prices; article attributed agricultural—especially cotton—ills to high tariffs and other obstacles to international trade.

1927: Jan. 6—U.S. Marines sent to Nicaragua to protect American interests; withdrawn 1933. Mar. 5—U.S. Marines landed in China to protect property in Civil War. May 20-21—Lindbergh nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Aug. 22—Execution of anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti, arrested for murder in Massachusetts on what seemed to many to be insufficient evidence. 1928: Jan. 16—Trotsky exiled from Russia. Nov. 4—Herbert Clark Hoover, Republican, was elected President of the U.S.

1929: Summer—Passage of the Agricultural Marketing Act, creating "President Hoover's" Federal Farm Board, with power, among other things, to grant government loans on farm crops and effect government purchase of surplus crops. July 24—Kellogg-Briand Treaty in effect: 62 powers renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Oct. 29—Stock market crash: biggest American depression began. Nov. 16—First step toward Southern delivery of cotton on New York futures contracts taken by New York Cotton Exchange. Nov. 28—Byrd started flight to South Pole. 1930: Feb. 27—Southern delivery cotton on New York futures fully launched : victory for Clayton's fight for this principle. Apr. 22—London Naval Reduction Treaty signed. (Terms expired Dec. 31, 1936.) June 13-14—Hawley-Smoot Tariff, highest tariff in U.S. history, passed.

135 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON May issue of ACCO Press carried an article by W. L. Clayton, "What Congress Can Do for the Cotton Farmer."

1931: March issue of ACCO Press carried an article by W. L. Clayton, "The Struggle for the World's Cotton Market." July ACCO Press—"Tardy Recognition" by W. L. Clayton. "Pres. Hoover's move to postpone for one year payment . . . on all intergovernmental debts is a tardy recognition of an extremely serious situation. It was overdue one year ago. It will now be helpful only if followed by a movement initiated by the U.S. for a conference of leading nations of the world to substantially wipe out all intergovernmental war debts, reparations, etc., accompanied by an international agreement for reciprocal tariff and armament reductions." Oct. ACCO Press: "How Long?" by W. L. Clayton. 1932: Mar. ACCO Press: "Tariff—False Talisman of Prosperity," by W. L. Clayton. 1933: Feb. ACCO Press: "The Domestic Allotment Plan" by W. L. Clayton. Mar. 24—Clayton delivered an address before Texas Cotton Association, Galveston: "Farm Relief," published in ACCO Press. Apr.—Clayton was one of a group selected to confer with Department of Agriculture on how Roosevelt could best help the farmer. Clayton argued against the government's plowing under or otherwise curtailing production to force price of cotton up, since cotton is not just an American but a world commodity. He warned that U.S. cotton would lose markets. This happened. Clayton joined the "Liberty League," a group formed to protest—among other things—government interference in industry.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS Hoover refused to grant petition of 1000 signatures, including Will Clayton's, to veto the bill. The signers, among them many well-known economists, had warned that the high tariff would aggravate the depression. The depression grew worse. June 30—Evacuation of Baden and Rhineland completed by the French. 1931 : Feb. 8—Restoration in Spain of Constitutional Guarantees (suspended by Premier Rivera in 1923) King Alfonso fled April 14. June 28—Republic in Spain proclaimed; new parliament elected. Sept. 18—Japan overran Manchuria.

1932: Feb. 18—Manchuria became "Manchukuo"—Japanese puppet state. Nov. 4—Franklin Roosevelt, Democrat, elected President of the U.S. (He was elected four times.) 1933: Jan. 30—Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor. Mar. 6—President Roosevelt ordered all banks closed. Stock and commodity exchanges in New York also closed. (Most reopened Mar. 15.) Apr. 19—President Roosevelt banned gold exports. June 13—Congress passed National Industrial Recovery Act which, with the Agricultural Adjustment Act gave the President control of agriculture and industry. (NRA was voided by Supreme Court May 27, 1935, and AAA processing of taxes was voided on Jan. 6, 1936.) June—Nazi Germany ordered suppression of all political parties but Nazis, ousted Jews from professions. Oct. 14—Germany quit League of Nations and withdrew from Disarmament Conference. Nov. 16—President Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union. Dec. 5—Prohibition ended in U.S. as 21st Amendment was ratified.

136 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1934: May 7—Clayton submitted a statement to the Commission of Inquiry on National Policy in International Economic Relations (appointed to make recommendations to the Administration) at Houston, Texas. June ACCO Press: "Our National Cotton Policy" by W. L. Clayton (a reprint of the statement submitted May 7).

1934: Jan. 26—Germany signed non-aggression pact with Poland. Mar. 22—U.S. Congress granted Philippine Independence (effective 1945). June—Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, proposed by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and passed by Congress, started to revive freer flow of international trade. July 25—Dolfuss, Austrian Chancellor, shot by Nazi conspirators. Aug. 16—Adolf Hitler became Reichsfuehrer of Germany. Oct. 2—Italo-Ethiopian War began; May 5, 1935, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini announced war was over. Italy annexed Ethiopia. 1935: Jan. 13—The Saar voted to return to Germany. Mar. 16—Hitler repudiated Versailles Treaty, ordered conscription in Germany.

1935: Feb. ACCO Press: "Our Vanishing Cotton Markets" by W. L. Clayton—reprint of a paper presented at the Institute of Public Affairs devoted to a study of the cotton crisis, held under the auspices of Southern Methodist University at Dallas, Texas, Jan. 31-Feb. 1. May ACCO Press: "When Is a Pegged Price Pegged?" by W. L. Clayton. May—Clayton made an address to the Foreign Trade Conference, Houston. June ACCO Press: "Cotton and Foreign Trade" by W. L. Clayton (a copy of his address to the Foreign Trade Conference in May.) June-Sept.—Will and Sue Clayton made trip to Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and India. Nov. 8—Clayton made an address on "The Southwest's Stake in Cotton" before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at Kansas City, Mo. The address was published as an article in the Dec. ACCO Press. "There is a sure way to make of unemployment the permanent problem that some people . . . fear it may become, and that is by freezing into our national economic fabric the present policy of priceraising through government sabotage of production." 1936: Aug.—Clayton praised the New Deal because of Secretary Hull's Reciprocal Trade program. Aug. 17—Clayton's photograph appeared on the cover of Time with caption "Cotton's Clayton." The Time article touched on Clayton's victory for Southern delivery of cotton on New York futures contracts, and on the Senate investigations of Anderson, Clayton & Co. Sept. 18—Clayton made an address—

1936: Jan. 6—The AAA was declared an invasion of the rights of the states by the Supreme Court. Dec. 11—King Edward VIII of Great Britain abdicated. George VI succeeded him as King, May 12, 1937. Mar. 2—U.S. renounced its guarantee of independence of Panama. Mar. 7—German troops re-occupied the Rhineland, thus breaking the Locarno Pact.

137 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON "A Businessman Looks at Capitalism" before the Business School at the Harvard Tercentenary. The address was commented on in a New York Times editorial, Sept. 21, which summarized part of the speech, as follows: "Mr. Clayton's is not the usual plea for 'less government interference in business.' Positive interventions of certain sorts may be necessary. One of the causes for the antagonism to capitalism is . . . resentment against . . . profits arising out of war. Capitalists will be wise to . . . assist the movement to prevent such profits in future. Again, just as we have... amortized machinery and plant, we must now make provision for "human obsolescences" and for recurring periods of unemployment, with a view to shortening their frequency and duration. "The central difference between capitalism and socialism is ably stated. Under private capitalism there is 'decentralization of decisions' and . . . competition in every department of life, the theory being that the competitive process fits men and capital into those places where they serve best. In practice, Mr. Clayton conceded, the system by no means operates perfectly, but unless too much interfered with, its failures are usually selfregulated before they have gone too far. Not merely efficiency, but liberty of person, of speech and of press, he maintained, are possible only under a system of private capitalism. The centralization for power and decision under socialism smothers individualism." Oct. 1—Clayton's speech, "A Businessman Looks at Capitalism," was printed in Vital Speeches, also in October ACCO Press. 1937: Mar. 10—The Claytons made a trip to South America—Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Clayton reported Latin America is "talking more cotton." (Photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Clayton in the Brownsville Herald, Mar. 10). May 26—Clayton made an address— "A Businessman Looks at Inflation and Related Matters"—before the Business and Professional Women's Club of Houston. (Speech appeared in June, 1937, ACCO Press.) Nov.—The Claytons made trip to Europe: Holland, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and also to Egypt, Iraq, and India.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS June 4—France had her first Socialist government under Leon Blum. July 11—Hitler signed treaty with Austria guaranteeing Austria's frontiers. July 17—Civil War in Spain began with a revolution against the Republic.

1937: Jan. 30—Hitler repudiated war guilt of Germans. May 21—Soviet airplane landed at North Pole; established permanent weather and scientific station. July—Japanese resumed fighting in China; took Shanghai, Nov. 8. On Dec. 12, Premier Chiang Kai-shek moved to Hankow. Dec. 11—Italy gave notice of withdrawal from League of Nations. Dec. 29—Irish Free State became the State of Eire (Ireland).

138 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1938: April American Magazine had article by Beverly Smith on Clayton—"King Cotton Himself." May 5—Clayton made address— "World Trade or World Regimentation" —at annual dinner, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C. The address appeared as an article in the May ACCO Press. May 24—Clayton made an address on "Cotton and the Tariff" at New Orleans, during Foreign Trade Week. The address appeared in the July ACCO Press.

