Smith had been briefly involved with the Young Communist League as a student at Reed College in the 1930s, which resulted in a subpoena by the U.S. Senate in the 1950s.

Smith's experiences during World War II inspired his future involvement in a movement known as peace psychology.

In 1961, he interviewed and helped to select the first group of Peace Corps volunteers; he traveled to Ghana to visit them multiple times.

He ceased his involvement with the organization in the late 1930s, but he later found out that he had been on a National Institute of Mental Health blacklist for ten years.

[3] In 1954, Smith provided expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education which characterized segregation as "inherently an insult to the integrity of the individual".

University of Colorado professor John P. Jackson Jr. writes, "Within 40 years, what was once viewed as psychology’s greatest achievement in social engineering has been proclaimed a miserable failure.

The psychologists involved in Brown are often viewed as liberal reformers who masked their political wishes in the guise of social science.

The fact of the matter was that in 1954 there simply did not exist sufficient research that could 'prove' whether any particular racial mix in schools was superior – or in what ways – to any other.

"[5] Jackson argues that segregationist writers of the time "succeeded in framing the issues in a manner that put the actions of the social scientists in the worst possible light.

[7] By the 1980s, the group's report was criticized for leading to deinstitutionalization in large numbers without establishing sufficient community resources for the mentally ill and for the subsequent overreliance on psychiatric drugs.

"[6] Smith admitted that "extravagant claims were made for the benefits of shifting from state hospitals to community clinics.