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Jesse Jones with his
principal architect, A.C. Finn
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Mr. Jones’s success with the
Ship Channel caught President Woodrow Wilson’s attention. President
Wilson offered him ambassadorships and cabinet positions, but Mr.
Jones turned the president down so he could continue to build his
businesses and his city. However, World War I changed his mind. When
President Wilson asked Mr. Jones to become director general of military
relief for the American Red Cross, he accepted at once and delegated
management of his businesses and buildings to his colleague Fred Heyne.
Within months, Mr. Jones had recruited nurses and doctors for the
battlefields, organized hospitals, canteens and ambulance networks
throughout Europe, and established rehabilitation centers for the
wounded. The Red Cross called him “big brother to 4 million
men in khaki.” He was also an early advocate for women’s
rights and lobbied President Wilson to give Army nurses military rank
and authority.
After the war, Mr. Jones accompanied the president to the Paris Peace
Conference and helped reorganize the Red Cross from a loosely knit
group of local societies into the permanent international relief agency
it is today. He wrote to Mr. Heyne from Paris, “I am very
sorry not to be home during this opportune time, for no doubt I could
accomplish a good deal if I could bring myself to believe that my
real duty did not lie here. The situation of the world is most alarming
and chaotic, and I do not know how it is going to be adjusted. Surely
there can be no peace unless people have the necessities of life—food
and clothes.”
After the peace treaties were signed, Mr. Jones returned to Houston,
embarked on the most ambitious phase of his building career and married
Mary Gibbs Jones in 1920. Mary Gibbs, a doctor’s daughter, was
born on April 29, 1872, in Mexia, Texas, and grew up with nine brothers
and sisters in a home filled with music and books. With her family’s
encouragement, she attended Methodist College in Waco, Texas, at a
time when few women went to college or finished high school. Mary’s
exposure to literature, music, education and other cultures through
extensive travel kindled an interest in learning and the arts that
would flourish throughout her life. While Mr. Jones was building in
midtown Manhattan and filling up Houston’s Main Street with
the city’s tallest buildings, its most ornate movie palaces
and its grandest hotels, the couple began making substantial donations
to colleges, hospitals, orphanages, museums and other civic institutions.
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