1938: Civil War in Spain continued; on Jan. 10, 1939, the Loyalists lost Barcelona. Mar. 11—Hitler invaded Austria. Mar. 18—Mexico nationalized the oil industry. Apr. 25—Britain and Eire signed an accord. Sept. 30—Munich: Britain and France yielded to Nazi demands at a conference in Munich for cession of the Sudetenland to Germany by Czechoslovakia. Oct.—Japanese occupied Canton, Hankow. German-Italian arbitrators completed partition of Czechoslovakia. Dec. 23—Insurgents in Spain—Franco forces—began final campaign against Barcelona, which fell Jan. 10,1939. 1939: Jan. 26—Mar. 29—Barcelona, Madrid, and other provincial capitals surrendered to Franco. The Spanish Civil War ended. Mar. 16—Nazis occupied Bohemia and Moravia, which became German "protectorates." Apr. 7—Italians invaded Albania. Apr. 27—British House of Commons voted conscription. Apr. 30—New York World's Fair opened. May 7—Germany and Italy announced military and political alliance. Sept. 1—World War II started by Germany's declaration of war on Poland. Sept. 3—Britain and her Empire declared war on Germany. France declared war on Germany. Sept. 8—President Roosevelt proclaimed a limited national emergency. 1940: Mar. 12—Finnish-Russian peace signed in Moscow. Mar. 30—Inauguration of Japanesesupported government of conquered area in China. Apr. 9—Germany declared war on Norway and Denmark. May 10—Germany declared war on the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. May 26-June 4—British retreated from Dunkirk: May 28—Belgium surrendered; June 10—Italy declared war on Britain and France. June 14—Spanish troops took control of Tangier. June 22—Occupied France signed armistice with Germany. June 28—Congressional Act gave RFC

1939: Nov. 28—Clayton was Texas Chairman of the Committee for the Celebration of the President's Birthday in the 1940 "Fight-Infantile-Paralysis" campaign.

1940: June 27—Clayton made an address on "The World Cotton Situation" at a banquet given by the Waco Chamber of Commerce to delegates to the Cotton Research Congress at Waco. The address appeared as an article in the July ACCO Press. It appeared in Vital Speeches for Sept. 1, 1940: "It seems petty to talk about the world cotton situation when the world itself . . . is on fire. It is more appropriate to talk about the world revolution, its meaning to the U.S. and, incidentally, its effect on cotton . . . under the new order, legislation for and by minority pressure groups, thinking only of their own selfish interests, must cease if we do not want to go the way of the other democracies . . . if the people of this country fail to realize . . .

139 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON that the old order has perished; that playtime is over; that we must work and economize as our forefathers did, then they are not worthy of the pioneers who subdued the savages, cleared the wilderness, and laid the foundations of our glorious country." Clayton became a member of the informal committee of about 30 men in New York, where the idea of trading destroyers to Britain for bases was born. July—Clayton went to Washington to suggest a way to help the Latin-American nations which had lost their markets with fall of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Aug. 26-Oct. 15—Clayton worked as deputy to Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS (and Federal Loan Administration) responsibility of buying strategic and critical materials. July 14—USSR annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Sept. 22—Japanese attacked French Indo-China. Oct.-Nov.—Nazi bombing of Britain— Battle of Britain. Spring—An informal committee of about 30 men who saw urgent need for U.S. to aid Great Britain was formed in New York; arrangement was made, upon the fall of France and expectation of bombing of Britain, for British children to be brought to America. Also, in this committee was born the idea of trading 50 over-age U.S. destroyers to Britain in return for a lease of bases on British territory in west Atlantic. General Pershing was persuaded by Herbert Agar (for the Committee) to make a nation-wide radio speech on this subject. Sept. 3—President Roosevelt, after Pershing's appeal—traded to Great Britain 50 over-age destroyers in return for Atlantic bases. This formed basis for LendLease Act in 1941.

October, 1940-1947 1940: Oct. 4—Clayton made speech on 1940: Nov. 5—Roosevelt elected to a third term as President—first "third-term" Latin America before Commerce DepartPresident. ment's Business Advisory Council. Oct. 18—He was named Deputy Federal Loan Administrator and Vice-President of Export-Import Bank. He was given charge of overseas purchase of strategic and critical materials for defense. 1941 : Jan. 29—Clayton made a speech on 1941 : Mar.—Congress passed Lend-Lease Act, by which U.S. could make defense "Cotton and Democracy" at National articles available to any nation whose deCotton Council meeting, Atlanta, Georgia. fense was vital to U.S. Mar. 29—Clayton made a speech on June 22—Germany attacked Soviet "The U.S. Defense Program" at Jackson Union. Day dinner in Houston. July 30—Roosevelt created Board of Economic Warfare—BEW; put V. P. Wallace in charge, with authority to buy strategic and critical materials, an order which conflicted with Congressional act of June 28, 1940. RFC was later made banker for BEW. Aug. 14—Atlantic Charter—joint declaration peace aims by Roosevelt and Churchill. Nov. 6—Roosevelt pledged $1,000,000,000 lend-lease aid to Russia.

140 LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1942: Feb. 24—Clayton named Assistant Secretary of Commerce (confirmed by Senate, July 22). June 6—He was named President of War Damage Corporation. Oct.—He was named Chairman of the Board of the U.S. Commercial Co., organized to do "preclusive buying" of strategic materials.

1943: May—Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Will Clayton, was U.S. delegate to the U.N. Conference on Food and Agriculture at Hot Springs, Va. June—In the feud between Henry Wallace's BEW and Jesse Jones' RFC, Clayton testified on behalf of the RFC before the Byrd Committee, "stating that all the RFC now did was foot bills for purchases of strategic materials made by BEW, and that BEW views on development programs prevailed when the two agencies differed." (Current Biography, 1944) Oct. 25—Clayton addressed 30th Natl. Foreign Trade Convention in New York on "America's Stake in World Trade." 1944: Jan.—Clayton tendered his resignation as Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Feb.—Clayton was appointed Surplus War Property Administrator in Justice James Byrnes' Office of War Mobilization. "Clayton, whose administration came under the jurisdiction of 4 House Committees, succeeded in getting the 4 chairmen to question him at a joint hearing, saving 3 of the usual duplications which waste . . . official time . . . " (Current Biography, 1944.) Apr. 12—Clayton made speech on Hull peace statement before Committee on Economic Development. Apr. 30—Clayton made speech at meeting of Freedom House.

CHRONOLOGY U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS 1941: Dec. 7—Japanese planes attacked U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Dec. 8—U.S. declared war on Japan. Dec. 11—U.S. declared war on Germany and Italy. 1942: Jan. 2—Japanese took Manila and Cavité. May—Battle of Coral Sea. June 3-6—Battle of Midway. June 5—U.S. declared war on Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary. June 21—British garrison of Tobruk in N. Africa captured. Oct. 3—Justice James Byrnes resigned from Supreme Court to accept appointment by President Roosevelt to Office of Director of Economic Stabilization (tenure to Apr., 1945). Oct. 23—Reinforced British under Montgomery defeated Nazi-Italians all the way to Tunisia. Nov. 8—U.S. and Britain landed troops on French N. Africa. 1943: May 27—James Byrnes made Director of War Mobilization. June 10—Roosevelt signed pay-asyou-go income tax bill; on July 1, he signed bill for the withholding tax. July 10—U.S. and British armies landed on Sicily and later invaded the Italian mainland. (Italy surrendered Sept. 8, but the Nazis were not dislodged until spring, 1945.) July 15—"The Vice-President's charges that... RFC and Jones had obstructed the war effort through their policies resulted in the abolishment of his own BEW post." (Current Biography, 1944) 1944: June 6—D-Day: Allies landed in France; beginning of victory seen. July 1—Brettons Woods (N.H.) Conference established International Monetary Fund. (First meeting of directors was May 6, 1946.) Aug. 21-Oct. 7—Dumbarton Oaks Conference (in Washington) : Aug. 21Sept. 28—between USSR, U.K., and U.S.; Sept. 29-Oct. 7—between China, U.K., and U.S. Effort to establish organization of nations to maintain world peace —laid foundation for San Francisco Conference for U.N. Sept. 15—Congress passed a bill to create a Surplus War Property Disposal Board; bill signed by President Oct. 4.

141 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON July 10—Clayton was charged by James Patton, President of National Farmers' Union, with secretly assigning government surplus farm lands disposal to the RFC. Sept. 23—Clayton set aircraft-pricing rules. Oct.—Clayton, in belief that Congressional bill creating an administrative board for SWPD was unworkable, tendered his resignation effective, Dec. 1, 1944, when majority of new board would have taken office. Oct. 4—Arthur Krock, in New York Times, commented on Clayton's plan to retire. Oct. 19—Clayton, in speech to Women's National Democratic Club, Washington, challenged statement of Republican Presidential nominee Thomas Dewey, that he would continue the Hull reciprocal trade treaties. Oct. 27—At a House Committee hearing on Postwar Economic Policy, Clayton advocated tariff reduction and sale of surplus ships to other nations. Dec. 3—He testified on surplus transport planes, later on surplus airplanes as of Dec. 1. Dec. 12—He made statement before Senate Foreign Relations Committee on his fitness to serve as Assistant Secretary of State. Dec. 20—Clayton's nomination as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs confirmed by Senate. 1944 Articles on Clayton— Mar. 27 Newsweek: "What's Clayton Doing?" May Nation's Business: "Sales Manager for Uncle Sam's Surplus" July 29 Business Week: "Surplus Disposal Plans Set" Aug. 7 New Republic: "Clayton & NAM" Aug. 26 Nation: "War Surplus Bill" Dec. 5 P.M.: "State Department Tragedy: Will Clayton" 1945: Jan. 4, 14—Clayton submitted French Government report on needs to conference at which Jean Monnet was present. Jan. 5—Clayton's views on U.N. Food Organization cited, New York Times: he was elected a trustee Grand Central Art Galleries. Feb. 25—Clayton, Chairman of Economics Section of U.S. Delegation, Chapultepec Conference, arrived Mexico City.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS (After a year Congress, realizing that this plan did not work well, amended the bill as Clayton had first advised. ) Nov. 7—Roosevelt elected for fourth term. Dec.—Roosevelt sent to Senate, for confirmation, the appointment of Edward Stettinius, Jr., as Secretary of State, replacing Cordell Hull. In the general reorganization of the Cabinet Joseph Grew was named as Undersecretary of State, and 3 new assistant secretaries were named—Will Clayton, Archibald MacLeish, and Nelson Rockefeller. Dec. 16—German counteroffensive: Battle of Ardennes Bulge.

