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| Lewis Smith Harvard University Yearbook 1939 |
Of the seven professors that the governor of South Carolina accused of being communist workers, the most mysterious was Benedict College professor, Lewis Smith. Smith only taught briefly at Benedict, and with nothing more than a common name to go on, I had a hard time tracking down information about him.
The governor only offered the slightest details in his speech accusing Benedict of harboring communists. While the other professors had lengthy records of political activity, the governor dismissed Lewis as "still a punk but given time may develop." The governor claimed that he had been dishonorably discharged from the US Navy as a security risk and had been a member of the Communist Party from 1949 to 1951. For a long time, this was all the information I had to go on.
Just today I stumbled into more information. Smith earned a PhD from the University of Iowa, and the catalogue entry includes both Smith's birth year and his full name: Aleck Lewis Smith. This information made it possible to connect Smith with a number of other records and helped sketch out a remarkable life.
Aleck Lewis Smith was born on August 14, 1916 to Jane Laura and Aleck Smith Sr. Records are conflicting as to whether he was born in Iowa City, Iowa or in White Plains, New York. In any case, his family was living on Long Island by 1930. It's not entirely clear what the father did for work. The 1920 census describes him as a producer for moving pictures, his World War I draft card says he was an advertising manager, and the 1930 census describes him as a credit manager for a dry goods store.
It appears that Lewis's parents divorced in the early 1920s. In 1923, his father married another woman (Katherine McKeever). Lewis moved to Iowa and first lived with his uncle, Roy Leslie Smith. The father remained in New York City, but his mother moved to Iowa a few years later. She and Lewis lived together in Sioux City where she found work as a public school teacher.
For college, Lewis attended Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa for three years. Before completing his degree, he transferred to Harvard University. He graduated with an English degree from Harvard a year later (in 1939).
The year after he graduated college (on August 12, 1940), Lewis joined the US Navy. Although he joined before America entered the Second World War, the Navy was trying to expand in anticipation of armed conflict. As part of that effort, it created an expedited naval officer training program, the US Navy Reserve Midshipmen's School. Lewis attended the school and then was commissioned as a lieutenant. He spent the duration of the war in the Pacific on surface warships such as the USS Indiana and the USS North Carolina.
While the governor of South Carolina claimed that Lewis was dishonorably discharged from the Navy in 1955, it appears that Lewis had left the Navy before then. By 1948, he had moved back to Iowa. While in the Navy, Lewis had married a woman named Harriet Ruth Cannon. However, the marriage failed, and they were divorced by 1950. Later that year, he was married a second time, this time to a woman named Claire Bradley. However, this marriage failed as well, and they divorced a year later.
While in Iowa, Lewis began pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. He also worked at the Gary Division of the University of Indiana as a research assistant in the Home Study Department. He may have also taught at the University of Chicago (he and Claire were married in the city). Lewis graduated in 1953 with a dissertation titled Changing conceptions of God in colonial New England.
After graduating, Lewis was hired as an associate professor by Knoxville College. His employment there is interesting. The college is a small historically Black college in Knoxville, Tennessee. Lewis had never lived in the South before, and it's unclear how much interaction he would have had with African Americans prior to teaching at the college.
Lewis's time at Knoxville was brief but very significant. It was there that he met his third wife, Kiyoko Nagai. Kiyoko was a Japanese woman who had made the remarkable decision to travel overseas to study at Knoxville College. Kiyoko had a difficult time when she first arrived on campus. She had learned English by working with a tutor from London who taught her proper British English. The tutoring left her wholly unprepared to understand the thickly accented speech of Black students in the south. Lewis was asked to help her by tutoring her, and it was during those tutoring sessions that they fell in love. Unlike Lewis's earlier marriages, this one was a long-lasting success.
Around 1970, Lewis made the adventuresome decision to move to Hiroshima, Japan and work as a teacher. Kiyoko had lived in the city before moving to the United States, and around 1970, she and Lewis traveled there to visit Kiyoko's mother, who was in poor health. Lewis fell in love with the county, so they decided to stay there and teach. He remained there for eighteen years.
Lewis left Japan in the early 1990s to move to Canada. He first lived in Ontario and then in Victoria. He remained in Victoria until his death on March 15, 2012.
Sources
1. Year: 1920; Census Place: Hempstead, Nassau, New York; Roll: T625_1128; Page: 1B; Enumeration District: 39
2. Year: 1930; Census Place: Sioux City, Woodbury, Iowa; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 0067; FHL microfilm: 2340425
3. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Sioux City, Woodbury, Iowa; Roll: 2314; Page: 17; Enumeration District: 103-71
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