Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,995

This is the grave of Howard Smith.

Born in 1883 in Broad Run, Virginia, Smith grew up in the area, attended the local schools, and graduated from high school in 1901. He went to the University of Virginia and received a Bachelor of Law degree in 1903 and then passed the bar the next year. He moved to Alexandria and became a known Democratic figure and lawyer in northern Virginia. He rose in local politics. The federal government hired him in World War I to be assistant general counsel for the Federal Alien Property Custodian, which basically meant figuring out what to do with property seized from the German government and others declared enemies of the United States. He then rose in the legal world in the area, holding increasingly important though ultimately minor positions and then become a judge in one of Virginia’s circuit courts in 1929. He was getting rich too–going into banking, farming, and a bunch of other stuff.

In 1930, Smith decided to run for Congress. He won–it was a Democratic year and Virginia was a Democratic state. But he sucked. He was one of the Democrats who initially supported much of the New Deal but soon came to believe it filled with awful liberals and commies and race-integrators. And in fact, Smith became a notorious white supremacist in Congress. He was hardly the only one of course–this body was completely dominated by white men of his generation who had the ideas of his generation–but his power and commitment to white supremacy made him an extra special fellow.

So the Tennessee Valley Authority? OK, that developed the South, so sure, fine. But once the New Dealers starting pushing through bills such as the National Labor Relations Act and created divisions within the agencies such as the Federal Writers Project, Smith began to organize opposition among southern Democrats to the entire New Deal. Working with northern Republicans, he was able to do this pretty effectively. There was no real meaningful New Deal legislation after 1938’s Fair Labor Standards Act and that barely passed as is. Smith is a big reason why. The Democratic coalition was broad and fragile. Smith led investigations into the NLRB being a bunch of commies. In that, he had an ally in American Federation of Labor head William Green, because much of the early NLRB activity was in working out who would represent workers between AFL and CIO unions and the agency’s directors did tend to support the CIO, so Green wanted the entire agency undermined if it wasn’t going to help AFL-style unionism. So a marriage of connivence took place between Green and Smith. Gross.

Smith decided he should take on communism. For him, communism was anything remotely liberal, never mind membership in the Communist Party. But there were enough actual members of the Communist Party for him to have a nice juicy target for his hate. So he pushed forward the Smith Act of 1940, which requires aliens to register with the government, set penalties for those advocating the overthrow of the American government (easily defined as many things that were not in fact advocating said violent overthrow), and other horrible provisions. It was challenged almost immediately and the worst parts of this law were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1957, but not until over 200 leftists had been prosecuted under its provisions.

In 1954, Smith became chairman of the House Rules Committee. That meant he had a tremendous amount of power to stop the bills he didn’t want from getting a hearing. The only thing Smith hated more than the commies were Black people and since anyone who advocated for civil rights was a communist, it was easy for him to combine these two issues into one great hate. So he did whatever he could to stop these bills. Of course, he gladly signed the Southern Manifesto of southern legislators in revolt over the growing civil rights movement. During the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Smith stated, “The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the whole people of the South.” It got so bad that Sam Rayburn–no progressive on race–tried to reduce Smith’s power in 1961, but the gambit didn’t work. Smith tried to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from coming to the floor, but Rayburn was able to institute a rule that bills had to be considered within 21 days and that was a defeat for Smith.

Now, the question about Smith always comes down to his work to include women in the Civil Rights Act. There’s what I think is a broken debate about this–did he include women in the CRA because the idea of equal rights for women was so ridiculous that it would kill the bill and preserve white supremacy or did he really believe in women’s equality? The answer is that it’s probably both and there’s no great contradiction here. He did support women’s rights, at least in a first wave feminism type of way. And he also knew that many of his colleagues thought that women’s rights were ridiculous and it was a great tool to try and kill the bill. But if there was going to be a Civil Rights Act, then it was going to include women too. Which is of course exactly what happened. White women have long been the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action plans. Smith worked closely with Alice Paul here–Paul was a pretty loathsome person and basically had the same politics as Howard Smith, good on women’s rights, atrocious on every other issue to the point that women such as Frances Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt refused to get behind the Equal Rights Amendment until very late in their lives. In any case, in our attempts to evaluate the past, we need to get off trying to place someone on the good or bad side of things and realize that those things could easily exist together in the same person.

By 1966, Smith’s northern Virginia district was changing and his shenanganians were increasingly seen as unacceptable. He lost his primary that year, but his supporters then voted for the Republican, who won the general. Smith ended his life living in Alexandria and practicing law. He died in 1976, at the age of 93.

Later, in 1995, after the Gingrich takeover of the House, the new Rules Committee chairman, a toad named Gerald Solomon, from New York, had a portrait of Smith hung in the conference room. John Lewis led the Congressional Black Caucus in demanding its removal. Lewis stated:

It is an affront to all of us …[Smith is] perhaps best remembered for his obstruction in passing this country’s civil rights laws. A man who in his own words never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the White people of the South…

The portrait was removed.

Howard Smith is buried in Little Georgetown Cemetery, Broad Run, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit others of the fine men who signed the Southern Manifesto, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lister Hill is in Montgomery, Alabama and Spessard Holland is in Barlow, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.