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  e saved the nation from complete financial collapse and at one point was considered to be the most powerful person in the country, next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet, Jesse Holman Jones has never been properly recognized in the annals of American history.
HoustonPBS paints a vivid portrait of this remarkable man who was to become one of the main architects of modern America. Narrated by Walter Cronkite, Brother, Can You Spare A Billion? The Story Of Jesse H. Jones, features a dynamic mix of historical film footage, information uncovered in the Jones archives and interviews with John Kenneth Galbraith, John Morton Blum and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Produced and directed by Boston filmmaker Eric Stange and co-written with executive producer Steven Fenberg, this multi-award winning one-hour documentary has aired on PBS stations across the United States.
Narrator Walter Cronkite says of Jones, "He's a forgotten hero from one of the most important chapters in our nation's history."
In the 1930s, America came closer to being torn apart than it had at any time in its history since the Civil War. The ravages of the Great Depression had not only shattered people's trust in America's institutions, it had shaken their faith in the very ideals that buttress the American dream.
That America not only survived the decade, but came out of it stronger is in great part due to the efforts of two men. One of them, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has become a national icon; the other, Jesse H. Jones, has been all but forgotten. But scholars are starting to realize that if Roosevelt can be credited with saving the country's political system, then Jones can be credited with saving its economic one. He may, in fact, be the man who rescued capitalism.
 Jones salvaged the American economy by entwining government and business in a way never before tried in the United States. As head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), a central pillar of Roosevelt's New Deal, Jones directed billions of dollars toward needy banks, industries, farmers and citizens. He had almost complete autonomy in deciding where the government's money should go and he parceled it out not as charity, but as an investment by America in its people. Under Jones, the RFC did not just make grants or loans, it bought stock in struggling enterprises, giving the government a voice in how those enterprises were run. During the bleakest years of the Depression, Jones was arguably the most powerful man in the world financial community. He was, in the words of observers at the time, nothing less than a "fourth branch of government."
According to executive producer Steven Fenberg, "Brother, Can You Spare A Billion? is a reminder of just how important Jesse Jones was in creating the world in which we live, and how, without men such as him, that world could easily have been lost."
Early in life, Jones exhibited the ambition that would drive his career. He was only 14 when his father, a successful tobacco grower in central Tennessee, put him in charge of running the family's curing shed. In 1894, Jones headed to Texas to run a lumberyard owned by his uncle. When his uncle died four years later, Jones became executor of his estate, a move that at age 24 brought him to Houston and his destiny.
In Houston, Jones -- an imposing figure at 6 feet 2 inches and 200 plus pounds -- made an immediate impact. Through the creative use of credit, he established his own chain of lumberyards, then expanded into building houses and, eventually, the skyscrapers that gave Houston a skyline unprecedented in Texas and the South. He also became a media power through his ownership of the city's major newspaper, the Houston Chronicle. A driving force in turning Houston from a quiet town into the bustling metropolis that would one day be America's fourth largest city, Jones quickly gained regional and national attention for his many ventures.
 One of the most striking was the 1914 dredging of the Houston Ship Channel. A project longer than the Panama Canal, the ship channel internationalized Houston by connecting the city to the sea. At the same time, it gave a much-needed economic boost to the entire South, which was still struggling with the poverty that had lingered since the Civil War.
Such successes caught the attention of President Woodrow Wilson, who saw in Jones a man with a zeal to equal his own. Wilson, who became something of a mentor to Jones, tried to lure his fellow Southerner into public service. Jones, though, turned down ambassadorships and cabinet positions, preferring the challenges of business to those of politics. But in 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, he changed his mind and agreed to head military relief for the American Red Cross. He recruited nurses and doctors and organized ambulance services, canteens and hospitals to serve the wounded on European battlefields. After the war, he transformed the Red Cross from a loose coalition of independent societies into the international relief agency it is today. It was quintessential Jesse Jones.
Upon his return to Houston, Jones began to enlarge his financial empire, expanding in the 1920s out from Houston to include enterprises in Dallas, Fort Worth and New York. As the nation sank into the Great Depression, it became apparent that two failing Houston banks were about to bring down all the others in the region. Jones called the city's leading businessmen to his office to work out a rescue plan. As a result of his leadership, no banks in Houston failed during the Great Depression. His work did not go unnoticed.
A man unashamed to make money, he was also a firm believer in the creative use of capitalism. Brother, Can You Spare A Billion? shows how Jones used his business acumen to both enrich himself and enhance the common good. Indeed, his status as a successful entrepreneur may have been what made it possible for him to run the RFC as forcefully as he did.
 It was during his time at the RFC that Jones made his most indelible imprint on America. Besides saving the economy during the Depression, Jones led the country's move into wartime. Using his dual position of secretary of commerce and chairman of the RFC, Jones mobilized industry to make the United States' "arsenal of democracy" a reality. By the time he left federal service in 1945, forced out by a bitter rivalry with Roosevelt's vice president, Henry Wallace, he had forever altered the way business and government dealt with each other.
When Jones returned to Houston he was 71, but far from ready to retire. He started back where he had left off when he headed to Washington in 1932, making deals, doubling and tripling the size of buildings he had erected decades before, entering the new world of television with KTRK-TV and, equally important, establishing scholarships and charitable programs to give others opportunities to excel. One year before his death in 1956, Houston, a town of 40,000 when Jones arrived, passed the one million mark in population. When Jones died, he had left a mark matched by only a select few in America's history.
Brother, Can You Spare A Billion? The Story Of Jesse H. Jones is produced by HoustonPBS and underwritten by Houston Endowment Inc. Brother, Can You Spare A Billion? The Story Of Jesse H. Jones has earned a regional Emmy award, a CINE Golden Eagle (recognizing it for creative and technical merit), a Golden Apple award (approving it for classroom and corporate use) and a gold award from WorldFest Houston (for best documentary).
For more information, visit the Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? web site at www.pbs.org/jessejones.
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