1945 : Feb. 3-11—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin met at Yalta to discuss the entry of USSR into the war against Japan. Feb. 21-Mar. 8—Inter-American Conference on problems of War and Peace met at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City (known as Chapultepec Conference). Result was Act of Chapultepec, by which U.S. and Latin-American nations pledged reciprocal assistance and American solidarity for defense in a regional

142 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1945: Feb. 27—In speech before joint session Committees IV and V, he promised U.S. aid to Latin-American nations, cautioned against too great hopes, noted U.S. problems. Mar. 1—Latin-American trade plan (proposed by Clayton) praised by the Mexican foreign minister, Padilla, criticized by U.S. Mfrs. Assn. Mar. 11—On State Dept. weekly radio program, Clayton sought reciprocal trade pact extension, declared against cartels. Mar. 12—He was appointed to interagency committee on export allocations. Mar. 17—He broadcast talk on International Monetary Fund (Bretton Woods Proposals) at Metropolitan Opera Guild Rally; outlined nation's economic aims as: "free and equal access for all nations to the trade and raw materials of the world, increased production, much greater exchange of goods and services between nations, and higher levels of living for all peoples everywhere." Mar. 24—He made address over CBS on foundations for peace. Apr. 3—At Senate Interstate Commerce Subcommittee hearing, Clayton testified against proposal to merge U.S. communication companies' overseas services. He also opposed McCarran bill which would authorize creation of single airline for world use. Apr.—Clayton named to head U.S. Economic Delegation to San Francisco Conference. Apr. 11—At Senate committee hearing, he testified that Canadian government permission for Canadian aluminum deal was hard won. Apr. 17—At Senate subcommittee hearing he testified for reciprocal trade. Apr. 19—Before House committee, he testified when questioned on Anderson, Clayton & Co. Apr. 21—He testified on tariff policy. May 21—He made address on "The Foreign Economic Policy of the State Department" before Economic Club of Detroit. June 14—He made speech on State Department foreign and commercial problems before U.S. Associates of International Chamber of Commerce. June 25—He testified, Senate subcom-

1945: arrangement which would be consistent with the U.N. when it was formed. (Argentina, recalcitrant at first, signed Act of Chapultepec Apr. 4, 1945.) The Act provided for a treaty to be drafted later extending the guarantee into the postwar period. Apr. 12—President Roosevelt died. Vice-President Harry Truman became President. He was elected President in 1948. Apr. 25-June 26—United Nations Conference on International Organization met at San Francisco; U.N. Charter drawn up, signed by 50 nations June 26. Apr. 28—Mussolini killed. Apr. 29—Hitler committed suicide. May 4—V-E Day: German armies began surrender; unconditional surrender signed in Berlin May 7. June 5—Commanders of four Allied Powers made declaration on "Arrangements for Control of Germany," which not only dealt with military surrender, but set pattern for civil administration under occupation; Allied Control Council set up to supervise four zones. (U.S. in World Affairs, 1945-47.) June 20—U.S. Senate passed bill revising and extending for 3 years the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. June 27—Stettinius was named U.S. member of U.N. Security Council; he resigned as Secretary of State. June 30—Truman appointed James Byrnes Secretary of State. (He resigned Jan., 1947.) July 21—Senate passed bill approving U.S. membership in U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. July 26—-Labor Party won in Britain— Churchill out, Clement Attlee became Prime Minister. July 17-Aug. 2—Potsdam Conference —Truman, Churchill (replaced by Attlee after July 25), and Stalin, with foreign ministers and experts, met to discuss implementation of Yalta peace agreements and to work out general problems of peace treaties. American proposal for Council of Foreign Ministers of "Big Five" to meet periodically to deal with problems was accepted, but USSR insisted that in preparing peace treaties Council be composed only of powers which had signed respective armistice

143 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON mittee hearing, on German economic plans; cited Argentine omission to eliminate Nazi economic spearheads. June 27—Argentine Minister replied to charge. July 8—Clayton appointed head of UNRRA Committee on financial control, which supervises UNRRA's budget. July 11-Aug. 2—Clayton accompanied Truman and Byrnes to Potsdam Conference, where chief troubles with USSR concerned Polish boundary (USSR wanted it on Oder-Niese line, west of prewar) and reparations. Clayton was in charge of the Reparations Committee. At Yalta Roosevelt had agreed USSR could have 50 per cent of whatever reparations were exacted from Germany; USSR now stressed they wanted 10 billion dollars worth in dismantled German factories and goods; this figure not agreed to. Commission decided which factories to be dismantled: USSR to have 25 per cent of these-15 per cent free, 10 per cent to be compensated for by Soviet shipment of raw materials—food, coal—from their zone to West zones. Aug. 7—Clayton arrived in London for conferences. Aug. 8—He attended UNRRA Council Conference. Aug. 13—He had trade talks with British; Aug. 26—He conferred with British officials on end of Lend-Lease. Sept., Oct., Nov.—Clayton Activities Relative to British Loan and UNRRA Aid: Sept. 11—Back in Washington, he briefed U.S. representatives at British Loan-Trade talks on his London conferences. Sept. 12—He headed U.S. delegation as Anglo-American Finance & Trade Conference opened. Oct. 10—He said U.S. interest justified financial aid to Britain. Oct. 12—Before House Committee he appealed for immediate appropriation of funds for UNRRA; he was reported seeking abolition of Empire preference system in talks with British. Oct. 21—In radio speech he warned of collapse of UNRRA unless funds were forthcoming. Nov. 15—He urged Congressional appropriation of UNRRA funds for fis-

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS agreements: thus 4 powers to draft Italian treaty, 3 to draft Balkan treaties, 2 for Finland treaty. Council of Foreign ministers to meet Sept. 1 to draw up 5 peace treaties. July 28—Senate ratified U.N. Charter. Aug. 6—Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Aug. 9—Atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Aug. 9—Truman broadcast on Potsdam Conference. Aug. 19—Truman ended Lend-Lease as of V-J Day. Sept. 2—V-J Day—Japan surrendered. Sept. 8—U.S. Forces entered Korea south of 38th parallel to displace Japanese. Sept. 9—Gen. Douglas MacArthur took over supervision of Japan. Sept. 11—Council of Foreign Ministers (of U.S., U.K., USSR, France, and China) held opening meeting in London. There was disagreement with the USSR over Italian peace treaty. Molotov claimed participation of all 5 in deliberations violated 4—3-2 formula of Potsdam. Molotov resented Byrnes' refusal to sign treaties with "unrepresentative" governments of Rumania and Bulgaria. Widening rift between USSR and other allies seen. Council broke up in failure. Oct. 3—Truman urged setting up Commission on Atomic Energy to supervise and control all operations. Oct. 23—Truman, addressing Congress, recommended universal military training. Nov. 13—Truman asked Congress for $1,350,000,000 for UNRRA in 1946. Nov. 30—Truman said U.N. should take over functions of meetings of "Big Three" heads of governments. Dec. 4—Senate passed the U.N. participation bill. Dec. 6—U.S. wrote off $25,000,000,000 lend-lease aid to Britain, also agreed to grant credits to her of $4,400,000,000— British Loan negotiated by Vinson and Clayton for U.S. ($3,750,000,000 approved by Congress July 13, 1946). Dec. 17—Senate authorized $1,350,000,000 for UNRRA in 1946. Dec. 19—Truman urged unification of armed services. Dec. 30—Secretary of State Byrnes flew to Moscow for conference of Min-

144 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1945: cal year 1946 at House committee hearing. Dec. 4—He had conference with British and U.S. commercial pact negotiators. Dec. 7—Clayton on International Trade Organization basis (New York Times) Dec. 12—He was named member National Red Cross Board. 1945 Articles about Clayton: May 5 Saturday Evening Post: "They Say He's a Dangerous Man" by Arthur Baum. May American Magazine: "He Minds Your Business." 1946: Jan. 21—Clayton addressed Houston branch of Foreign Policy Association on proposed loan to Britain, up for approval by Congress. Jan. 24—He was named U.S. Alternate Governor of International Monetary Fund and Bank. Feb. 15—He addressed Des Moines meeting of National Farm Institute on Anglo-American financial agreement (British Loan). Feb. 26—Clayton took part in American Forum of Air radio debate on "What Should We Do about the British Loan?" Mar. 7—Clayton testified at Senate committee hearing on the British loan. Mar. 13—He attended Savannah, Ga., meeting of the Boards of Governors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and of the International Monetary Fund. Mar. 21—In Atlantic City Clayton addressed Fourth Council UNRRA on distribution of food to war-devastated countries. Apr. 3—Clayton addressed American Retail Federation; urged ratification of U.S. credit to Great Britain. Apr. 12—Clayton addressed meeting of Academy of Political Science, in New York, on "Importance of International Economic Relations to World Peace." May 2—Clayton addressed 34th Annual Meeting of U.S. Chamber of Commerce at Atlantic City on "American International Economic Interests"; urged U.S. business to support government plans to lower trade barriers. May 22—Clayton testified at House committee hearing on U.S. loan to Britain.

1945: isters of "Big Three." Agreement on peace treaty procedure announced; U.S. agreed to recognize Balkan governments if future free elections were pledged.

