William Rhodes Davis

William Rhodes Davis (February 10, 1889 – August 1, 1941) was a United States businessman whose oil interests involved him in furthering the strategic interests of Nazi Germany.

Davis was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 10, 1889, into a family of limited means. His father was a policeman. He claimed to be a relative of Cecil Rhodes on his mother's side and of Jefferson Davis on his father's side, assertions which remain unproven. He held menial positions on railroad trains and eventually became a locomotive engineer.

His career in the oil industry began in 1913 when he organized a small company in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and became a "wildcatter". He volunteered for the U.S. Army during World War I and was discharged as a second lieutenant in 1920. He saw action in France and later claimed to have been wounded, though the only injuries he received occurred when he jumped from a moving train. He worked as an oil broker in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and late in the 1920s was party to a complicated conflict between several independent oilmen and Standard Oil that revolved around settling thousands of colonists on land in Peru.

In 1933 he built an oil refinery in Hamburg, Germany, and developed business interests for a short time in England and somewhat longer in Germany. He served as the principal negotiator of the arrangement that allowed Germany and Italy to build up their oil reserves in the years before World War II using expropriated Mexican oil, until the British blockade put an end to the enterprise. "He is said", according to the New York Times, to have won the arrangement thanks to an introduction to Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a "powerful Mexican labor leader", provided by his longtime friend John L. Lewis, head of the CIO.

He was involved in many legal battles in the course of his career. In one instance, a British judge called him "an unscrupulous and ruthless financier" and said "I do not accept him as a witness of truth."

In 1940, Davis arranged for multiple contributions, evading the restrictions of the Hatch Act, to finance the October 23 radio address in which John L. Lewis attacked FDR and backed Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, all without Willkie's knowledge. The following spring, Willkie heard Davis had disparaged him and inquired as to the truth of what he had heard. To Davis' reply he wrote: "I have your very impertinent letter. I had written as one gentleman to another concerning a statement that had been attributed to you. Your replies are merely cheap inferences."

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