Departures of note

In 1964, as the House prepared to vote on the Civil Rights Act, Howard W. Smith, a Virginia Democrat who had spent years using his chairmanship of the Rules Committee to block civil rights legislation, offered an amendment adding “sex” to the categories protected from employment discrimination under Title VII. The Congressional Record shows Smith arguing seriously that white women would face greater discrimination without such a protection. Reformers who knew his hostility to civil rights for Black Americans assumed he was trying to sink the bill, but the amendment passed 168 to 133, and Smith insisted he sincerely supported it. He had sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment for twenty years and had worked with the National Woman’s Party and its leader Alice Paul since 1945 to find a way to include sex as a protected category.

Born in Broad Run, Virginia, in 1883, Smith graduated from the University of Virginia law department in 1903 and practiced law in Alexandria. He served as Commonwealth’s Attorney for Alexandria, then as judge of the city’s corporation court and later of Virginia’s sixteenth judicial circuit, earning the nickname “Judge Smith” that stayed with him in Congress. Elected to the House in 1930, he initially supported New Deal measures like the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, but became a leader of the conservative coalition opposing the New Deal. He headed a special House committee that investigated the National Labor Relations Board, and his proposed amendments passed the House in 1940 before being stopped by New Dealers. That same year he proposed the Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act, which required resident aliens to register and banned advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government; the Supreme Court’s 1957 ruling in Yates v. United States later halted prosecutions under it.

As chairman of the Rules Committee from 1955, Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House and used that power to keep civil rights bills from reaching the floor. He signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing school desegregation, and in 1957 said, “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.” Speaker Sam Rayburn’s attempt to reduce his power in 1961 had only limited success, but under pressure Smith released the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also temporarily blocked the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, objecting that its Job Corps provision would allow coeducational and interracial job camps.

Smith was defeated in the 1966 Democratic primary by the more liberal State Delegate George Rawlings. He remained neutral in the general election, but many of his supporters defected to Republican William L. Scott, who won the seat. Smith resumed the practice of law in Alexandria, where he died at 93 on October 3, 1976, and was buried in Little Georgetown Cemetery in Broad Run. In 1995, a portrait of Smith hung in the House Rules Committee hearing room drew objections from the Congressional Black Caucus, with Representative John Lewis calling it an affront and citing Smith’s obstruction of civil rights laws; the portrait was later removed.