Real estate developer

Jones, Jesse Holman (1874-1956), American financier, builder, and public official who played an important role in the management and disbursement of government funds during the Great Depression of the United States. Born in Robertson County, Tennessee, Jones was educated in the public schools in Tennessee and Texas.

In 1894 he entered the lumber business in Dallas, Texas, but four years later he left Dallas to establish himself in Houston. In 1902 he organized the South Texas Lumber Company, which he continued to operate for many years. During the so-called money panic of 1907, Jones organized the Bankers’ Mortgage Company in Houston to rescue and reorganize several unstable banks.

In 1908 Jones entered the construction business in Houston and began erecting buildings in the city’s downtown area. At one time people said that he had single-handedly created the skyline of Houston with his various hotels and business buildings.

By 1930 he was credited with owning more office buildings—in Houston, New York City, Saint Louis, Dallas, Fort Worth, and other cities—than any one man had ever owned. He organized the National Bank of Commerce in Houston in 1912 and helped lead the construction of the 50-mile ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico that opened in 1914, making Houston a seaport.

In 1917 Jones was appointed director general of military relief for the American Red Cross, and with banker Henry P. Davison he completely rearranged the organization. At the end of World War I (1914-1918), he and Davison organized the League of Red Cross Societies of the World (which later became the International Federation of the Red Cross).

In 1920 Jones returned to Houston, and in 1926 he purchased the Houston Chronicle and became the newspaper’s publisher. Active in Democratic politics, he vied for the 1928 presidential nomination and received the support of several states, including his own state of Texas.

When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was organized in 1932 to provide financial institutions and companies with emergency funding, President Herbert C. Hoover appointed Jones one of its five directors. The following year, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, Jones assumed the chairmanship of the organization.

In 1940 Congress passed special legislation so that Jones might serve simultaneously as administrator of the Federal Loan Agency and as a member of the cabinet, and it was under this statute that he served as secretary of commerce from 1940 to 1945.

Five years before his death Jones published Fifty Billion Dollars (1951), an account of his disbursement of public money during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945).