William Lockhart "Will" Clayton was an American business leader and government official. Much of his business career centered on cotton trading. He and his three brothers-in-law formed a partnership that grew into the Anderson, Clayton and Company, at one time the world's largest cotton trading company. Politically aligned with the Democratic Party, he opposed some of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's agricultural policies. He repudiated his opposition after Roosevelt's Secretary of StateCordell Hull worked for a reciprocal trade agreement. Returning to government service in 1940, Clayton first Later in World War II, he took on a number of roles in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. He first served as deputy to the coordinator of inter-American affairs. For the next four years he held a variety of high-level positions with the Export-Import Bank, the Department of Commerce, and wartime agencies. He served as assistant, and then as deputy Secretary of State for economic affairs from December 1944 to October 1947, where he was primarily concerned with working on the Marshall Plan. He returned to Houston and private life in late 1947, though he continued to serve the government as a participant and contributor to various international conferences on world trade and other economic issues.
Early life and career
Born near Tupelo, Mississippi to James Monroe and Martha Fletcher Clayton, Will Clayton moved with his family in 1886, to Jackson, Tennessee, where he completed seven grades of public school. Leaving school at age 13, he became an expert stenographer, which earned him a job as private secretary to Jerome Hall, a Saint Louis cotton merchant. In 1896, Clayton went to work for the American Cotton Company in New York City, becoming an assistant general manager in 1904. He left the company later that year to join with two other partners in starting Anderson, Clayton and Company, a cotton marketing firm based in Oklahoma City. In 1916, the firm moved its headquarters to Houston, Texas, where it grew to be the world's largest cotton-trading enterprise.
Truman appointed Clayton as the first Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, a post Clayton held for 1946-47. In this role, Clayton witnessed the weakness of U.S. allies and their susceptibility to falling under the domination of the Soviet Union. He urged greater U.S. engagement with the world to halt the spread of communism. In a March 5 memo, Clayton wrote a fifteen-point manifesto for U.S. global leadership, in which he argued:
The reins of world leadership are fast slipping from Britain's competent, but now very weak hands. These reins will be picked up either by the United States or by Russia. If by Russia, there will almost certainly be a war in the next decade or so, with the odds against us. If by the United States, war can almost certainly be prevented.
Clayton strongly supported American economic aid to rebuild Europe after World War II and had a major role in shaping the Marshall Plan in 1947. After returning from a meeting at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe United Nations Economic Commission for Europe||ECE in Geneva in May, Clayton wrote a memo to George Marshall, entitled "The European Crisis," in which he argued that U.S. economic aid was urgently needed to prevent the collapse of Europe. In this memo, he warned that "without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe." Charles Bohlen, when drafting the announcement of the Marshall Plan, drew heavily from Clayton's memo. In 1948, he returned to his private business in Houston, but remained active in efforts to promote free trade and economic cooperation between the United States and its allies during the Cold War. Clayton was also an early advocate of improved relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, In 1963, when Clayton was in his eighties, President John F. Kennedy asked him to work on the national export expansion program and the limited nuclear test ban treaty. The William L. Clayton Professorship of International Economics at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a part of the Johns Hopkins University, is named for him.
Personal and family life
Clayton married Susan Vaughn Clayton in Clinton, Kentucky on August 14, 1902. They had one son and four daughters. The son died in infancy, but the daughters survived their parents. William Clayton died in Houston, Texas February 8, 1966, after a short illness, and is buried there in Glenwood Cemetery.
Clayton is memorialized by the William L. Clayton Professorship on International Economics at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, a part of Johns Hopkins University located in Washington, D.C, The William L. Clayton Professorship of International Economic Affairs at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a part of Tufts University, and the Will Clayton Fellowship in International Economics at the James Baker Institute, a part of Rice University. Clayton and his associates in the cotton trade are memorialized on a marker in the M.D. Anderson Memorial Plaza in Jackson, Tennessee.
