Ellison DuRant Smith

Smith, Ellison DuRant (Aug. 1, 1864 - Nov. 17, 1944), Senator from South Carolina, known as "Cotton Ed" Smith, was born at Tanglewood, the 2,000-acre plantation near Lynchburg, S. C., which had been in family hands since his English forebears settled there in 1747. He was one of five children and the youngest of the three sons of William Hawkins Smith, a Methodist minister, and Mary Isabella (McLeod) Smith; his brother Alexander Coke Smith became a prominent Methodist bishop. His mother was a native of the Scottish Isle of Skye. The boy received his early education at schools in Lynchburg and Charleston, S. C. He entered South Carolina College in 1885, but the following year transferred to Wofford College, where he was graduated in 1889. On May 26, 1892, he married Martha Cornelia Moorer of St. George, S. C., who died the following year; their only child, Martius Ellison, was killed in 1912 in a hunting accident. On Oct. 31, 1906, Smith married Annie Brunson Farley of Spartanburg, S. C., by whom he had four children: Anna Brunson, Isobel McLeod, Ellison DuRant, and Charles Saxon Farley.

Smith first entered politics in 1890, the year in which Benjamin R. Tillman led the agrarian masses in a political revolt against Wade Hampton [qq.v.] and the aristocrats. When, that October, a convention of die-hard conservatives met and nominated Alexander C. Haskell as an independent candidate against Tillman, Smith was listed as a delegate, although he later denied being present. Despite his early Bourbon affiliations, Smith was deeply affected by the ideology of the agrarian protest, and in his subsequent political career he waged a continuous battle against such old Populist enemies as the tariff, Wall Street, hard money, and big business. He represented Sumter County in the state legislature from 1897 to 1900 and made an unsuccessful bid for election to Congress in 1901.

Himself a cotton farmer at Lynchburg, Smith became active during the next few years in a movement to organize Southern cotton growers. He attended growers' conventions in Louisiana in 1904 and 1905, where his forensic efforts attracted wide attention and earned him the nickname "Cotton Ed," which he thereafter cherished. In 1905 he became a field agent for the Southern Cotton Association, which sought to raise cotton prices; the statewide contacts he established strengthened his political base. As a candidate for the United States Senate in 1908, "Cotton Ed" unveiled the pageantry that was to become his trademark. Perched on two cotton bales in a wagon drawn by lint-plastered mules, with a cotton boll in his lapel, he stumped the state proclaiming his devotion to "my sweetheart, Miss Cotton." Smith won the election over several formidable opponents, the beginning of a long Senate career.

In Washington the new Senator joined the Democratic and Progressive onslaught upon the Taft Republicans, and with the Democratic triumph in 1912 he became an adherent of Woodrow Wilson and the New Freedom. Like other Southern agrarians, Smith lent enthusiastic support to Wilson's farm program, the Federal Reserve Act, the Underwood Tariff, and the Federal Highways Act. He voted with less enthusiasm for the Clayton Act, the Adamson Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act; and he opposed child labor legislation and woman suffrage. A reliable Wilson supporter during and after World War I, Smith sponsored the bill creating the Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals for the production of nitrates. After the Harding landslide of 1920, he reverted to his earlier role as Senatorial critic of the Republican administration, opposing the Fordney-McCumber Tariff, the fiscal policies of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon [Supp. 2], and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but voting for restrictive immigration laws and the soldiers' bonus. Smith helped form the Senate's farm bloc in 1921. He opposed the McNary-Haugen bills in 1924 and 1926, but did support later versions of the McNary-Haugen plan. He also supported the World Court, a stand that, together with the opposition of Coleman L. Blease [Supp. 3] and the Ku Klux Klan, almost cost him the election of 1926, when his opponent (Edgar A. Brown) claimed that the Court had three Negro judges. In the 1932 election, however, Smith had little difficulty in defeating Blease himself, as he had previously in 1914.

An early supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Smith had looked forward to a position in the new administration that would enable him to "make that crowd that is in eat out of a Southern spoon" (Columbia State, June 15, 1932). Although he became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, Smith had little influence in shaping the New Deal farm program. He thought the Agricultural Adjustment Administration too complicated, and though he favored price supports, he opposed crop controls. The severity of the depression and Roosevelt's initial popularity caused him to vote for most of the early New Deal legislation, but he had little enthusiasm for the WPA, the NRA, and other agencies that threatened to interfere with the South's social and economic structure.

After 1935 Smith became more openly hostile to the administration. He also became more demagogic. Whereas previously it was not Smith but his opponents (such as Blease) who had injected race-baiting into the political campaigns, Smith now unleashed a barrage of vitriolic tirades in the Senate against Negroes and against the proposed antilynching law. He vigorously opposed the regulation of wages and hours and, with appeals to the sanctity of states' rights, fought against the judiciary and executive reorganization bills of 1937. Roosevelt attempted to "purge" Smith in the 1938 elections, but the strategy backfired and the Senator went on to win the greatest political triumph of his career. The mainstay of his campaign was the "Philadelphia Story," a masterpiece of Southern political demagoguery in which he regaled his audiences with an account of his well-publicized walkout from that year's Democratic National Convention following an invocation by a Negro minister.

Smith's last term was an anticlimax. The prosperity that accompanied World War II obscured the domestic issues he had hoped to raise, and his opposition to selective service, lend-lease, and other wartime policies irritated a constituency that ardently supported the war effort. These factors, together with the effects of old age (he was now eighty), brought about his defeat in 1944 by Gov. Olin D. Johnston. "Cotton Ed" died at Tanglewood of a coronary thrombosis just a few weeks before his term expired. He was buried in the cemetery of St. Luke's Methodist Church near Lynchburg. At the time of his death his tenure of almost thirty-six years was the longest in Senate history.

Ellison D. Smith committed the cardinal sin of remaining in office too long. The race-baiting histrionics of his last years, attributable partly to political frustration and to the decline of his faculties, obscured the respectable, though modest, accomplishments of his earlier career.