Enduring Legacy: The M. D. Anderson Foundation and the Texas Medical Center

Chapter 3. The Legal Team: Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman & Bates

Chapter 3 The Legal Team Fulbright, Crooker, Freeman & Bates While the city of Houston provided the setting in which the cotton firm Anderson, Clayton & Company achieved global prominence and earned Monroe D. Anderson a sizable fortune, the law firm known for most of its history as Fulbright & Jaworski LLP played a key role as the company ’s legal advisor. In time, these attorneys also had a central, contributing part in both creating Monroe Anderson’s foundation in 1936 and also serving as its primary trustees ever since. The law firm, established originally as Fulbright and Crooker in 1919 by Rufus Clarence Fulbright and John H. Crooker, was known as Fulbright, Crooker, and Freeman by 1936. It specialized in transportation issues and had as one of its earliest major clients the expanding cotton concern of Anderson, Clayton & Company. In order to fully understand the integral part the firm had in creating the M. D. Anderson Foundation and, later, the Texas Medical Center, it is useful to look briefly at the lawyers who formed the original firm and those who later established the Anderson Foundation . Generally, they came from fairly humble backgrounds and grew to maturity in an environment of stark reality that demanded hard work, developed strong character, and shaped them as young men to become the community leaders of their adulthood. Coincidentally, the Fulbright family had once resided in Jackson, Tennessee, also the home of Frank Anderson and his brother Monroe . But like many folks from “back east,” in 1875 Rufus T. Fulbright and his wife, Bertie (Welborn) Fulbright, moved to Texas to seek a new and better life. They settled in the northeast Texas community of New 49 THE LEGAL TEAM Boston in Bowie County, just west of Texarkana and south of the Red River. Here, six years later, on October 6, 1881, their son Rufus Clarence Fulbright was born. Clarence grew up roaming the forested hills of this ruralTexas community, attended Baylor University in Waco, and graduated in 1902 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. After teaching school for a short time, he returned to Baylor and earned a master’s degree in philosophy and then in 1906 was accepted at the University of Chicago Law School.1 During the law school’s summer break of 1908, Clarence Fulbright visited Houston looking for employment opportunities in anticipation of his graduation the following year. The visit proved fruitful in that a firm where one of his Baylor classmates was employed, Andrews, Ball, and Streetman, offered him a job. During this visit he also became acquainted with John H. Freeman, who at the time worked at Stewart Abstract & Title Company. The two hit it off as friends, and when Freeman expressed his interest in the legal profession, Fulbright convinced him that he ought to attend the University of Chicago Law School. Freeman enrolled for classes that fall as Fulbright began his final year. Following his graduation in 1909, Clarence Fulbright returned to Houston to begin working at Andrews, Ball, and Streetman, where he took advantage of the firm’s extensive railroad clientele—the firm had been representing railroads since 1902—to learn all he could about the railroad business . Fulbright quickly developed an expertise in commerce and rail shipping. This knowledge would serve him well during the 1920s and 1930s as railroads continued to thrive but were subjected to increased regulation from the Interstate Commerce Commission.2 In 1916 Fulbright’s career began to take a new turn when the cotton firm Anderson, Clayton & Company moved its headquarters to Houston. World War I had begun two years earlier, and the US cotton industry was suffering as the strain on European nations increased. Because European customers could no longer afford to finance the purchase and storage of cotton from the United States, US firms had to change the way they conducted business. Anderson, Clayton saw this as an opportunity to expand its business, but the firm needed access to oceangoing transportation and warehouse space in which to store cotton. They chose Houston over Galveston as the best place to relocate their business and construct warehouses to store cotton until it was 50 CHAPTER 3 needed by textile mills. Houston was already known as a railroad center, and the ease with which cotton could be shipped from growers around the country appealed to the firm. But, with each passing year, fluctuating railroad rates became an area of growing concern. As mentioned...