1946: Jan. 6—Poland nationalized basic industries. Jan. 10—First General Assembly of U.N. opened in London. Jan. 22—In the U.S. a National Intelligence Authority was established composed of Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, with a Director of Central Intelligence. Jan. 23—Truman named Vinson and Clayton as U.S. Representatives of the World Bank and Fund. Jan. 30—In a message to Congress Truman asked approval of British Loan. Feb. 27—Vandenberg reported to the Senate on the U.N. meetings in London. Mar. 16—Secretary of State Byrnes, in speech on foreign policy, said the U.S. would seek security through the U.N. Apr. 6—Truman, in an Army Day address, pledged the military might of the U.S. behind the right of the U.N. to insist that the sovereignty and integrity of nations "not be threatened by coercion or intimidation." Apr. 25—Council of Foreign Ministers (of U.S., U.K., France, and USSR) held second session in Paris: agreement on revision of Italian armistice terms— abolishing Allied commission and removing all control except that connected with Allied occupation of Venezia Giulia; other treaties and problem of Germany postponed for 2nd meeting, a month later. May 10—Senate approved British Loan. June 4—Peron in power in Argentina, hinted Act of Chapultepec not be honored. June 15—Council of Foreign Ministers reconvened in Paris: disagreement with

145 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON May 24—Clayton chosen to receive 1946 Captain Robert Dollar Memorial Award, given annually for work in advancing foreign trade. May 29—Clayton testified before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations with reference to Chicago Convention on International Aviation. June 10—House Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation to make new post—Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. June 21—Clayton addressed meeting of members of Film Industry, New York, on "World Food Crisis"; speech broadcast on nation-wide hook-up. July 12—Clayton participated in NBC University of Air series on "The Road to Expanding World Trade." July 23—Clayton went to Paris Peace Conference as aide to Secretary of State Byrnes. Aug. 4—He broadcast from the Paris Peace Parley over NBC; he emphasized that "we must not repeat the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty in overestimating the aggressor's ability to pay." Aug. 8—Clayton addressed UNRRA Council meeting in Geneva; he backed Director LaGuardia's proposal for termination UNRRA, but urged continued care for DP's until a UN agency could take over. Aug. 18—Back in Washington, Clayton took oath as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. Aug. 31—Clayton to be Acting Secretary of State during Undersecretary Acheson's absence on vacation in Canada. Sept.—Activities as Acting Secretary of State: Sept. 3—Clayton's answer to Belgrade about U.S. bombers reported that locations of every U.S. plane between July 16 and Aug. 29 had been checked, and that no planes had crossed Yugoslav boundary. Sept. 5—He hinted, in reply to Yugoslavia, that indemnity payment would settle issue of planes Yugoslavs shot down. He reviewed U.S. note to Sweden protesting proposed Swedish-USSR Trade Pact. Sept. 6—He received Australian check as partial lend-lease settlement payment. Sept. 7—He lauded Secretary Byrnes' Stuttgart speech.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS USSR over frontier between Yugoslavia and Italy and over Trieste was compromised by creation of autonomous territory of Trieste. Draft rules of procedure for a Peace Conference to be held July 29 in Paris were suggested. No progress on peace treaty with Germany. July 1—The first postwar atom bomb test took place at Bikini. July 4—Independence of Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed. July 13—The House approved British Loan. July 14—Truman signed the British Loan Agreement. July 16—U.S. Senate appropriated $465 million for UNRRA. July 25—U.S. Senate ratified a treaty to establish an International Civil Aviation Organization. July 29—Delegates from 21 nations met for Peace Conference in Paris. Aug. 1—Truman appointed Will Clayton to be the newly created Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. Aug. 2—U.S. Senate voted to accept compulsory jurisdiction of World Court, but excepted matters within domestic jurisdiction. Aug. 9, 19—Yugoslavs shot down American planes. (Supposedly Yugoslavs were testing American reaction to force in case Yugoslavia decided to seize Trieste. ) Sept. 3—Belgrade protested that U.S. bombers had flown over Yugoslavia. Sept. 6—At Stuttgart, Germany, Secretary of State Byrnes made an address giving U.S. views that Germany should be reunited under a provisional government to carry out terms of the pending peace settlement. He revealed that our military representative would be told to cooperate with other zones, and that we would secure economic cooperation of the four zones or place responsibility for violation of Potsdam agreement; also, that, as long as occupation was required, we would not withdraw our forces. Sept. 12—In New York, at PAC rally, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace made a speech in which he deplored the "Get-Tough-with-Russia" foreign policy. Sept. 20—President Truman asked for the resignation of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce.

146 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1946: Sept. 11—He reported Yugoslavs had tentatively accepted principle of indemnity for death of fliers; commented on charges that relief supplies did not reach those for whom intended; disapproved longshoremen's refusal to load Yugoslav relief ships as intervention in foreign affairs—said UNRRA must decide. Sept. 13—Made address of welcome to new foreign service officers. Sept. 14—Clayton was reported to have sent President Truman a message warning against permitting Wallace to make foreign-policy speech. Sept. 17—Clayton said he assumed any foreign-policy speeches by government officials henceforth would be cleared with State Department before delivery. (Wallace's speech the week before urging a softer policy toward Russia had embarrassed Secretary of State Byrnes in Paris. ) Sept. 20—Clayton discussed proposed charter for International Trade Organization. Sept. 21—A note to Russia accused her of continuing to strip Hungary of supplies. Sept. 24—Clayton disclosed in Washington that the U.S. government had again urged Russia to collaborate with it in the economic rehabilitation of Hungary. Sept. 27—Clayton said that real issue behind Yugoslav closing of USIS was "whether people of one country are to be denied access to opinions and information about other people." He would ask that USIS be reopened. Sept. 29—Acheson was Acting Secretary again. Oct. 1—Clayton sent note to Yugoslavia on arrest of Yugoslav troops in Venezia Giulia. Oct. 10—Clayton said Yugoslavia had agreed to indemnify families of five American airmen downed Aug. 19. Oct. 17—Clayton endorsed city manager plan for Houston. Oct. 19—Clayton broadcast over NBC University of the Air series—"Our Foreign Policy"—on "What Part Does World Trade Play in Our Foreign Policy?" Oct. 24—He made address of welcome to United Maritime Consultative Council. Nov. 10—He announced U.S. intention

1946: Sept.-Oct.—Nuremberg trials—International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, sentenced Nazi leaders. Oct. 13—French approved charter of Fourth French Republic. Oct. 15—Paris Peace Conference closed. Draft peace treaties with Italy and the Balkans had been drawn up, to be referred to the Council of Foreign Ministers. Oct. 18—Secretary of State Byrnes broadcast a statement on the Paris Conference. Nov. 4—Third conference of Council of Foreign Ministers began in New York, ended in December: agreement reached on Italian, Balkan, and Finnish peace treaties. (U.S. in World Affairs, 19451947) Nov. 16—Reaction of London meeting (planning International Trade and Employment Conference) to Clayton's (Nov. 10) statement on U.S. trade policy noted. (New York Times)

147 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

of negotiating reciprocal trade agreements with 18 nations simultaneously. Nov. 13—He addressed the National Foreign Trade Convention in New York on "The Foreign Economic Policy of the United States." Nov. 24—He was seen as opposing revision of U.S.-Mexican Trade Pact. Dec. 30—He turned down presidency of World Bank. 1946 articles about or including much mention of Clayton: Mar. 30 Business Week: "Hardest Driving Official" May Fortune: "Why This Peace Would Work" Oct. Nation's Business: "Role of Trade in World Peace" 1947: Jan. 18—Clayton replied to Representative Shafer's charge that he had used his post for personal gain (by fostering U.S. loans abroad as a means of increasing cotton trading). Mar. 5—On the plane to Tucson, Arizona, for a rest, Clayton wrote early memorandum for European Recovery Program. Mar. 12—Clayton was named to head U.S. delegation to planned International Trade and Employment Conference in Geneva. Mar. 25—Clayton, testifying before House Foreign Affairs Committee, revealed that Greece would get $300,000,000; and that Turkey would get $100,000,000 in economic and military aid. (Truman Doctrine is thus implemented.) Apr. 8—Clayton had conference with Ambassador Tarchiani on proposed U.S. relief to Italy. Clayton and wife sailed for Geneva. Apr. 15—Clayton arrived in Geneva to head U.S. Delegation to trade conference. Apr. 23—Clayton was appointed by Truman to head U.S. delegation to Economic Commission for Europe. May 19—Clayton flew home from Geneva International Trade Parley to protest Congressional bill which would require raising import duties on wool. On plane, he wrote 2nd memorandum for what later became the Marshall Plan. May 23-27—Clayton, ill at home with a cold, gave copy of memorandum to an assistant to hand to some of his colleagues.

1947: Jan. 7—James Byrnes resigned as Secretary of State. Truman recalled General George Marshall from China and appointed Marshall Secretary of State. Jan. 16-17—Undersecretaries of State Acheson and Clayton were accused by Paul Shafer, Republican representative from Michigan, of using their offices for personal gain; Shafer assailed Acheson's connection with a law firm and Clayton's with Anderson, Clayton & Co. (Both men replied they had resigned from their firms before taking office.) Shafer, without success, demanded their ouster. Mar. 10—Fourth Session of Council of Foreign Ministers met at Moscow with Secretary of State Marshall attending for the U.S. Mar. 12—Truman asked Congress to appropriate $400,000,000 for economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey to combat communism. "This American declaration of intention to stand firm against further Soviet expansion in the Near East" is called the Truman Doctrine. Apr. 2—U.N. Security Council voted to place under U.S. trusteeship Pacific islands formerly mandated to Japan. Apr. 23—U.S. Senate passed the Greek-Turkish Aid bill. Apr. 28—Secretary of State Marshall gave a radio talk on the results of the Moscow conference on Germany and Austria; fusion of American and British zones in Germany to be pushed so as to make bi-zonal area self-sustaining at end 3 years (later the French zone would be

