Howard W. Smith

Howard W. Smith

Howard Worth Smith (born February 2, 1883 in Broad Run , Virginia , † October 3, 1976 in Alexandria , Virginia) was a Democratic Congressman from Virginia and the leader of the Conservative Coalition . He was an avid supporter of racial segregation .

Education and Early Life

Smith was educated in public schools, graduating from Bethel Military Academy in Warrington in 1901 . He received his Bachelor of Laws in 1903 from the law faculty of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville . He was inducted into the Bar Association in 1904 and began practicing in Alexandria.

During World War I he was assistant to the chief legal officer of the Federal Alien Property Custodian . Between 1918 and 1922 he was the Commonwealth's Attorney for the City of Alexandria. From 1922 to 1930 he served as a judge, which is why he was subsequently referred to as "Judge Smith" even during his time in Congress, and dealt with banking, agriculture and the dairy business.

Career in Congress

In 1930 Smith was elected to Congress. From the beginning, he supported measures of the New Deal , such as the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act , and in 1940 was the author of the anti-Communist rated Smith Act .

As the leader of the Conservative Coalition , Smith also led the opposition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Conservative politicians formed a special committee, led by Smith and riddled with opposition to the New Deal, to investigate the NLRB. The committee conducted a sensationalist investigation and undermined public support for the NLRB and especially for the New Deal. In June 1940, proposed legislative changes by the Smith Committee were adopted on a grand scale, in part due to Smith's alliance with William Green , President of the American Federation of Labor . The AFL believed that the NLRB was controlled by leftists who supported the competing Congress of Industrial Organizations , not the AFL, in raising funds. New Deal supporters stopped Smith's legislative changes, but Roosevelt approved them, replacing CIO-oriented members in the NLRB with men acceptable to Smith and the AFL.

As head of the United States House Committee on Rules from 1955, Smith largely controlled the legislature in the House of Representatives.

Opposition to civil rights legislation

Opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as the head of the Rules Committee to intercept or stop many civil rights laws before they were voted in the House of Representatives.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said:

"The southern people have never recognized the colored race as a race of people with the same intelligence ... as that of the white southerners."

Sam Rayburn tried in 1961 to reduce Smith's power with little success, as Smith's close ties to other Southern Democrats and Republicans kept him in office. Smith initially also stopped the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . One of Rayburn's reforms was the "twenty-one day rule," which required that the law be passed to a vote within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith agreed.

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an extension to add “gender” after the word “religion” to criminalize gender as a ground of discrimination . One of Smith's opponents denied that he was even trying to help women; Carl Elliott of Alabama later said:

"Smith wasn't interested in women's rights at all ... he tried to mobilize dissenting voices because there was always a hard core of men who were against women's rights."

According to the Congressional Record, Smith provoked laughter when he read a letter from "a lady" when he presented the ballot . However, the record also shows that during a dispute over a second vote, Smith raised more serious arguments, such as concerns that white women would be more discriminated against without gender protection.

Thanks to close ties to feminist Alice Paul , Smith may have supported women's rights as early as the 1920s. Rep. Martha Griffiths , a liberal feminist from Michigan, also supported Smith's motion to include "gender" in the bill. Smith would have preferred not to have a Civil Rights Act, but also preferred an act prohibiting gender discrimination over one without.

Next life

In 1966 Smith lost his re-election to a more liberal Democrat, George C. Rawlings, Jr. This in turn was clearly beaten by Republican William L. Scott . Smith resumed his legal practice in Alexandria, where he died on October 3, 1976 at the age of 93. He was buried in Georgetown Cemetery on Broad Run.

1995 portrait controversy

In January 1995, the Chairman of the House Rules Committee , Republican Rep. Gerald BH Solomon , hung a portrait of Smith in the committee's negotiating room. The Congressional Black Caucus , i.e. H. the African American members of Congress, then requested the removal of the image.

“This is an affront to all of us… [Smith is] best known for his obstruction to the passing of the civil rights laws of this country. A man who, in his own words, never recognized the colored race as a race with the same intelligence, upbringing and social merit as the southern white people, "said John Lewis , the Georgia MP .

Solomon said he was showing the portrait to honor Smith's collaborative work with Republicans during his time as chairman but was unaware of the racial segregation background. The portrait was subsequently removed.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Storrs p. 212
2. ↑ chief Field, S. 194
3. ^ Gold, 1981
4. ↑ Freeman, 1991
5. ↑ CBC members get portrait removed from House Rules Committee meeting room - Congressional Black Caucus . In: Jet . February 13, 1995. Retrieved March 24, 2007.
6. ↑ David E. Rosenbaum: Offending Portrait Succumbs To Black Lawmakers' Protest . In: New York Times . January 25, 1995. Retrieved March 24, 2007.

swell

• Carl M. Brauer: Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act , 49th Journal of Southern History , February 1983, online via JSTOR
• Bruce J. Dierenfield: Keeper of the Rules: Congressman Howard W. Smith of Virginia . 1987
• Bruce J. Dierenfield: Conservative Outrage: the Defeat in 1966 of Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia. Virginia Magazine of History and Biography , 1981 89 (2): 181-205.
• Jo Freeman: How 'Sex' Got Into Title VII: Persistent Opportunism as a Maker of Public Policy . Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice , Vol. 9, No. 2, March 1991, pp. 163-184. Online version
• Michael Evan Gold: A Tale of Two Amendments: The Reasons Congress Added Sex to Title VII and Their Implication for the Issue of Comparable Worth . Faculty Publications - Collective Bargaining, Labor Law, and Labor History. Cornell, 1981 [1]
• Charles O. Jones: Joseph G. Cannon and Howard W. Smith: an Essay on the Limits of Leadership in the House of Representatives . Journal of Politics , 1968 30 (3): 617-646.
• Donald Allen Robinson: Two Movements in Pursuit of Equal Employment Opportunity . Signs , 1979 4 (3): 413-433. About the Smith-Griffiths alliance.
• Landon RY Storrs: Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era . University of North Carolina Press, 2000

Web links

Commons : Howard W. Smith  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Howard W. Smith in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• The Political Graveyard