Virginia Gentleman

Thin, stooped, flop-eared Howard Worth Smith sits in big, comfortable chairs, and nobody puts even a small tack in them. Nobody could. As president of the Alexandria (Va.) National Bank, as owner of a money-making Virginia dairy farm, as organized labor's hair shirt in Congress, the 59-year-old Alexandrian serves what Virginians call The Organization --the "courthouse crowd" machine of Senator Harry F. Byrd.

Smith's pals include potent realtors and contractors in mushrooming Alexandria, Fairfax, Arlington, the jammed suburbs hard by jampacked Washington. Out of the 250,000-odd population of Smith's district, the trouble and expense of paying $1.50 to $6 in poll taxes keep all but a faithful handful of heelers from voting. (Smith represents the Eighth District, home of Washington, Jefferson, Madison.)

"Mr. Judge." Wealthy Howard Smith ("Judge" to his cronies) has long campaigned against union labor as a monopoly. (For his Virginia dairymen he favors a virtual monopoly of the Washington milk market.) His name has appeared on no major legislation, but in 1938 he put through the House 17 amendments to the Wagner Labor Relations Act; the Senate killed them. Half a hundred times he has tried to tack amendments on appropriation bills to bar funds to anyone paying dues to organizations for the right to work. Always defeated but never ruffled, Judge Smith kept on trying. In late April he missed by one vote getting a no-strike bill reported. He supported Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy, but 25 days before Pearl Harbor he "reluctantly reached the parting of the ways" on the Neutrality Act "until the President is moved to assert and protect the right of American citizens to work. . . ."

Once a few idealistic New Dealers tried to get rid of him. Young, chubby William E. Dodd Jr., son of the late U.S. Ambassador to Germany, took up residence on the paternal Virginia farm just before the 1938 Congressional campaign started, got some amateur help, was roundly trounced by the bored courthouse crowd.

Fortnight ago the District Democratic committee decided that enough poll-tax payers (250 required) had signed a petition for the Aug. 4 primary to permit the candidacy of grey-haired, bespectacled Emmett C. Davison, 64, secretary-treasurer of A.F. of L.'s International Association of Machinists, onetime mayor of Alexandria, member of the northern Virginia draft-appeals board. In 1936 Davison was tried, acquitted on a charge of concealing assets in personal bankruptcy proceedings. He ran again for mayor of Alexandria, to vindicate himself, was badly beaten.

Said confident Judge Smith: "There is no question that this is an attempt of labor to purge me because I have fought some of their damned rackets. That's the issue, and that makes it easy --for me."

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