Ellison D. Smith | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Smith in 1937 | |
| 30thDean of the United States Senate | |
| In office January 19, 1940 – November 17, 1944 | |
| Preceded by | William Borah |
| Succeeded by | Kenneth McKellar |
| United States Senator fromSouth Carolina | |
| In office March 4, 1909 – November 17, 1944 | |
| Preceded by | Frank B. Gary |
| Succeeded by | Wilton E. Hall |
| Chairman of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry | |
| In office 1933–1944 | |
| Preceded by | Charles L. McNary |
| Succeeded by | Elmer Thomas |
| Chairman of the Committee on Interstate Commerce | |
| In office 1924–1925 | |
| Preceded by | Albert B. Cummins |
| Succeeded by | James E. Watson |
| In office 1917–1919 | |
| Preceded by | Francis G. Newlands |
| Succeeded by | Albert B. Cummins |
| Member of theSouth Carolina House of Representatives fromSumter County | |
| In office January 12, 1897 – January 8, 1901 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Ellison DuRant Smith (1864-08-01)August 1, 1864 |
| Died | November 17, 1944(1944-11-17) (aged 80) Lynchburg, South Carolina, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 5 |
| Residence(s) | Lynchburg, South Carolina |
Ellison DuRant Smith (August 1, 1864 – November 17, 1944) was an American cotton planter, lobbyist, andDemocratic Partypolitician who representedSouth Carolina in theUnited States Senate from 1909 until 1944.
Smith was widely known for his virulently racist and segregationist views, his advocacy ofwhite supremacy, and his support for the Southern cotton industry, earning him the nickname“Cotton Ed”.
Smith was born nearLynchburg, South Carolina, the youngest child of William Hankin Smith and Mary Isabella Smith (née McLeod), at his ancestral home,Tanglewood Plantation (formerly Smith's Grove).[1] Throughout his life, he would reside in Tanglewood.[1] Smith attended theUniversity of South Carolina, where he was a member of thePhi Kappa Psi fraternity,[2] and graduated fromWofford College in 1889.
Smith served in theSouth Carolina House of Representatives from 1896 to 1900. He was unsuccessful in his bid to become a member of theU.S. House of Representatives in 1900. In 1901, Smith helped organize the Farmer's Protective Association[3] and eventually became one of the principal figures in the formation of the Southern Cotton Association in 1905.[3][4] Between the years 1905 and 1908, he served as a field agent and general organizer in the cotton protective movement.[4] Smith received the nickname "Cotton Ed" after he declared: "Cotton is king and white is supreme."[5]
Smith was elected to theUnited States Senate in 1908. He was re-elected five times, although from 1920 until 1944, he had four close elections, with three of them leading torun-off elections because he failed to capture a majority. Smith never won more than 61 percent in Democratic Party primaries during that time. During his time in Congress, he had a goal to “keep the Negroes down and the price of cotton up.”[6] Known for being a reputed showman, Smith would publicly promote this goal by riding to Washington on a wagon-load of cotton waving the banner of white supremacy.[7] He also developed a reputation for having a violent temper while speaking in Congress and would at times stand on his feet and try to get the floor speaker's attention by repeatedly hacking his armchair with a penknife whenever the speaker angered him.[6] Smith was not fond of his fellow Senators and liked to describe the Senate Chamber as "the Cave of the Winds."[6]
Between 1909 and 1933, Smith was regarded as a fairly effective senator, though admittedly not of the first rank.[7] A tireless champion of agriculture, he supported some planks of theProgressive Era, having written a small part of them. He sponsored the Muscle Shoals project, a forerunner to theTennessee Valley Authority.[3] During this time Smith's policies were "a curious mixture of conservatism and liberalism". He was a loyal supporter of PresidentWoodrow Wilson and hisNew Freedom agenda especially regarding agriculture supporting theSmith–Lever Act of 1914,Smith–Hughes Act, theWarehouse Act of 1916,Federal Farm Loan Act, andFederal Aid Road Act of 1916.[7] His passage of theCotton Futures Act earned him the nickname "Cotton" Ed Smith. Smith, however, would not favor legislation he felt would largely diversify the Southern economy, reduce the need for the vast presence of the plantation system in the South,[6] or endanger the old Southern way of life.[6][8] He also supported theClayton Act, theFederal Trade Commission, theUnderwood tariff, and theAdamson Act. He opposed theKeating–Owen Act which prohibited child labor.