148 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1947: May 27—Clayton gave Marshall the memorandum which became basis for Marshall's speech at Harvard, June 5. June 7—Clayton's return to Geneva was awaited to break U.S.-Australia wool tariff deadlock. Clayton went to London first; he spent a week there helping start negotiations for Marshall Plan. June 18—Clayton endorsed Vandenberg Plan for bi-partisan council to estimate U.S. resources and advise President and Congress on European aid. June 22—Clayton flew to London at climax of British efforts to win Russian cooperation in the Marshall Plan. He was "first high State Department official to visit Europe since Marshall's speech June 5." (Houston Chronicle) June 30—Clayton arrived at Geneva, armed with authority from Truman to cut U.S. wool tariffs 25 per cent and thus break U.S.-Australia deadlock. Clayton planned visit to European capitals in study of unified European Recovery Program. July 9—Clayton arrived in Paris for conference with French leaders on Marshall Plan. July 10—Clayton and wife gave $1,000,000 to Johns Hopkins for medical research. July 23—Clayton arrived in Rome for conference with Premier Alcide de Gaspari and Foreign Minister Carlo Sforza and Minister of the Budget Luigi Einari. July 24—Clayton had audience with Pope Pius XII. July 31—Clayton conferred in Paris with Sir Stafford Cripps, Board of Trade President, who wanted U.S. to relax two major provisions of loan to Britain— sterling convertibility and non-discrimination clause. Aug. 1—Clayton revealed in Geneva at International Trade Conference that Britain could not sign multilateral tariff agreement then without special exemption from proposed ban on discriminatory import controls. Aug. 6—Clayton concluded a 3-day conference in Paris with 3 American ambassadors—Jefferson Caffery (France), Lewis Douglas (Britain), Robert Murphy (advisor to General Lucius Clay)—on Europe's economic problems. Aug. 28—In Paris to consult on trim-

1947: added); Austrian peace treaty held up for lack of agreement on large amount of "assets" USSR wanted. May 8—Undersecretary Acheson, in speech at Cleveland, Mississippi, before Delta Council, outlined government's foreign economic policy. May 23—Upon Clayton's urging, Truman vetoed wool tariff bill. June 5—Secretary of State George Marshall delivered at Harvard his speech proposing U.S. aid for European recovery, to be known as the Marshall Plan. June 30—Acheson resigned as Undersecretary of State; was succeeded by Robert Lovett. July 18—Truman signed joint resolution authorizing U.S. approval of U.N. trusteeship agreement for former Japanese mandated islands in Pacific. July 22—The House established a select Committee on Foreign Aid. Aug. 15-Sept. 2—Secretary of State Marshall headed U.S. delegation to InterAmerican Conference at Rio de Janeiro, where, Sept. 2, an Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (to meet security needs) was signed. Secretary of State Marshall was chief delegate of U.S. to General Assembly of U.N. in 1947. Sept. 29—Truman announced he was asking various committees of Congress to meet as soon as possible to approve a plan for suitable stop-gap aid to France, Italy, and Austria, and if they recommended such aid, a special session of Congress would be called. Oct. 7—Conversations on the Committee of European Economic Cooperation report began in Washington between U.S. and European experts. Oct. 9—Krug Report, stating America had means to extend Marshall Plan aid to Europe without damaging its own economy, was submitted. Oct. 10—Herter Committee, returning from Europe, issued report on Europe's need. Oct. 23—President Truman called special session of Congress to deal with inflation and aid to Europe. Nov. 10—Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees met jointly to begin hearings on interim aid to Europe. Marshall outlined proposals.

149 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON ming the first estimate of U.S. aid required in Marshall Plan were State Undersecretary Clayton, Chairman of State Department's Planning Division George Kennan, Ambassador to London, Lewis Douglas, and Ambassador to France, Jefferson Caffery. Sept. 10—Clayton made radio broadcast from Paris ( 16-nation European Economic Cooperation Committee); said there was little hope for Marshall Plan unless international trade barriers were reduced. Sept. 19—Clayton seen as gaining broad picture on European economic problems while in Europe. (New York Times) Sept. 21—New York Times Magazine article by Michael Hoffman: "No. 1 Envoy to Europe Will Clayton, counsel to an ailing continent, embodies America's great power." Sept. 26—Clayton left London. Sept. 27—Clayton sailed for U.S. Oct. 9—Clayton declared in Washington—after long stay in Europe—that nothing could prevent East-West trade when production hit full stride; he lauded results of world trade talks in Geneva, reporting 108 tariff agreements completed, and 80 more nearing completion. Oct. 14—Clayton resigned as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs. Oct. 16—Truman accepted resignation, but Clayton was to remain on call. Oct. 30—Clayton was to head U.S. delegation to Havana trade conference. Nov. 22—Clayton, head of U.S. Delegation to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Employment at Havana, broadcast over NBC from Havana in an interview with Edward Tomlinson, Inter-American adviser to NBC. Nov. 27—Clayton addressed the Fourth Plenary Session of the Conference. Nov. 29—Saturday Evening Post carried article by Clayton—as told to Beverly Smith—"Is the Marshall Plan Operation Rathole?" Dec. 9—In radio address, Clayton made plea for Congressional approval of the Marshall Plan. (Houston Chronicle, Dec. 9) 1947 Articles about or including much about Will Clayton: June 2 Time: "Baa, Baa Black Sheep" June 27 Time: "Below the Belt" Apr. 14 Time: "Tombstones and Teasels"

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS Nov. 21—U.N. Conference on Trade and Employment opened in Havana, Cuba, to agree on a charter for an International Trade Organization to be set up as part of the Economic and Social Council of the U.N. (Preparatory conferences at London, New York, and Geneva had drawn up a draft charter, to be considered for approval by 54 nations. ) Nov. 25—Council of Foreign Ministers (Marshall, Bevin, Bidault, Molotov) met in London to decide fate of Germany and Austria. Dec. 17—President Truman signed Foreign Aid Act of 1947 (interim aid to Europe.)

150 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON 1947: Feb. 3 Time: "Spring Fever" May 19 Life: "Will Clayton and His Problem" by John Chamberlain Feb. 14 U.S. News: "Biggest Round in W. L. Clayton's Fight for Tariff Reductions" May 23 U.S. News: "Business Men Making Policy: Group with Financial Experience That Is Directing Foreign Affairs" Sept. 21 New York Times Magazine: "No. 1 Envoy to Europe" by Michael Hoffman Oct. 27 Newsweek: "Freer Trade for the Free World"

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1948-1958 1948: Jan. 12, 14, 15—Clayton addressed 1948: Jan. 23—The USSR informed the Association of Buying Offices (Nat'l ReU.N. that the temporary commission on tail Dry Goods Association) in New York; Korea would not be permitted to visit joint session of Foreign Trade Bureau northern Korea. and members of Assembly of St. Louis Feb.-June 7—Communist coup in Chamber of Commerce in St. Louis; and Czechoslovakia. [Premier Jan Masaryk Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce in died, Mar. 10; President Benes died Sept. Indianapolis on importance of approval 3.] of Marshall Plan by Congress. Feb. 29—Anglo-French proposal for Mar. 23—Clayton (who was head of Western European Union accepted by U.S. delegation to International Trade Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Conference at Havana) predicted: "This Mar. 14—Senate passed ERP; House may well prove the greatest step in hispassed it Mar. 31. tory toward order and justice in economic Mar. 17—Truman called on Congress relations." to revive the draft temporarily, conMar. 29—Clayton addressed Economic demned Soviet aggressive policies, enClub of Detroit on "The Proposed Interdorsed Brussels Treaty. national Trade Organization." Speech apAt Brussels, foreign ministers of U.K., peared in Vital Speeches. France, Belgium, Netherlands, and LuxMay 12—"Among 71 new fellows of embourg signed a 50-year treaty for ecoAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences nomic, social, cultural collaboration and was . . . W. L. Clayton." (Facts On File). collective self-defense. June 20—Truman accepted Clayton's Mar. 24—U.N. Conference on Trade resignation from post as U.S. representaand Employment at Havana adjourned, tive to U.N. Economic Commission for 53 states having signed final act establishEurope. (Houston Chronicle) ing ITO, but charter must be ratified by governing bodies of majority of members Aug. 15—Clayton accepted place on before it could take effect. Board of Trustees of Johns Hopkins. Mar. 30—Ninth International Confer(Houston Chronicle) ence of American States opened in BoNov.—The Claytons returned to Housgotá; created organization of 21 American ton to live. states. Nov. 5—Clayton seen as possible SecApr. 6—Truman nominated Paul Hoffretary of State if Marshall resigned. man as Economic Cooperation Admin(Houston Chronicle) istrator. Nov. 10—State official denied Clayton Apr. 26—May 8—Economic Commisquit post. (Houston Chronicle AP dission for Europe held its 3rd session in patch from Washington) Geneva. Nov. 11—Clayton said he would resign Apr. 1-Sept. 30—Soviet military govpost as adviser to the Secretary of State ernment blockaded allied sectors of Bershortly and re-enter the cotton business.

151 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

He was elected a member of the Board of Directors of Anderson, Clayton & Co. Dec. 23—Clayton nominated as South's "Man of the Year" by Cotton Trade Journal. 1948: Articles by Clayton: June— U.N. World: "Why You Can't Be for the Marshall Plan and against Reciprocal Trade and ITO." June 6—New York Times Magazine: "Reciprocity or Retaliation" Nov.—Congressional Digest: "Views on the Havana Charter for an International Trade Organization."

lin. Western counter blockade and airlift. June 28—Truman signed the Foreign Aid Appropriation Act. July 6—Informal talks began with representatives of Canada, U.K., France, and Benelux on security of North Atlantic region. Aug. 27—State Department declared U.S. strongly favored "closer integration of free nations of Western Europe." Nov. 2—Truman elected President of U.S. Dec. 10—Talks with Canadian and West European Representatives on proposed North Atlantic Treaty were resumed. 1949: Jan. 15—Chinese Communists occupied Tientsin. Jan. 22—Chinese Nationalists surrendered Peiping. Mar. 18—U.S., Canada, and 10 Western European nations adopted a North Atlantic Defense Pact; NATO ratified by U.S. Senate July 21. Apr. 8—U.S., U.K., and France agreed on merger of their zones in Western Germany and the establishment of the German Republic. May 11—Israel admitted to U.N. July 26—Senator Estes Kefauver introduced Atlantic Union resolution in U.S. Senate. Sept. 23—Truman announced atomic explosion had occurred in USSR, ending U.S. monopoly of atomic bomb. Dec. 7—Nationalist China's government fled to Formosa. Dec. 27—U.S. of Indonesia became sovereign nation when Queen Juliana signed act granting full autonomy.

