Benjamin W. Smith: New South Hero

New Orleans belongs to no one. It is not really a Southern town, though a civil rights activist may well expect to wake up some night to the sound of a bomb tearing up his home. I is not a Northern town, though hippies in purple cloaks may cluster around the statue of Andrew Jackson in the middle of busy Jackson Square. Though that statue bears an inscription which reads, "The Union must be preserved"--an inscription which has to strike a Southern ear with painful irony--it is not a Northern town. It is not an All-American town, though bright, brassy Kwik-Cleen or Bunny Burger stands line the boulevard, as they do in every other American town. And it is not a European town though the street signs are in French and the houses have a grace that can only be French.

Despite its diversity, life for a native of New Orleans is in fact like life in any other large town of the Deep South, and New Orleaneans are much like the townsfolk of other Deep South towns. They are conservative. On foreign policy they support the Administration's Vietnam stand. At home they oppose federal meddling, and on the racial question they are paranoid.

For all these reasons the campaign of white lawyer, Benjamin E. Smith, for the State House of Representatives in last Saturday's Democartic primary was both important and extraordinary. Smith, a jolly, red-faced Louisianian of many generations, counts himself among those rare creatures--a Southern liberal, and is all the rarer for his decision to go into politics.

Smith finished eighth in a field of nine candidates running for two house seats. He received 2,000 votes to the winner's 6,000 in a district with 20,000 potential voters. The results were disappointing for Smith who had hoped against hope to get into the runoff, but he was not disillusioned. "For a man with my reputation, a Communist, a damn nigger lover, a radical and a peacenik, I did damn well," Smith beamed as he watched the results trickle in on the television at his home--campaign headquarters for the last three months.

Smith lives in a modest house on Cherokee Street in Ward 16. Like most New Orleans' housing, this ward is laid out checkerboard fashion. A block of Negro homes may be followed by a block of white homes. The economic pattern is just as complex; a block of huge columned mansions screened from view by heavy oaks, crepe myrtles, or magnolia trees may be followed by a block of pleasant middle class homes which boast a few palms or maybe a banana tree, followed again by a block of near-shacks with a scraggly clump of gladiolas growing outside.

Out of this patchwork Smith wants to weave a new Roosevelt-like alliance. Over his kitchen table, professors and biochemistry grad students from nearby Tulane exchange political banter with a retired Negro post-office worker, and the white leader of a local labor union. They are all Ben Smith campaign workers. "Roosevelt put together a party of the farmer, the laborer, the intellectual. We're going to get the Negro, the white wroking class, and the intellectuals, and work on issues together."

On election day last Saturday over 50 people trooped into Smith's home. It was the largest--and most energetic staff of any candidate. And Smith fought by far the most dynamic campaign. He was the only one to hold a series of rallies in each of his wards. He was the only one to use a sound truck. And he was the only one to walk the streets shaking hands for votes.

The one candidate with a strong civil rights record, Smith's greatest potential strength lay in the predominantly Negro areas such as Gerttown. Gerttown is one of the city's pocket ghettos--rows of low level shabby brick buildings squashed together inside a wall of light industry. But even in these wards Smith was defeated by a Catholic candidate whose campaign tactics were to approach the local priest with a certain sum of money. New Orleans is ninety per cent Catholic. "I tried to speak to the priests but they wouldn't see me. They had obviously been told not to have anything to do with me," he sighed. "That's the kind of thing we're up against."

In his campaign, Smith called for an open housing law. This need not spell death for a politician he argues. It can even win votes. "People are immediately worried about property values going down," he explains. "You show them that if you don't let the Negro move in next door today, he will burn down your house ten years from now. And then it won't be worth a dime."

Despite his notoriety in white New Orleans, and despite his controversial platform, the campaign was relatively quiet. At this moment the white power structure is not threatened--after all, he placed eighth. But had Smith entered the runoff, "the big boys would have been after me," he says with not a little glee. "Then they'd red bait and they'd nigger bait as usual."

Smith, relaxing in an armchair and filling the room with the wild cherry aroma of his pipe tobacco, did not feel powerless after his defeat. His unsuccessful campaign created a potentially devastating base of support--a coalition among white workers, Negroes, and intellectuals. "We have created something to work from, whether it's me or somebody else who runs next time. My job is to get the working class, the Negro and the intellectual together and screw the middle class."

Like so many other Southern Liberals, he entered the limelight in 1948, campaigning for Henry Wallace. "I was a radical grass roots organizer even then," he says. He ran for elector of the Progressive Party in district five and spent 10,000 dollars on the campaign, winning a total of 500 votes. "And those I got by trading on my grandfather's name, also a Smith," he chuckles. "I told Wallace we could have bought more votes with that money."

But it was probably not until October of 1963 that he became a favorite target fro any Louisiana politician low on controversial issues. That October the local committee on subversive activities suddenly ransacked the offices of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (considered the white equivalent to SNCC). Smith was treasurer of SCEF.

The committee then sent police to arrest Smith at the plush downtown Hilton Inn where he was addressing Louisiana's first integrated Bar Association meeting. He was marched out of the hall before the eyes of the country's most eminent civil rights lawyers, and sent to jail, charged with violating the state's Communist Control Act.

Columnist Drew Pearson suggested that Smith should be investigated because he had been elected Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild, "a known Communist front," and because he had attended the second anniversary of Castro's revolution and returned "singing Castro's praises." Smith did not know of the Act "and if I had I would not have registered," he says. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and an unfavorable decision would have meant thirty years in jail, but the Court ruled the law unconstitutional.

Life in New Orleans has not been easy. There have been the threats, the accusations, and the economic and social boycotts the Souther liberal has to face. "The wolf is always at the door," Smith's wife joked. The family did not pay its phone bills for six months. The campaign ran on a tight $4,000 budget. "I refused to let it come out of the grocery bill," Mrs. Smith said. It didn't. The money trickled in from numerous friends.

The Smith are not thinking of leaving the state. "It may be scratchy, but this is my briar patch," Ben Smith says. "Next time we'll hit them all the harder."