Smith, reflecting the xenophobic views of constituents, sponsored numerous bills restricting immigration culminating in theImmigration Act of 1917 that passed over President Wilson's veto.[7] Smith spoke out in support of theImmigration Act of 1924, which limited emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and effectively entrapped European Jews in the feverish atmosphere of emergent fascism.[9]
During theFirst World War he supported most of the war time actions of President Wilson but prevented attempts by the President to impose price controls on cotton. After the war he supported theLeague of Nations and theTreaty of Versailles.[7]
Smith opposed thewomen's suffrage movement, and specifically theNineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Tying the amendment toblack 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.[10]
In the 1930s, Smith becameChairman 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.)[6]
Time called Smith a “conscientious objector to the 20th Century.”[6] One observer claimed he “taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue.”[7] He had at first welcomed US PresidentFranklin Roosevelt[8] but soon emerged as an opponent to theNew Deal, which he dubbed as “the Jackass Age”[6] when he noticed that Roosevelt's programs were leading the Southern economy in a new direction.[6][8] Although he voted for part of the draft of theRevenue Act of 1935 he voted against the final bill, due to the highly progressive rates. In 1935, a group of reformist officials in the Agriculture Department proposed a directive that would ensure that Southern landlords actually paid their sharecroppers for their labor, which most of them did not.[11] Smith stormed into the office of the author of the directive,Alger Hiss, and shouted: "Young fella, you can't do this to my niggers, paying checks to them. They don't know what to do with the money. The money should come to me. I'll take care of them".[11]
At the1936 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Smith walked out of the convention hall once he saw that a black minister,Marshall L. Shepard, was going to deliver the invocation.[6] At the sight of Shepard, Smith shouted: "By God, he's as black as melted midnight! Get outa my way. This mongrel meeting ain't no place for a white man! I don't want any blue-gummed, slew-footed Senegambian praying for me politically".[12] Shepard's response to the incident was to say "it was just a sign the good brother needs more prayer."[13]
Smith opposed a Federal minimum wage; he filibustered it in the 1938Fair Labor Standards Act, saying “South Carolinians are willing to work for less than 50 cents/hour.”[14] In common with other Southern senators, Smith was vigorously opposed to the Fair Labor Standards Act, believing that a national minimum wage of 40 cents/per hour would undermine the Southern economy, which was based upon having lower wages than could be found anywhere else in the nation.[14] Roosevelt's Attorney General,Homer Stille Cummings wrote in his diary: "Southern Senators actually froth at the mouth when the subject [of a national minimum wage] is mentioned".[14] 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 GovernorOlin D. Johnston.[15] During a campaign speech, Roosevelt announced that "no man can live on 50 cents a day" and appealed to the people of South Carolina to replace Smith with Johnston.[16] Smith called Roosevelt a "Yankee carpetbagger" and ran a campaign depicting himself as the defender of traditional Southern values.[17] Standing under a statue of the Confederate generalWade Hampton, Smith declared "No man dares to come into South Carolina and try to dictate to the sons of those men who held high the hands ofLee and Hampton".[17] Smith billed himself as "Roosevelt's worse enemy" and vowed to stop the New Deal.[17]
Smith won re-election in a close race in that year, thanks mainly to the unpopularity of Roosevelt's interfering in the primary,[6] Johnston's inability to please either the state's powerful textile mill owners or staunch white supremacists[18] and an endorsement from Smith's fellow South Carolina senator,James F. Byrnes,[19] a highly popular outspoken New Dealer who had been re-elected in 1936 with over 87% of the vote.[20] Byrnes, however, despised Smith and only endorsed him because he was opposed to Johnston's strong support for Roosevelt's new push for vast labor reform,[21] which was evident in the Fair Labor Standards Act.[21] He hoped that Smith would retire in 1944 and his friendBurnet R. Maybank, themayor of Charleston who was running for governor of South Carolina that year, would then go on to win Smith's Senate seat[19] and build a powerfulpolitical machine with Byrnes that would control the South Carolina political scene.[19]
