A Better Moral Loan

Tips had mortgaged his land and home to keep the factory running. His two millionaire partners had lost their money in the Depression and could not help. The glass trust had spent years cutting prices and blocking supply to drive him out. At that point, he had one remaining card: a personal acquaintance with the man Franklin Roosevelt had put in charge of the federal government’s emergency lending program. Whether that connection would save the plant was settled in a Washington meeting that Tips described forty years later as the moment he believed the factory was saved. It was not saved. But Jesse Jones of Houston had told him it would be.

The man Roosevelt appointed

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had become one of the New Deal’s most consequential agencies. Roosevelt appointed Jesse Jones of Houston to head it [@ev-0039, p. 25]. Jones was a Houston banker and commercial figure who understood what a loan meant and what a borrower faced. He was not an administrator assigned to a program from the outside; he was a businessman who had built things and financed them.

Tips already knew him. Smith’s account says Tips “was acquainted with Jesse Jones of Houston” [@ev-0039, p. 25]. Tips’ own account takes the acquaintance as given and says nothing about its origin. How the two men had met — through Texas civic networks, through the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, through some earlier connection — is not stated in either held account. What both accounts agree on is that when Tips came to Washington, Jones received him.

The meeting

Tips describes the encounter on page 19 of the marker material, in the 1973 address he gave at the historical marker dedication. He had gone to Washington “and got an appointment to see Mr. Jones to try to get a loan to save the Three Rivers Glass Company” [@ev-0041, p. 19].

Jones called his staff in. Tips’ transcription of what Jones said to them: “You know I would not do anything for a friend of mine from Texas that I would not do for anyone in the United States. All I will say is that if you make the loan to Mr. Tips, we would not have a better moral loan.” Then Jones said to Tips directly: “If you can convince these men that you can repay the money we will make the loan” [@ev-0041, p. 19].

This speech exists in the held record in one version: Tips’ own transcription, in a 1973 address delivered forty or more years after the meeting. Smith’s account of the episode does not quote the speech. Smith confirms the meeting and the acquaintance and writes that “Tips persuaded Jones to push through a loan to stimulate the plant” [@ev-0039, p. 25], but the words themselves — the endorsement, the standard Jones publicly invoked — are held only through Tips.

Tips spells the name “Jessie Jones” throughout the marker material; Smith writes “Jesse Jones.” No held evidence item supplies a middle initial.

The two conditions

The loan was approved subject to two requirements, which the RFC staff — not Jones — set. First, “an engineering firm approved by them must visit the factory and report to them.” Tips arranged it: “The engineers from Pennsylvania went to Three Rivers with me, surveyed the factory, and made a completely favorable report” [@ev-0041, p. 19]. Second, the loan company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which held the first mortgage on the factory, had to agree to let the Reconstruction Finance Corporation hold a first lien on the plant [@ev-0041, p. 19; @ev-0039, pp. 25-26].

Tips “returned to Three Rivers feeling that the Three Rivers Glass Factory was saved from the depression” [@ev-0041, p. 19].

The Tulsa condition was never satisfied. The Tulsa holder’s attorney — William Church of San Antonio — took the board’s five-hundred-dollar fee to Tulsa and instead arranged for Ball Brothers Glass Company to purchase the mortgage notes and foreclose. That story is documented in art-0017 and art-0018.

After the endorsement

Jesse Jones does not appear in any held document after the Washington meeting. His name is not in Hartford’s infringement files. He does not appear in the Ball Brothers foreclosure record. No RFC correspondence from the loan file is held. What he knew about Church’s actions, what he learned about the Tulsa outcome, or whether he took any position on what happened to the application — none of that is in any held document.

The 1971 letter Tips wrote to Thelma Lindholm refers to the RFC episode in a single sentence: “I went to Washington and got the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to approve a loan for a $100,000.00 for us” [@ev-0041, p. 44]. Jones is not named there. In that summary, after a year’s further distance, the agency has displaced the man.

What this expert does not hold about the meeting

When the Washington meeting occurred is not stated in any held document; Tips’ account gives no year and no month, and Smith places it in the Depression period without specifying. How Tips and Jones knew each other is not stated in either held account; Tips introduces the connection without context, and Smith summarizes it as an acquaintance without explaining it. What the RFC staff said to Tips after Jones left the room, whether they were persuaded by Jones’ endorsement or reached their own independent judgment, and what their formal approval looked like as a document — none of that is in any held account. Whether the loan was approved as a formal written commitment before Church’s betrayal or remained conditional at the point the Tulsa requirement was engaged is not stated in any held document. What Jones knew about the outcome — whether the RFC notified him that the Tulsa condition had not been met, whether he was aware of Church’s actions, or whether he ever learned that the loan did not close — is not in any held document. The RFC’s institutional file on the loan is not held: no application, no approval letter, no conditions as the agency wrote them, no engineering report, no denial, and no internal RFC correspondence about Three Rivers Glass Company is in this evidence base. Jones’ middle name or initial is not given in either held evidence item.