A leader of the conservative coalition, he 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 that was headed by Smith and dominated by opponents of the New Deal.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Yates v. United States (1957) that the First Amendment protected much radical speech, which halted prosecutions under the Smith Act.

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.

He was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Two days before the vote, Smith offered an amendment to insert "sex" after the word "religion" as a protected class of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Congressional Record shows Smith made serious arguments, voicing concerns that white women would suffer greater discrimination without a protection for gender.

[9][10] In 1968, Leo Kanowitz wrote that, within the context of the anti-civil rights coalition making "every effort to block" the passage of Title VII, "it is abundantly clear that a principal motive in introducing ["sex"] was to prevent passage of the basic legislation being considered by Congress, rather than solicitude for women's employment rights.

The National Woman's Party (NWP) had used Smith to include sex as a protected category and so achieved their main goal.

[19] When Bostock v. Clayton County was decided in 2020, legal scholars postulated that Smith's insertion of "sex" into Title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected sexual orientation and gender identity from employment discrimination.

Although Smith remained neutral in the general election, many of his supporters defected to Republican William L. Scott, who soundly defeated Rawlings in November.

Georgia Congressman John Lewis said:[25][26] It is an affront to all of us ...[Smith is] perhaps best remembered for his obstruction in passing this country's civil rights laws.

A man who in his own words never accepted the colored race as a race of people who had equal intelligence and education and social attainments as the White people of the South...Solomon said he displayed the portrait to acknowledge Smith's co-operative work with Republicans when he was chairman but that he was unaware of his segregationist views.

[27] Smith was portrayed by American actor Ken Jenkins in the 2016 HBO TV movie All the Way, in which his segregationist views posed as a central and divisive opposition to President Lyndon B. Johnson's proposal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.