Ellison DuRant Smith (August 1, 1864 – November 17, 1944) was an American cotton planter, lobbyist, and Democratic Party politician who represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1909 until 1944.

[1] Smith attended the University of South Carolina, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity,[2] and graduated from Wofford College in 1889.

[7] Smith spoke out in support of the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and effectively entrapped European Jews in the feverish atmosphere of emergent fascism.

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.

[13] 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".

[13] 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 Governor Olin D.

[14] 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.

[15] Smith called Roosevelt a "Yankee carpetbagger" and ran a campaign depicting himself as the defender of traditional Southern values.

[16] 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[17] and an endorsement from Smith's fellow South Carolina senator, James F. Byrnes,[18] a highly popular outspoken New Dealer who had been re-elected in 1936 with over 87% of the vote.

[20] He hoped that Smith would retire in 1944 and his friend Burnet R. Maybank, the mayor of Charleston who was running for governor of South Carolina that year, would then go on to win Smith's Senate seat[18] and build a powerful political machine with Byrnes that would control the South Carolina political scene.

[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.”[17]

During the campaign, Johnston, once again governor of South Carolina, was strongly supportive of Roosevelt's foreign policy,[24] 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 the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Smith v. Allwright decision, which ruled that racial segregation in state primaries was unconstitutional, by passing a series of laws making the South Carolina Democratic Party a private club which could keep blacks from voting in the state’s primary.

[24] During the campaign, Smith presented himself as an aged and tired old man and during at least one debate with Johnston,[24] he spoke for only a few minutes and then played a recording of a speech he had made six years earlier.

[1] Her uncle, Henry Farley, fired the first shot in the Confederate Army[citation needed], serving under J. E. B. Stuart, and died fighting in the Civil War.