Ellison D. Smith - Senate Time

Senate Time

Between 1909 and 1933, Smith was regarded as a fairly effective senator, though admittedly not of the first rank. A tireless champion of agriculture, he supported most of the social legislation of the Progressive Era and had a small part in writing some of it. He authored the Smith-Lever Act and sponsored the Muscle Shoals project, a forerunner to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Smith, however, would not favor legislation he felt would largely diversify the Southern economy and reduce the need for the vast presence of the cotton industry in the South, and endanger the old Southern way of life. In the 1930s, Smith became Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry and would imperiously summon the fellow Senators on the Committee by saying "tell those butt-heads we will assemble tomorrow morning." When he spoke, Smith would usually chew tobacco and keep a spittoon next to him.

Time called Smith a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." One observer claimed he "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue." He had at first welcomed US President Franklin Roosevelt but soon emerged as an opponent to the New Deal, which he dubbed as "the Jackass Age" when he noticed that Roosevelt's programs were leading the Southern economy in a new direction. Smith's opposition to the New Deal led to Roosevelt's decision to make an unsuccessful attempt to have him defeated in the 1938 primary by supporting the candidacy of Olin D. Johnston.

Smith won re-election in a close election in that year, thanks mainly to the unpopularity of Roosevelt's interfering in the primary, Johnston's inability to please either the state's powerful textile mill owners or staunch white supremacists and a huge endorsement from Smith's fellow South Carolina Senator James F. Byrnes, a highly popular outspoken New Dealer who was renominated in 1936 after winning by a margin of over 87%. Byrnes, however, despised Smith and only endorsed him because he was opposed Johnston's strong support for Roosevelt's new push for vast labor reform, which showed in the recently enacted Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and hoped that Smith would retire in 1944 and his friend Burnet R. Maybank, the mayor of Charleston who was running for Governor of South Carolina that year, would then go on to win Smith's Senate seat and build a powerful political machine with him that would control the South Carolina political scene.

While the 1938 election would mark the first time since 1914 where he faced no runoff, it was also believed that the vast majority of the people in South Carolina at this point in time were fed up with Smith, who would probably have would have easily lost the primary if Roosevelt had not interfered. In 1940, a survey found that there was no great admiration for Smith among the people in South Carolina and that his 1938 victory was symbolic because it showed that an unpopular person was elected because "the president picked him out as the victim."

During World War II, Smith opposed the national war mobilization efforts, which consisted of programs that developed a vast number of factories across the states that manufactured and supplied the US military with munitions, metal, fuel and other materials needed in order to successfully win the war. During this time, the aged senator would violently criticize Americans for supporting both the war effort and the New Deal. Cotton Ed Smith lost the renomination for the Senate in 1944 to Olin D. Johnston, a pro-Roosevelt New Dealer who had previously challenged Smith in 1938, and he died soon afterward, even before his Senate term had expired.

Smith opposed the woman's suffrage movement, and specifically the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution Tying the amendment to black suffrage, he warned on the Senate floor, "Here is exactly the identical same amendment applied to the other half of the Negro race. The southern man who votes for the Susan B. Anthony Amendment votes to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment."

At the 1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Smith walked out of the convention hall once he saw that a black minister was going to deliver the invocation. Smith recalled, "He started praying and I started walking. And from his great plantation in the sky, John C. Calhoun bent down and whispered in my ear – 'You done good, Ed.'"