Blackwell Smith papers, 1933-1984

Blackwell Smith (b. Richard Blackwell Smith) was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on April 4, 1904. He received his Bachelor of Law at Columbia in 1929, and was admitted to the New York bar the same year. From 1933-1935, Smith worked as General Counsel and Assistant Administrator for Policy for the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA was established by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933, and was FDR’s primary New Deal agency. Its goal was to create “codes of fair competition.” In 1935, the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional. After the NRA, Smith did anti-trust work for GE, RCA, Union Carbide, and Goodyear (among others) until WWII, at which point he was Assistant Director of Priorities for Policy established by the War Production Board. Smith devised all the priority and allocation systems used in WWII, dealing with supply distribution. He died in Wilmington, North Carolina on September 9, 2000.