He then worked at Camp William James, a center for youth leadership training opened in 1940 by Rosenstock-Huessy as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
After World War II, he studied American history under Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard College, receiving his M.A.
[5] Pursuing his graduate studies at Harvard, he explains in Killing the Spirit how he struggled against certain figures in History departments in ways akin to those that had plagued his mentor, Rosenstock-Huessy throughout his own career.
Rosenstock-Huessy, he explained, was a contentious figure in many History departments, whose ideas he suggested posed a threat to existing conventions in that field.
After receiving his doctorate, Smith began work as a research associate at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1951.
[8] For the years leading up to 1973, an issue had arisen on campus surrounding a decision of whether his friend and colleague Paul Lee would be granted tenure.
Lee, however, seemed to Smith to have accumulated enough opponents in senior professorships throughout UCSC that his tenure track would ultimately be ill-fated.
[9] Smith recounts in detail his painstakingly going around to first the Philosophy Department, which had "closed its ranks to Paul", based on colleague Maurice Natanson's intense dislike of Lee, most likely based largely on Lee (as a junior faculty member) choosing to state disagreement with a Natanson appointment to the University, Albert Hofstadter.
[10] Next, he went to UCSC's Religious Studies department, as Lee's teaching style was a closer fit to theology anyway, his having been a teaching assistant of influential theologian Paul Tillich and a friend of religious scholar Huston Smith, who he infamously participated in the marsh chapel experiment with.
The garden was infamous as a beginning catalyst for the organic movement[11][12] and for its mystical and poetic atmosphere,[13] which Smith explains many at Cowell were of the opinion had undermined the scientific seriousness of UCSC as an institution.
And so shortly after that I told Paul that I thought the cause was lost, that I was announcing my resignation on these grounds that I then described in my letter to the faculty.
At every point, Paul had intractable enemies, people who felt so strongly, were so hostile to him, that they wouldn’t abide by any sort of group decision.
[15] In this work, he describes the apostasy of institutional educational figures from their primary duty to teach students and their skewed focus on a publish or perish paradigm.
He wrote more than 20 books, including a biography of John Adams that won the 1963 Bancroft Prize, and an eight-volume A People's History of the United States.
William James wrote The Moral Equivalent of War, which centers around a civic call to voluntary work service during peace time.
[16] Taking cues from this and from his own time in Rosenstock Huessy's Camp William James Smith, along with Lee, sought to reestablish the spirit that was at work in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Eloise died of kidney cancer two days before Smith's own death from leukemia at their home in Santa Cruz.