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Jesse Jones's expansion from the lumber business to the building business was natural. And the mammoth Jones's ideas of building made expansion into the banking business inevitable. Between 1909 and 1918 he founded Texas Trust Co., now Bankers Mortgage Co., of which he has temporarily resigned his board chairmanship. He became an officer of two other Houston banks and board chairman of a third. He built hotels at Fort Worth and Eastland. Through Houston Properties Corp. he invaded New York City, where he has interests in no less than 45 structures. But the Jones building monument is Houston, where he erected the city's three biggest hotels—Rice, Texas State, Lamar (where he lives)—and a round dozen of the biggest office buildings and theatres. In one of those structures is housed his Chronicle. There are only two pictures on the walls of Jesse Jones's RFC office. One shows Houston's skyline as Jones found it. Another shows the skyline as Jones left it. By 1928 he was said to be worth $100,000,000, the richest man in the biggest U. S. State.* It was also in 1928 that the name of Jones first rose in the national political firmament. Having practically financed the Democratic Presidential debacle of 1924, he tendered the Democratic National Committee his certified check in blank to get the 1928 national convention for Houston. When the Democratic delegates settled down in a vast auditorium which he had rushed to completion for them, Jesse Jones got his reward in the form of a courtesy nomination for the Presidency, engineered by such friends as onetime (1927-31) Governor Dan Moody, onetime (1931-33) Governor Ross Sterling. More practical recompense was the whopping business his hotels did during convention week. Financier to Bureaucrat. It was House Speaker John Garner of Texas who persuaded President Hoover to make Jesse Jones a director when RFC was organized in the dread month of February 1932, to lend $2,000,000.000 to paralyzed banks and railroads. Mr. Jones has seen the thing through. He has seen the personnel expand from 100 clerks to 1,400 clerks and 1,400 field agents. As a director, he first served under Charles Gates ("Hell 'n Maria") Dawes, who retired when his Chicago bank sorely needed RFC assistance. In midsummer, 1932, RFC got another $1,800.000.000 to advance for public works and relief, and a new chair man, bald, bumbling Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, a Democrat whom Senate Democrats would not confirm and a Democratic President would not continue in office. Under bumbling Mr. Pomerene and his pinchpenny conservatism RFC prestige hit rockbottom. When President Roosevelt took office, RFC entered its dog days. Mr. Roosevelt was not inclined to continue Mr. Hoover's innovation. He was about to scrap RFC, turn over its functions to Public Works Administration and other of his own burgeoning crop of agencies, when Jesse Jones (no mean politician himself) got his ear. With Jesse Jones elected Chairman, RFC entered a new phase. No longer was it interested primarily in patching up crumbling banks. From rescue it turned to expansion, became the ready means of financing a dozen different projects of the New Deal. It used its credit to force down the price of the dollar, tossed off a few millions to finance the sale of agricultural commodities in foreign markets, poured out hundreds of millions for preferred bank stock in order to set up a