1949: Feb. 9—Clayton was National Committeeman of Third National Planned Parenthood Campaign; urged support. Mar. 4—Clayton made a director of the Goethe Foundation. Mar. 15—Clayton made a vice-president of the Atlantic Union Committee. Apr. 13—Clayton wrote memorandum on ITO. Apr. 4, June 11, Sept. 16, 28, 30— Clayton made speeches in Houston and Austin urging support for a Congressional bill to call a conference to discuss Atlantic Union. May 9—Clayton warned [of bad consequences] of failure of U.S. to join the International Trade Organization (Houston Chronicle, May 9). Aug. 19—Clayton resigned post as Alternate Governor of World Bank. Nov. 13—Federation [of democracies— Atlantic Union] might avert war—Clayton and Streit, originator of Atlantic Union idea (Houston Chronicle, Nov. 12). Nov. 17—Clayton joined fund campaign for Johns Hopkins University. Dec. 13—Clayton elected president of Texas Philosophical Society. Dec. 23—Clayton named to Board of Regents of Texas State University for Negroes. 1950: Jan. 11—Clayton to defend public housing plans in Houston. Jan. 17—Clayton spoke in favor of an Atlantic Union before the Kiwanis Club and the Chamber of Commerce in Dallas. Jan. 24—Clayton testified in favor of the bill for Atlantic Union before subcommittee of Foreign Affairs Committee of Senate.

1950: Jan. 6—Britain recognized Communist Regime in Peiping. Jan. 26—India was proclaimed independent Republic at New Delhi. Jan. 29—France recognized the Vietnam regime in Indo-China. The Soviet Union recognized the Ho Chi Minh Vietminh Communists. Jan. 31—Atomic Energy Commission

152 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS

1950: Feb. 13—Clayton testified in favor of Atlantic Union at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. May 16—Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy set up Clayton Chair of International Finance in honor of Will Clayton. June 2—Clayton addressed A.U. Committee at dinner in Washington. June 6—Clayton resigned as chairman of Board of Anderson, Clayton & Co. June 26—Clayton urged President Truman to back Atlantic Union. Oct. 22—New York Times Magazine published "We Must Trade Sovereignty for Freedom," by Will Clayton, in which he urged formation of an Atlantic Union. Dec. 10—In an address at the annual dinner of the Texas Philosophical Society, Clayton said the free world must unite. Dec. 30—Clayton and wife buy site in Houston for low-cost housing project.

1950: authorized by Truman to produce the hydrogen bomb. May 9—France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg agreed to a conference on the Schumann Plan to pool European Coal and Steel (Treaty ratified June 16, 1952). June. 24—Communist North Korean army invaded Republic of Korea. U.N. Security Council demanded withdrawal of North Korean Army. June 27—Security Council asked U.N. members to help carry out its demand. President Truman ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur to aid South Korea. U.N. forces put under Gen. MacArthur as Commander-in-Chief; U.S. and associated troops landed at Inchon, Sept. 15. Communists finally pushed back beyond 38° parallel, after 3 yrs.; armistice signed (July 27, 1953). Feb. 13—Hearings by Senate Foreign Relations Committee on A.U. resolution. Dec. 23—Vietnam became sovereign nation in French Union. 1951: Apr. 2—Gen. Eisenhower opened in Paris the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE). Apr. 11—President Truman relieved General MacArthur of his command in the Far East. Sept. 15-20—NATO Council at Ottawa approved the entry of Turkey and Greece into NATO. Oct. 19—War between U.S. and Germany was formally ended. Oct. 25—General election in Great Britain returned the Conservatives to power. Oct.—Iran ousted foreign oil companies and nationalized its oil industry.

1951: Mar. 6—Clayton addressed a joint session of the Texas legislature on the need for Atlantic Union. June 19—President Truman appointed Clayton a member of the National Security Training Commission. Nov. 24—Clayton and others urge NATO aid (Houston Chronicle headlines article). Three former Undersecretaries of State—Clayton, Joseph Grew, and William Phillips—were joined Friday by General George Marshall and 29 others in an open letter to the American people urging U.S. support for the ministerial committee of foreign ministers of Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway, established at the last NATO meeting—to recommend means of integration of the economic and foreign policies of the NATO members. 1952: Mar. 22—Clayton received Finland's highest award—the Order of the White Rose—presented by the Finnish Minister to the U.S. and Mexico, Johan Nykopp, in recognition of the faith he had shown in assisting the recovery of Finland. Sept.—Clayton Chair became William L. Clayton Center for International Economic Affairs at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

1952: May 26—Peace Contract signed in Bonn between West Germany, U.S., Great Britain, and France. May 27—European Defense Community, founded by treaty, signed in Paris by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg. France rejected E.D.C. August 30, 1954. May 30—General Matthew Ridgway succeeded Eisenhower as SHAPE com-

153

CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1953: Dec. 29—Clayton was member of nation-wide committee formed to oppose the Bricker amendment limiting Presidential power.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS mander. (July 11, 1953, General Alfred Gruenther succeeded Ridgway; Nov. 20, 1956, Gen. Lauras Norstad succeeded Gruenther.) July 25—Puerto Rico became first commonwealth of U.S. after Truman approved its constitution July 3. July 26—King Farouk of Egypt was forced to abdicate after General Naguib seized power. Nov. 4—General Eisenhower elected President. 1953: Feb. 10-May 1—Single market for coal and steel set up by European Coal and Steel Community. Six member nations agreed to scrap tariffs and import quotas. Mar. 10—Draft charter for limited European Political Federation completed. Mar. 5—Stalin, Premier of USSR, died. Apr. 25—U.S. Atomic Power pledged to NATO at meeting in Paris. June 2—Elizabeth II crowned Queen of Great Britain. June 17—Anti-Communist riot in East Berlin quelled. Aug. 20—Soviet Union announced test of hydrogen bomb. Sept. 26—Spain and U.S. signed 10year defense agreement in Madrid, giving U.S. rights to Spanish military bases. 1954: Apr. 26-July 21—Geneva Conference on Far Eastern Affairs attended by 19 nations, including Communist China. Armistice, effective Aug. 11, ended seven and one-half years war in Indo-China. Vietminh won land from Vietnam. Apr. 29—India and Communist China entered 8-year pact for peaceful co-existence. July 27—Britain made agreement with Egypt to end occupation of Suez Canal Zone in less than 2 years. Sept. 8—Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, SEATO, signed in Manila by U.S., Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand. Oct. 3—End of London Conference of 7 Western European nations, Canada, and U.S.; agreement—on basis 1948 Brussels Treaty—to integrate West Germany with Western Europe. New organization named Western European Union, Oct. 11, at Paris.

154 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1955: Jan. 9—Will Clayton was among sponsors of a U.N.-backed World Trade Agency open to all trading nations. 1955-1956 International Yearbook of Cotton Trade Journal published "The Road to Peace," by Will Clayton.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS 1954: Oct. 23—Agreement signed at Paris to permit West Germany to rearm and enter NATO and WEU. Oct. 30—Agreement signed between Iran and 8 oil companies (British, American, Dutch, French) to produce oil. 1955 : Jan. 28—Congress approved President Eisenhower's request for emergency powers to permit U.S. forces to protect Formosa and the Pescadores. Mar. 7—Negotiations at Geneva by 44 nations extend GATT tariff truce; proposal to establish an OTC (Organization for Trade Cooperation) to provide administrative machinery. Apr. 18-27—First conference of 29 Asian-African countries at Bandung, Indonesia, endorsed elimination of colonialism, independence, self-determination, and U.N. membership for all. Chou EnLai, premier of Communist China, announced willingness of Chinese to negotiate with U.S. over relaxing Formosa and Far Eastern tensions. Premier of India, Nehru, condemned NATO as protector of colonialism. May 5—Federal Republic of West Germany became a sovereign state when ratifications were deposited in Bonn. U.S. completed ratification. Apr. 21—Eisenhower signed order ending U.S. occupation of West Germany, but troops remained on a contractual basis. May 14—A 20-year treaty of mutual defense was signed at Warsaw by USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and East Germany. May 15—Sovereignty was restored to Republic of Austria by treaty signed in Vienna by foreign ministers of U.S., Britain, France, and USSR. May 31—U.S. Supreme Court gave local authorities task of integrating schools. July 18-23—Summit meeting at Geneva of U.S., Great Britain, France, USSR. Sept. 19—Peron dictatorship overthrown in Argentina. Oct. 27-Nov. 16—Meeting of Foreign Ministers follows summit meeting. Dec. 14—U.N. brought membership to 76 by admission of 16 new members. Dec. 16—U.S. and Great Britain as-

155 CHRONOLOGY LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1956: Oct. 10—Clayton was named an honorary chairman of 50-member National Businessmen's Council for Adlai Stevenson.

