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(In his private career he never trifled with enterprises that promised either big quick profits or big quick losses, or that depended on luck or the weather — oil or cotton.)
In the 1907 depression, when Houston was stagnant, Jesse Jones began building up ten-story buildings smack downtown. He organized a bank, became an officer of two others, chairman of a fourth. He built hotels. He bought the Houston Chronicle. He headed the board which dug a ship canal that made inland Houston a seaport. He spread out, changed the sky lines of Fort Worth, Dallas, Eastland; of Memphis and Nashville, Tenn. At 43, in World War I, he was big enough to be a dollar-a-year man. In 1928 he brought the Democratic convention to Houston with a blank check (the Democrats filled it in for $200,000).
No Jesse, No Houston. Such was the simple graph of Jesse Jones's rise. Jealous men — and some who were not jealous —called him "Jesse James," or "Ten Per Cent Jones." For Jesse left casualties along his march to power. His friends and his enemies differ in estimating their number. But long before he went to Washington as John Garner's nominee for RFC, † he had become a kind of generalization, operating behind a foggy corporate barrier, with little property in his own name.
Nearly all his friends, many of his relatives, hold managerial jobs, running rail roads, banks, insurance companies, hotels, newspapers, radio stations, lumber companies.
Typical such chum is Stewart McDonald, Federal Housing Administrator from September 1935 to November 1940. Crony McDonald, who has a nice eye in such matters, filled FHA with lovely redheaded stenographers and efficiency; made it a profitable organization and much more attractive. Two years ago Jones gave Mc Donald the chairmanship of Maryland Casualty Co. Few weeks ago he gave him an RFC office next his own as a $1-a-year special assistant, membership on the board of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.