While the 1938 election would mark the first time since 1914 where “Cotton Ed” 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 easily lost the primary if Roosevelt had not interfered.[6] 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.”[18]
DuringWorld War II, Smith opposed thenational war mobilization efforts,[8] which consisted of programs that developed a vast number of factories across the states that manufactured and supplied the U.S. military with munitions, metal, fuel and other materials needed in order to win the war.[22] During this time, the aged senator would violently criticize Americans for supporting both the war effort and the New Deal,[23] and even supported RepublicanThomas E. Dewey in the1944 presidential election.[24]
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In 1944,Olin D. Johnston again challenged Smith in the Democratic primary. During the campaign, Johnston, once again governor of South Carolina, was strongly supportive of Roosevelt's foreign policy,[25] but was now lukewarm towards the New Deal and was able to snatch the “flag of white supremacy” from Smith by boasting how he countered theU.S. Supreme Court’s recentSmith v. Allwright decision, which ruled that racial segregation in state primaries was unconstitutional, by passing a series of laws making theSouth Carolina Democratic Party a private club which could keep blacks from voting in the state’s primary.[25] During the campaign, Smith presented himself as an aged and tired old man and during at least one debate with Johnston,[25] he spoke for only a few minutes and then played a recording of a speech he had made six years earlier.[25] Johnston would go on to win the primary with over 55 percent of the vote, thus achieving the majority needed to avoid a run-off, and Smith would only receive just over 35 percent of the vote. After hearing word of his defeat on his 2,500-acre farm near Lynchburg,[25] Smith stood up in frustration and said "Well, I guess I better go out and look at the pigs."[25]
He first married at the age of 28 in 1892 to Martha Cornelia Moorer (1865-1893) ofSt. George, South Carolina.[1] She died giving birth to their son Martius Ellison in 1893.[1] In 1912, at age 19, Martius was accidentally shot by his own gun while drinking water at the barnyard well.[1] He died five days later.[1][26]
In 1906, Ellison married Annie Brunson Farley (1882-1958).[1] Her uncle, Henry Farley, fired the first shot in theConfederate Army[citation needed], serving underJ. E. B. Stuart, and died fighting in the Civil War. Ellison and Annie had four children of their own, two boys and two girls:[1]
All five of Smith's children are now deceased.[1]
On November 17, 1944, a month and a half before the end of his term, Smith died at Tanglewood Plantation in the same bed in which he was born.[1] He is buried at St. Luke's Cemetery nearWisacky inLee County.[1]
Media related toEllison D. Smith at Wikimedia Commons| Party political offices | ||
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| First | Democratic nominee forSenator fromSouth Carolina (Class 3) 1914,1920,1926,1932,1938 | Succeeded by |
| U.S. Senate | ||
| Preceded by | U.S. senator (Class 3) from South Carolina March 4, 1909 – November 17, 1944 Served alongside:Benjamin Tillman,Christie Benet,William P. Pollock,Nathaniel B. Dial,Coleman Livingston Blease,James F. Byrnes,Alva M. Lumpkin,Roger C. Peace,Burnet R. Maybank | Succeeded by |
| Honorary titles | ||
| Preceded by William E. Borah Idaho | Dean of the United States Senate January 19, 1940 – November 17, 1944 | Succeeded by Kenneth McKellar Tennessee |
| Class 2 |  | |
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| Class 3 | ||
| Agriculture (1829–1857; 1863–1881) | | |
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| Agriculture and Forestry (1884–1977) | ||
| Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry (1977–) | ||
| Commerce and Manufactures (1816–1825) | | |
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| Commerce (1825–1947) | ||
| Interstate Commerce (1887–1947) | ||
| Interstate and Foreign Commerce/Commerce (1947–1977) | ||
| Commerce, Science, and Transportation (1977–present) | ||
| International | |
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| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
