Virginia Dodd Smith’s House career owed much to her 40 years on a Nebraska farm and experience as a spokesperson for agricultural issues. As the first woman elected to Congress from Nebraska, Smith steered federal money toward farm programs from her seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. Widely popular in her state, she also exercised a great deal of influence on political developments there, both because of her western Nebraska district’s size and her personal connection with constituents, whom she visited regularly.
Virginia Dodd was born in Randolph, Iowa, on June 30, 1911, to Clifton Clark Dodd and Erville (Reeves) Dodd. She graduated from Shenandoah High School in Shenandoah, Iowa. Virginia Dodd met Haven Smith while attending the University of Nebraska. The two wed on August 27, 1931, taking a hiatus from school to earn tuition money. The Smiths settled in Chappell, Nebraska, in the western portion of the state near the Colorado border and worked on Haven’s family wheat farm during the depths of the Great Depression. They both returned to school and received their bachelor of arts degrees from the University of Nebraska in 1936. The Smiths eventually expanded their wheat farming business into poultry, seed potatoes, and other crops.1 From 1950 until 1960, Virginia Smith worked for the Home Economics Research Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She became involved in a wide variety of farm organizations, such as the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), spending 20 years on its board of directors and serving as the national chair of the AFBF women’s bureau from 1955 to 1974.
Meanwhile, Smith was active in the state’s Republican Party. Smith’s extensive participation in farming organizations and civic af fairs in Nebraska provided an invaluable network for her first run for elective office in 1974, when seven-term incumbent Republican David Thomas Martin retired from the U.S. House of Representatives. Martin represented what was then the nation’s largest congressional district, consisting of 61 counties and 307 towns spread over the western three-quarters of the state, an area dominated by the wheat, corn, and cattle businesses. A political observer described it as “one of the most macho districts” in America.2 It certainly was one of the most historically Republican regions. The farmers and ranchers of western Nebraska had voted for Republican House Members with only one significant interruption—from 1932 to 1942 during the heyday of the New Deal agricultural programs.
Name recognition in the massive district was no problem for Smith. Already a familiar face in many of the district’s small farm towns, she defeated eight candidates in the GOP primary. In the general election, Smith faced Democratic candidate Wayne W. Ziebarth, a former state senator. Ziebarth, too, had name recognition, after having run a statewide race in 1972 for the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate. Smith was a formidable campaigner who engaged individuals in the crowds in one-on-one conversations and had an “extraordinary” capacity for names, faces, and issues.3 She relied on the wholehearted support of her husband, Haven. “It was a two-person job,” Virginia Smith recalled. “He was just my righthand man all the way.”4 Ziebarth aided Smith’s cause when he made a crucial mistake late in his campaign, publicly stating that women were not cut out for politics.5 Smith defeated her opponent by a margin of just 737 votes out of more than 161,000 cast.6 When she took her seat in the 94th Congress (1975–1977), she did so as the first Nebraska woman elected to the U.S. House. In her subsequent bids for reelection, voters returned Smith to office for seven more terms by increasingly wider margins, from 73 to 84 percent of the vote.7
During Smith’s freshman year, she served on the Education and Labor and the Interior and Insular Affairs committees. In her second term in Congress, she managed to get a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee— an assignment she held until her retirement in 1991. She served on two Appropriations subcommittees: Rural Development, Agriculture, and Related Agencies and Energy and Water Development. She also was assigned to the GOP policy committee in 1977, which advised House Republicans on key issues.
Throughout her tenure, Smith focused on agricultural matters. Fiscally conservative on most issues, she nevertheless routinely favored spending federal money on farm programs. As Ranking Member of the Rural Development, Agriculture, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, she had a strong position from which to steer federal dollars into that sector, and into her district in particular. In 1984, for instance, more than $162 million in federal payments for corn growers flowed into her district, by far the largest amount of any other congressional district for a region that, in fact, produced more corn than any other in the nation.8
In 1987 she managed to exempt U.S. agriculture later, exporters from having to ship a certain percentage of
their product on American vessels, which charged higher
shipping costs. In 1989, as the United States began to send
food aid to Eastern European countries emerging from
communist rule, Smith was one of several midwestern
Representatives to argue that the U.S. government should
continue to allow shipments to be made on foreign
vessels—at about one-third of the transportation rates on
American-registered ships. The differential could then have
been applied to buying more foodstuffs, which would have
further benefited American farmers.9 Smith also supported
the creation of more domestic land and air transportation
routes, in order to keep rural America connected to urban
centers. “The revitalization of rural America cannot and
will not occur unless we guarantee mobility.”10 In a 1989
Appropriations Committee vote, her amendment to restore
subsidies to airline companies as an incentive to fly to
small towns was narrowly defeated, with the vote breaking
down not along party lines, but between rural and urban
legislators.11 In 1988 she helped secure federal funding for
a bus line that connected remote parts of western Nebraska
with South Dakota.12 That same year she also successfully
fended off efforts to cut funding to the Davis Creek Dam
which, when completed, would provide irrigation water in
her district.13
Smith’s farming constituents showed their approval for
her policies with her overwhelming success at the polls. “I
think people know I fight very hard to get a fair share of
federal revenues for Nebraska,” she once said. “I visit every
one of the counties in my district every year and I visit most
of them quite a lot of times. I work seven days a week on
this job. I do my homework . . . I love this job and I love
the people of my district, and I think that when you have
the privilege of representing 500,000 of the finest people on
earth, you ought to work hard.”14
Focusing on the needs and traditions of her agricultural
constituents, Smith did not embrace feminist issues during
her House career. As a new Member of Congress, for
instance, she had requested that she be known as “Mrs.
Haven Smith.”15 In 1977, though she often encouraged
women to enter politics, Smith was one of three Members
who did not join the Congressional Women’s Caucus during
its inaugural meetings.16
Smith did not stand for re-election in 1990 and
retired the following January. In retirement, she and her
husband settled in Sun City West, Arizona. Three years
the community named Virginia Smith one of its favorite leaders. Haven Smith died on May 12, 1997, after the couple had reached their milestone 65th wedding anniversary. Approaching age 90, Virginia Smith was still active in Nebraska politics. In 2000 she agreed to work on the campaign for a promising Republican candidate in her old district.17 Virginia Smith died on January 23, 2006, in Sun City West, Arizona.18
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
[ Top ]
