William Lockhart Clayton was an American business executive and government official.
Background
William Lockhart Clayton was born on February 7, 1880 in Tupelo, Mississippi, United States. He was the son of James Monroe Clayton, a cotton farmer, and Martha Fletcher Burdine. In 1886 the family moved to Jackson, where James Clayton had contracted to build a railroad bed.
Education
Hard times followed and William Clayton left school at the age of thirteen to work as a clerk.
Career
His remarkable proficiency in stenography attracted the attention of Jerome Hill, a cotton merchant from St. Louis, and Clayton went there as Hill's private secretary. In 1896 he moved to New York City to work for the American Cotton Company, rising to the position of assistant general manager by 1904. On August 1, 1904, Clayton joined his brother-in-law, Frank Anderson, and Anderson's brother, Monroe, in founding Anderson, Clayton and Company, a cotton marketing firm located in Oklahoma City. In 1905 Clayton's brother, Benjamin, also became a partner. The company's headquarters were moved to Houston in 1916 in order to take advantage of the port facilities there. In the next fifteen years the company grew to be the largest cotton-trading enterprise in the world, with branches in several major United States cities and with a number of foreign subsidiaries. America's dominant financial position after World War I provided the capital that Anderson, Clayton and Company needed for expansion into markets formerly controlled by European cotton brokers. By World War II the company was handling 15 percent of the United States cotton crop, and Clayton, who had become chairman of the board in 1920, was acknowledged as one of the country's most successful business leaders. Clayton's first government service came in 1918 as a member of the Cotton Distribution Committee, part of the War Industries Board, headed by Bernard Baruch. A lifelong Democrat, Clayton remained out of public life in the 1920's and 1930's. In 1934 and 1935 he was associated with the anti-New Deal Liberty League because of his opposition to New Deal agricultural policies, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull's liberal international trade policy revived Clayton's loyalty to the Roosevelt administration, and he publicly supported Roosevelt's reelection in 1936. In October 1940 Clayton reentered government service as an official of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation with the title of deputy federal loan administrator, and also as a vice-president of the Export-Import Bank. Working under his good friend and fellow Texan Jesse Jones, Clayton was responsible for overseas procurement of materials connected with strategic defense needs. He was particularly effective in his work with the United States Commercial Company, which was entrusted with the task of purchasing large quantities of critical materials, thus denying these goods to the Germans. An administrative shuffle in 1942 brought Clayton to the post of assistant secretary of commerce, although his responsibilities remained much the same. In the summer of 1943 he was placed under the authority of Vice-President Henry Wallace, who headed the Board of Economic Warfare. Unable to get along with Wallace, Clayton resigned in January 1944. In February 1944, upon the urging of Bernard Baruch, Clayton was named Surplus War Property Administrator under the direction of James F. Byrnes and the Office of War Mobilization. Here Clayton had final authority over the sale and disposal of surplus war plants, equipment, and food. This was a controversial post because of the special interests involved, and Clayton resigned on December 1, 1944, after a dispute with congressional leaders over the nature of agency administration. On December 20 the Senate confirmed Clayton as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs. Over the next three years as assistant and, in 1946, undersecretary of state, Clayton made valuable contributions as the most significant economic foreign-policy maker in the Truman administration. At the Mexico City Conference in February 1945, Clayton promoted equal access to trade and raw materials, lower tariffs, and the elimination of economic nationalism. He struck a theme that formed the basis of his economic negotiations elsewhere: that steps should be taken whenever and wherever possible to produce the greatest degree of free trade among nations. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Clayton was head of the Reparations Committee and worked out a compromise formula with the Soviet delegates concerning the value of dismantled German industrial facilities to which the USSR would be entitled. His postwar travels in Europe convinced Clayton that the economic recovery of America's wartime allies could be accomplished only with a large amount of American aid. To this end he worked hard to induce Congress to appropriate substantial funds for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1945 and 1946. He was also the principal United States negotiator in an important Anglo-American trade agreement, signed in December 1945, in which the British received a $3. 75 billion loan at 2 percent interest. In return the British accepted a set of trade principles designed to weaken imperial preference and other forms of trade discrimination and to make possible freer trade with the United States. Clayton's effective lobbying with Congress was of great importance in securing ratification of the agreement in 1946. In early 1947, while in Europe participating in the General Agreement for Trade and Tariffs (GATT) negotiations, Clayton was shocked at the severity of the economic crisis on the Continent. Believing that the free-world economy was in jeopardy because of the preponderant strength of the American economy, Clayton concluded that the United States was obliged to both restore international economic balance and help preserve democracy in the free world. He strongly supported the aid to Greece and Turkey that comprised the Truman Doctrine, and in late May, returning from another trip to Europe, he wrote a memorandum urging that the United States transfer to Europe surplus goods and services in the amount of $6 million to $7 million over a three-year period. Priority would be given to essential items such as coal, food, and cotton, and their use would be based on a plan worked out by the Europeans themselves. This memorandum found its way to Charles E. Bohlen, the State Department official who drafted Secretary of State George C. Marshall's famous speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, in which he outlined what became known as the Marshall Plan. For this reason, some historians have credited Clayton with being the "father of the Marshall Plan, " although others point out that Marshall's speech incorporated not only Clayton's memorandum, but also one by George Kennan of the State Department's Policy Planning Committee, as well as some ideas of Dean Acheson. At any rate, Clayton was sent to Britain and France to explain the new direction of American foreign policy; he was later involved in the planning talks held in Paris in August. There he made a key concession to the French regarding international control of Ruhr coal, coke, and steel production. Clayton's last major service for the State Department was his participation in the November 1947 Havana Conference to establish the International Trade Organization (ITO), a multilateral body dedicated to the elimination of international trade barriers. Although the goal was important to Clayton, the agreement worked out in Havana was unacceptable to Congress, which felt that the free-trade character of the ITO had been too greatly diluted by political compromises. In late 1948 Clayton returned to Houston and Anderson, Clayton and Company, where he remained until 1961, overseeing the company's diversification into food processing, manufacturing, and insurance. He became involved with the Atlantic Union, an organization devoted to the creation of a much more closely knit free world centered around the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. In this forum Clayton stressed the importance of economic cooperation in the struggle against Communism, a struggle he felt was primarily economic rather than military. He remained active in these endeavors until shortly before his death in Houston. But his fierce adherence to the principles of free trade and economic cooperation among the Western allies, and his effectiveness as both an international negotiator and an administration lobbyist with Congress, earned him an important place in the making of postwar foreign policy.