Given the long arc of Fred Lee Smith Jr.’s career, it would surprise many to know that Mr. Smith first went to Washington to work at the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s. “For many years, I had no decided political views. Indeed, since I wasn’t a southern racist, I thought I must be a liberal,” he later explained, and the EPA seemed a promising place where he could make a difference.
Smith, who died Nov. 23 at the age of 83, had a sharp mind, most agreed. His degree from Tulane was in theoretical mathematics and political science and was later supplemented with graduate work at Penn, SUNY Buffalo, and Harvard. His expertise at the EPA was recycling, waste management, and pollution taxes.
The experience at the EPA was not a pleasant one for Smith. It soured him on federal bureaucracy and most government regulations. He would go on to work at the Association of American Railroads trade association as an economist at a time when the push for deregulation was chugging ahead full steam. The Staggers Act, passed in 1980, would largely privatize freight rail in the U.S.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, deregulation was a bipartisan issue. Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, and Joe Biden, among others, backed various efforts to deregulate rail and air travel and other sectors of the economy. Most Democrats turned against deregulation over the intervening decades, but Smith never did. Instead, he pushed further, as a director for the Charles Koch-created Council for a Competitive Economy, which tried to talk businesses out of playing the lobbying game and accepting government bailouts.
Smith would go on to found with his wife, Fran, the free-market think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (this author’s employer). The 40th-anniversary dinner that he attended this September would be his final public appearance. He had stepped back from president to center head and then, as his health worsened, to chairman emeritus.
The Spectator World noted that the predinner reception featured “fire-dancing girls performing in front of the Washington National Cathedral.” Awardees and speakers included George F. Will and Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade. The afterparty sported “more pyrotechnics, a Cirque-du-Soleil-style acrobatics performance, and women roaming the cathedral on stilts.”
How the geeky world of policy wonkery would come to host such a colorful annual celebration has to do with the person and personality of Smith. Though he was born in Arkansas, his formative years were spent in rural Louisiana, a state that he liked to joke “doesn’t just tolerate corruption, it insists upon it.”
The Pelican State has also given the nation a heaping of politicians and public figures who are genuine characters. These include the late Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards, who once ducked responsibility for a fundraising scandal thusly, “It was illegal for them to give, but not for me to receive” (thus furthering Smith’s point). Or Louisiana’s current Republican Sen. John Neely Kennedy, who declared, “If you trust the government, you obviously failed history class” (a notion that would have Smith nodding and laughing).
Smith rejected Jim Crow and political corruption, but he refused to throw out the Mardi Gras with the bathwater. The Sixth Ward where he grew up was “an isolated rural community some 50 miles north of New Orleans,” Smith remembered in Labor of Love, a 2021 collection of his writings. “It was a closely-knit community with a few major families and a small number of non-native residents. Like many ‘tribal’ communities, Sixth Ward enjoyed a strong sense of egalitarianism based on kinship.”
He found that that neighborly spirit “extended even to my family, even though we were ‘outsiders’ with no local family connections,” he wrote. “Moreover, we were Catholics in a community where everyone else was Evangelical Christian. Still, our family quickly put down roots. My Daddy was the lockmaster at Lock #1 on the Pearl River Corps of Engineers system, which brought him into contact with many of the locals. When my mother died, women from throughout the community brought us hot dishes and provided solace.”
Smith and the think tank that he headed in downtown D.C. (though he didn’t love to call it a think tank) pushed back against government regulation and subsidies on multiple fronts. He helped to oppose global warming legislation in the 1990s, for instance, earning the ire of the organized environmental movement in the process. Smith, whose sweet tooth was legendary, also worked against the public health anti-sugar initiatives by arguing for and eating actual Oreos on live television for effect.
He read widely and ideated freely, to his own staff’s amusement and occasional consternation. Among other things, Smith advanced an alternative anthropology of Native American land management (“they were not dancing with wolves!”), called for the private ownership of endangered species to ensure their survival, and mused about an airlift for African gorillas caught between humans in a civil war. “Build a Jurassic Park in Central America!” Smith said.
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The CEI founder was also criticized for warning about federal backing for lone guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a House committee hearing in 2000. On this point, he would be thoroughly vindicated within his lifetime. Smith said that the pipeline for funds from government to Fannie and Freddie was “very expandable” in a crisis. “It is only $2 billion today; It could be $200 billion tomorrow,” he estimated, and that was within spitting distance. The total bill to bail out both guarantors was about $191 billion eight years later, while the whole economy was hurting for cash.
His larger legacy is both institutional and ideological. Many of the ideas that he nourished appear to be animating the next presidential administration.
Jeremy Lott is author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.