Howard W Smith

Early life and education

Born in Broad Run, Virginia, on February 2, 1883, he attended public schools and graduated from Bethel Military Academy, Warrenton, Virginia, in 1901. He took his LLB at the law department of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1903, was admitted to the bar in 1904 and practiced in Alexandria, Virginia.

During World War I, he was assistant general counsel to the Federal Alien Property Custodian. From 1918 to 1922 he was Commonwealth's Attorney of Alexandria. He served as a judge 1922 to 1930 (he was often referred to as "Judge Smith" even while in Congress), and also engaged in banking, farming, and dairying.

Congressional career

He was elected in 1930 to Congress. He initially supported New Deal measures such as the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act. A leader of the conservative coalition, Smith led the opposition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) established by the Wagner Act of 1935. Conservatives created a special House committee to investigate the NLRB, headed by Smith and dominated by opponents of the New Deal. The committee conducted a sensationalist investigation that undermined public support for the NLRB and, more broadly, for the New Deal. In June 1940, amendments proposed by the Smith Committee passed by a large margin in the House, due in part to Smith's new alliance with William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was convinced the NLRB was controlled by leftists who supported the Congress of Industrial Organizations not the AFL in organizing drives. New Dealers stopped the Smith amendments, but Roosevelt replaced the CIO-oriented members on the NLRB with men acceptable to Smith and the AFL.

Smith proposed the anti-Communist Alien Registration Act of 1940 18 U.S.C. § 2385, which became known as the Smith Act. It required resident aliens to register. It also banned advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government or its political subdivisions. CPUSA chairman Gus Hall, among others, was later convicted of violating its provisions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Yates v. United States (1957) that the First Amendment protected much radical speech, which halted Smith Act prosecutions under the Act.

Civil rights

As chairman of the all-powerful United States House Committee on Rules after 1955, Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor. When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said "The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence ... as the white people of the South." Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961 with only limited success. Smith delayed passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" requiring a bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith released the bill.

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion", adding gender as a protected class of Title VII of the Act. The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender. Liberals—who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks—assumed that he was hostile to rights for women, unaware of his long connection with white feminists.

In 1964 the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks. Liberals argued that it was the Negro's hour, and that women should wait their turn, but the National Woman's Party (NWP) found a way to include sex as a protected category, and thus achieved one of the main goals of the movement.

The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by Smith. While Smith was a conservative who strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133. Historians debate whether Smith's motivation was a cynical attempt to defeat the bill by someone opposed to both civil rights for blacks and women or an attempt to improve the bill by broadening it to include women. Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Historians speculate that Smith was trying to embarrass northern Democrats who opposed civil rights for women because labor unions opposed the clause.

Smith asserted that he sincerely supported the amendment and along with Rep. Martha Griffiths was the chief spokesperson for the amendment. For twenty years Smith had sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment—with no linkage to racial issues—in the House. He for decades had been close to the NWP and its leader, Alice Paul, one of the leaders in winning the vote for women in 1920 and the chief supporter of equal rights proposals since then. She and other feminists had worked with Smith since 1945 trying to find a way to include sex as a protected civil rights category. Griffiths argued that the new law would protect black women but not white women, and that was unfair to white women. Furthermore, she argued that the laws "protecting" women from unpleasant jobs were actually designed to enable men to monopolize those jobs, and that was unfair to women who were not allowed to try out for those jobs. The amendment passed with the votes of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Republicans and Northern Democrats voted for the bill's final passage.

Smith had a part in temporarily blocking the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 because “Job Corps provision would allow coeducational and interracial job camps.”

Defeat

After U.S. Senator Carter Glass died in 1946, Smith sought the nomination to succeed him. The Byrd Organization, of which Smith was a member, instead nominated A. Willis Robertson, who was elected to the Senate.

Smith was defeated in the 1966 primary by a considerably more liberal Democrat, State Delegate George Rawlings, Jr. after the 8th district was redistricted to include part of the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Although Smith remained neutral in the general election, many of his supporters defected to Republican William L. Scott, who soundly defeated Rawlings in November.

Post-congressional career

Smith resumed the practice of law in Alexandria, where he died at age 93 on October 3, 1976. He was interred in Georgetown Cemetery, Broad Run, Virginia.

Portrait controversy

In January 1995, the House Rules Committee chairman, Republican Congressman Gerald B. H. Solomon, had a portrait of Smith hung in the Committee hearing room. The Congressional Black Caucus requested that it be removed. Georgia Congressman John Lewis said:

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...

Solomon said he displayed the portrait to acknowledge Smith's cooperative work with Republicans when he was chairman but that he was unaware of his segregationist views. The portrait was later removed.