1957: Jan. 20—New York Times credited Will Clayton with authorship of resolution circulated by Rayburn, Jan. 8, as possible substitute for the Eisenhower Doctrine for the Middle East. (Rayburn had said the resolution had been sent him by a "prominent man" no longer in the government. )

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS sured Egypt of financial aid sufficient to start Aswan Dam on Nile. 1956: Feb. 1—Declaration of Washington by Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Eden, warning Asia and Africa against looking to USSR for aid. Feb. 14-25—Soviet leaders disavow Stalinism. Mar. 2—Jordan's King Hussein dismissed Lieutenant General J. B. Glubb, British Commander of the Arab Legion since 1939. May 21—U.S. made its first air-drop of hydrogen bomb over Namu Island. July 19—U.S. withdrew offer to help finance Egypt's Aswan Dam on Nile; withdrawal of British and World Bank proposals followed. July 26—Egypt, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized Suez Canal. Oct. 23—Charter of International Atomic Energy Agency approved by representatives of 82 nations. Nov. 4—Hungarian Revolt, begun Oct. 23, crushed by Soviet armed forces. Oct. 29—Israel invaded Egypt. Britain and France attacked Egypt, Oct. 31. Suez Canal blocked by sunken and scuttled ships. Nov. 5—U.N. established first international police force to supervise a Middle East truce. A U.N. cease-fire ended the fighting Nov. 7. Nov. 6—President Eisenhower reelected over Adlai Stevenson. Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress. Dec. 18—Japan became 80th member of U.N. 1957: Jan. 1—The Saar became 10th State of West Germany. Jan. 5—Eisenhower Doctrine for Middle East was proposed. President asked joint session of Congress for authority to use U.S. armed forces to resist any Communist aggression in Middle East; he stressed he would not use the authority "except at the desire of the nation attacked." Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, circulated a substitute resolution: "The United States regards as vital to her interest the preservation of the independence and integrity of the states of the Middle East, and if necessary, will use her armed forces to that end." Jan. 9—Dulles rejected the substitute as proposing "unilaterally" a U.S. "pro-

156 CHRONOLOGY

LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS 1957: tectorate over the area, irrespective of the desire or request of the countries themselves." Jan. 9—Eden resigned as British Prime Minister; was succeeded by Harold MacMillan. Jan. 13—The Kremlin attacked Eisenhower Plan for Middle East. Jan. 14—U.S. proposed disarmament plan before U.N. Political Committee: "Atoms for Peace." Jan. 19—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria agreed to provide financial aid for Jordan. Jan. 23—USSR warned that nations permitting the U.S. to establish atomic bases would be "under the jeopardy of retaliatory atomic action." Jan. 25—U.N. Political Committee (80 nations) urged world powers to continue disarmament discussions, with emphasis on Eisenhower's plan for exchange of military blueprints and air inspection and on Bulganin's proposals for ground checks. Feb. 9—Farm support prices cut—announcement by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Benson. Feb. 12—Soviet Middle East plan made public; proposals included "withdrawal of foreign troops, liquidation of foreign bases." (Plan rejected by U.S., Britain, and France, Mar. 11 ) Feb. 25-27—Arab Chiefs (Nasser of Egypt, King Saud of Saudi Arabia, President Al-Kuwatly of Syria, King Hussein of Jordan) declared neutrality in "cold war" between East and West and upheld Algerian revolt against France. Feb. 21—U.N. approved resolution for peaceful solution of Cyprus problem. (Greece had complained of Britain's denial of right of self-determination to Cypriotes.) Mar. 7—Suez Canal reopened. Mar. 21—U.S. Vice-President Nixon visited Africa. Mar. 25—Representatives of six West European Union nations signed treaties creating the European Economic Community and the European Community of Atomic Energy. July 25—Tunisia declared itself a Republic, voted to dethrone Bey of Tunis; Bourguiba was elected first President.

157

CHRONOLOGY

LIFE OF WILL CLAYTON

1958: Jan. 11—The Claytons offered their home in Houston as a gift to the Houston Library. Mar. 17—Clayton opposed limit on oil imports in pamphlet "What Price Oil?" Part of this statement appeared in an article in Time, Mar. 21. June 25—Clayton urged five-year renewal of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, without crippling amendments, in a statement to the Senate Finance Committee. This statement appeared in a pamphlet called "We Are Losing the Cold War." It also appeared in the Congressional Record.

U.S. AND WORLD EVENTS Aug. 26—USSR announced successful test of intercontinental ballistic missile. Sept. 3—USSR renewed demands for 4-power Declaration renouncing use of force in Middle East. Oct. 1—Japan was elected to U.N. Security Council. Oct. 7—Soviet Union announced successful test of "mighty hydrogen warhead of new design." Oct. 16—Secretary of State Dulles warned that attack by Soviet Union on Turkey would bring retaliation by U.S. Oct. 23-25—Eisenhower and MacMillan, at White House, confer on means of strengthening the Western alliance. Oct. 4—Soviet Union launched the first rocket—Sputnik—evidence that USSR was ahead of U.S. in research in this field. Nov. 10—USSR education reported ahead of U.S. education. Nov. 11—Jamaica got home rule. Nov. 14—U.S. and Britain proceeded on plan to ship small arms to Tunisia; this action was protested by France. 1958: May 14—Vice-President Nixon, on a trip to Latin America, was demonstrated against in Peru and was stoned and spit at in Caracas, Venezuela. May 19—General Charles de Gaulle offered to resume power in France to resolve a rebellion against the Paris government by rightists and French military leaders in Algeria. July 14—Revolt in Iraq overthrew King Faisal II, pro-Western monarch. July 15—U.S. sent troops to Lebanon in answer to her request for aid against rebels supported by U.A.R. July 22—Three-year renewal of Reciprocal Trade Act voted in Senate.

This page intentionally left blank.

159

Index Acheson, Dean, 10, 14, 22; book by, noted, 37; inaugurates Clayton Lectures, 37 Adams, Walton, 60 Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929, 101 Alexander Sprunt and Sons, 81 Allen, Robert, 39 American Cotton Company: Clayton's work for, 57-73 passim American Magazine: cited 51, 78, 90 Anderson, Frank, 57; forms partnership with Clayton, 78; death of, 78 Anderson, Monroe, 57; forms partnership with Clayton, 78; death of, 78 Anderson, Clayton & Co., 15, 22; attack on, 20; profits for 1946, 23; business activities of, 24—25; early growth of, 25, 26, 79; relations with Great Britain, 28; formation of, 78; international flavor of, 79; expansion of services, 82, 93, 95, 102; investment in round-bale cotton, 9091; during World War I, 91, 92, 93; Senate investigation of, 97—101 Anderson, Clayton & Fleming, 64 Anderson family, 57 Argentina, 15, 102 Arizona, 102

Atlantic City, New Jersey: UNRRA meeting in, 29 Atlantic Union Committee, 34 Atlantic Union Proposal: supported by Clayton, 34, 35 Atomic bomb : Clayton on committee concerning, 29 Australia, 16 Ball, D. C., 59, 61, 62 Barbee family, 58 Bard, Ralph Α., 29 Barkley, Alben, 60 Baruch, Bernard, 15 Bevin, Ernest, 122 Board of Economic Warfare, 18 Brand, Lord ,7 Brazil, 15, 102 British Loan: Clayton support of, 7, 8, 23; Houston press defends Clayton stand on, 25; Clayton's negotiations on, 26, 27, 28 Brooklyn, New York, 70 Brown, Winthrop, 26, 71; reminiscences of, 89-90 Bryan, William Jennings, 49 Burdine, Fletcher. See Clayton, Fletcher Burdine

160 INDEX

Burdine, John, 47 Bush, Vannevar, 29 Byrnes, James, 29 Caffery, Jefferson, 14 California, 102 Campbell, Chalmers, 64 Chamberlain, John: quoted, 93, 97, 102, 104; impressions of Clayton, 106 Chapultepec Conference, 29 China, 95 Clark, Hood & Co., 56 Clason, (cotton agent), 92 Clayton, Ben, 46, 48; joins Anderson, Clayton & Co., 78 Clayton, Burdine (daughter), 95, 96, 97 Clayton, Burdine (sister), 54, 57 Clayton, Fletcher Burdine, 43, 44, 45, 49, 51, 52, 53; ancestry of, 45, 46; letters to Will, 58-59 Clayton, James Monroe, 43, 44, 45, 48,50 Clayton, Julia, 95, 96 Clayton, Lafayette, 45, 46, 47, 56, 59 Clayton, Leland, 54, 66 Clayton, Stewart, 56 Clayton, Sue Vaughan, 28; Roosevelt's letter to, 19, 110; efforts in Houston, 37; meets Will Clayton, 53; courtship by Will Clayton, 54-73 passim; influence on husband, 85, 108-109; character of, 85; support of Roosevelt, 108, 109, 110 Clayton, Susan, 84, 85, 96, 106, 107 Clayton, William Lockhart. To early manhood: ancestry of, 43; birth of, 43; education of, 49, 50, 62, 69, 70; move to Tennessee, 45; boyhood jobs, 49, 50; move to St. Louis, 50; move to New York, 52; as court reporter, 56, 57; describes life in New York, 64, 65 —. Business life: resignation from Anderson, Clayton & Co., 16; work for American Cotton Company, 58-

73 passim; forms partnership with Andersons, 78; investigation by Senate committee, 97-101; fight for Southern delivery on New York Cotton Exchange, 97-101. See also American Cotton Company; Anderson, Clayton & Co. —. Government service: appointed Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, 3, 111; articles by, noted, 4, 14, 15, 35, 36, 109; pamphlet by, quoted, 4, 5, 105; advocate of reciprocal trade, 5, 39; resignation as Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, 5; role in developing Marshall Plan, 6, 7, 11, 31; Houston address on British Loan, 7, 8; at Havana Trade Conference, 8, 30; advocate of ITO, 8; European criticism of, 9; March, 1947, memo on Marshall Plan, 1113, 115-118; May, 1947, memo on Marshall Plan, 13-14, 118-121; Chairman of Board of the United States Commercial Company, 16; Deputy Federal Loan Administrator, 16, 111; Vice-President of Export-Import Bank, 16, 111; appointed Assistant Secretary of Commerce, 18; President of War Insurance Corporation, 18; resignation as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, 18; trustee of School for Advanced International Studies, 18; appointed Surplus War Property Administrator, 19; appointed Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, 22; nominated as United States Alternate Governor of International Monetary Fund and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 22; attacked by Shafer, 22, 24-25; negotiations on British Loan, 26, 27, 28; special assignments in State Department, 29, 30; represents United States on Economic Commission for Europe, 30; VicePresident of Atlantic Union Committee, 34; supports Atlantic Union Proposal, 34, 35, 36; work on National Security Training Commission, 36; Deputy Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs, 111; Sep-

