ABSTRACT

One of the early US free trade proponents was William Lockhart Clayton, a successful businessman who headed the world’s largest cotton brokerage firm with subsidiaries around the world. In 1936, Clayton had appeared on the cover of Time magazine as ‘the epitome of the new American capitalist who operated on a global scale’. Clayton was a great believer in free trade because his business was based on international trade:2

To his critics, Clayton was a corporate reactionary whose brutal speculative tactics and endorsement of unbridled competition helped bring ruin upon the cotton farmer. As a world trader, he came under attack for continuing to sell to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan long after the character of those regimes became obvious.3