Title: Our finest hour
Description: William L. Clayton was "the principal architect of American postwar foreign economic policy," according to Newsweek, while a New York Times editorial declared "Mr. Clayton had more to do than anyone else with shaping postwar economic policy for the rest of the world as well as for the United States. He was the driving force in a score of efforts to bring order out of chaos ... a symbol of American constructive energy and faith in the future." Yet his seminal contributions to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the Marshall Plan, and the Truman Doctrine have been largely ignored over the past four decades. This gap in the story of free-world cooperation is filled by Gregory Fossedal's vivid biography. Clayton grew up in the South, in a household troubled by a series of farming and business failures. He left school and family at the age of fifteen to work as a secretary to a cotton merchant.^

From that position developed his remarkable career as founder of the largest cotton brokerage firm in the world. With his fortune made by the 1920s, Clayton became an outspoken and influential activist for improved government fiscal policies. In 1944, he was appointed by President Roosevelt to direct foreign economic policy. His passionate goal was to bring into existence a worldwide free economy. After World War II, European recovery was not taken seriously enough to evoke real action in the State Department until Clayton's urgent appeal upon his return from Europe in May 1947. "Europe is slowly deteriorating," he wrote. "Millions of people in the cities are slowly starving ... Without further prompt and substantial aid from the United States, economic, social, and political disintegration will overwhelm Europe. He went on to conceive and press for the adoption of the Marshall Plan, which saved democratic capitalism in Europe after the war by promising U.S.^

assistance if the Europeans could devise a scheme of freemarket reform. A businessman-statesman genius, Clayton is a forgotten titan of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. He served as assistant secretary of state for economic affairs but became one of the few men to decline a presidential offer to serve as secretary of state, explaining to Truman that his wife was ill and desperately wanted him to leave Washington. "He felt he had contributed his talents to the nation's war effort and was content with his place in history," writes Fossedal. "In fact, he was one of the few men who served in Washington, D.C., in those critical years who did not write his memoirs or cultivate a biographer ... This book is meant to be Will Clayton's memoirs."
Subjects: American Economic assistance, Biography, Foreign relations, History, Marshall Plan, Statesmen, Clayton, will, 1880-1966, Economic assistance, american, United states, foreign relations, 1945-1961
Places: Europe, United States
People: Will Clayton (1880-1966)
Time periods: 1945-1953, 20th century