161 INDEX

tember, 1947, memo on Marshall Plan, 121-125. See also British Loan; Marshall Plan —. Personal life and personality: biography, noted, 6; illnesses, 10, 53, 64, 65, 66, 72; walking habit, 11, 70, 71, 87-88; basis of ideas on trade, 15, 16; influence in Houston, 37-38; personality described, 47, 55, 71, 85; appearance, 48; temperance, 51; love of poetry, 52; love of music, 54; love of nature, 60; generosity, 63; love of books, 68, 86; philosophy, 72; temperament, 83-84; influence on younger colleagues, 88; thoroughness, 89; support of Roosevelt, 102; courtesy, 107; views of Roosevelt measures, 108 —. Romance and domestic life: meeting with Sue Vaughan, 53; courtship of Sue Vaughan, 54-73 passim; marriage, 73; relationship with daughters, 83, 85-86, 93-94, 95-96, 106-107; move to Oklahoma City, 78; move to Houston, Texas, 93 Clayton Center for International Economic Affairs: program of, 37 Clayton Chair of International Finance, 37 Clayton Lectures, 37 Clinton, Kentucky, 53 Commerce Department, Clayton's activities in, 18 Committee for Economic Development, 18 Commodity Credit Corporation, 24 Communism: Clayton writes on, 4, 105 Compton, Karl T., 29, 36 Conant, James B., 29 Confederate Reunion of 1895 (Shiloh),47 Congressional Record, 5 Cotton industry: Anderson, Clayton & Co. exports for 1945-46, 24; affected by World War I, 82 Cotton merchandising, 81; round bale versus square bale, 90-91; Webb presses, 91; spot cotton merchants, 97-98, 100; fight for Southern

delivery on New York Cotton Exchange, 97-101; cottonseed byproducts, 102 Cotton Research Congress (Waco), 21 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 26 Czechoslovakia, 93 Dalgleish, John: article on Clayton, noted, 34 Davis, John W., 103 De America: quotes from, 23-24 Defense purchasing: Clayton's work in, 16, 17 Delta Council (Mississippi), 14 Dewey, George, 60 Douglas, Lewis, 14, 122 Dulles, Allen, 10 Dulles, John Foster, 35 Dunaway family, 57 Dutch East Indies, 16 East Orange, New Jersey, 68 Economic Commission for Europe, 30 Egypt, 15, 102 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 8 Elliot, William, 17 England. See Great Britain European Recovery Program. See Marshall Plan Everybody's Weekly : cited, 34 Fanny (nurse), 84 Fifteen Weeks,The: cited, 6-7, 13-14 Finland : presents Clayton with Order of the White Rose, 30-31 Fleming, Lamar, 64, 65, 67 Fleming, Lamar, Jr., 64, 101; lives with the Claytons, 87; reminiscences of, 87, 88, 89, 90 Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 37 Foreign Policy Association, 7 Fox, John, Jr., 49 Free trade, 9, 10

162 INDEX

Gardner, Richard: quoted, 26, 27 Garwood, Ellen Clayton : relationship with father, 82-83, 93-94, 96, 106, 107; schools attended, 106, 107 GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 8 Geneva: world trade conference in, 8,30 George H. McFadden and Bro., 81 Germany, 95 Graphite, 17 Great Britain, 95 Halifax, Lord ,7 Harris, Hu, 48, 57; reminiscences of, 86 Harrison, George L., 29 Harrod, R. F.: quoted, 27-28 Havana, Cuba: Clayton broadcast from, 8; world trade conference in, 30 Hawkins, Harry, 26 Hill, Jerome, 49, 51 Hoffman, Michael: quoted, 9, 10, 11, 31,50 Houston, Texas, 82; Clayton's efforts in, 37; Clayton family's move to, 93 Houston Chronicle, 30 Houston Post: cited, 31, 38, 39, 110 Houston Press: quoted, 29 Hull, Cordell, 17, 26,27,102 Hurt, Robert: 49, 52, 57, 59; loan to Clayton, 77 Hutcheson, Joseph : quoted, 38 Indianapolis, Indiana: Clayton speech in, 15 Ingram, Will, 49 International Trade Organization : proposed, 8; criticism of, 9, 10 International Trade Organization Charter, 30 International Yearbook of the Cotton Trade Journal for 1955-56: cited, 4, 36

Irving, Henry, 63 ITO. See International Trade Organization Jackson, Tennessee, 38, 45, 49, 57 Japan, 15, 95 Jesse H. Jones: cited, 16 Johnson, Lyndon, 5 Jones, Ernest, 61, 68; friendship with Clayton, 69, 70; reminiscences of, 69, 70, 71, 72 Jones, Jesse, 7, 16,18, 109 Jones, Joseph M.: quoted, 6-7, 10, 13-14 Journal de Genève : quoted, 32 Kefauver, Estes, 34 Kennan, George, 7 Kennan memorandum, 14 Keynes, John Maynard, 7, 28 Kinkaid, Thomas C , 36 Knife and Fork Club (Houston), 100 Krock, Arthur: quoted, 21-22 LaFollette, Robert, Jr., 20 Le Havre, France, 95 Liberty League, 103 Life Magazine: cited, 93, 97, 104 Lone Star (ship), 17 McClain, Raymond S., 36 McNeil, Irving, 61 Malay States, 16 Marshall, George, 7; Harvard speech of, 6, 13, 14, 125-128 Marshall Plan: background of, 6; Clayton's role in, 6, 7, 10, 31; Marshall's Harvard speech on, 6, 125— 128; relation to ITO, 8; Clayton's role in, 31; and aid to France, 3233; Clayton's March, 1947, memo on, 11-13, 115-118; Clayton's May, 1947, memo on, 13-14, 118-121; Clayton article on, quoted, 109; Clayton's September, 1947, memo on, 121-125 Martin, John, 71

163 INDEX

Mercer, Ed, 57 Mercer and Clayton, 57 Mexico, 15, 102 Mica, 17 Miner, Professor , 50 Mississippi River, 51, 107 Monnet, Jean: tribute to Clayton, 3233; quoted, 105 Moscow, Russia, 7

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Clayton speech in, 15 Philippines, 16 Piovene, Guido : quoted, 23-24 Potsdam Conference, 29 Power and Diplomacy: cited, 37 Pritchard, Ross: biography of Clayton

National Democratic Committee : Houston's women's division of, 110 National Security Training Commission, 36 NATO : Clayton as advocate of, 5 Neilson, William Allen, 107 New York, Ν. Υ. : Clayton speech in, 15; Clayton's description of life in, 64,65 New York Cotton Exchange: Clayton's fight for Southern delivery on, 97-101 New York Times: cited, 21-22, 39, 40 New York Times Magazine: cited, 9, 11,31,35-36,50 North Caledonia, 17 Nykopp, Johan, 30, 31

Quartz crystals, 17

Oil: Clayton writes pamphlet on, 4; importation of foreign, 4 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: 78; in early 1900's, 79-80 Organization for Trade Cooperation, 8,9 OTC. See Organization for Trade Cooperation P.M.: attacks Clayton, 20; cited, 50 Panic of 1907, 82 Paraguay, 15, 102 Paris L'Aurore: quoted, 32 Paris Le Monde: quoted, 31 Patterson, Robert, 34 Patton, Jim: quoted, 103 Pepper, Claude, 103 Peru, 15, 102

by, noted, 6

Rayburn, Sam, 39 Reciprocal trade: Clayton comments on, 5 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act: supported by Clayton, 5, 39 Reval, Russia, 91 Riga, Russia, 91 Roberts, Owen J., 34 Rockefeller, Nelson, 16,108 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 19; call to Clayton, 110; letter to Sue Clayton, 110 Roper, Elmo, 34 Ruhr, the, 33 Russia: cotton shipment to, 91, 92 St. Louis, Missouri: Clayton speech in, 15 Saturday Evening Post: article in, noted, 14, 15; cited, 109 Schumann Plan, 33 Searls, , 60 Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 35 Shafer, Paul: attacks Clayton, 22 Shelton, Edgar, 36 Shibusawa, Baron , 65 Smith, Beverly: quoted, 15, 51, 78, 90 Sobolev, Arkady, 5 Spot cotton merchants, 97-98, 100 Stephen M. Weld & Co., 81 Sterling Dollar Diplomacy: cited, 26, 27 Stettinius, Edward R., 20 Stevenson, Adlai, 10, 34

164 INDEX Stewart, Robert, 37 Stimson, Henry L., 29 Stone, I. F.: quoted, 9, 50 Streit, Clarence, 34 Texas Cotton Products Company, 67 Texas Spectator: attacks Clayton, 102-103; cited, 109 Timmons, Bascom: quoted, 16 Truman, Harry S., 14, 29 Truss, Lillian, 53 Tungsten, 16 Tupelo, Mississippi, 44, 45 Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs: creation of, 3; opposition to Clayton as, 20-21 United States: growth and change in early 1900's, 81 United States stockpile: Clayton's work for, 16 UNRRA: meeting in Atlantic City, 29 Vaughan, Hattie, 53, 57, 58, 61; death of, 72 Vaughan, Sue. See Clayton, Sue Vaughan

Vichy France : United States relations with, 17 Vinson, Fred, 7, 22; and British Loan, 26 Vladivostok, Russia, 92 Wadsworth, James W., 36 Wallace, Henry, 18 War Industries Board, 15 War Insurance Corporation, 18 Ward, Barbara : quoted, 34 Washington, D. C , 107 Washington College (Washington, D. C.), 60 Webb, Dr. ,91 Webb presses, 91 West at Bay, The : cited, 34 Willkie, Wendell, 110 Wisdom family, 57 Wool: tariff bill on, 14 World War I: Clayton's activities during, 15; effect on cotton industry, 82; Anderson, Clayton & Co. during, 91, 92, 93 World War II, 108 Wren, Sir Christopher, 35, 46

W i l l C l a y t o n : A Short Biography By E L L E N C L A Y T O N GARWOOD

has been composed in 11 point and 10 point Baskerville leaded two points with titles in True-Cut Caslon, printed letterpress on Logan Eggshell wove paper and bound in Holliston Roxite cloth by the University of Texas Printing Division, and published as a supplement to Volume One, Number Four of T H E TEXAS QUARTERLY by the University

of Texas Press.