Existing comment:
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Victory for Women and Blacks
This document shows that Representative Howard Smith of Virginia introduced the word "sex," despite his previous opposition to the bill. Historians still debate his motives, but his actions resulted in sweeping change. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission characterized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as "the most comprehensive and important of all Federal and state laws, prohibiting employment discrimination."
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Howard W. Smith
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Howard Worth Smith (February 2, 1883 – October 3, 1976), Democratic U.S. Representative from Virginia, was a leader of the conservative coalition who supported both racial segregation and women's rights.
Early life and education
Born in Broad Run, Virginia, on February 2, 1883, he attended public schools and graduated from Bethel Military Academy, Warrenton, Virginia, in 1901. He took his LLB at the law department of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1903, was admitted to the bar in 1904 and practiced in Alexandria, Virginia.
During World War I, he was assistant general counsel to the Federal Alien Property Custodian. From 1918 to 1922 he was Commonwealth's Attorney of Alexandria. He served as a judge 1922 to 1930 (he was often referred to as "Judge Smith" even while in Congress), and also engaged in banking, farming, and dairying.
Congressional career
He was elected in 1930 to Congress. He initially supported New Deal measures such as the Tennessee Valley Authority Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act. A leader of the conservative coalition, Smith led the opposition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) established by the Wagner Act of 1935. Conservatives created a special House committee to investigate the NLRB, headed by Smith and dominated by opponents of the New Deal. The committee conducted a sensationalist investigation that undermined public support for the NLRB and, more broadly, for the New Deal. In June 1940, amendments proposed by the Smith Committee passed by a large margin in the House, due in part to Smith's new alliance with William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was convinced the NLRB was controlled by leftists who supported the Congress of Industrial Organizations not the AFL in organizing drives. New Dealers stopped the Smith amendments, but Roosevelt replaced the CIO-oriented members on the NLRB with men acceptable to Smith and the AFL.
Smith proposed the anti-Communist Alien Registration Act of 1940 18 U.S.C. § 2385, which became known as the Smith Act. It required resident aliens to register. It also banned advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government or its political subdivisions. CPUSA chairman Gus Hall, among others, was later convicted of violating its provisions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Yates v. United States (1957) that the First Amendment protected much radical speech, which halted Smith Act prosecutions under the Act.
Civil rights
As chairman of the all-powerful United States House Committee on Rules after 1955, Smith controlled the flow of legislation in the House. An opponent of racial integration, Smith used his power as chairman of the Rules Committee to keep much civil rights legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor. When the Civil Rights Act of 1957 came before Smith's committee, Smith said "The Southern people have never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence ... as the white people of the South." Speaker Sam Rayburn tried to reduce his power in 1961 with only limited success. Smith delayed passage the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One of Rayburn's reforms was the "Twenty-One Day Rule" requiring a bill to be sent to the floor within 21 days. Under pressure, Smith released the bill.
Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion", adding gender as a protected class of Title VII of the Act. The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender. Liberals -- who knew Smith was hostile to civil rights for blacks -- assumed that he was hostile to rights for women, unaware of his long connection with white feminists.
House Rules Committee clerk's record of markup session adding "sex" to bill.
In 1964 the burning national issue was civil rights for blacks. Liberals argued that it was the Negro's hour, and that women should wait their turn, but the National Woman's Party (NWP) found a way to include sex as a protected category, and thus achieved one of the main goals of the movement.
The prohibition of sex discrimination was added on the floor by Smith. While Smith was a conservative who strongly opposed civil rights laws for blacks, he supported such laws for women. Smith's amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133. Historians debate whether Smith's motivation was a cynical attempt to defeat the bill by someone opposed to both civil rights for blacks and women or an attempt to improve the bill by broadening it to include women. Smith expected that Republicans, who had included equal rights for women in their party's platform since 1940, would probably vote for the amendment. Historians speculate that Smith was trying to embarrass northern Democrats who opposed civil rights for women because labor unions opposed the clause.
Smith asserted that he sincerely supported the amendment and along with Rep. Martha Griffiths was the chief spokesperson for the amendment. For twenty years Smith had sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment -- with no linkage to racial issues -- in the House. He for decades had been close to the NWP and its leader, Alice Paul, one of the leaders in winning the vote for women in 1920 and the chief supporter of equal rights proposals since then. She and other feminists had worked with Smith since 1945 trying to find a way to include sex as a protected civil rights category. Griffith argued that the new law would protect black women but not white women, and that was unfair to white women. Furthermore, she argued that the laws "protecting" women from unpleasant jobs were actually designed to enable men to monopolize those jobs, and that was unfair to women who were not allowed to try out for those jobs. The amendment passed with the votes of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Republicans and Northern Democrats voted for the bill's final passage.
Smith had a part in temporarily blocking the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 because "Job Corps provision would allow coeducational and interracial job camps." |