U.S. At War: Virginia Gentleman

Thin, stooped, flop-eared Howard Worth Smith sits in big, comfortable chairs, and nobody puts even a small tack in them. Nobody could. As president of the Alexandria (Va.) National Bank, as owner of a money-making Virginia dairy farm, as organized labor's hair shirt in Congress, the 59-year-old Alexandrian serves what Virginians call The Organization —the "courthouse crowd" machine of Senator Harry F. Byrd.

Smith's pals include potent realtors and contractors in mushrooming Alexandria, Fairfax, Arlington, the jammed suburbs hard by jampacked Washington. Out of the 250,000-odd population of Smith's district, the trouble and expense of paying $1.50 to $6 in poll taxes...

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