Background
John Marvin was born on February 26, 1882 near Valley View, Texas, United States, the fourth of eleven children of Horace K. Jones, a farmer, and Theodocia ("Docia") Gaston Hawkins.
John Marvin was born on February 26, 1882 near Valley View, Texas, United States, the fourth of eleven children of Horace K. Jones, a farmer, and Theodocia ("Docia") Gaston Hawkins.
Jones finished the curriculum of the local public school of Texas.
He sought additional education and graduated in 1905 from South-western University, a small Methodist school at Georgetown, Texas, where he was a member of the debate and baseball teams. He declined a scholarship from Vanderbilt University for graduate study in English and registered at the University of Texas School of Law. Excelling in oratory, he graduated in 1908.
After school Jones farmed briefly in partnership with his brother Delbert and then taught school for a year.
Dissatisfied with both farming and teaching, he studied law and was admitted to the Texas bar. Jones established his law practice in Amarillo, a relatively new town of fewer than 10, 000 in the center of the rapidly developing Panhandle section of northwestern Texas. He soon secured a retainer from one of the largest ranches in the area and eventually specialized in representing farmers and ranchers in damage suits against railroads. His practice was lucrative, but Jones wanted a political career and used his travels to regional county courthouses to solicit political support.
In his first campaign he defeated ten-term incumbent John Hall Stephens and two other rivals in the 1916 Democratic primary for the Thirteenth Congressional District. Given the lack of significant Republican opposition, the primary victory was tantamount to election. During the campaign, for reasons never fully explained, he stopped using his first name; henceforth he was Marvin Jones.
In the House of Representatives, Jones quickly became a protégé of John Nance Garner and established a close friendship with Sam Rayburn, a law school acquaintance. His first vote was cast in support of President Woodrow Wilson's war resolution in April 1917; later he joined the United States Army and served briefly as an enlisted man at Fort Polk, North Carolina.
Increasingly his attention turned to agriculture. Because his sprawling West Texas district was so agriculturally diverse, ranging from cattle and wheat in the northwest to cotton in the southeast, Jones became an expert on a variety of farm commodities. When the Democrats organized the House in 1931, he succeeded to the chairmanship of the powerful House Agricultural Committee. Following the victory of fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, Jones anticipated legislative actions aimed at improving agricultural conditions. He was not disappointed. Even before taking office, Roosevelt asked Jones and Professor William I. Myers of Cornell University to begin drafting an executive order (no. 6084, March 27, 1933) that would consolidate all farm credit agencies into one new organization, the Farm Credit Administration.
On April 9, 1940, Roosevelt appointed Jones a judge of the United States Court of Claims with the proviso that he remain in the House and continue to shepherd agricultural matters until after the fall elections. Consequently, Jones did not join the court until January 1941. He remained on it until early 1943 when, again at Roosevelt's request, he took a leave of absence to become agricultural adviser to James F. Byrnes, director of the newly created Office of Economic Stabilization.
One of Jones's initial assignments was to serve as president of the first International Conference on Food and Agriculture held at Hot Springs, Virginia, May 18-June 3, 1943. Representatives from forty-four countries attended. One result of the conference was a resolution calling for the establishment of a permanent world food organization. This goal was reached in 1945 when the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) was formed. When Jones returned from the Hot Springs Conference in 1943, he received a call from Roosevelt asking that he become war food administrator, a position left vacant by the resignation of Chester Davis. Fearing the job was political suicide, Jones consented only after receiving assurances that his judicial leave of absence would be continued. He was sworn in on June 29, 1943. Jones had little enthusiasm for administrative details and instead devoted much of his efforts to public relations campaigns to stimulate the production and conservation of food. He sought to resign after a year, but Roosevelt insisted that he remain for the duration of the war.
On May 22, 1945, shortly after Roosevelt's death and the end of the war in Europe, Jones sent his resignation to President Harry S. Truman and returned to the court on July 1. Two years later President Truman named him chief justice of the Court of Claims, a position he held from July 10, 1947, until his retirement on July 14, 1964. Even then, though well into his eighties, Jones remained remarkably active, filling temporary vacancies on various courts of appeal across the nation and working on his memoirs. He died in Amarillo shortly after his ninety-fourth birthday.
Jones supported the Prohibition and women's suffrage amendments and was generally a loyal Wilsonian Democrat.
During the 1920's, he sought lower transportation rates, expanded rural credit, and the development of export markets for surplus production, but he displayed little enthusiasm for the McNary-Haugen Farm Bill because he feared it would lower the price of cotton. Jones believed in President Herbert Hoover's unwillingness to support government aid for depression-stricken farmers.
At times Jones clashed with Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and those he referred to as the "bright boys" of the New Deal, but generally his policy was to support "the man on the other end of the avenue. "
By nature Jones was not a highly partisan individual. He was soft-spoken and mild-mannered. Besides, he largely ignored the social aspects of Washington life, preferring to read a book or to take a quiet walk or an occasional fishing trip.
Jones was unmarried.