fixture in the booming port city for three decades. He modestly lived in
small hotel rooms his entire life, never marrying and fastidiously saving
his money.
With the Houston Ship Channel’s completion in 1914, the port of
Houston became one of America’s busiest hubs, and the balance of power
in cotton trading shifted to the United States after World War I. European
firms, handicapped by weakened markets, perilous shipping, and lack of
warehousing, ceded power to cotton trading centers like Houston, and
firms like Anderson, Clayton flourished. The partnership not only
weathered the war, but was positioned for meteoric growth in the roaring
1920s. In the midst of unbridled success, Frank Anderson succumbed to
appendicitis in 1924 (at age fifty-six), a reminder of the fragile existence
every human clung to in the era before antibiotics, highlighting the
importance of medicine in Monroe’s mind.
In 1936, Monroe Anderson, his health declining, established a
foundation while his privately held firm was worth roughly $100 million.
The hotel-bound Anderson struggled with kidney and heart disease, even
though he had never smoked or drank, and was piously frugal.^2 In 1938, he
suffered a stroke, and only then moved into a house south of town near the
Rice University campus where he would live out the remaining months of
his life until passing away in 1939, aged sixty-six. Having industriously
built the largest cotton trading firm in the world, and scrupulously saving
and investing, his $20 million estate was positioned to make a difference.
The savvy men who were named the executors of his foundation knew that
small gifts spread across many well-deserving charities would be
meaningful, but perhaps not impactful on a grand scale. What they
accomplished over the next few decades is nothing short of astonishing.
The reader may wonder why Monroe’s name is not more familiar until
they consider his full name: Monroe Dunaway Anderson, from which
came the foundation commonly known as M.D. Anderson.
In 1941, the Internal Revenue Service recognized the legality of the
M.D. Anderson Foundation (MDAF), and in the same year, the Texas
legislature passed a bill authorizing the establishment of a state-sponsored
cancer hospital. The first significant distribution of the MDAF was a
$500,000 matching gift for the establishment of one of the first dedicated
cancer hospitals in the world, with the stipulation that the hospital be built
in Houston. For more than a decade the hospital operated from the Oaks,