Jesse H. Jones: Acivic-minded powerhouse
Finance mastermind helped U.S. out of Depression, took Houston into future
When he wasn’t building and shaping Houston, Jesse Holman Jones was saving America.
That sounds like hyperbole, but everything about Jesse Jones was outsized, including Jones himself. At 6 feet 3 inches, in a time when that was a towering height, his square face and piercing blue eyes made him a compelling physical presence.
So the notion that he was President Franklin Roosevelt’s right-hand finance man during the Great Depression and the Second World War, as well as the man who built much of Houston’s downtown and brought the arts to the city, simply completes the look.
“He was in the inner circle that took Houston and made it into an international city,” said Nancy Beck Young, a professor of history at the University of Houston.
Jones was born in 1874 on a tobacco farm in Tennessee — but not in poverty, a myth that persisted throughout his life, according to his biographer, Steven Fenberg.
At best an indifferent student (he completed the eighth grade), Jones had, however, a natural head for business.
As a teenager, he came to Texas to help his uncle, M.T. Jones, run one of his lumberyards in Hillsboro. But it was a trip to Chicago to see the World’s Columbian Exhibition — the World’s Fair — that opened Jones’s eyes to the wonders of a cosmopolitan, electrified world on the brink of the 20th century, Fenburg says in his book, “Unprecedented Power.” It was a lesson Jones never forgot.
M.T. Jones became increasingly successful and, when he moved to Houston, his nephew stayed in Dallas and soon parlayed his good sense into a lumber business of his own. But when M.T. died, in 1898, Jesse relocated to Houston. And except for long stints with the federal government in Washington, D.C., he never left.
With Jones managing his late uncle’s assets and his own business dealings, the extended Jones family got very rich very quickly.
“The primary pieces of Jones’ business life were now in place: he had access to capital, ability to multiply its power, and a vision of greater things to come,” Fenberg writes.
In 1908, Jones earned a half-ownership in the Houston Chronicle by constructing a 10-story building on Texas Avenue downtown, between Travis and Milam, to house it. (In 1926, he bought the rest from Marcellus Foster and became publisher, a position he held until his death.)
After the Galveston hurricane of 1900, Houston bigwigs saw the need to turn the inland city into a port, which would mean digging a 50-mile Ship Channel. As Fenberg points out, that’s longer than the Panama Canal. Jones helped find federal money for the channel, and in 1914 Houston became a port city.
Jones had a grand vision for Houston: that it should become a serious city with all the amenities of a New York or Chicago. To that end, he tore down the existing Rice Hotel at Texas and Main and built an impressive 17-story structure in its place, though it kept the same name.
He started a bank, too, and by 1912 he was president of Houston’s National Bank of Commerce.
But Jones was canny enough to know that a city isn’t all business. He lobbied the mayor and city council to build a grand auditorium, completed in 1910. When the Russian Symphony Orchestra came to play at Jones’ behest, locals were inspired to start the Houston Symphony Orchestra.
“It was not enough to be thriving and big,” Young said. “It required cultural institutions like those in the Northeast — New York or Boston. Jones may not have had a lifelong love of opera or art, but he realized the importance of those institutions.”
Meanwhile, Jones was attracting notice outside of Houston.
When President Woodrow Wilson offered him the post of Secretary of Commerce, he said no. But when Wilson came back and asked him to run the military relief effort for the American Red Cross in 1917, during World War I, he couldn’t turn it down. That was Jones’ first two-year stint in Washington.
His personal life was in a state of flux around that time, too. When Jones first arrived in Houston, he bought an enormous house on Main Street for his Aunt Louisa. Known as “The Boarding House,” it became home to a rotating cast of Joneses, not the least being Jesse’s cousin, Will, and his wife, Mary Gibbs Jones, and their son, Tilford.
Mary and Jesse got along well for many years, and when Mary divorced Will in 1919 (an act more rare and scandalous than it would be today) it was perhaps not a surprise that Mary and Jesse married in 1920. They had no children.
In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, a Republican, called Jones to Washington for what would be his most important role: saving the country’s finances during the Great Depression. His work carried over into World War II under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jones, a Democrat, was one of the first prominent D.C. players to come out of Texas.
“I don’t know that we’d have come through the Depression or World War II as powerfully as we did without him,” Young said. “Next to FDR, he was probably one of the top three most important individuals at the time.”
As head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin Roosevelt, Jones had the power to loan huge amounts of money and rescue banks, keep railroads in business and perform the kind of financial wizardry that caused FDR to refer to the chairman as “Jesus H. Jones.”
Jones served as FDR’s commerce secretary from 1940 to 1945. The two parted badly, and Jones came back to Houston for good.
As successful as he was, Jones never sought elective office.
“I just don’t think he was the sort who thought of himself as Senator Jones or President Jones,” Young said. “At heart he was a businessman.”
Jesse and Mary Jones had set up the Houston Endowment in 1937 and given over the Chronicle to be owned by the trust. It became the largest private endowment in Texas and was responsible for the ubiquity of the Jones name on Houston institutions.
Jones died in 1956 and is buried in Houston.
He arrived in a small, not terribly prosperous city that depended on exporting raw agricultural products. By the time he died, Houston was thriving and diversifying. Jones helped put Houston on the map.
Young summed up Jones’ career: “He was the epitome of civic-mindedness.”