William Lockhart Clayton (February 7, 1880 – February 8, 1966) 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 State Cordell 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 (Burdine) 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 (including his brother-in-law Monroe Dunaway Anderson) 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.
Government service
Clayton entered government service in World War I as a member of the Cotton Distribution Committee of the War Industries Board. Although he was a Democrat, he opposed the New Deal agricultural policies of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the New Deal's free trade policies led him to support Roosevelt in the 1936 election.
In 1940, Clayton returned to government service in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, then moved to the Export-Import Bank, where he worked to procure strategic materials for the United States and to deny them to Nazi Germany. After a series of administrative shuffles, Clayton found himself working under Vice President Henry A. Wallace. Disagreements between them led Clayton to resign in January 1944, only to return to government service a month later as Surplus War Property Administrator under James F. Byrnes in the Office of War Mobilization.
At the end of 1944, Clayton was named the first Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, a post that allowed him to promote the free trade policies that he believed in. He was a member of the Interim Committee appointed to advise Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman on problems expected to arise from the development of the atomic bomb and he was an economic advisor to Truman at the Potsdam Conference.